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THIS IS A DRAFT. PLEASE DO NOT CITE OR CIRCULATE. Introduction “Black Art in Transition” For African American Literature and Culture in Transition: The 1960s (Cambridge UP, 2020) Shelly Eversley Baruch College, The City University of New York For African American writers and artists, the 1960s was an era of empowerment and polarization, optimism, and disillusion. They met this epochal moment in history with a renewed commitment to art, when “Black” was not only beautiful but also a political identity, one in which racial justice became inseparable from aesthetic practice. Even as the “New America” inaugurated by President John F. Kennedy and continued by President Lyndon B. Johnson’s “Great Society” promised a new frontier, one in which the United States would be the first to land a man on the moon while it also achieved some of the most ambitious civil rights legislation in the twentieth century, equal opportunity in a “post-racial” America seemed unlikely. The decade also witnessed incredible moments of violence such as brutal police responses to peaceful protests by students and citizens, violence at the Democratic National Convention, attacks against churches and children, uprisings in cities, and the assassinations of President Kennedy, Robert Kennedy, Medgar Evers, Malcolm X, and the recent Nobel Laureate Martin Luther King. Many lost hope in a new America. These political disappointments and social paradoxes also signaled a necessary transformation in culture. Black Art, Politics and Aesthetics in 1960s African American Literature and Culture, takes seriously this notion of transition, particularly as it informs literature and culture as important indications of the era’s zeitgeist, and it offers an exciting account of the period for a new generation of readers. For instance, Gwendolyn Brooks (who, in 1950, was the first African American to win a Pulitzer Prize), published her last book with a mainstream, white press in 1968. This book of poems, In the Mecca signaled a significant shift in Brooks’ work as well as in the history of African American literature. Toni Cade Bambara’s assessment of her career in The New York Times characterizes this turn, “something happened to Brooks, something most certainly in evidence in In the Mecca and subsequent works—a new movement and energy, intensity, richness, power of statement and a new stripped lean, compressed style. A change of style prompted by a change of mind.”1 This shift—this “change of mind”—was her now explicit conscious commitment to her racial, social, and political identity as the subject and the inspiration for her writing. In this transition, Brooks had become a black poet as she shed the highly celebrated yet problematic integrationist distinction of being a “real poet,” one whose writing was no more “Negro poetry” than as Robert Frost wrote, “white poetry.” Brooks’ attendance at the Second Black Writers Conference (1967), held at Fisk University, had formally prompted this transition. In her autobiography, she writes the conference was transformational, “I had never been, before, in the general presence of such insouciance, such live firmness, such confident vigor, such determination to mold or carve something DEFINITE.” While there, she met a host of younger poets—among them, Dudley Randall, whose aesthetics were a politics of blackness, an attentiveness to the specific social, historical, and political conditions of African Americans that he and other younger poets understood were inseparable from the project of poetry. Their passion moved Brooks. Randall and fellow poet and arts-activist Margaret Burroughs had announced their intention to publish a poetry anthology to honor Malcolm X, whose 1965 assassination was another definitive turning point in 1960s black culture. Brooks’ poem, “For Malcolm X” which opened their anthology, proclaims: We gasped. We saw the maleness. The maleness raking out and making guttural the air And pushing us to walls. And in a soft fundamental hour A sorcery devout and vertical Beguiled the world. He opened us – Who was a key. Who was a man.2 The For Malcolm anthology appeared in 1969, soon after Randall had launched Broadside Press in Detroit. Brooks’ poem celebrates Malcolm’s black pride—a maleness, a manhood—that stood for many as defiance to an emasculating racism that had been pervasive within a 1960s culture of televised anti-black violence that seemed to persist with seeming impunity. The “man” Brooks celebrated in her poem claimed for himself and for black people a humanity that America’s long history of apartheid had sought to deny. Like the range of poets in the anthology—among them, Mari Evans, Ted Joans, Robert Hayden, Clarence Major, Margaret Walker, LeRoi Jones, Etheridge Knight, and Sonia Sanchez—Malcolm X was an inspired symbol for a new, black consciousness. For instance, in his 1965 eulogy for Malcolm, Ossie Davis