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An Introduction to the Black Arts Movement B Y N A S R U L L A H M A M B R O L ON J U L Y 9 , 2 0 2 0 • ( 0 )

The Black Arts movement was a controversial literary faction that

emerged in the mid-1960s as the artistic and aesthetic arm of the Black

Power movement, a militant political operation that rejected the

integrationist purposes and practices of the Civil Rights movement that

preceded it. The Black Arts movement was one of the only American

literary movements to merge art with a political agenda. Because poems

were short and could be recited at rallies and other political activities to

incite and move a crowd, poetry was the most popular literary genre of

the Black Arts movement, followed closely by drama. Poet, playwright,

activist, and major figure of the Black Arts movement, Amiri Baraka

(formerly LeRoi Jones) coined the term Black Arts when he established

his Black Arts Repertory Theatre/School in New York City’s Harlem.

Although the Black Arts movement began its decline during the mid-

1970s, at the same time as the Black Power movement began its descent,

it introduced a new breed of black poets and a new brand of black

poetry. It also inspired and energized already established poets like

Gwendolyn BROOKS and Robert Hayden. The Black Arts movement

created many poetic innovations in form, language, and style that have

influenced the work of many of today’s spoken word artists and socially

conscious rap lyricists.

The poets most often associated with the Black Arts movement include

Baraka, Sonia Sanchez, Etheridge Knight, Nikki Giovanni, Larry Neal,

Mari Evans, Don L. Lee (now known as Haki Madhubutti), Carolyn

Rodgers, Marvin X, Jayne Cortez, Askia Toure, and June Jordan. A

number of important African-American playwrights, fiction writers, and

scholars also made significant contributions to the Black Arts

movement, creatively as well as philosophically and theoretically, by

defining and outlining the objectives and criteria of the movement and

its “black aesthetic.”

Several publishing houses and workshops were founded during the

period of the movement, and several magazines and journals emerged,

all of which provided a vehicle for the literary work of Black Arts poets.

Literary publications, such as Freedomways, Negro Digest (later

renamed Black World), the Black Scholar, the Journal of Black

Poetry, and Liberator, brought Black Arts movement poets to a larger

audience when more established publications rejected their work. Two

important publishing houses—Dudley Randall’s Broadside Press in

Detroit and Madhubuti’s Third World Press in Chicago—were also

instrumental in helping to introduce new poets and to disseminate their

work. Umbra Workshop (1962–65), composed of a group of black

writers, produced Umbra Magazine and gained significance as a literary

group that created a distinct voice and often challenged mainstream

standards concerning literature. Lastly, Baraka’s Black Arts Repertory

Theatre/School, founded in 1965, brought free plays, poetry readings,

and musical performances to the people of Harlem, thereby carrying out

the idea of art as a communal experience.

The Black Power movement, from which the Black Arts movement

derived, sought to empower African- American communities

economically and politically by relying solely on resources within the

black community. It also sought to celebrate blackness and restore

positive images of black people from the negative stereotyping that took

place in the larger society. Thus slogans, such as “Black Is Beautiful,”

were prominent during the time. Members of organizations, such as the

Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), under the

leadership of Stokely Carmichael, and the Black Panther Party, founded

by Huey Newton and Bobby Seale, demanded racial equality, not

through the methods of passive resistance associated with Dr. Martin

Luther King, Jr., but “by any means necessary” (a slogan of the party),

including “violent revolution,” as stated by Malcolm X. Moreover,

“black cultural nationalism,” the belief that blacks and whites had two

separate worldviews and outlooks on life, was a prominent idea in both

the Black Power and the Black Arts movements. As a result, Black Arts

movement writers experimented with methods of artistic expression that

were characteristic of African-American culture and experience. First all

of the poetry was infused with a certain level of black consciousness,

meaning that its subjects and themes reflected the quality and character

of black experience. In form, Black Arts movement poets often rejected

standard English in favor of Black English, a more colloquial and

vernacular language and syntax. They peppered it with street slang and

idiomatic phrases that were simple, direct, explicit, and often irreverent.

