Here May Is Not Rap Be Music D in Almost Every Major Language,Excerpted Including Pages Mandarin

Home , Adrienne Kennedy, AfriCOBRA, Barbara Christian, Black Arts Movement, Carolyn Rodgers, Etheridge Knight

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Edited by istribut Verner D. Mitchell Cynthia Davis

ROWMAN & LITTLEFIELD Lanham • Boulder • New York • London

18_985_Mitchell.indb 3 2/25/19 2:34 PM ed or printed. Published by Rowman & Littlefield An imprint of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706 istribut www.rowman.com

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Names: Mitchell, Verner D., 1957– author. | Davis, Cynthia, 1946– author. Title: Encyclopedia of the Black Arts Movement / Verner D. Mitchell, Cynthia Davis. Description: Lanhaman : uncorrectedRowman & Littlefield, page proof [2019] and | Includes may not bibliographical be d references and index. Identifiers:Excerpted LCCN 2018053986pages for advance(print) | LCCN review 2018058007 purposes (ebook) only. | AllISBN rights reserved. 9781538101469This is (electronic) | ISBN 9781538101452 | ISBN 9781538101452 (cloth : alk. paper) Subjects: LCSH: Black Arts movement—Encyclopedias. Classification: LCC NX512.3.A35 (ebook) | LCC NX512.3.A35 M58 2019 (print) | DDC 700.89/96073—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018053986

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18_985_Mitchell.indb 4 2/25/19 2:34 PM To the memory of our dear colleague Dr. Reginald Martin

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18_985_Mitchell.indb 5 2/25/19 2:34 PM CONTENTS

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istribut Foreword LaToya R. Jefferson-James xi Preface xix Acknowledgments xxiii Timeline xxv ENCYCLOPEDIA AfriCOBRA 1 Allen, Samuel W. 3 Angelou, Maya 5 Baldwin, James 7 “Ballad of Birmingham” 12 Bambara, Toni Cade 14 Baraka, Amirian uncorrected page proof and may not be d 16 TheExcerpted Black Aesthetic pages for advance review purposes only. All rights reserved. 24 TheThis Black is Arts Movement in Algeria 29 “Black Dada Nihilismus” 34 Black Fire: An Anthology of Afro-American Writing 38 Black Theatre Issue of The Drama Review 39 Black Theatre Magazine 43 Black Women Writers (1950–1980): A Critical Evaluation 45 Black Women Writers and the Black Arts Movement 46 “Blues Ain’t No Mockin’ Bird” 49

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Blues for Mister Charlie 51 Broadside Press 57 “A Bronzeville Mother Loiters in Mississippi. Meanwhile, a Mississippi Mother Burns Bacon” 58 Brooks, Gwendolyn 60 Bullins, Ed 66 Caldwell, Ben 69 The Caribbean Artists Movement 71 Catherine Carmier 79 Childress, Alice 81 Chisholm, Shirley 84 Coleman, Wanda 86 Collins, Kathleen 92 ed or printed. Davis, Angela 97

Deacons for Defense and Justice istribut 100 Dent, Thomas Covington 107 Dodson, Owen 109 Du Bois, W. E. B. 110 Dutchman 112 Evans, Mari 121 Evans-Charles, Martie 123 The Fire Next Time 126 for colored girls who have considered suicide / when the rainbow is enuf 132 The Free-Lance Pallbearers 134 Gaines, Ernest J. 139 Giovanni, Nikki 141 Gunn, Bill 147 Hansberry, Lorraine 150 an uncorrected page proof and may not be d Hayden, Robert 154 Henderson,Excerpted David pages for advance review purposes only. All rights reserved. 159 This is Hopkinson, Nalo 161 Jordan, June 164 Kennedy, Adrienne 167 Kgositsile, Keorapetse William 171 Knight, Etheridge 173 The Last Poets 176 “The Lesson” 185 Malcolm X 188

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Malcolm X, Poetry on 194 Marginalization and the Black Arts Movement 195 Marson, Una 201 Milner, Ron 212 “Monday in B-Flat” 215 Morrison, Toni 216 Mumbo Jumbo 223 Music and the Black Arts Movement 225 Neal, Larry 230 Negro Digest / Black World / First World 233 The Negro Ensemble Company 235 No Place to Be Somebody 239 One Day When I Was Lost: A Scenario Based on Alex Haley’s “The ed or printed. Autobiography of Malcolm X” 241

Organization of Black American Culture istribut 242 Polite, Carlene Hatcher 244 Ra, Sun 254 A Raisin in the Sun 259 Randall, Dudley 262 “Raymond’s Run” 263 Redmond, Eugene B. 265 Rodgers, Carolyn 266 Ross, Fran 268 Sanchez, Sonia 275 Sexual Identity and the Black Arts Movement 284 Shange, Ntozake 291 Shepp, Archie 295 The Slave 299 an uncorrected page proof and may not be d Smith, Jean Wheeler 301 TheExcerpted Society pagesof Umbra for advance review purposes only. All rights reserved. 302 This is “Sonny’s Blues” 306 Soul on Ice 311 Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee 314 Teer, Barbara Ann 317 This Child’s Gonna Live 321 Thomas, Lorenzo 325 Till, Emmett, Poetry on 327 Touré, Askia Muhammad 331

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Tupac Shakur and the Black Arts Movement 333 Understanding the New Black Poetry: Black Speech and Black Music as Poetic References 339 Voodoo Aesthetics and the Black Arts Movement 341 Your Blues Ain’t Like Mine 350 Selected Bibliography 355 Index 359 About the Editors and Contributors 377

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18_985_Mitchell.indb 10 2/25/19 2:34 PM FOREWORD: KEEP THE LAMP BURNING The Longest Shortest Artistic Movement

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istribut It is time to reevaluate the Black Arts Movement. Over the past four decades, the academic discourse surrounding the Black Power Movement (BPM) and its artistic arm, the Black Arts Movement (BAM), has flattened into a dismissive cliché: it was the shortest literary movement in African American literature, dogged by misogyny and homophobia, and brought to a righteous end by a feminist backlash of the 1980s. Yet the BPM and the BAM remain a source of fascination and inspiration for African American popular culture. On the date of Malcolm X’s birth in 1968, a group of oral poetry performers from New York who called themselves the Last Poets came together and began performing. With drums added for emphasis to the words, their style of music—with the human voice becoming the main focal point— became known as Rhythm and Poetry or what is commonly called RAP. The Last Poets were featured on a song by current rapper Common called “The Corner,” performing a slam piece for that song. Today, rap music and its culture, hip hop, has become youthan uncorrected culture the page world proof over. and There may is not rap be music d in almost every major language,Excerpted including pages Mandarin. for advance In review addition, purposes there areonly. slam All poetryrights reserved.venues in every major Thiscity withis a sizeable black population, and black college students still continue to host these events. In spite of the watering down of mainstream rap as a poetic art form, within respective African American communities, the best rappers are always those who can be considered poets. For example, the world knows TuPac as a rapper, but many African Americans consume his poetry, which is available in print form. The rapper Common was invited to the Obama White House as a poet, not a rapper, and in 2002, rapper Mos Def launched a show in conjunction with Russell Simmons that hearkened back to the BAM roots of rap, Def Poetry Jam, on HBO. It ran for five seasons. Many African Americans also see the best rappers as poets of the underground (those rappers who do not receive much radio play and

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who may not necessarily want it) who can still tell stories, such as Jean Grae. Their styles and the impetus to address people at the grassroots level, come directly from the BAM, particularly from poets like Sonia Sanchez, Jayne Cortez, Nikki Giovanni, and Wanda Coleman. Coleman, though nationally recognized as a poet, electrified audiences with her performances at jazz cafes until her untimely death from breast cancer in 2013. Then, there is that strain of rap music that manifested an undeniable influence of the BPM, the Nation of Islam (NOI), and more specifically, Malcolm X. Like their BAM predecessors, many rappers are heavily influenced by the speeches of Malcolm X, even though he was assassinated before many of them were born. His speeches are still widely available through online music services like Spotify and Tidal, and some entertainers even imitate his style of rimless glasses. Some rappers have simply taken speeches of Malcolm X and mixed his voice into a beat. Ice Cube, in his album Predator, which followed the 1992 Los Angeles riots, inserted an excerpt from one of Malcolm’s speeches, warning American blacked people or printed. about the government’s lip service to democracy and its failure to enforce its own laws. Ironically, the insert is simply called “Integration.” In 1988, istributthe rap group Boogie Down Productions released its album, By All Means Necessary. Of course, the title is an allusion to the famous Malcolm X quote “by any means necessary,” which was popularized by a poster in the 1960s. The album cover features the group’s leader, KRS-One, replicating in hip hop clothing the famous picture of Malcolm X holding a gun and protectively watching the street through a window. Other rappers such as the Brand Nubians featured NOI speakers on their albums. Still others professed to be Five Percenters, a sect of Islam founded in Harlem by former NOI member Clarence 13X. When worldwide recording sensation Beyoncé Knowles stepped onto the stage for her Super Bowl halftime performance in February 2016, she wore a suit that paid homage to the Black Panther Party, and so did her backup dancers. It caused a firestorm of backlash from much of white America and a great deal of confusion from younger African Americans who, long removed from the moment and certainly not exposed to their own histories in standardized test-driven public school districts, did not anunderstand uncorrected what page the performer’sproof and may outfit not signified. be d That year marked the fiftieth anniversary of the party’s formation, and Knowles wanted to pay homage inExcerpted her way. Following pages for thatadvance performance, review purposes she and only. her husband, All rights rapperreserved. Shawn Carter (Jay-Z),This is established a scholarship for students wanting to major in African American studies, history, or literature. In addition, Beyoncé’s sister, Solange Knowles, released A Seat at the Table later that year; it became a number one album on the Billboard 200 list. It features themes of social and racial justice in its lyrics and interludes, with members of Knowles’s family and rapper Master P discussing their experiences with white hatred and civil rights and their awakening to black consciousness. The album became Solange’s first Grammy nomination and win. The fascination with BPM/BAM is still winning Grammy nominations and caus- ing national sensations for African American artists, and it is imperative that academia review, reassess, and respect both the BPM and BAM with the same kind

