Amiri Baraka

• Born: 7 October 1934
• Birthplace: Newark, New Jersey
• Best Known As: Author of the 1964 play Dutchman

Amiri Baraka, born Everett LeRoi Jones, is an African-American writer known especially for his politically-charged poems, essays and plays from the 1960s and '70s. Raised in New Jersey, Jones graduated from Howard University (1954), spent three years in the U.S. Air Force (1954-57) and then moved to New York's Greenwich Village, where he associated with jazz musicians and writers of the Beat era (Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg and others). His early work, written as LeRoi Jones, secured his literary reputation: Preface to a Twenty-Volume Suicide Note (poems, 1961), Blues People: Negro Music in White America (criticism, 1963) and Dutchman (Obie-winning play, 1964). During the 1960s he was active in the Black Nationalist movement, converted to Islam, changed his name to Imamu Amiri Baraka (Imamu, meaning "spiritual leader," was later dropped) and became an adherent of Marxist-Leninist politics. A gifted and prolific writer, he's railed against The Man his entire career, in university classrooms and in essays, poems and plays. An influential figure in 20th century African-American literature, Baraka remains both literary doyen and anti-establishment hero -- he was made New Jersey's poet laureate in 2002, only to have his post eliminated after he suggested the government of Israel had prior knowledge of the 11 September 2001 attacks on the United States (in a reading of his poem "Somebody Blew Up America"). His other works include the plays The Death of Malcolm X (1969) and What Was the Relationship of the Lone Ranger to the Means of Production? (1979), the poetry collections Black Magic (1969) and Funk Lore: New Poems 1984-1995 (1996) and the non-fiction books Trippin': A Need for Change (1969) and The Music: Reflections on Jazz and Blues (1987).

A university lecturer throughout his career, Baraka spent many years (1979-2000) at the State University of New York in Stony Brook.

Baraka, Amiri (b. 1934), poet, playwright, essayist, activist, lecturer, novelist, editor, anthologist, and director. One of the most influential and prolific African American writers of the twentieth century, Amiri Baraka first came to the attention of readers and critics as LeRoi Jones. He was born Everett LeRoy Jones on 7 October 1934 in Newark, New Jersey. His solidly middle-class upbringing figures prominently in his creative work and must be considered one of the major distinguishing features in any comparative treatment of Baraka and other seminal African American literary artists. The son of postal employee Coyt LeRoy Jones and social worker Anna Lois (Russ) Jones, Baraka articulates the angst of the African American middle class with unsurpassed effect in works from every phase of his artistic development. This concern is most apparent in such relatively early works as the Beat-inspired Preface to a Twenty-Volume Suicide Note (1961), the theatrical triumph Dutchman (1964), the barometric essays collected in Home: Social Essays (1966), and The System of Dante's Hell (1965), Baraka's only attempt at the novel. Although completed at a relatively early point in the artist's development, these works evidence the writer's protracted struggle with the issues of racial identity and artistic responsibility, the two concerns that have remained his most dominant themes over the years.

Baraka attended the public schools of Newark, New Jersey, Rutgers University, and Howard University. On leaving Howard University, he enlisted in the U.S. Air Force. Upon his discharge, he settled in New York City, studied comparative literature at Columbia University, and began to cultivate strong relationships with a number of avant garde artists on the Lower East Side of New York City. In association with his first wife, Hettie (Cohen) Jones, whom he married in 1958, Baraka edited the journal Yugen, which was dedicated to the publication of works by struggling East Village writers. Around this time, he also served as coeditor of Floating Bear, an underground literary newsletter. Moreover, he and Diane di Prima cofounded the American Theater for Poets in 1961. This experimental dramatic troupe, too, was primarily concerned with presenting the works of lesser-known local writers.

Generally recognized as a “mover and shaker” on the Lower East Side art scene, Baraka quickly earned the respect of artists of all mediums, particularly the writers of the so-called Beatnik movement. His emergence as a personality and leader among this group is reflected in a 1964 feature article entitled “King of the East Village,” which appeared in the New York Herald Tribune. His stature was further enhanced with the publication of his first collection of poems, Preface to a Twenty-Volume Suicide Note, and two early dramatic works, The Baptism and The Toilet (both jointly published in 1967, but performed in 1964 and 1961, respectively).