In addition the poetry borrowed greatly from black music, using

rhythmical effects from jazz and blues, as well as from other forms of

black oral speech, such as sermons, folktales, signifying (an intricate,

humorous language style that uses indirection, innuendo, puns,

metaphors, and other wordplay to persuade, argue, send a message, or

insult), and the dozens (a form of signifying that involves trading insults,

primarily about a person’s relatives). Other common features of the

poetry include free verse, short line lengths, call-and-response patterns,

chanting, and free rhyming.

The Black Arts movement had much in common with another period of

increased artistic production among African-American writers—the

Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s. During both periods, there was an

increased interest in establishing a more assertive black collective

identity than had previously existed (during the Harlem Renaissance, it

was called “the New Negro”) and in searching for ethnic identity and

heritage in folk and African culture. Thus poets from both periods

experimented with folk elements, such as blues, spirituals, and

vernacular idioms in their poetry, and venerated Africa. However,

despite these similarities, many Black Arts movement writers were

critical of the objectives of the Harlem Renaissance, believing it had

failed to link itself concretely to the struggle of the black masses.

Adherents of the Black Arts movement were also critical of Harlem

Renaissance writers’ reliance on white patronage, as well as their

tendency to esteem Western art, to desire mainstream recognition, and to

write with a white audience in mind. They felt that this compromised

black writers’ ability to be completely honest in their depiction and

expression of black life and struggle.

The Black Arts movement established a number of objectives and

criteria for its creative artists to follow. Primary among them was to

persuade African Americans to reject the mainstream culture and the

process of Americanization and assimilation, instead encouraging them

to embrace a “black aesthetic,” whereby black people would look to

their own culture and aesthetic values to create and evaluate African-

American literature. The three major criteria of the Black Arts

movement, established by Ron Karenga, were that all black art must be

“functional, collective, and committed” (33). The functional nature of

black art meant that the literary work must serve a purpose larger than

merely the creation of art. It had to be connected to the social and

political struggles in which African-American people were engaged. The

second criterion, that black art must be “collective,” meant that it must

serve the people; it must educate, inspire, and uplift them. Reciprocally,

the artist must learn from and be inspired and uplifted by the people. The

artist must be prepared to sacrifice her or his own individuality and,

instead, always write with the good of the people in mind. Third and

lastly, black art must be committed to political and social reform and

supportive of the revolution that will bring this about. In essence the

Black Arts movement’s objectives were to reach the masses of black

people, to make them understand their message of self-sufficiency and

dignity, and to inspire them to act upon it.

Many of the criteria and objectives of the Black Arts movement are

discernible within the poetry itself. For example, in “From the Egyptian”

in his 1966 collection Black Art, Baraka makes clear that violent

confrontation with the oppressors of black people is an imminent reality

as he asserts that he is prepared to murder “the enemies / of my father.”

Likewise, in “The True Import of Present Dialogue, Black vs. Negro”

in Black Feeling, Black Talk (1968), Giovanni tells black people: “We

ain’t got to prove we can die / We got to prove we can kill.” Giovanni

also demonstrates the criterion of commitment with “My Poem” (1968),

when she writes in support of the revolution and its enduring nature,

stating that “if i never do anything / it will go on.” The didacticism of

much Black Arts poetry is visible in Baraka’s “A School of Prayer”

(1966). In this poem, Baraka tells his black audience: “Do not obey their

laws.” “Their,” of course, refers to white society. Essentially Baraka

urges black people to rebel against white authority and be wary of the

words spoken by those who seek to oppress them because their purpose

is to deceive black people and curtail their advancement. The celebration

of blackness is also noticeable in Black Arts poetry. Sanchez, perhaps

the female poet most closely identified with the Black Arts movement,

reclaims the dignity of black womanhood in an unnamed poem in her

volume We a BaddDDD People (1970), when she links herself as a

black woman to a regal African queen who will, “Walk / move in / blk

queenly ways.” Similarly, in “Ka Ba” (1969), Baraka affirms the

uniqueness of black expressive culture and of black people, whom he

describes as “full of masks and dances and swelling chants / with

African eyes and noses and arms,” despite the present condition of

oppression and degradation under which many African Americans live.

In both of these poems, Sanchez and Baraka seek to restore to black

people a positive representation of blackness and raise their collective

sense of identity.