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of rigorous scholarship given to other eras. With rap music officially being around for fifty years, it is now qualified as a senior citizen art form, complete with gen- erational tensions, regional variations, and internal strife! There are now high art forms of rap and low art, but it all began with the BAM. If rap is a musical branch of the BPM/BAM tree, it suffices to say that there needs to be more study of the root system, which is often more complex and runs deeper than what is appar- ent above ground. In his study of the BAM, The Black Arts Movement: Literary Nationalism in the 1960s and 1970s, James Smethurst asks, “What was the Black Arts movement? What were its sources? What were its regional variations and com- monalities” (6–7). As mentioned, critics have accused the Black Arts Movement of homophobia and misogyny, and black feminists have lambasted the movement. To that end, Smethurst asks: “Who says so? And why do they say it” (7). Then, there are questions about the date affixed to the Black Arts Movement in most literary anthologies: 1960–1969 or 1960–1975. Some critics say Amiri Baraka (formerly LeRoi Jones) affixed this date when he declared the movement too parochialed or inprinted. scope and insisted that African Americans see their struggle as part of a worldwide, anticolonial battle. But had not Malcolm X said that several times beforeistribut his death? Did not Paul Robeson write a letter to the United Nations in 1951? If the BAM began in the 1960s, what is to be done with Langston Hughes’s encouragement of younger artists and his international involvement with Black Power writers elsewhere in the African Diaspora? What do we do with Lorraine Hansberry? Perhaps there is an alternative reason for the BAM’s maltreatment (or nontreat- ment) by scholars of African American studies and literature. First, it simply does not fit the carefully crafted South/North Great Migration II historiography. African Americans left the South for the same reasons most people come to America: better economic opportunities, safe and sturdy housing, and good schools for their children. They left with hope and optimism. Instead, what they found was entrapment in ghetto Black Belts, subpar, overpriced rentals, menial or scarce employment, and overcrowded schools that were sometimes little better than the ones they left behind in the South. People sought vertical socioeconomic advancement and found that they had accomplished nothing more than horizontal movement. As historian Manning Marablean uncorrected put it, black page people proof woke and upmay in not cold, be alienatingd climates, having escaped immediate death by the Klan, to slow death by poverty. They had traded the Excerptedplantation pagesfor the for ghetto—one advance review form purposesof oppression only. for All another. rights reserved. This was a psy- chologicalThis blowis that was not easily overcome. In order to overcome it, black people anecdotally engaged in poverty shaming (which incidentally impeded progress in the struggle for civil and economic advancement), using the images that they saw in the media. It is no secret that in African American popular culture the words “country” and “ghetto” are insults. In one sardonic scene from Ralph Ellison’s Invis- ible Man, the unnamed protagonist is trying to discard some garbage. One person yells at him because “country” garbage from the South is not wanted in her garbage can: another yells at him because “ghetto trash” from the North is not allowed in his can. These types of microaggressions within the African American community, built upon hard-won class differences that allowed black people to shake off an

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agrarian past and on the careful suppression of stories of racism in Northern and Western cities on the Cold War stage, served to sometimes distract and divide Afri- can Americans. Langston Hughes, writing for the Chicago Defender, coyly implies this. He also suggests it in his Jesse B. Semple stories, especially when one speaker points out to Jesse that he should not take so much pride in Harlem while laughing at black people in other places, since black people did not own anything in Harlem, but simply paid rent. It is important that academics and scholars place the civil rights movement and the Black Power movement that immediately followed it within an international, Cold War context. During that time, Mississippi became a construction of America’s imagination, while the racism in Chicago, Los Angeles, and Harlem went largely unreported, unnoticed, and unchecked. Segregation and racism were used by the Soviets as criticisms against America. The American media portrayed Mississippi, with its Draconian laws, large black population along the Highway 82 metroplex, segregationist women, Citizens Council, crisis at Ole Miss, and colorfuled demagogues or printed. as a type of third world country within a country—and not really American at all. (Today, the largest population of black males in America stillistribut resides along High- way 82, which cuts directly through the Cotton Belt of Mississippi and Alabama.) African Americans began to embody this thinking as well. Many African Americans in Mississippi, because of the Citizens Council blackouts and limited news received from other parts of the country, only received word-of-mouth accounts of the North and West from family who had migrated. Unfortunately, more often than not, black Mississippians were the source of ridicule and shaming by Northern black people. Many black Mississippians say that they often felt pressured to lie about their origins when they went other places, saying that they were from Baton Rouge or New Or- leans. Most importantly, black Mississippians, like their other Southern neighbors, said they simply did not know how bad racism was in places like Chicago and Los Angeles. Their family members and kin ridiculed them, calling them “country,” but never mentioned the terrible race relations or extreme poverty in their own North- ern or Western homes. When the riots of the 1960s broke out, they simply did not understand why the people were rioting or why the people of Watts would destroy their own property.anuncorrected In fact, some page black proof southerners and may were not be absolutely d shocked at the violence Martin King Jr. faced when he went to Chicago. Even King was unpre- pared.Excerpted King’s 1966 pages march for inadvance Chicago review exposed purposes the hate only. that All the rights mainstream reserved. press had beenThis hiding. is He said after the march: “I’ve been in many demonstrations all across the South, but I can say that I have never seen—even in Mississippi and Ala- bama—mobs as hostile and as hate-filled as I’ve seen here in Chicago” (quoted in Grossman). King later rented an apartment on the South Side in order to continue his work and witness the hatred in Chicago firsthand. Southerners learned that they could not rely on the media or family and friends to be truthful with them about racism in the North and West. If Mississippi was the ultimate racial/economic dystopia, where was black people’s egalitarian utopia? Certainly not in the urban chaos of America’s exceptional region, and the riots of the Boston busing crises more than proved that Malcolm X was right about North-

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ern liberal/media hypocrisy. However, BPM participants and BAM writers recorded the lives, incidents, and moments long before the busing crises. Wanda Coleman (1946–2013), who was married at eighteen and a mother of two, often complained that she did not have time to write as she wanted, because she had to provide for her children. She divorced after two years of marriage and found herself living in poverty with two babies to feed. She was a young activist who wanted to participate in the March on Washington in 1963 but was discouraged from doing so, along with other more militant civil rights workers. She saw and experienced firsthand how the media almost scientifically silenced activists from the West and North, portraying them as if they were merely vandals and hoodlums who were out to disrupt peaceful protests rather than political beings and members of organizations with legitimate concerns about police brutality and racist employment practices in the ghetto. She was there to watch Watts burn. Coleman, in several interviews, said that given the time, she would have written over a dozen books about black people and the racism they endured in Los Angeles. With very little time on her hands, she became a poeted instead. or printed. Likewise, the very early rap songs recorded the lives, incidents, and moments that the media (and for that matter, many African Americans)istribut may not have wanted told. It was music of the ghetto that sounded awfully like Coleman’s poems and stories. One of the earliest hit records, “The Message,” by Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five, released in July 1982, tells the story of nihilistic life in the ghetto. Rap music went through a period when it was taken before Congress and asked to be censored by other black people for profanity. Comedians Rudy Ray Moore and Richard Pryor were never taken before Congress, and they used more profanity than any rap songs to date in their comedy routines. The congressional hearing was less about the profanity than about the story. Rap is a child of the BAM, and it told a story that many African Americans simply did not want to hear, from the plantation to the ghetto. Songs like “The Message” had no profanity at all: only poverty, gang violence, economic/housing discrimination, and racism. BAM poetry, based in the North/West and those early rap songs, far removed from the middle-class-led, nonviolent civil rights movement of the South, are anticolonial in nature, led by the grassroots and shaped by the working class. The nonviolent civil rights movement was carefully ancoordinated uncorrected for pagethe visuals proof andit presented may not forbe dthe cameras, with genteel people dressed in their Sunday best. Certain African American history textbooks do notExcerpted bother pagesto mention for advance Claudette review Colvin purposes and her only. role All in rights the Montgomery reserved. Bus Boycott.This The is BPM, in contrast, seemed spontaneous, with people seeming not to care what they looked like before the camera. The nonviolent civil rights movement was led by the college educated; whereas the self-defense precursor was led by the working-class barber, mill-worker, yeomen farmer, and military veteran, who may not have finished high school. A look at the contrast shows why the BPM and BAM are treated dismissively. The nonviolent civil rights movement was middle class, careful, coordinated: the BPM/BAM was working class, spontaneous, grassroots. For academics to continuously dismiss it even though modern-day democratization of higher education curricula may not have occurred without the activism of the