Although it appeared well past the zenith of the Beat movement, Preface is most representative of the literature produced by the more characteristic Beat writers. Reflecting scorn for convention, pretence, and materialism, the poems share also the brooding, self-deprecating tone of these artists. While the two plays of this period are strikingly different in mode of presentation-The Baptism, a highly experimental, absurdist effort, and The Toilet, a markedly naturalistic work-they too evidence notable Beat tendencies. In both plays, homosexual characters figure prominently as symbols of openness and tolerance, direly needed qualities in the convention-bound, excessively prohibitive straight world.

Despite the clarity of Baraka's Beat-inspired criticism of society, however, the works from this period of the writer's development reflect, paradoxically, a growing unease with the very culture from which they emerge. This is most profoundly felt in the works of Preface, which posit a poignant dissatisfaction with the essentially apolitical protestations of the Beats. These poems are most notable in their expressions of concern with the poetic process and with questions of audience and artistic engagement. The author's employment of the racial theme in a number of the poems is indicative of his attempts to effect a reconciliation of his art with his emerging political activism. Examination of Baraka's essays from this period, works that later found their way into Home: Social Essays, reveals the depth of his thought on these issues at the time.

The various essays of Home: Social Essays, originally published in a number of liberal and leftist journals, present a record of Baraka's artistic transformation from black Beat poet to “Father of the Black Arts movement.” Becoming increasingly involved in political and artistic pursuits that took him beyond the confines of the Lower East Side, he shows in these essays an intense disaffection for liberalism, the gradualism of the civil rights movement, all manifestations of cultural shame, and assimilationist behavior by African Americans.

Despite his growing attraction to direct political action and racial concerns (as evidenced in his membership in such Harlem-based groups as the militant “On Guard for Freedom Committee” in 1961), Baraka was still very much involved with the Beat coterie during the writing of many of the aforementioned essays. His poems continued to appear in publications edited and supported by this group. Moreover, his first published fictional efforts appeared during this period in these same journals. Of particular significance was the appearance of The System of Dante's Hell (1965), Baraka's only novel. The author's final triumph, however, as denizen of the Lower East Side, was the explosive drama Dutchman (1964). Along with the poems of The Dead Lecturer (1964), these works reflect the tremendous psychological tension experienced by the artist during this phase of his development. Informed by an increasingly African American frame of reference, they represent, to a great extent, the artist's attempts to rationalize his new posture.

The poems of The Dead Lecturer represent Baraka's farewell to the closed, apolitical circle of Beat peers. Marked by an ever-increasing preoccupation with racial concerns, these lyrics evince the artist's crystallization of his commitment to revolutionary action and his disavowal of what he perceives to be the apolitical decadence of former compatriots. In withering attacks on his “friends,” the poet shows impatience with the life of reflection and dead-end intellectualism. Manifesting his sense of guilt for not being more actively involved in the rapidly expanding black liberation movement, he frequently invokes the prodigal theme in the poems of The Dead Lecturer and the essays of Home.

The poems and essays of these early works are also characterized by Baraka's commitment to the articulation of a Black Aesthetic. Poems such as “Black Dada Nihilismus”, “Crow Jane”, and “Rhythm and Blues 1 (for Robert Williams in Exile)” must be viewed as the lyrical equivalents to such essays as “LeRoi Jones Talking”, “A Dark Bag”, and “The Revolutionary Theater”.