Many of the poems in Sanchez’s collection We a BaddDDD

People exemplify experimentation with language. In

“indianapolis/summer/1969/poem,” Sanchez provides a new spelling of

the words mothers (“mothas”), fathers (“fathas”), and sisters (sistuhs”);

the word about becomes “bout,” the word black becomes “blk,” and the

word I becomes “i.” The changes in spelling, as well as the use of

nonstandard English in Sanchez’s poems, are meant to capture the

syntax and vernacular speech of many within the black community,

while the abbreviated spelling of “blk” and the lower case “i” are part of

Sanchez’s refusal to adhere to the rules of standard English. Many Black

Arts poets perceived language to be a tool of the oppressor and therefore

sought ways to make it their own. Lastly, the use of pejorative

terminology and irreverent language was also common among Black

Arts poets. The police were often referred to as “pigs,” and white people

were termed “honkies” or “crackers.”

Several criticisms have been leveled against the Black Arts movement.

One was that it tended only to address issues of race and to promote

racial hatred. Also the functional aspect of the Black Arts movement

came to be denounced by newly emerging black literary critics who

claimed that the literature itself was often subordinate to the political or

social message of the movement. These critics saw this as detrimental to

black literature, creating a narrowness of focus that creatively limited the

artist and the kinds of literature he or she could compose. In addition

there was a tendency in the Black Arts movement to devise theories

prior to the creation of an actual body of literature that would prove the

theory. Therefore the literature was driven by the theory rather than the

other way around. Lastly, some Black Arts movement writers were

known to judge harshly any black writer who did not conform to the

criteria and objectives of the movement. Even black writers of the past

were not exempt from being maligned, and Black Arts movement

writers often did criticize them without always taking into consideration

the historical period and context in which these past writers were

composing their literature.

Still the Black Arts movement’s influence and contributions to

American poetry were far reaching. It made literary artists rethink the

function and purpose of their work and their responsibility to their

communities and to society. It also influenced and continues to inspire

new generations of poets to experiment with a variety of artistic forms to

refuse the pressure to conform to Western standards of art and to write,

embrace, and derive their art from within their own expressive culture

An Introduction to the Black Arts Movement B Y N A S R U L L A H M A M B R O L ON J U L Y 9 , 2 0 2 0 • ( 0 )

The Black Arts movement was a controversial literary faction that

emerged in the mid-1960s as the artistic and aesthetic arm of the Black

Power movement, a militant political operation that rejected the

integrationist purposes and practices of the Civil Rights movement that

preceded it. The Black Arts movement was one of the only American

literary movements to merge art with a political agenda. Because poems

were short and could be recited at rallies and other political activities to

incite and move a crowd, poetry was the most popular literary genre of

the Black Arts movement, followed closely by drama. Poet, playwright,

activist, and major figure of the Black Arts movement, Amiri Baraka

(formerly LeRoi Jones) coined the term Black Arts when he established

his Black Arts Repertory Theatre/School in New York City’s Harlem.

Although the Black Arts movement began its decline during the mid-

1970s, at the same time as the Black Power movement began its descent,

it introduced a new breed of black poets and a new brand of black

poetry. It also inspired and energized already established poets like

Gwendolyn BROOKS and Robert Hayden. The Black Arts movement

created many poetic innovations in form, language, and style that have

influenced the work of many of today’s spoken word artists and socially

conscious rap lyricists.

The poets most often associated with the Black Arts movement include

Baraka, Sonia Sanchez, Etheridge Knight, Nikki Giovanni, Larry Neal,

Mari Evans, Don L. Lee (now known as Haki Madhubutti), Carolyn

Rodgers, Marvin X, Jayne Cortez, Askia Toure, and June Jordan. A

number of important African-American playwrights, fiction writers, and

scholars also made significant contributions to the Black Arts

movement, creatively as well as philosophically and theoretically, by

defining and outlining the objectives and criteria of the movement and

its “black aesthetic.”

Several publishing houses and workshops were founded during the

period of the movement, and several magazines and journals emerged,

all of which provided a vehicle for the literary work of Black Arts poets.