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BPM/BAM artists is to practice a type of underlying academic elitism that relegates the BAM to the impoverished ghetto of academic scholarship. Contemporary critics continue to charge BAM writers with misogyny and homophobia. In some instances, they are absolutely correct. Eldridge Cleaver’s disrespectful, downright vulgar diatribe against James Baldwin in his book Soul on Ice (1968) is enough to make even contemporary audiences shudder. However, contemporary critics continue to overlook the fact that BAM women did not silently accept the sexism of black men. Most of them were seasoned activists and political/ social iconoclasts. They knew how, and were not afraid, to wield a pen—even if it meant wielding it against their own leadership/membership ranks. Sonia Sanchez personally spoke to Malcolm X and told him that she did not agree with all of his positions, facing off his bodyguards in order to do so. Barbara Sizemore wrote “Sex- ism and the Black Male” in 1973, acknowledging that much black male sexism came from American institutions and even quoting Paulo Freire. Alice Walker penned an opinion piece for a newspaper chastising black males for believing thated oronly printed. certain women were qualified to speak for the civil rights movement. She reminded them that Fannie Lou Hamer spoke whenever she felt she neededistribut to and never asked anyone’s permission and did not care if she offended them. In addition, Walker later coined the term “womanism,” in order to define the brand of feminism that black women practice as an alternative to white versions of feminism that left black women out of their configurations. Fannie Lou Hamer, in one of her speeches, denounced white feminism as antifamily and reminded black men that the struggle for freedom was one in which women and men worked as equals against white su- premacy whenever and wherever it appeared. These women and their writings were forceful enough in their day, from within the BAM, to effect change. Some men of the BAM denied vehemently that they were sexist and made sure that they were seen encouraging women writers and supporting them. Later, Amiri Baraka apologized to Lorraine Hansberry for his scath- ing critique of Lena Younger in A Raisin in the Sun (1959). He realized that it was sexist. Others apologized, too: “Even Maulana Karenga, whose Kawaida philosophy, with its notion that black women should be ‘complementary’ to rather than equal with, men was unquestionablyan uncorrected masculinist,page proof andlater may renounced not be d this masculinism, saying that he was influenced by a sexism that was rampant in all sectors of the United States”Excerpted (Smethurst pages 85). Infor spiteadvance of the review rhetoric, purposes the Black only. Arts All Movement rights reserved. has given African AmericanThis is literature internationally known African American women poets, playwrights, and fiction writers who continue to exercise considerable influence on literature, academia, and even rap music: Lorraine Hansberry (some critics place her in the protest tradition, while others place her in the BAM), Gwendolyn Brooks, Sonia Sanchez, Carolyn Rodgers, Jayne Cortez, Rosa Guy, and Nikki Giovanni, among others. In addition, Hoyt Fuller was openly gay and it was widely known. This strain of sexism was also a fight against a centuries-old, gendered stereotype of black men crafted by philosophers in the shadows of the Enlightenment. Scien- tific racism grew alongside the Enlightenment, and with it, strict, European notions of gendered, uneven binaries. The same philosophers who argued for the freedom

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of mankind held stock in slave trading companies. According to European philosophers, African women were masculinized because they worked outside the home in fields and in the market place. African men were effeminate because they did not properly subdue their women and relegate them to the domestic sphere: they were some type of faux men who should be made to serve real men. Europeans were real men, and colonialism was cast as a masculine endeavor, especially in pro-colonial pieces like Kipling’s “White Man’s Burden.” Slave traders and colonizers later used this scientific and philosophical “knowledge” to justify race-based policies of slavery, colonization, and imperialism. Nothing was said of the violence it took for Africans to accept their status as inferiors. In anticolonial struggles throughout the African Diaspora, from North America to the Caribbean to Africa, the language of nationalism and freedom is cast in terms of castration and manhood. Even Malcolm X, in one of his speeches, says that when people sit down in nonviolent protests, they are “castrated.” Some BAM women called attention to this divisive rhetoric. Sizemore wrote that this type of dualism, where the genders are only lookeded orat printed.in terms of superior/inferior, was taught to black men. Europeans knew absolutely nothing of the complex gender systems in West Africa. One of the projectsistribut of Western society has been to create an image of what a woman should be, and that image has never been one of black women. Dualism ultimately hurts any movements for freedom and equality. While some black men chafed beneath Sizemore’s and Bambara’s critiques, others thanked them for liberating them from a seemingly never-ending Hegelian dialectic. Therefore, BAM women writers worked to solve the sexism problems within their movement decades ago. It is the challenge of academics today to extend the debate, for example, to academic institutions that relegate the BAM to the academic ghetto for its sexism while simultaneously denying tenured positions to women of color and routinely underfunding and only paying lip service to scantily staffed African American and Ethnic Studies departments. Thus, this book enters two concurrently running conversations on the BPM/ BAM: one being explored in popular African American culture and one in a re- newed interest in academic culture. It may not be exhaustive, but perhaps this is only a first edition. The book aims to re-present those familiar figures of the BAM such as Amirian Baraka, uncorrected Sonia Sanchez, page proof and and Malcolm may not X beto ad new generation of scholars, and to reintroduce some lesser-known or even forgotten figures of the BAM, suchExcerpted as the Umbra pages poets, for advance Bill Gunn, review James purposes Baldwin only. (although All rights some reserved. do not consider BaldwinThis BAM), is the Deacons for Defense, and Wanda Coleman. This volume has been a labor of love that the editors and contributors hope will add to the conversation and black literary letters for years to come.

Further Reading Brooks, Maegan Parker, and Davis W. Houck, eds. The Speeches of Fannie Lou Hamer. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2011. Grossman, Ron. “50 Years Ago: MLK’s March in Marquette Park Turned Violent, Exposed Hate.” Chicago Tribune, 28 July 2016. http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/opinion/com-

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mentary/ct-mlk-king-marquette-park-1966-flashback-perspec-0731-md-20160726-story. html Marable, Manning, and Leith Mullings. Let Nobody Turn Us Around: An African American Anthology, 2nd ed. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2009. Sizemore, Barbara. “Sexism and the Black Male.” Black Scholar 4.6–7 (March–April 1973): 2–11. Smethurst, James Edward. The Black Arts Movement: Literary Nationalism in the 1960s and 1970s. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005. Walker, Alice. In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens: Womanist Prose. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1983.

—LaToya R. Jefferson-James, PhD University of Tennessee at Martin

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istribut Amiri Baraka’s poem “We Own the Night” (1965) has become the touchstone of the Black Arts Movement (BAM). The poem links black art to black lives in an ee- rily contemporary way as it exalts the night as a space of black autonomy. Night is implicitly contrasted with day, and the penultimate line, stressing that the day will not protect them, implies a potentially violent solution to American racism. One of the twentieth century’s greatest poets, Baraka was a founder of the militant Black Arts Movement. In fact, due to the poem’s reference to black art, he is credited with the movement’s name. BAM artists created works in every literary genre, from the radical fiction of Toni Cade Bambara, James Baldwin, and Ishmael Reed to the revolutionary drama of Ed Bullins, Adrienne Kennedy, and Ron Milner; from the films of Bill Gunn and Kathleen Collins to the searing verse and essays of Baraka, Mari Evans, Wanda Coleman, and Larry Neal. From the beginning, the movement had embraced political activism and the performative arts: music, spoken-word poetry, and community theatre were integral components of BAM. As LaToya anJefferson-James uncorrected page writes proof in her and incisive may not foreword, be d the Black Arts Move- mentExcerpted was the pagesartistic for arm advance of the reviewBlack Powerpurposes Movement only. All (BPM). rights reserved. Like the BPM, BAM Thiswas ais global phenomenon; artists hailed from throughout the United States and the African Diaspora. The poet Keorapetse Kgositsile, for example, immigrated to the United States from South Africa, while the activist and essayist Stokely Car- michael came from Trinidad, and the poet Lorenzo Thomas from Panama. In 1969, when renegade Black Panther Eldridge Cleaver sought refuge in Algeria, Richard Wright’s daughter Julia flew in from Paris to translate for him. The same year, saxophonist and playwright Archie Shepp helped organize the first Pan-African Festival in Algiers, featuring Miriam Makeba (recently wed to Stokely Carmichael), Oscar Peterson, and Nina Simone.

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In recent years, the steady stream of international conferences, anthologies, films, criticism, biographies, social commentaries, and memoirs from the period attests to the popular and academic interest in the BAM. In 2017, the London Review of Books published an excerpt from Elaine Stein Mokhtefi’s memoir of her glamorous years in Algeria, where, as press secretary to President Houari Boumedienne, she worked with the Black Panthers, the Zimbabwe African People’s Union, and other national liberation movements. In 2018, the “Black Arts Movement in the United States and Algeria” Conference was held at the University of Abdelhamid Ibn Badis. Indeed, the BAM is experiencing a popularity not seen since its heyday in the 1960s. While there is wide agreement that the BAM reached its zenith during the mid-1960s, there is no consensus on its beginning and end dates. In fact, LaToya Jefferson-James, in her foreword, notes BAM’s propulsive trajectory into the future, and shows how today’s most original and radical young musicians ground their work in BAM’s tropes and tenets. One cannot help but see the freshness and relevance of BAM poems, plays, films, and fiction as they are poignantly reinforceded in or theprinted. Black Lives Matter Movement. Although Henry Louis Gates, in a 1994 Time magazine article about African American literary movements, labeled BAMistribut the “most short- lived of all,” claiming that it was “dead” by the 1970s, drama critics Errol G. Hill and James V. Hatch cite the movement’s broad scope, energy, and vitality. They date the BAM from 1959, with the Broadway debut of Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun, and end it in 1976 with the premiere of Ntozake Shange’s for colored girls who have considered suicide / when the rainbow is enuf. Fueled by the intrusive FBI investigations into the lives of radical black artists and the Joseph McCarthy Senate Subcommittee hearings in the late fifties, BAM was catalyzed by the civil rights movement and the young veterans who headed to New York with literary aspirations in the early sixties. BAM culminated in the Black Power struggle in the seventies, although the early eighties produced ground-breaking films and plays that, but for the financial and political constraints endured by black artists, would have appeared a decade earlier. In this volume, we agree with Hill and Hatch, as well as with Aldon Nielsen, who argues in Black Chant (1997) that an African American avant-garde flourished from the 1950s through the 1970s; however, we maintain that thean movement’s uncorrected trajectory page proof extends and may into notthe beearly d eighties. As a reflection of the movement’s current and continuing influence, we include entries such as “TupacExcerpted Shakur pages and the for Black advance Arts review Movement.” purposes only. All rights reserved. AlthoughThis the is exact dates of BAM are sometimes contested, there is general agreement that the Black Arts Movement represented the most prolific expression of African American literature since the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s. In 1965, Amiri Baraka had called for a revolutionary theatre “to reshape the world.” Consis- tent with Baraka’s manifesto, BAM artists envisioned an aesthetic that was insepa- rable from social and racial justice, civil rights, feminism, sexuality, black agency, and black autonomy. As Loretta McBride points out, Eldridge Cleaver ends Soul on Ice with a call for a radically new Black American aesthetic: “But put on your crown, my Queen, and we will build a New City on these ruins.”