The dramatic works Dutchman and The Slave (1964) should be seen as highly representative of this transitional period in Baraka's artistic development. Poets and marginal men, the heroes of both works give voice to many of the sentiments expressed in the poetry and prose of this period. Both Clay of Dutchman and Walker Vessels of The Slave are shown wrestling with the demons of self-denial that Baraka himself was attempting to eradicate between the years 1961 and 1965. C. W. E. Bigsby offers, in The Second Black Renaissance: Essays in Black Literature (1980), some of the most perceptive critical commentary available on these two works. Writing of Dutchman, he notes, “[It] remains one of the best plays ever written by a black author and one of the most impressive works of recent American theater…. At its heart is a consideration of the artistic process, a debate over the legitimacy of sublimating social anguish into aesthetic form.” In his treatment of The Slave, he refers to the drama as “a personal act of exorcism,” a description that could serve as well in discussion of most of the works of this phase of Baraka's artistic and personal development.

Baraka's espousal of a thoroughly political, race-conscious art was given dramatic emphasis by the continued shifting of his base of activities from the Lower East Side to Harlem. His involvement with the Black Arts Repertory Theater/School, located in Harlem, provided him with a base and a vehicle to test the aesthetic theories of the emerging cultural nationalist. Formally opened in early 1965, the Black Arts Repertory Theater/School was of critical importance in the development of the Black Arts movement of the later 1960s and early 1970s. Describing its programmatic thrust and strict adherence to the ideas put forth by Baraka, Larry Neal noted, “the Black Arts Theater took its programs into the streets of Harlem. For three months, the theater presented plays, concerts, and poetry readings to the people of the community. Plays that shattered the illusions of the American body politic, and awakened Black people to the meaning of their lives” (“The Black Arts Movement,” Drama Review, Summer 1968). Although short-lived, the Black Arts Repertory Theater/School's influence was widespread. Groups fashioned in its image sprang up throughout the country, and Baraka, its chief architect, was generally recognized as a seminal influence and leader.

Following the demise of the Black Arts Repertory Theater/School, Baraka returned to his hometown of Newark, New Jersey, to continue the work begun in Harlem. In doing so, he established Spirit House and its troupe of actors, called the Spirit House Movers. He also exercised his political acumen by organizing and leading the Black Community Development and Defense Organization, which proved to be an effective force in advancing the cause of Newark's African American community.

It was during this period that the writer changed his name. Having become a proponent of the Kawaida faith, a hybridization of orthodox Islam and traditional African practices, he became Ameer Baraka (“blessed Prince”). Taking on the role of priest in his growing commune, he added the title Imamu (“spiritual Leader”) and changed “Ameer” to “Amiri,” with no change in its regal connotation. He later dropped the title Imamu.

The poems, plays, and essays of the committed cultural nationalist are characterized by a markedly hortatory or didactic manner. Directed to an African American audience, they were intended to “raise the consciousness” of a divided and debased people. Baraka exerted tremendous influence on a generation of young African American writers during this period. Haki Madhubuti (formerly Don L. Lee), Nikki Giovanni, and Sonia Sanchez are only a few of the younger writers who attracted the attention of readers and listeners as disciples of Baraka.

The poems of Black Magic: Collected Poetry, 1961–1967 (1969), It's Nation Time (1970), and In Our Terribleness (1970) are typical of the verse produced by cultural nationalist, poet/priest Baraka. Black Magic contains a number of poems that reflect the self-accusatory, brooding tone of the Beat and post-Beat periods. However, the latter works more frequently evidence the assured exhortations of the committed revolutionary. Moreover, these efforts are marked by an increase in the use of the language of the streets and black oral modes. In poems such as “Black Art,” Baraka also continues the formulation of prescriptive artistic manifestos begun in the essays of Home. Like the play, the poem must be put to revolutionary use.

The dramatic works produced in this phase of Baraka's development show an extremely conscious employment of what is, perhaps, best described as the allegorical-didactic technique of medieval drama. Such an approach was logical for the playwright desirous of reaching, and teaching, a largely unlettered audience, hence, such plays as Experimental Death Unit #1, Madheart, and Great Goodness of Life, all published in Four Black Revolutionary Plays (1969). It should be noted, however, that Baraka, the avant garde dramatist, is also in evidence here. In addition to the stylized devices of medieval drama, the plays abound with expressionistic techniques. Moreover, Baraka produces what is arguably his most innovative and challenging drama, Slave Ship: An Historical Pageant (1967), a moving example of “environmental” or “living” theater, during this phase of his development.

