El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz, known to most as Malcolm X, was born Malcolm Little in 1925 in Omaha, Nebraska. His father was an outspoken Garveyite, who supported Marcus Garvey's views on separatism and racial politics. When his father was murdered by members of the KKK in Omaha, his mother was left to raise multiple children on her own--a task that led to her nervous breakdown and hospitalization. In his formative years, young Malcolm spent time in foster homes, moving from one family to another, before becoming involved in criminal activity. As your text reports, he was arrested and incarcerated for burglary in Massachusetts and it was there, in the Charlestown State Penitentiary, where Malcolm Little underwent a transformation. Embracing the teachings of Elijah Mohammad, Little began writing to the leader of the Nation of Islam from his prison cell. He would embark on his own, self-styled education, which enlightened him to the fact that the black man had largely been written out of the history taught to him as a child.
"It has always been my belief that I, too, will die by violence." (Malcolm X) By the 1960s, Malcolm had made a trek to Mecca, where he discovered Muslims of all ethnic and racial backgrounds congregating under a single faith. His trip to Mecca did, in some regard, soften his attitudes toward separatism in the U.S., and his attitude toward the Nation of Islam began to cool. In Spike Lee's adaptation of X's life, the film suggests that Malcolm X had become disenchanted with Elijah Muhammad as a leader when he found out that the holy man had several dalliances with his secretaries. It is suggested that Malcolm X's knowledge of, and threat to expose this knowledge is what led to his murder in 1965. Malcolm X is important for so many reasons: he enlightened his listeners with the ways African Americans had been cheated out of their own history; he called upon them to recognize their own worth, and to reevaluate the way the black woman had been regarded throughout history. In the clip below, Malcolm X makes it plain what a Muslim will do if his woman is threatened.
Looking back on history, it is perhaps natural to align Malcolm X with Martin Luther King, Jr. The two leaders have been understood as rivals, sharing a fairly tense relationship over racial politics. While King was accommodationist in his approach (a strategy Malcolm X decried), X was, for most of his speaking career, a separatist. However, Dr. Gates points out that at some point they were actually not as adversarial as previously thought (566).
The Black Arts Movement (BAM) was the creative arm of the Black Power Movement. The term "Black Power" originated in part from a Richard Wright work by the same name, and was further coined by Stokely Carmichael, co-founder of Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (or "SNCC"). A philosophical movement that urged the need for African American autonomy through political and economic independence, the Black Power Movement gave rise to organizations such as the Black Panther Party.
Huey P. Newton
Eldridge Cleaver and Huey Newton
Largely inspired by the writings of Malcolm X and Mao Tse-tung, the Black Panther Party advocated, in accordance with the philosophies of its co-founder Huey P. Newton, a policy of armed aggression against an oppressive, and corrupt white governmental infrastructure in the U.S.
*From Huey P. Newton Website Photo taken by student, Christina Hill, March 2019
El Hajj Malik El Shabazz, or Malcolm X, whose ideology and affiliations with Black Nationalism inspired and galvanized the Black Power Movement. The Black Arts Movement, produced such figures as Nikki Giovanni, Gwendolyn Brooks, and Amiri Baraka (or, LeRoi Jones) who advocated the poetic form--particularly spoken word poetry--for its immediacy and thrift to articulate the anger, frustration, hostility, and desires of the artist for a new era in race relations. These poets advocated solidarity among members of the African American diaspora, and the need to assert their rights by force if necessary. Kaluma ya Salaam observes that "[b]oth inherently and overtly political in content, the Black Arts movement was the only American literary movement to advance "social engagement" as a sine qua non of its aesthetic. The movement broke from the immediate past of protest and petition (civil rights) literature and dashed forward toward an alternative that initially seemed unthinkable and unobtainable: Black Power. In a 1968 essay, "The Black Arts Movement," Larry Neal proclaimed Black Arts the "aesthetic and spiritual sister of the Black Power concept." As a political phrase, Black Power had earlier been used by Richard Wright to describe the mid-1950s emergence of independent African nations. As previously mentioned, the use of the term originated in 1966 with Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee civil rights workers Stokely Carmichael and Willie Ricks. Quickly adopted in the North, Black Power was associated with a militant advocacy of armed self-defense, separation from "racist American domination," and pride in and assertion of the goodness and beauty of Blackness" (Kaluma ya Salaam 1) The following video features Amiri Baraka calling for "poetry that kills."
"From a historical perspective, it is clear that the Black Arts Era is, in many ways an echo of both Reconstruction and the Harlem Renaissance. Once again, African Americans questioned the terms of their identity, history, and future prospects as citizens of the United States. They were concerned with the meaning and purpose of art both as a factor in social change and as an economic enterprise. Relevant questions about stylistics, form and discourse/language as well as intended audience and purpose were again debated. Yet the terms and circumstances of these questions and concerns were distinctly different, if for no other reason than writers of the Black Arts era were aware that their literary predecessors had raised similar issues during Reconstruction and the Harlem Renaissance. From that legacy dating back to one hundred years before, they determined that artists needed to exert more control over the production and marketing of their works. Moreso than Reconstruction and Harlem Renaissance authors, Black Arts era writers questioned both the personal and the communal significance of literary production and distribution. Many chose to be published by small (and often transitory) presses that allowed them greater freedom of expression, that targeted a particular readership, or that simply promised greater financial profit... "Whereas Langston Hughes had said in the 1920s that writers were going to create whether people liked or understood them or not, the proponents of the Black Arts era contended that their work be understood by African Americans, that it must be both political and aesthetic, and to be successful, it must move their audiences to action" (Moody 343-4).
Maya Angelou
Nikki Giovanni
Rita Dove
Lucille Clifton
Questions for Discussion: In what ways has the Black Power Movement shaped and influenced contemporary African American popular culture? What other movements, literary or cultural, sprang from the Black Power Movement? Alice Walker's 1970 (re)discovery of Zora Neale Hurston's fiction catalyzed a literary movement among African American female writers. How might Walker's discovery of a lineage of literary 'foremothers' coincide with the aims of the Black Power Movement? Kaluma ya Salaam lists several of the generative collections of Black Arts poetry and other writings in: Black Fire (1968), edited by Baraka and Neal, is a massive collection of essays, poetry, fiction, and drama featuring the first wave of Black Arts writers and thinkers. Because of its impressive breadth, Black Fire stands as a definitive movement anthology. For Malcolm X, Poems on the Life and the Death of Malcolm X (1969), edited by Dudley Randall and Margaret Taylor Goss Burroughs, demonstrates the political thrust of the movement and the specific influence of Malcolm X. There is no comparable anthology in American poetry that focuses on a political figure as poetic inspiration. The Black Woman (1970), edited by Toni Cade Bambara, is the first major Black feminist anthology and features work by Jean Bond, Nikki Giovanni, Abbey Lincoln, Audre Lorde, Paule Marshall, Gwen Patton, Pat Robinson, Alice Walker, Shirley Williams, and others.