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This volume is intended as an introduction to (a) key contributors to the Black Arts Movement, (b) their major works produced during the period, (c) significant publications such as Black Theatre magazine, and (d) influential groups and organizations, like the Umbra Poetry Workshop, Deacons for Defense, Negro Ensemble Theatre, and Broadside Press. We have included essays on the undisputed leaders of the BAM, as well as on lesser-known artists, whose work deserves a wider audience. While such an undertaking is always subjective, we trust that readers will find that the essays here reflect the breadth and depth of the Black Arts Movement.

FURTHER READING

Gates, Henry Louis, Jr. “Black Creativity: On the Cutting Edge.” Time 144.15 (10 October 1994): 74. Hill, Errol G., and James V. Hatch. A History of African American Theatreed. New or printed. York: Cam- bridge University Press, 2003. Nielsen, Aldon. Black Chant: Languages of African-American Postmodernism. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997. istribut

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1950 Gwendolyn Brooks wins the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry for Annie Allen, becoming the first African American to win a Pulitzer 1952 Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man 1953 Gwendolyn Brooks, Maud Martha James Baldwin, Go Tell It on the Mountain 1954 Brown v. Board of Education, U.S. Supreme Court declares separate public schools for black and white students unconstitutional 1955 Emmett Till lynched in Money, Mississippi 1959 Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun becomes the first play by an African American woman to appear on Broadway Paule Marshall, Brown Girl, Brownstones 1960 Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) founded at Shaw University in Raleigh, North Carolina 1961 Langston Hughes, The Best of Simple an uncorrected page proof and may not be d Hoyt Fuller, revamps and reissues Negro Digest 1962ExcerptedUmbra pages Poets for advanceWorkshop review founded purposes in Tom only. Dent’s All rights New reserved.York City apart- This isment Robert Hayden, Ballad of Remembrance 1963 James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time The Free Southern Theater founded at Tougaloo College in Jackson, Mississippi, by SNCC members Doris Derby, Gilbert Moses, and John O’Neal March on Washington; Martin Luther King Jr. gives “I Have a Dream” speech Medgar Evers, NAACP leader, assassinated in Mississippi

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Four black girls killed in a bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama 1964 LeRoi Jones (later Amiri Baraka), Dutchman and The Slave Adrienne Kennedy, Funnyhouse of a Negro 1965 U.S. combat troops enter the Vietnam War Alex Haley and Malcolm X, The Autobiography of Malcolm X Dudley Randall founds Broadside Press in Detroit, Michigan Malcolm X is assassinated in Harlem. BAM Poet Larry Neal witnesses the assassination LeRoi Jones founds the Black Arts Repertory Theatre/School (BARTS) in Harlem 1966 John Oliver Killens organizes the First Black Writers Conference at Fisk University Huey Newton and Bobby Seale found the Black Panther Party in Oak- land, California ed or printed. 1967 The Second Fisk University Black Writers Conference, held in Nash- ville, Tennessee istribut Haki Madhubuti creates Third World Press in Chicago 1968 Amiri Baraka and Larry Neale, Black Fire: An Anthology of Afro- American Writing Gwendolyn Brooks, In the Mecca Etheridge Knight, Poems from Prison Eldridge Cleaver, Soul on Ice Nikki Giovanni, Black Feeling, Black Talk A Third Black Writers Conference is held at Fisk University Martin Luther King Jr. is assassinated in Memphis, Tennessee 1969 Maya Angelou, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings Carolyn Rodgers, “Black Poetry—Where It’s At” 1970 Toni Cade Bambara, The Black Woman: An Anthology Mari Evans, I Am a Black Woman June Jordan, Soulscript: Afro-American Poetry Toni anMorrison, uncorrected The Bluestpage proofEye and may not be d Charles Gordone becomes the first African American to win the Pulitzer ExcerptedPrize forpages best for drama, advance for Noreview Place purposes to Be Somebody only. All rights reserved. 1971 ThisDudley is Randall, The Black Poets Addison Gayle, “The Black Aesthetic” June Jordan, Some Changes 1972 Toni Cade Bambara, Gorilla, My Love Ishmael Reed, Mumbo Jumbo 1973 Stephen Henderson, Understanding the New Black Poetry Toni Morrison, Sula U.S. combat troops exit the Vietnam War 1974 Pat Crutchfield Exum, Keeping the Faith: Writings by Contemporary Black American Women

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Sonia Sanchez, A Blues Book for a Blue Black Magic Woman 1975 Ntozake Shange’s for colored girls who have considered suicide / when the rainbow is enuf, the second play by a black woman produced on Broadway 1976 Eugene B. Redmond, Drumvoices: The Mission of Afro-American Poetry Ishmael Reed, Flight to Canada The journal Black World ceases publication

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istribut AFRICOBRA (African Commune of BAD Relevant Artists) Chicago has always been in the vanguard of African American art. The Great Mi- gration up the Mississippi to the city’s South Side, also known as Bronzeville, and Chicago’s energetic Black press contributed to an unprecedented cultural flower- ing. Newspapers like the venerable Chicago Defender and the Nation of Islam’s Muhammad Speaks, and magazines like John H. Johnson’s Ebony, as well as Negro World, edited by Hoyt W. Fuller, promoted and encouraged political activism and the arts. In the 1960s, a typical issue of Muhammad Speaks might include a review of a James Baldwin play and book reviews by John Henrik Clarke, while readers of the Chicago Defender could anticipate Langston Hughes’s weekly column of satiri- cal Jesse B. Semple stories. In 1936, well before the Black Arts Movement, Richard Wright had gathered fellow Chicago writers into the South Side Writers’ Group, which included Margaret Walker, Marian Minus, and Frank Marshall Davis. Gwen- dolyn Brooks, Lorraine Hansberry, and Val Gray Ward hailed from Chicago, as did poet Carolyn anRodgers uncorrected and novelist page Samproof Greenlee. and may notIn the be visuald arts, Archibald John MotleyExcerpted Jr., William pages Edouard for advance Scott, review and Charlespurposes Wilbert only. AllWhite rights Jr., reserved. all graduates of the ChicagoThis is Art Institute, made significant contributions to American painting. In 1967, an organization called OBAC (Organization of Black American Culture) was meeting regularly at the South Side Community Arts Center, located at 77 East Thirty-Fifth Street. OBAC included a Visual Artists Workshop, whose members had created the “Wall of Respect,” a mural in the Bronzeville neighborhood that “became the visual symbol of Black Nationalism and liberation” (Jones-Henderson 101). An OBAC Writers Workshop, chaired by Hoyt Fuller, soon followed. Mem- bers included Carolyn Rodgers, Johari Amini, Haki R. Madhubuti, and Sam Green- lee. The Writers Workshop hosted such luminaries of the Black Arts Movement as Sonia Sanchez, Amiri Baraka, and Nikki Giovanni (Jackson 921).

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In 1968, with the demise of the OBAC Visual Artists Workshop, a group of Chicago artists, including painters, printmakers, photographers, textile designers, and sculptors, came together to articulate “an aesthetic philosophy to guide their collective work—a shared visual language for positive revolutionary ideas” (Jones- Henderson 101). The group further defined its philosophy as “an aesthetic life force and a way of seeing the visual world, coupled with social, spiritual, relational and political realities” (Jones-Henderson 99). Founding members were Jeff Donaldson, Wadsworth Jarrell, Gerald Williams, Napoleon Jones-Henderson, James Phillips, Akili Ron Anderson, Kevin Cole, and Frank Smith. The artists dubbed themselves the African Commune of BAD Relevant Artists, or AfriCOBRA. They saw themselves as a trajectory of the Black Arts Movement that was integral to “the life force of Black Chicago” (Jones-Henderson 100). The group postulated that all aesthetics are culture-bound, and that a Black Aesthetic exists which should be “used as an instrument of struggle, pride, uplift” (102). The palette embraced by the group would involve “high-energy color . . . across the full range spectrumed like or printed.Coltrane attempting to squeeze a multiplicity of tonal patterns and textures out of every note played on the saxophone” (103). Touchstones and inspirations istributof the group included Sun Ra, John Coltrane, Thelonius Monk, Stevie Wonder, Jimi Hendrix, Miles Da- vis, Nina Simone, Askia Touré, Amiri Baraka, Gwendolyn Brooks, and Toni Cade Bambara. In 1971, founder Jeff Donaldson organized CONFABA (Conference on the Functional Aspects of Black Art) at Northwestern University in Evanston, Il- linois, which was the largest gathering of black artists and activists in the country. The conference strategized ways to continue the discussion of black creativity. In 1979, a retrospective of the AfriCOBRA artists was mounted, for which Larry Neal wrote the catalog. Today, the artists of AfriCOBRA continue to exert a powerful cultural influence on African American art and activism. In 2013, two exhibits of AfriCOBRA artists were held in Chicago at the South Side Community Arts Center (curated by the University of Chicago) and at the DuSable Museum of African American History. In October 2018, the prestigious Galerie Myrtis in Baltimore, Maryland, presented a show entitled AfriCOBRA: The Evolution of a Movement in celebration of the fiftieth anniversaryan uncorrectedof this coalition page of proof black and revolutionary may not be dartists whose aesthetic emerged from activism and a commitment to decry racism through positive, powerful, andExcerpted uplifting pagesimagery. for advance review purposes only. All rights reserved. This is

Further Reading Jackson, Angela. “Remembering Carolyn M. Rodgers.” Callaloo 33.4 (2010): 919–25. Jones-Henderson, Napoleon. “Remembering AfriCOBRA and the Black Arts Movement in 1960s Chicago.” Journal of Contemporary African Art 30 (2012): 98–103.

