7 - Amiri Baraka and the Black Arts Movement

Summary

In a 1994 Time magazine cover piece on black creativity, noted scholar Henry Louis Gates, Jr. tracked the various “renaissances” of black art in the United States. Gates defined three movements of the twentieth century: the rise of literary figures at the turn of the century, including writer and activist W. E. B. Du Bois and poet Paul Laurence Dunbar; the fabled Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s; and then, almost as an afterthought, the Black Arts Movement, deeming it the “most short-lived of all” and, by the 1970s, “dead.” While his chronological history quantifies the small moment in time in which the Movement occurred, Gates fails to identify the impact of the Movement on today’s artists. Black Arts was not so much a movement in time, but rather an overlapping of artistic expressions and political transformations during a heightened moment in America’s history. The art and ideas shared and produced during Black Arts not only affected those involved at the time, but also those who came after. As Larry Neal wrote in a seminal essay on Black Arts, “If art is the harbinger of future possibilities, what does the future of Black America portend?” In viewing the trajectory of Black theatre, it is clear the Movement’s philosophies reverberate in the plays of artists such as Ntozake Shange, August Wilson, and Suzan-Lori Parks.

Since the Black Arts Movement spans a decade of artists and work, theatrical and poetic, visual and musical, this chapter examines the Black Arts Movement through one of its key players: Amiri Baraka, the Movement’s undeclared founder, poet, and playwright. In-depth case studies of Baraka’s 1964 play Dutchman and the short-lived Black Arts Repertory and School demonstrate the complex relationships between the political undergirding of the Movement and its artistic creations. While Dutchman came before the assassination of Malcolm X and Baraka’s total disillusionment with black–white equality, the play foreshadows Baraka’s growing rage spurred by the nascent Black Nationalist Movement. It is the play’s precarious position and Baraka’s own transitional growth that makes the reading of Dutchman so important to understanding Black Arts.