Literary publications, such as Freedomways, Negro Digest (later

renamed Black World), the Black Scholar, the Journal of Black

Poetry, and Liberator, brought Black Arts movement poets to a larger

audience when more established publications rejected their work. Two

important publishing houses—Dudley Randall’s Broadside Press in

Detroit and Madhubuti’s Third World Press in Chicago—were also

instrumental in helping to introduce new poets and to disseminate their

work. Umbra Workshop (1962–65), composed of a group of black

writers, produced Umbra Magazine and gained significance as a literary

group that created a distinct voice and often challenged mainstream

standards concerning literature. Lastly, Baraka’s Black Arts Repertory

Theatre/School, founded in 1965, brought free plays, poetry readings,

and musical performances to the people of Harlem, thereby carrying out

the idea of art as a communal experience.

The Black Power movement, from which the Black Arts movement

derived, sought to empower African- American communities

economically and politically by relying solely on resources within the

black community. It also sought to celebrate blackness and restore

positive images of black people from the negative stereotyping that took

place in the larger society. Thus slogans, such as “Black Is Beautiful,”

were prominent during the time. Members of organizations, such as the

Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), under the

leadership of Stokely Carmichael, and the Black Panther Party, founded

by Huey Newton and Bobby Seale, demanded racial equality, not

through the methods of passive resistance associated with Dr. Martin

Luther King, Jr., but “by any means necessary” (a slogan of the party),

including “violent revolution,” as stated by Malcolm X. Moreover,

“black cultural nationalism,” the belief that blacks and whites had two

separate worldviews and outlooks on life, was a prominent idea in both

the Black Power and the Black Arts movements. As a result, Black Arts

movement writers experimented with methods of artistic expression that

were characteristic of African-American culture and experience. First all

of the poetry was infused with a certain level of black consciousness,

meaning that its subjects and themes reflected the quality and character

of black experience. In form, Black Arts movement poets often rejected

standard English in favor of Black English, a more colloquial and

vernacular language and syntax. They peppered it with street slang and

idiomatic phrases that were simple, direct, explicit, and often irreverent.

In addition the poetry borrowed greatly from black music, using

rhythmical effects from jazz and blues, as well as from other forms of

black oral speech, such as sermons, folktales, signifying (an intricate,

humorous language style that uses indirection, innuendo, puns,

metaphors, and other wordplay to persuade, argue, send a message, or

insult), and the dozens (a form of signifying that involves trading insults,

primarily about a person’s relatives). Other common features of the

poetry include free verse, short line lengths, call-and-response patterns,

chanting, and free rhyming.

The Black Arts movement had much in common with another period of

increased artistic production among African-American writers—the

Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s. During both periods, there was an

increased interest in establishing a more assertive black collective

identity than had previously existed (during the Harlem Renaissance, it

was called “the New Negro”) and in searching for ethnic identity and

heritage in folk and African culture. Thus poets from both periods

experimented with folk elements, such as blues, spirituals, and

vernacular idioms in their poetry, and venerated Africa. However,

despite these similarities, many Black Arts movement writers were

critical of the objectives of the Harlem Renaissance, believing it had

failed to link itself concretely to the struggle of the black masses.

Adherents of the Black Arts movement were also critical of Harlem

Renaissance writers’ reliance on white patronage, as well as their

tendency to esteem Western art, to desire mainstream recognition, and to

write with a white audience in mind. They felt that this compromised

black writers’ ability to be completely honest in their depiction and

expression of black life and struggle.

The Black Arts movement established a number of objectives and

criteria for its creative artists to follow. Primary among them was to

persuade African Americans to reject the mainstream culture and the

process of Americanization and assimilation, instead encouraging them

to embrace a “black aesthetic,” whereby black people would look to

their own culture and aesthetic values to create and evaluate African-

American literature. The three major criteria of the Black Arts

movement, established by Ron Karenga, were that all black art must be

“functional, collective, and committed” (33). The functional nature of

black art meant that the literary work must serve a purpose larger than

merely the creation of art. It had to be connected to the social and

political struggles in which African-American people were engaged. The

second criterion, that black art must be “collective,” meant that it must

serve the people; it must educate, inspire, and uplift them. Reciprocally,

the artist must learn from and be inspired and uplifted by the people. The

artist must be prepared to sacrifice her or his own individuality and,

instead, always write with the good of the people in mind. Third and

lastly, black art must be committed to political and social reform and

supportive of the revolution that will bring this about. In essence the

Black Arts movement’s objectives were to reach the masses of black

people, to make them understand their message of self-sufficiency and

dignity, and to inspire them to act upon it.