—Cynthia Davis

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expose the harsh realities of racial inequalities in the United States. Determined to break Hollywood stereotypes about blacks, she wrote and/or produced films about the police assault on the black liberation group MOVE’s headquarters in 1985, as well as depictions of Cecil B. Moore, a civil rights activist from Philadelphia, and W. E. B. Du Bois. After her passing in 1995, fellow writer Toni Morrison edited additional Bambara manuscripts, publishing a compilation of essays and short stories as Deep Sightings and Rescue Missions in 1996 and the novel Those Bones Are Not My Child in 1999.

Further Reading Bambara, Toni Cade. Deep Sightings and Rescue Missions: Fiction, Essays, and Conversa- tions. Ed. Toni Morrison. New York: Random House, 1996. ———. The Sea Birds Are Still Alive. New York: Random House, 1977. ———. Those Bones Are Not My Child. New York: Pantheon Books, 1999. ed or printed. Goodnough, Abby. “Toni Cade Bambara, a Writer and Documentary Maker, 56.” New York Times. (December 11, 1995). Holmes, Linda Janet, and Cheryl A. Wall, eds. Savoring the Salt: The Legacy of Toni Cade Bambara. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2007.

—Meredith Heath Boulden

BARAKA, AMIRI (October 7, 1934–January 9, 2014) Civil Rights Activist, Poet, Essayist, Novelist, Playwright, Short Story Writer, Professor

A central figure in the Black Arts Movement, Amiri Baraka was born Everett Leroy Jones to a lower-middle-class family in Newark, New Jersey. In 1951, he graduated from Barringer High School and went on to attend Rutgers University on a scholarship. A year later, he transferred to Howard University, only to drop out in 1954 and join the United States Air Force. To ward off the loneliness and despair of militaryan life, uncorrected Baraka began page toproof read and voraciously, may not beincluding distribut fiction texts and works on philosophy, history, and left-wing politics. After being discharged in 1957 Excerpted pages for advance review purposes only. All rights reserved. on suspicionThis ofis communist sympathies, Baraka moved to New York’s Greenwich Village and began his career as a writer and editor. In 1958, he married Hettie Cohen, with whom he coedited the avant-garde magazine Yugen from 1958 to 1963. A powerful political and aesthetic voice, Baraka’s career spanned over fifty years and had lasting effects on post-integration African American literature. Influenced by many the Beat writers he met in Greenwich Village, including Allen Ginsberg, Frank O’Hara, and Gilbert Sorrentino, Baraka’s early volumes of poetry reflect the experimental forms and rebellious attitudes of post–World War II America. As he states in his 1960 essay “How You Sound?,” “The only ‘recognizable tradition’ a poet need follow is himself.” Baraka, like many other Beat poets, felt that

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Amiri Baraka. Photofest © Photofest

a poem should not emerge from traditional forms or subjects, but should impact the reader through the emotional intensity and strength of the poet. With vivid imagery and powerful lyricism, his first two volumes of poems, which include Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note (1961) and The Dead Lecturer (1964), focused on death, suicide, and the hollow morality and hopelessness of modern life. As he notes in his 1961 poem “Notes for a Speech,” “They shy away. My own / dead souls, my, so called / people. Africa / is a foreign place. You are / as any other sad man here / american.” While the subjects of blackness and cultural identity appear sporadically in these works, it does not become a driving force in his work until a few years later. Two important events inspired Baraka’s transition from Beat poetry to Black Nationalism. The first was his 1960 visit to Cuba with the Fair Play for Cuba Com- mittee (FPCC)an that uncorrected included blackpage proofactivists and and may writers not be such d as Harold Cruse, Julian Mayfield,Excerpted John pages Henry for Clarke, advance and review Robert purposes F. Williams. only. Throughout All rights reserved. the trip, he was critiquedThis for is his singular goals of cultivating his soul and writing simply for the sake of writing. Time and time again, he was reminded that art can and should be a tool for political activism and the representation of disenfranchised people around the globe. In his 1960 essay “Cuba Libre,” in which he recalls the trip, he ends his piece with a revelation about America’s current bohemian artists: “The rebels among us have become merely people like myself who grow beards and will not participate in politics. A bland revolt. Drugs, juvenile delinquency, complete isolation from the vapid mores of the country—a few current ways out. . . . We are an old people already. Even the vitality of our art is like bright flowers growing up through a rot- ting carcass.”

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On the heels of this trip, he began researching and writing Blues People, a groundbreaking text that discusses music as a communal site of African American culture, history, social consciousness, and innovation. In stark contrast to Ralph El- lison and James Baldwin’s view of literature as a social democratic expression of the American experience, Baraka’s work expresses the belief that African Americans constitute a progressive nation whose values are antithetical to white America. From the slave ship to shouts, work songs, and spirituals through blues, bebop, and jazz, Baraka argues that African American is a unique cultural expression that, despite white appropriation, could not be fully accessed by white audiences or musicians. He deliberately draws relationships between orality, music, and African American history, arguing that music provides a historical record of the African American community: “Music was the score, the actually expressed creative orchestration, reflection, of Afro-American life, our words, our libretto, to those actual, lived lives.” Freed from the proscriptive narratives of the white community, music allowed Af- rican Americans a form of freedom that could draw tangible relationshipsed or printed. between the past and present. Throughout the text Baraka describes how African Americanistribut musicians compli- cate black subjectivity through virtuoso performance and improvisation. Improvisa- tion was particularly important to Baraka, specifically because he felt artists could express a freedom distorted by dominant historical narratives and restricted by the stringent aesthetic structures of Western music. As he notes in his discussion of the music of Ornette Coleman, Sonny Rollins, John Coltrane, and Cecil Taylor, “Their music does not depend on constantly stated chords for its direction and shape. Nor does it pretend to accept the formal considerations of the bar, or measure, line. . . . All these are shaped by the emotional requirements of the player, i.e., the improvising soloist or improvising group.” This focus on the black artist’s individuality reflects Baraka’s historical philosophy of black music as an art form created by and for black people. Sparked by the rise of racial violence across the nation and the assassination of Malcolm X in 1965, Baraka divorced his first wife, Hettie Cohen; moved to Harlem; and declared himself a black nationalist. Shortly after, he rekindled his relationship with fellow activistsan uncorrected Larry Neal pageand Askiaproof Touré,and may whom not be he d had met in 1961 at a rally protesting the assassination of Patrice Lumumba, a Congolese leader of the global Excerptedanticolonial pages struggle. for advance Together review they purposesstarted the only. Black All Arts rights Repertory reserved. The - atre SchoolThis (BARTS), is a short-lived but highly influential space for the creation of a revolutionary black aesthetic. Deploying unusual tactics such as performing plays, music, poetry, and dance on the four corners of Harlem intersections, BARTS set the stage for several black companies that would emerge across the country. Through BARTS and his own plays, Baraka promoted a black theatre that was politically and aesthetically revolutionary. His 1965 essay “The Revolutionary The- atre” makes this point clear:

So the Broadway theatre is a theatre of reaction whose ethics like its aesthetics reflect the spiritual values of this unholy society, which sends young crackers all over the world

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blowing off colored people’s heads. . . . Our theatre will show victims so that their brothers in the audience will be better able to understand that they are the brothers of victims, and that they themselves are victims. . . . We will scream and cry, murder, run through the streets in agony, if it means some soul will be moved, moved to actual life understanding of what the world is, and what it ought to be. . . . All men live in the world, and the world ought to be a place for them to live. (“The Revolutionary Theatre” 238)

During this time, he also received a Guggenheim Fellowship, released his play The Toilet, and wrote his only novel, The System of Dante’s Hell. A further exploration of the relationship between white and black America, Baraka’s 1964 play, Dutchman, quickly became one of his most critically acclaimed and controversial pieces. An Obie winner for the best American play that year, it is a story of the interactions between Clay, a twenty-year-old black man, and Lula, a thirty-year-old white woman. As he describes in the opening lines, the play takes place “in the flying underbelly of the city. Steaming hot, and summered or printed.on top, outside. Underground. The subway heaped in modern myth” (3). Layered with mythol- ogy and symbolism, critics have investigated the play as bothistribut a reinterpretation of the fall of Adam and Eve and a subversion of Richard Wagner’s story of the Flying Dutchman and the doomed relationship between a sailor and his lover. As Baraka explains in his 1966 collection of essays, Home, the play also examines, among many other topics, “the difficulty of becoming a man in America” (“LeRoi Jones Talking,” 213). Through an increasingly tense conversation between Lula and Clay, Baraka exposes the racist stereotypes, representations, and constructions of African Americans by their white counterparts. From the opening lines to the final, gruesome ending, Lula vacillates between racist comments and sexual innuendo, a pattern that eventually leads to Clay’s violent death at her hands. In the process of critiquing everything from his clothes to his name and ancestry, Lula constantly questions Clay’s identity and masculinity. She also presumes to know everything about him.

