Ready-made histories of 1960s cultural development might easily overlook Robert Hayden. His apparently genteel politics, reflected in commitments to racial cosmopolitanism and substantial reverence for the Western canon, distinguished him from many of the innovators and experimentalists of 1960s Black radical poetry. However, Hayden’s distinctive contributions to the decade played a key role in the evolution of African American poetics. His political aesthetic became an important model for successful Black poets of the later twentieth century. These academic poets, whose professional and intellectual lives were distanced from the economic and cultural exigencies of the Black majority, learned much from Hayden’s theory of aesthetic distance. While a powerful Black aesthetic of the 1960s called for art that appeared to spring from the heart of the Black folk masses, Hayden honed a deeply introspective Black poetics, which contemplated the experiential distance that stretched between the “colleged” poet-speaker and the Black folk world.

This chapter explores Albert Murray’s diagnosis and refusal of key elements of 1960s-style Black cultural politics. In books like The Omni-Americans he repudiated the pessimism and particularism that he found in figures like Baldwin and replaced it with a life-affirming concrete universalism rooted in the blues as a mode of phenomenology and in the sense that a fully American Blackness could stand as an instance and emblem of universal human experience. The chapter provides a brief sketch of Murray’s life; discusses the intellectual commitments he shared with his most important interlocutor, Ralph Ellison; explains how Murray turned these shared commitments into his own distinctive philosophical apparatus; and explores what may be the clearest difference between Murray and Ellison: Murray’s willingness to cultivate followers like Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and Wynton Marsalis, pivotal culture workers in the post-civil rights shift in U.S. racial politics.