Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones)

Amiri Baraka (born Everett LeRoi Jones) (b. 1934–d. 2014) is one of the most important African American artists and intellectuals. He was a poet, critic, essayist, musicologist, playwright, novelist, and brilliant polemicist who sought to expose through his work the historical ravages of racism and oppression. He began his literary career as part of the Beat scene on the Lower East Side of New York, where he met the poet Allen Ginsberg and developed friendships with Black Mountain School artists like the influential Charles Olson and New York school poet Frank O’Hara. After the assassination of Malcolm X in 1965, Baraka, who had already been wrestling with his identity and his responsibility as a black artist, left Hettie Jones and moved uptown to Harlem to found, along with Askia Touré and others, the Black Arts Repertory Theatre and School (BARTS), the first initiative of the Black Arts Movement (BAM). The movement was the artistic wing of Black Power and attempted to define the function of black history and culture in developing a consciousness capable of resisting the lure of acculturation and assimilation. This newly raised consciousness, Baraka believed, would lead to the theorization of a black aesthetic, a functional writing politics devised to reflect the full extent of the African American experience. In 1967, he changed his name from LeRoi Jones to the Bantu Muslim name Imamu Ameer Baraka (later Amiri Baraka); this change was inspired by his time at San Francisco State University and his relationship with Maulana (Ron) Karenga and the cultural nationalist association US Organization. After the collapse of BARTS, Baraka returned to his hometown of Newark, where he continued his cultural work with his wife Amina at the Spirit House, later rejecting cultural nationalism in favor of Third World Marxism, while still maintaining the grassroots dimension of BAM. Whether it is in the early poems of Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note (1960), the musicology of Blues People (1963), Black Music (1967) and The Music (1987), plays like Dutchman (1964), the more politically inflected poetry of Black Magic (1969) and It’s Nation Time (1970) or the historiographical projects of “In the Tradition” (1982) and Wise Why’s Y’s (1995), Baraka remained committed both to poeticizing his people and to proposing innovative ways of voicing his displeasure with power structures. His poetic avant-gardism, his astute political prose, and his performance poetics make him the most important figure of the black cultural vanguard to have emerged from the turbulent 1960s.