The politically engaged movement of Black poets, playwrights, and artists, launched in 1965, that its theorists called the artistic sister of Black Power.
The Black Arts Movement was a loose national network of poets, playwrights, musicians, visual artists, editors, and publishers who, from the mid-1960s into the 1970s, set out to make art by, for, and about Black people. Its symbolic starting point came in 1965: after the assassination of Malcolm X that February, the poet and playwright Amiri Baraka moved from Manhattan’s Lower East Side to Harlem and founded the Black Arts Repertory Theatre/School, which staged plays, poetry readings, and concerts for Black audiences.
The movement defined itself in close alliance with Black Power. In a 1968 essay in The Drama Review, the critic Larry Neal called Black Art “the aesthetic and spiritual sister of the Black Power concept,” since both grew from the desire for self-determination. That same year Baraka and Neal edited Black Fire: An Anthology of Afro-American Writing. Poetry flourished most: in free verse that borrowed from jazz, the blues, the sermon, and Black vernacular speech, writers including Sonia Sanchez, Nikki Giovanni, and Haki R. Madhubuti addressed Black readers directly.
Independent institutions made the movement possible. Dudley Randall founded Broadside Press in Detroit in 1965, and Madhubuti, then publishing as Don L. Lee, launched Third World Press in Chicago in 1967. Gwendolyn Brooks, already a Pulitzer Prize winner, turned to Broadside for books including Riot (1969) and Family Pictures (1970). The movement drew criticism, then and since, for misogyny and exclusivity, yet later writers, among them Indigenous, Latino, and LGBTQ poets, have acknowledged their debt to its insistence on self-defined art and Black-owned outlets. In its arguments over art and politics it revisited questions first posed during the Harlem Renaissance.
See also: Black Power, Harlem Renaissance, New Negro Movement
Sources
- Academy of American Poets, “A Brief Guide to the Black Arts Movement.” Link
- New York Public Library, “Exploring the Literary Within the Black Power Movement” (2016). Link
- New York Public Library, “On Black Aesthetics: The Black Arts Movement” (2016). Link
- Clarke Historical Library, Central Michigan University, “Detroit’s Broadside Press.” Link
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