During the early 1970s, Baraka played key roles in the organization of such major African American political conferences as the Pan African Congress of African Peoples in Atlanta (1972) and the National Black Political Convention in Gary, Indiana (1974). Around this same time, he made another dramatic ideological shift by announcing his formal adoption of a Marxist-Leninist perspective. Rejecting a narrowly prescribed cultural nationalism, he notes, in one of his earliest statements from this period (“The Congress of Afrikan People: A Position Paper”, Black Scholar, Jan./Feb. 1975), “Nationalism is backward when it says we cannot utilize the revolutionary experience of the world… the theories and experience of men like Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin, Mao Tse-Tung… Fidel Castro… to utilize all this revolutionary experience and revolutionary theory, by integrating it with the concrete practice of the black liberation movement.” With publication of such work as Hard Facts (1975), Poetry for the Advanced (1979), and Daggers and Javelins (1984), Baraka has continued his efforts to reconcile the more positive or useful aspects of cultural nationalism with the scientific accuracy of Marxism. As with his earlier works, the critical reception has been mixed.

Baraka continued his productivity with a series of works in the 1990s. He published Eulogies (1996), Funk love: New Poems, 1984–1995 (1996), and The Autobiography of LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka (1997). Scholarly interest in his poetry and essays continued as well. Paul Vangelisti edited Transbluesency: The Selected Poems of Amiri Baraka/LeRoi Jones (1961–1995) (1995), and two of Baraka's most well known works, Black Music and Home: Social Essays, were reissued in 1998.

Amiri Baraka's example is in many ways emblematic of the collective experience of African Americans since the momentous decade of the 1960s. His spiritual and artistic journey reflects, in microcosm and, to be sure, in the extreme, the movement from doubt to self-assurance, from self-contempt to self-acceptance. Moreover, in his more recent disavowal of the confining dictums of cultural nationalism, we see a suggestion of the larger African American community's movement toward greater openness to diversity and cross-cultural collaboration. Baraka's greatest contribution, however, lies in his tremendous influence on the direction of post-1960s African American writing. In encouraging a generation of writers to use, confidently and unapologetically, their own rich African American cultural heritage as well as experimental modes of presentation, he proved himself a key facilitator in the maturation of a good number of innovative young artists. By freeing these aspiring writers from all vestiges of cultural shame and the lock-step realistic/naturalistic mode, he contributed immeasurably to African American literature specifically and American literature in general.

[See also Literary History, article on Late Twentieth Century.]

Bibliography

• Donald B. Gibson, ed., Modern Black Poets: A Collection of Critical Essays, 1973.
• Theodore Hudson, From LeRoi Jones to Amiri Baraka: The Literary Works, 1973.
• Kimberly Benston, Baraka: The Renegade and the Mask, 1976.
• Werner Sollors, Amiri Baraka/LeRoi Jones: The Quest for a “Populist Modernism, 1978.
• Lloyd Brown, Amiri Baraka, 1980.
• William C. Fisher, “Amiri Baraka,” in American Writers, supplement 2, part 1, ed. A. Walton Litz, 1981, pp. 29–63.
• Henry C. Lacey, To Raise, Destroy, and Create: The Poetry, Drama, and Fiction of Imamu Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones), 1981.
• William J. Harris, The Poetry and Poetics of Amiri Baraka: The Jazz Aesthetic, 1985.
• Robert Elliot Fox, Conscientious Sorcerers: The Black Post Modernist Fiction of LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka, Ishmael Reed, and Samuel R. Delany, 1987.
• George Piggford, “Looking into Black Skulls: Amiri Baraka's Dutchman and the Psychology of Race,” Modern Drama 40:1 (Spring 1997): 74–85.
• Saba Siddiqui, “Women in Amiri Baraka's Plays,” in New Waves in American Literature, ed., Desai A. Mutalik, et al. (1999), pp. 38–44

Henry C. Lacey

For more information on Imamu Amiri Baraka, visit Britannica.com.