Lula: I told you I didn’t know anything about you . . . you’re a well-known type. Clay: Really?an uncorrected page proof and may not be d Lula:Excerpted Or at least pages I know for advancethe type very review well. purposes (Dutchman only., 12) All rights reserved. This is Although Lula goes by different names, lies about her profession, misguides Clay about her intentions, and repeatedly questions him about his own, she seems enter- tained by her ability to construct Clay’s identity for her own entertainment. After incessantly insulting and goading Clay, she finally pushes him too far with her erratic and increasingly aggressive discussion of the blues and African Americans in general.

Lula: And that’s how the blues was born. Yes. Yes. Son of a bitch, get out of the way. Yes. Quack. Yes. Yes. And that’s how the blues was born. Ten little niggers sitting on a

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limb, but none of them ever looked like him. . . . Screw yourself Uncle Tom. Thomas Woolly-Head. [Begins to dance a kind of jig, mocking Clay with loud, forced humor.] There is Uncle Tom . . . I mean, Uncle Thomas Woolly-Head. With his old white mat- ted mane. . . . Old Tom. Old Tom. Let the white man hump his ol’ mama, and he jes’ shuffle off in the woods and hide his gentle gray head. (30)

She then stands up on the train, begins dancing to embarrass and further goad Clay into an expression of anger that he must surely feel as a black man in America. In fact, her behavior mocks the creation of the form and presumes it was for the sake of her own entertainment. She runs into other passengers, curses, and has a lack of awareness of those around her. She finally pushes Clay too far with her proclamations, erratic behavior, misconceived notions, and insinuations. In one swift action, Clay throws Lula into her seat, slaps her, and goes on a tirade that, as many critics have cited, is perhaps his own attempt at defining his masculinity.ed or printed. He describes how he could kill Lula and every other white person on the train for their ruthless behavior and misguided perceptions. istribut

Clay: They say ‘I love Bessie Smith.’ And don’t even understand that Bessie Smith is saying ‘Kiss my ass, kiss my black, unruly ass.’ Before love, suffering, desire, anything you can explain, she’s saying, and very plainly, ‘Kiss my black ass.’ And if you don’t know that, it’s you that’s doing the kissing. . . . If Bessie Smith had killed some white people she wouldn’t have needed the music. She could have talked very plain and straight about the world. No metaphors. No grunts. No wiggles in the dark of her soul. . . . Just murder! Would make us all sane. (34–35)

As he completes his speech, he reaches across Lula to gather his things, only for her to reveal a small knife and stab him in the heart. She then directs other passengers to pick him up and throw him off the train. The play ends abruptly, with Lula catching the eye of another young black man who has entered the train with books under his arm. Written the same year and often viewed as a companion piece to Dutchman, The Slave centers aroundan uncorrected Walker Vessels, page proof the andleader may of nota black be d revolution, his white formerExcerpted wife, Grace, pages and forher advance new husband review and purposes academic, only. Easley. All rights An examination reserved. of the relationshipThis is between antebellum slavery and the contemporary context, the play begins with Vessels as a field slave, after which he reenters as a black revolutionary leader during a race war between black and white. During this unknown future time, when bombs are dropping outside, Walker returns to take his children from his former wife and her new husband. Torn by his position and questioning the ef- ficacy of the revolution, he comes to the conclusion, “It comes down to baser human endeavor than any social-political thinking. What does it matter if there is more love or beauty? . . . Is that what the Western ofay thought while he was ruling . . . that his rule somehow brought more love and beauty into the world? . . . that was never the point. Not even in the Crusades. The point is that you had your chance, darling,

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now these folks have theirs” (The Slave 73). Easley later attacks Walker, and Walker fatally shoots him in the stomach. Bombs then hit the house, killing Grace and threatening his own children. As a complex examination of the self-identification that accompanies a militant and nationalist consciousness, Baraka’s play responds to the prevalent narrative of progress as achievable only by nonviolence and integration. Rather than repeat the narratives of unsuccessful slave rebellions, Baraka creates an alternative reality in which a violent black revolution has succeeded. As he states in a 1965 essay, “The Revolutionary Theatre must take dreams and give them a reality. It must isolate the ritual and historical cycles of reality. . . . It is a political theatre, a weapon to help in the slaughter of these dimwitted fat-bellied white guys who somehow believe that the rest of the world is here for them to slobber on” (“The Revolutionary Theatre” 237). What followed the release of these two plays was a period of unceasing political activism, writing, collaboration, and controversy. In 1966, he married Sylvia Robinson, who was his wife until his death, and moved back edto orNewark, printed. New Jersey, to continue his work. He then changed his name to the Bantuized Muslim Imamu (“spiritual leader,” later dropped) Ameer (later Amiri,istribut “Prince”) Baraka (“blessed”). He also released the plays The Baptism and The Toilet, was arrested during the Newark riots, and published Black Magic, his first volume of poetry that focused exclusively on black culture and Black Nationalism. As he notes in the introduction to Black Magic, “We are spiritual, and we must force this issue, we must see our selves again, as black men, as the strength of the planet, and rise to rebuild what is actually spiritual, what is actually good, and leave the evil Duhevil the devil, alone, leave the filth, the freakishness, the perversion, the selfcentered unhealthy egoism, Alone, with its self. Albino doo doo in a dark auditorium” (ii). This inflammatory rhetoric, tongue in cheek commentary, and radical honesty was a characteristic of Baraka’s work throughout his career. Additionally, the poem “For Tom Postell, Dead Black Poet,” which appears in Black Magic, exposed an anti-Semitism rarely revealed in his earlier works. While he would later state that his views were misguided and apologize for the poem, he was critiqued throughout his career for the sexism and homophobia that many critics felt emboldened his rhetoric. an uncorrected page proof and may not be d In 1971, Baraka and Larry Neal coedited Black Fire, the most comprehensive col- lectionExcerpted of Black pages Arts Movementfor advance writing review to purposes date. Including only. All everyone rights reserved. from musicians Sun RaThis to ispolitical activist Stokely Carmichael, and over seventy essayists, poets, fiction, and drama writers, Black Fire remains a seminal African American literary anthology. From 1967 to 1972 he also wrote six plays, a book of short stories, a new volume of poetry, a collection of essays, and an evaluation of the new nationalism. Outside of writing, he taught at San Francisco State University, assisted black can- didate Kenneth Gibson in his mayoral campaign in Newark, and was a major orga- nizer and participant in both the “Pan African” Congress of African Peoples (CAP) and the historic National Black Political Convention, which drew over ten thousand participants. Although Baraka was a major figure in black activism and politics during this time, he was also accused of sectarianism and an autocratic leadership style

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that undermined his work in organizations such as CAP and the Committee for Unified Newark (CFUN). In 1971, Baraka and a group of activists won state and municipal support to build a low-income apartment complex in the primarily white north ward of Newark. After the city approved a tax abatement and loan for the building, the project came under attack from opposition groups led by Anthony Imperiale, then a state senator. Although the white citizens argued their protests were due to the size and impact of the project on schools, it became increasingly clear that race was a motivating factor in the prolonged legal battle. After repeated setbacks, including picket lines of nearly three hundred fifty people at the construction site, the project became untenable and the Kawaida Complex was abandoned before ever being built. After fighting for the principles of Black Nationalism and cultural separatism for nearly ten years, in 1974 Baraka rejected Black Nationalism and proclaimed his con- version to international socialism. A combination of the thinking of Vladimir Lenin, Karl Marx, and Mao Zedong, his newfound politics was based on an evaluationed or printed. of the relationship between racism, capitalism, class, imperialism, and neocolonialism. Al- though he still felt that Black Nationalism “sought to show us thatistribut our racial oppression had to be our point of departure in struggling to make change” (“Toward Ideo- logical Clarity” 21), he no longer believed that cultural separatism was effective as a revolutionary tactic. In order to create global change for oppressed people around the world, he felt they needed to “advance an ideology that is based on cultural analysis and Nationalism, Pan-Afrikanism, and Socialism, as its three cutting edges. We believe that each of these categories represents a dynamic of our struggle that is absolutely necessary for the accomplishment of the highest form of social development” (24). Although his views of international socialism would evolve over the next forty years, Baraka remained a strong supporter of the movement until his death. Throughout the remainder of his career, Baraka would continue to be a strong voice in black activism, politics, writing, and poetry. After assaulting a police officer during an altercation with his wife in 1979, he was sentenced to spend forty-eight consecutive weekends in a Harlem halfway house, where he wrote The Autobiog- raphy of Leroi Jones/Amiri Baraka. In the 1980s, he taught in the Africana Studies Department at SUNY,an uncorrected Stony Brook, page was proof a visiting and may professor not be atd Columbia University, and won both the Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship and a National Endowment for theExcerpted Arts Fellowship. pages for He advance also edited review the purposes influential only. magazine All rights the reserved.Black Nation from 1982This to is1986 and opened Kimako’s Blues People, a multimedia space dedi- cated to supporting art for a cultural revolution. Appointed the poet laureate of New Jersey in 2002, he immediately came under fire for reading his 2001 poem “Somebody Blew Up America,” which was criticized as anti-Semitic for suggesting that Israelis bombed the Twin Towers. Although he was thoroughly critiqued by the media and asked to step down by then governor James E. McGreevy, Baraka refused to censor his thoughts or step down from his position as poet laureate. After it was determined to be unconstitutional for the State to fire the poet laureate, the assembly decided to abolish the position outright. Despite a life mired with controversy, Baraka is considered one of the most influential writers and thinkers of post-integration America. He won the American Book

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Awards’ Lifetime Achievement Award, the Langston Hughes Award, the PEN/ Faulkner Award, and membership in the Academy of Arts and Letters. He died on January 9, 2014, in Newark, at the age of seventy-nine.