proclaims, “Malcolm was our manhood, our living black manhood! This was his meaning to his people. And, in honoring him, we honor the best in ourselves.”3 Of course, Malcolm had also experienced his own transitions. In The Autobiography of Malcolm X, which he authored with Alex Haley and was published the same year as his murder, Malcolm explains his turn away from a criminal life to a religious one, guided by Elijah Muhammed and the Nation of Islam. Then his break with Muhammed and with the Nation coincides with Malcolm’s hajj in 1964. During his Muslim pilgrimage to Mecca, Malcolm describes his own personal discovery of a freedom unbound by race or nationality: There were tens of thousands of pilgrims, from all over the world. They were of all colors, from blue-eyed blonds to black-skinned Africans. But we were all participating in the same ritual, displaying a spirit of unity and brotherhood that my experiences in America had led me to believe never could exist between the white and the non-white…You may be shocked by these words coming from me…what I have seen, and experienced, has forced me to rearrange much of my thought-patterns previously held, and to toss aside some of my previous conclusions…We were truly all the same (brothers)—because their belief in one God…I could see from this, that perhaps if white America could accept the Oneness of God, then perhaps too, they could accept in reality the Oneness of Man.4 This epiphany shows Malcolm at the height of his spiritual and political consciousness, when he understood black freedom struggles as crucially global and coalitional. He then formed the Organization of Afro-American Unity (OAAU), modeled on the Organization of African Unity (OAU), and designed to support black human rights all over the world. Months before his death, Malcolm appeared in a television interview announcing his desire to work alongside any organization or person genuinely committed to justice for oppressed people, and it is this man who the poets in For Malcolm celebrated as “the best in ourselves.” Malcolm and Martin Luther King had met only once, also in 1964. In February 1965, Malcolm went to Selma and met with Coretta Scott King while her husband was in jail. Malcolm and Martin were on a path to collaboration, but Malcom was murdered later that month, on February 21. In the same year as For Malcolm, Brooks published a short book of poems, Riot (1969), with Broadside Press. It chronicles the uprisings in Chicago after Martin Luther King’s murder; its title poem in three parts begins with a quote from King, “A riot is the language of the unheard.”5 Here, Brooks acknowledges the uprisings in black communities across the nation as the result of the country’s disregard for racial justice. Formally, the collection makes turn toward assemblage. Its first page is black, with a white-lettered epigram, “[I]t would be a terrible thing for Chicago if this black fountain of life should erupt,” it begins, announcing a black eruption that is both political and creative. The next page of Riot is white. This time, it features an image by Jeff Donaldson, founding artist of the collective AfriCOBRA,6 whose painting of young black people, one grasping an African-inspired sculpture pressed against a glass, as if the sculpture, and the person, will smash through. Riot’s content framed by a graphic, mixed-media design visualizes Brooks’ transition from mainstream publishing to a new allegiance with smaller, black presses like Broadside and Chicago’s Third World Press. In this moment, the well-established Brooks welcomed young black creatives into her home, sponsored poetry competitions in schools, traveled to Africa, and began wearing an afro. This turn toward independent African American publishing houses and their commitment to black communities as the decisive audiences represent an important resurgence and survival of black print culture despite the censorship and surveillance that sought to disable it. It is another example of the formal and institutional shifts taking place in the history of 1960s that informs transitions in African American literature and culture. Similarly, Martin Luther King’s 1968 murder—inspiring, for example, the “high priestess of soul” Nina Simone to ask, “what will happen now that the King of Love is dead?”—can be read as the signal apocalypse James Baldwin forewarned in The Fire Next Time (1963). Baldwin’s hopeful essays about the transformational power of love, changes into disappointment and disillusionment by the end of the decade. Following King’s faith and commitment to nonviolence, Baldwin metaphorizes the country’s legal and cultural endorsements of racism as a moral failure, one with apocalyptic consequences. His solution in 1963 was love. Baldwin argues that love could overcome the fearful thinking and behaviors that cause so many to cling to an ethically untenable status quo.

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