Many of the criteria and objectives of the Black Arts movement are

discernible within the poetry itself. For example, in “From the Egyptian”

in his 1966 collection Black Art, Baraka makes clear that violent

confrontation with the oppressors of black people is an imminent reality

as he asserts that he is prepared to murder “the enemies / of my father.”

Likewise, in “The True Import of Present Dialogue, Black vs. Negro”

in Black Feeling, Black Talk (1968), Giovanni tells black people: “We

ain’t got to prove we can die / We got to prove we can kill.” Giovanni

also demonstrates the criterion of commitment with “My Poem” (1968),

when she writes in support of the revolution and its enduring nature,

stating that “if i never do anything / it will go on.” The didacticism of

much Black Arts poetry is visible in Baraka’s “A School of Prayer”

(1966). In this poem, Baraka tells his black audience: “Do not obey their

laws.” “Their,” of course, refers to white society. Essentially Baraka

urges black people to rebel against white authority and be wary of the

words spoken by those who seek to oppress them because their purpose

is to deceive black people and curtail their advancement. The celebration

of blackness is also noticeable in Black Arts poetry. Sanchez, perhaps

the female poet most closely identified with the Black Arts movement,

reclaims the dignity of black womanhood in an unnamed poem in her

volume We a BaddDDD People (1970), when she links herself as a

black woman to a regal African queen who will, “Walk / move in / blk

queenly ways.” Similarly, in “Ka Ba” (1969), Baraka affirms the

uniqueness of black expressive culture and of black people, whom he

describes as “full of masks and dances and swelling chants / with

African eyes and noses and arms,” despite the present condition of

oppression and degradation under which many African Americans live.

In both of these poems, Sanchez and Baraka seek to restore to black

people a positive representation of blackness and raise their collective

sense of identity.

Many of the poems in Sanchez’s collection We a BaddDDD

People exemplify experimentation with language. In

“indianapolis/summer/1969/poem,” Sanchez provides a new spelling of

the words mothers (“mothas”), fathers (“fathas”), and sisters (sistuhs”);

the word about becomes “bout,” the word black becomes “blk,” and the

word I becomes “i.” The changes in spelling, as well as the use of

nonstandard English in Sanchez’s poems, are meant to capture the

syntax and vernacular speech of many within the black community,

while the abbreviated spelling of “blk” and the lower case “i” are part of

Sanchez’s refusal to adhere to the rules of standard English. Many Black

Arts poets perceived language to be a tool of the oppressor and therefore

sought ways to make it their own. Lastly, the use of pejorative

terminology and irreverent language was also common among Black

Arts poets. The police were often referred to as “pigs,” and white people

were termed “honkies” or “crackers.”

Several criticisms have been leveled against the Black Arts movement.

One was that it tended only to address issues of race and to promote

racial hatred. Also the functional aspect of the Black Arts movement

came to be denounced by newly emerging black literary critics who

claimed that the literature itself was often subordinate to the political or

social message of the movement. These critics saw this as detrimental to

black literature, creating a narrowness of focus that creatively limited the

artist and the kinds of literature he or she could compose. In addition

there was a tendency in the Black Arts movement to devise theories

prior to the creation of an actual body of literature that would prove the

theory. Therefore the literature was driven by the theory rather than the

other way around. Lastly, some Black Arts movement writers were

known to judge harshly any black writer who did not conform to the

criteria and objectives of the movement. Even black writers of the past

were not exempt from being maligned, and Black Arts movement

writers often did criticize them without always taking into consideration

the historical period and context in which these past writers were

composing their literature.

Still the Black Arts movement’s influence and contributions to

American poetry were far reaching. It made literary artists rethink the

function and purpose of their work and their responsibility to their

communities and to society. It also influenced and continues to inspire

new generations of poets to experiment with a variety of artistic forms to

refuse the pressure to conform to Western standards of art and to write,

embrace, and derive their art from within their own expressive culture