Further Reading Baraka, Amiri. The Autobiography of LeRoi Jones. Chicago: Lawrence Hill Books, 1997. ——— . Black Music. 1968. New York: Morrow Quill Paperbacks, 1980. ——— . Home: Social Essays. 1966. New York: Akashic, 2009. ——— . The LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka Reader. Ed. William J. Harris. 2nd ed., New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 1991. ———. “LeRoi Jones Talking.” In Baraka, Home: Social Essays. 204–13. ———. “The Revolutionary Theatre.” In Baraka, Home: Social Essays. 236–39. ———. “Toward Ideological Clarity.” Newark, NJ: Congress of African People, 1974. https:// www.freedomarchives.org/Documents/Finder/Black%20Liberation%20Disk/Black%20 Power!/SugahData/Books/Baraka2.S.pdf. ed or printed. Baraka, Amiri, and Larry Neal, eds. Black Fire: An Anthology of Afro-American Writing. 1968. Baltimore: Black Classic Press, 2007. istribut Brewer, Rosem. “Black Radical Theory and Practice: Gender, Race, and Class.” Socialism and Democracy 17.1 (2003): 109–22. Frazier, Robeson Taj P. “The Congress of African People: Baraka, Brother Mao, and the Year of ’74 1.” Souls 8.3 (2006): 142–59. Grundy, David. A Black Arts Poetry Machine: Amiri Baraka and the Umbra Workshop. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2019. Jones, LeRoi. Black Magic: Sabotage, Target Study, Black Art; Collected Poetry, 1961–1967. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1969. ———. Dutchman and The Slave: Two Plays. New York: Harper Perennial, 1971. Mackey, Nathaniel. “The Changing Same: Black Music in the Poetry of Amiri Baraka.” Boundary 2, 6.2 (1978): 355–86. Marable, Manning. “Marxism, Memory, and the Black Radical Tradition: Introduction to Volume 13.” Souls 13.1 (2011): 1–16. Muñoz, José Esteban. “Cruising the Toilet: LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka, Radical Black Tra- ditions, and Queer Futurity.” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 13.2 (2007): 353–67. an uncorrected page proof and may not be d Rebhorn, Matthew. “Flaying Dutchman: Masochism, Minstrelsy, and the Gender Politics of AmiriExcerpted Baraka’s pages Dutchman.” for advance Callaloo review 26.3 (2003):purposes 796–812. only. All rights reserved. Reilly, ThisCharlie, is and Amiri Baraka. Conversations with Amiri Baraka. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1994. Scott, Darieck. “The Occupied Territory: Homosexuality and History in Amiri Baraka’s Black Arts.” Extravagant Abjection: Blackness, Power, and Sexuality in the African American Literary Imagination. New York: New York University Press, 2010. 172–203. Smethurst, James E. The Black Arts Movement: Literary Nationalism in the 1960s and 1970s. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005. Taylor, Willene P. “The Fall of Man Theme in Imamu Amiri Baraka’s [Le Roi Jones’] Dutch- man.” Negro American Literature Forum 7.4 (1973): 127–31.

—Leisl Sackschewsky

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BLACK WOMEN WRITERS (1950–1980): A CRITICAL EVALUATION (1984) Several critics place the Black Arts Movement’s beginning in 1959, with the Broad- way debut of Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun, the first play by a black woman to appear on Broadway. Despite its matrilineal birth, over the years most studies of the BAM have given little attention to the contributions of women. Mari Evans thus sought to meet an obvious need with her pioneering volume, Black Women Writers (1950–1980): A Critical Evaluation. She notes in her preface to the book that prior to 1979 there was not “a single definitive volume of criticism that made available both traditional and nontraditional analyses and examinations of works of a representative and significant segment of skillful Black women writers” (xvii). Advancing in the path initiated by Barbara Christian’s Black Women Novelists: The Development of a Tradition (1980), Black Women Writers highlights the literature of fifteen women of the Black Arts Movement. It provides concise bibliographical information, helpful biographical data, and carefuled textual or printed. analysis. Following Evans’s preface is an introduction by the distinguished scholar Stephen E. Henderson. He emphasizes that “the founders of Black istributAmerican literature, in a formal sense, were women—Phillis Wheatley, Lucy Terry, and Harriet E. Wilson” (xxiii). The literature of the BAM women should therefore be recognized as part of a larger legacy and literary tradition. The book proper is organized alphabetically, with a chapter devoted to each of the artists. The fifteen creative writers are Maya

Top row: Louise Meriwether, Pinkie Gordon Lane, Johnnetta Cole, and Paula Giddings. Middle row: Pearl Cleage, Gwendolyn Brooks, and Toni Cade Bambara. Bottom row: Sonia Sanchez, Nikki Giovanni, and Mari Evans (1988). Photo © Susan J. Ross

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Angelou, Toni Cade Bambara, Gwendolyn Brooks, Alice Childress, Lucille Clifton, Mari Evans, Nikki Giovanni, Gayl Jones, Audre Lorde, Paule Marshall, Toni Mor- rison, Carolyn Rodgers, Sonia Sanchez, Alice Walker, and Margaret Walker. Each chapter, in turn, consists of three main parts: (1) a selection from the writer, (2) two essays from leading critics critiquing the writers’ oeuvre, and (3) bio-bibliographical pages. Evans was certainly correct in understanding the project’s value to poster- ity, as “the first compendium of criticism to focus on the works of so representative a segment of Black women, particularly those writing through three of the most impactful decades in the history of African Americans in the United States” (xix). Her great disappointment, Evans reveals, is that the publisher limited her to fifteen writers. Given more space, she would have included June Jordan, Lorraine Hansberry, Adrienne Kennedy, Ntozake Shange, and many others. Even so, decades after its initial publication, Black Women Writers (1950–1980): A Critical Evaluation remains an essential work for those interested in the literature and lives of black female writers. ed or printed.

Further Reading istribut Christian, Barbara. Black Women Novelists: The Development of a Tradition, 1892–1976. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1980. Clarke, Cheryl. “After Mecca”: Women Poets and the Black Arts Movement. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2005. Evans, Mari, ed. Black Women Writers (1950–1980): A Critical Evaluation. Garden City, NY: Anchor Press, 1984.

—Verner D. Mitchell

BLACK WOMEN WRITERS AND THE BLACK ARTS MOVEMENT Poet and author Larry Neal once suggested that the Black Arts Movement was the “aesthetic and spiritual sister of the Black Power concept.” However, the male chauvinistic, androcentric leanings of the movement often left observers wondering where the actual sisters were who contributed to the Black Arts Movement. The rise of the BAM’s nationalistican uncorrected ideology page and proof the andgrowing may number not be d of male leaders during the 1960sExcerpted and 1970s pages often for advanceresulted inreview the repression purposes only.of African All rights American reserved. women. In an effortThis to is combat white racism and oppression, African American males sought to make themselves leaders of the black community by requiring that black women take on subservient roles. This meant that to support black manhood and to put black men at social and political ease, black women were often expected to assume a position of passivity. However, as Hélène Cixous admonishes in “The Laugh of the Medusa,” women should use written and oral language to “break out of the snare of silence” in areas that have traditionally been “governed by the phallus” (881). African American women of the Black Arts Movement accepted Cixous’s challenge. To begin to appreciate the contributions of women writers to the Black Arts Movement, one must trace the broad scope of women’s writing from the 1950s

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as a whole than the continued judgment and segregation of others based on sexual orientation and color. The rights gained through struggles over many decades have given back to African Americans what they lost so long ago, and one may argue that it was during the Black Arts Movement that the expressive repossession of sexuality began.

Further Reading Byrd, Rudolph. Introduction. I Am Your Sister. By Audre Lorde. New York: Oxford Univer- sity Press, 2008. 4–5. Clarke, Erskine. Dwelling Place: A Plantation Epic. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005. Clifton, Lucille. Blessing the Boats: New and Selected Poems 1988–2000. Rochester: BOA Editions, 2000. Collins, Lisa Gail, and Margo Crawford. New Thoughts on the Black Arts Movement. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2006. ed or printed. Evans-Pritchard, Edward E. “Sexual Inversion among the Azande.” American Anthropolo- gist 72.6 (1970): 1428–34. istribut Fox, Michael V. The Song of Songs and the Ancient Egyptian Love Songs. Madison: Univer- sity of Wisconsin Press, 2005. Gates, Henry Louis, Jr., and Nellie Y. McKay. Introductions. The Norton Anthology of Af- rican American Literature. New York: W.W. Norton, 2004. 1919–20, 2006–7, 2031–32. Genovese, Eugene D. Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made. New York: First Van- tage Books Edition, 1976. Lorde, Audre. Zami: A New Spelling of My Name. Berkeley: Crossing Press, 1982. Lovejoy, Paul E. Identity in the Shadow of Slavery. London: Continuum, 2009. Murray, Stephen O., and Will Roscoe, eds. Boy-Wives and Female-Husbands: Studies in African Homosexualities. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998. Reed, Ishmael. Preface. Soul on Ice. 1968. By Eldridge Cleaver. New York: Random House, 1999. 1–11.

—Tiffany Akin and Lily A. Nicholson

SHANGE, NTOZAKEan uncorrected page proof and may not be d (October 18, 1948–October 27, 2018) Excerpted pages for advance review purposes only. All rights reserved. Poet, Playwright, Novelist, Essayist, Performer This is Ntozake Shange was born Paulette Williams in Trenton, New Jersey, to Paul T. Williams, a surgeon, and Eloise Owens, a psychiatric social worker. She was the oldest of four children. Her father formerly played drums in a band. His past work connected him with many artists who visited Williams’s home during her childhood. Some of these visitors included W. E. B. Du Bois, Paul Robeson, and Miles Davis. When she was eight years old, her family moved to St. Louis. Her experiences in St. Louis differed greatly from her happy memories of New Jersey. In 1956, just two years after the landmark case Brown v. Board of Education desegregated

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schools, Williams experienced the integration of the public school system in Missouri through busing. At her new school, she was one of very few black children. Consequently, she experienced hostility from her white peers and suffered various racist episodes. When she was thirteen, her family moved back to New Jersey, but her difficult experiences left an impression. Later on, she published Betsy (1985), an autobiographical novel about a young African American girl struggling with racism and the aftermath of integration. When she was eighteen, Williams married and graduated high school in New Jersey. Then, she enrolled in Barnard College and earned a BA in American studies with honors in 1970. Her marriage ended in divorce shortly afterward. The dissolu- tion of her marriage led to a period of depression and suicide attempts. In 1971, she changed her name to Ntozake (Zulu for she who comes with her own things) and Shange (who walks like a lion). In a 1979 interview with Laura Berman, Shange ex- plained the necessity of her name change. For her, the name represented claiming an identity and defining herself apart from patriarchal and Europeaned expectations. or printed. In the early 1970s, she earned a master’s degree in American studies from the Uni- versity of Southern California. In California, she began readingistribut African American literature and experimenting with writing and performing her own poetry. In 1972, Shange moved to Northern California, where she taught at Sonoma State College and the University of California Extension until 1975. During this period, she wrote poetry and participated in dance groups including the Third World Collective and the West Coast Dance Company before forming her own dance company. In 1974, she began work on her most important play: for colored girls who have considered suicide / when the rainbow is enuf (1976). She started by working on a series of poems that verbalized diverse perspectives representing seven different black women’s experiences. While in California, she worked with fellow dancers and artists to transform these extensive poems into the play. The initial poems were woven together representing extensive monologues coupled with rhythmic dances to explore the joys and tribulations connected to black womanhood. She moved to New York City in July 1975 to perform the play. However, she work- shopped the play in New York, which resulted in revisions as it was performed in various theatresan uncorrectedacross the city page including proof and the may Studio not Theatre,be d the New Federal Theatre, the Public Theater, and finally in the Booth Theatre on Broadway in SeptemberExcerpted 1976. pages After thefor advanceBooth Theatre review itpurposes landed a only. successful All rights national reserved. tour that extendedThis to Canada is and the Caribbean. After the play’s successful run, Shange won an Obie Award and an Outer Critics Circle Award for drama; the play also garnered a Tony nomination along with Grammy and Emmy nominations. The critical success of the play propelled her into celebrity status. Shange was con- cerned with the commercial success because the larger audiences that Broadway offered did not target the black female community she intended to uplift. Shange continued writing, branching into new genres. She published Sassafrass: A Novella (1977); Nappy Edges (1978), a collection of poetry; and the play, From Okra to Greens (1978), which premiered at her alma mater, Barnard College.

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She also published novels during this time period, including Sassafrass, Cypress, and Indigo (1982) and Betsey Brown (1985). Additionally, she began to lecture at colleges and universities across the country, including Howard University, Yale University, and New York University, before returning to teaching at the City Col- lege of New York and Rutgers University’s all-female Douglass College. She taught English, drama, and creative writing, before serving as artist-in-residence for the New Jersey State Council of the Arts. In 1981, she published Three Pieces, which included the plays spell # 7, Boogie Woogie Landscapes, and A Photograph: Lovers in Motion. The plays were first produced Off-Broadway at the New York Shake- speare Festival Public Theater, with A Photograph first produced in 1977 and spell # 7 in 1979. In spell #7, a group of black male and female performers experience difficulties because of the limited opportunities available for minorities on the stage. In A Photograph, the character Sean has romantic relationships with three women and experiences conflicts as an artist in trying to maintain creative integrity with a simultaneous desire to achieve wealth and critical success. Shange’sed or 1980 printed. adapta- tion of Bertolt Brecht’s Mother Courage earned an Obie Award. Her revision of the play presented an African American family during the Civilistribut War. In 1977, she also married musician David Murray, but they separated shortly after the birth of their daughter Savannah. Throughout the 1990s and 2000s, Shange produced poetry and novels including Liliane: Resurrection of the Daughter (1994), a cookbook entitled If I Can Cook / You Know God Can (1998), and a volume of poetry entitled Lavender Lizards and Lilac Landmines: Layla’s Dream (2003). She cowrote a novel with her sister Ifa Bayeza in 2010 entitled Some Sing, Some Cry: A Novel. After 2010, she focused more on children’s literature, where she partnered with artists to create vivid pictures of black history to pair with original and reworked works from the past. A few of these offerings include Ellington Was Not a Street (2004), Coretta Scott (2011), Freedom’s a-Callin Me (2012), We Troubled the Waters (2012), and Float Like a Butterfly (2017). Finally, in 2017 she released Wild Beauty: New and Selected Po- ems, a collection that represents the most popular poems of her career along with new previously unpublished poems. Throughoutan her uncorrected career, Shange page continuedproof and hermay genre-mixing not be d approach to writing. Her contribution to letters represents more than her prolific outpouring of works. HerExcerpted use of language, pages for which advance embraces review phonetic purposes spellings, only. All incorporates rights reserved. Black Ver- nacularThis English, is and challenges traditional English linguistic constructions pushed the barriers of modern English. In 2011, Shange revealed that she had suffered two ministrokes that impacted her reading and writing ability. She was ultimately diag- nosed with chronic inflammatory demyelinating polyneuropathy, a neurological dis- order that causes mobility issues and made it difficult for her to write. Nonetheless, Shange remained upbeat and proud of her creative contributions. Her medical challenges did not deter her creative spirit. She continued to create through the help of modern technology. While she struggled against the expectations of word processor programs that did not recognize her vernacular spellings or use of mechanics, she

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remained determined to use her voice to paint important pictures about the role of black women in communities in the United States and beyond. On October 27, 2018—less than ten days after her seventieth birthday—Shange passed away in Bowie, Maryland.

ed or printed.

istribut

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Further Reading Lyons, Brenda. “Interview with Ntozake Shange.” Massachusetts Review 28.4 (Winter 1987): 687–96. Shange, Ntozake. for colored girls who have considered suicide / when the rainbow is enuf. New York: Scribner, 1975. ———. “Porque Tu No M’entrendre? Whatcha Mean You Can’t Understand Me?” Black Theatre: Ritual Performance in the African Diaspora. Eds. Paul Carter Harrison, Victor Leo Walker II, and Gus Edwards. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2002. 397–99. ——— . Wild Beauty: New and Selected Poems. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2017.

—Jennifer L. Hayes

SHEPP, ARCHIE (May 24, 1937–) Saxophonist, Singer, Composer, Social Critic, Public Intellectual, Playwright, Pro- fessor of Black Studies ed or printed.

Archie Shepp was born in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, althoughistribut he spent most of his formative years in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, where he listened to and played with other area music legends such as John Coltrane (1926–1967), Jimmy Heath (b. 1926), and Lee Morgan (1938–1972). Shepp attended Goddard College in Vermont, where he studied dramatic literature, graduating in 1959. Shortly afterward, Shepp began playing with jazz pianist Cecil Taylor (1929–2018) until 1962. Shepp was also a co-bandleader of two groups, the New York Contemporary Five with John Tchicai (1936–2012) and Don Cherry (1936– 1995), and the Archie Shepp–Bill Dixon Quartet. In 1964, Shepp released the album Four for Trane on Impulse! under the tutelage of John Coltrane. A year later, Coltrane featured Shepp on his album Ascension, which featured a free jazz ensemble composed of Freddie Hubbard (1938–2008), Marion Brown (1931– 2010), Tchicai, Pharoah Sanders (b. 1940), and others. As Tom Reney puts it apropos of Shepp’s participation on the album, “one can only conclude that the young firebrand was an influence on the increasingly radical direction thatan Ascension uncorrected epitomized page proof in Coltrane’s and may music.” not be dShepp’s influence on Col- trane was not simply musical, but also theoretical, as evident from the liner notes of Excerpted pages for advance review purposes only. All rights reserved. AscensionThis, isin which Shepp writes that in Coltrane’s sound, “the idea is very similar to what the action painters do in that it creates various surfaces of color which push into each other, creates tensions and countertensions and various fields of energy” (Mathes 43). Shepp’s awareness of the ruptural quality of Coltrane’s sound antici-pated the direction that free jazz would take after Coltrane’s death, as he explains how “the emphasis was on textures rather than the making of an organizational entity. . . . You can hear, in the saxophones especially, a reaching for sound and an exploration of the possibilities of sound” (Mathes 44). Shepp believed that Coltrane “taught . . . people to listen beyond the expected, how to hear themselves and their times in jazz” (Crenshaw et al., 317). This type of sound Shepp describes would

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