Baraka, Amiri [né Everett LeRoi Jones] (b. 1934), playwright. The most radical and influential African‐American writer of the 1960s, he first was noticed (under the name of LeRoi Jones) with Dutchman (1964), an explosive one‐act allegory about a sensuous white woman who teases and taunts a black student on a subway train before killing him. Baraka's other significant drama was Slave Ship (1967) where actors and audience experience the Atlantic crossing of a colonial slave‐trade vessel. He changed his name and mission in the late 1960s, advocating theatre as a weapon against white supremacy, and his works inspired a generation of African‐American writers.

• Born: 1934
• Birthplace: Newark, NJ

Dramatist, poet and novelist Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones) first rose to national prominence in 1964, with the New York production of his Obie Award-winning play, Dutchman. Baraka established the Black Arts Repertory Theater School in Harlem, and in 1967, he published his black nationalist collection of poetry, Black Magic.

Having attended a number of colleges and universities, Baraka also served in the United States Air Force. In the late 1950s, he settled in New York’s Greenwich Village and was a central figure of the bohemian scene there. He became a Black Nationalist, and then, in the 1970s, a Third World Marxist-Leninist.

Baraka taught at New York's New School for Social Research (1961-64),and was a visiting professor at San Francisco State College (1966-67), Yale University, New Haven (1977-78), and George Washington University, Washington, D.C. (1978-79). In 1980, he moved to the Department of African Studies at SUNY-Stony Brook, where he taught until his retirement in 1999. He continued to write all through the nineties, has edited many anthologies of African-American writing, and has received numerous fellowships, grants and awards.

Married twice, first to Hettie Cohen, Baraka lives with his second wife, the poet Amina Baraka, in Newark.

Most Famous Works

• Dutchman (1964)
• Black Magic (1967)
• Slave Ship (1967)
• Hard Facts
• Poetry for the Advanced
• Daggers and Javelins
• The Autobiography of LeRoi Jones (1984)

The African American author Imamu Amiri Baraka (born 1934 as Everett LeRoi Jones) became influential during the 1960s as a spokesperson for radical black literature and theater.

Born as Everett LeRoi Jones in Newark, New Jersey, on October 30, 1934, Baraka studied at Rutgers, Columbia, and Howard universities and at the New School for Social Research. After taking a bachelor of arts degree at Howard in 1953, he spent two years in the U.S. Air Force in Puerto Rico.

Baraka's life may be divided into two major periods. As a resident of New York City's Greenwich Village, LeRoi Jones led the life of a typical white American. He married a caucasian woman, Hettie Cohen, and they had two children. He and his wife published Yugen, a poetry magazine, and he coedited a literary newsletter, Floating Bear. Jones's political commitment began when he visited Cuba in 1960.

In 1965 Jones moved to Harlem and began the second period of his life. Here he lived a totally African American and separatist life. As founder and director of the Black Arts Repertory Theatre School, he made every aspect of his life "black" and opposite to the "white" life he had previously known.

Religious Conversion and Political Activism

Converted to the Kewaida sect of the Muslim faith, he took the name Imamu Amiri Baraka and moved to Newark, New Jersey. "Imamu" is the Swahili word for spiritual leader; "Amiri Baraka" is the Arabic name Jones adopted. In Newark he directed Spirit House, a religious, cultural, and educational black community. He lived with his second wife, their son, and his wife's three daughters by a previous marriage.

During the 1967 racial rebellions in Newark, Baraka was severely beaten and then arrested and charged with carrying a concealed weapon. The judge fined him $25,000 and read one of Baraka's poems, which he regarded as obscene, as justification for the exorbitant fine. National indignation was aroused by this injustice, and the fine was paid by the contributions of Baraka's supporters. He later appealed the case and won. The 1970 election of the African American Kenneth Gibson as mayor of Newark was due partly to Baraka's leadership of a fervent voter registration campaign among African Americans of the city.

As a black nationalist political leader, Baraka was a key figure in the organization of the Congress of African Peoples in 1970 and the National Black Political Assembly in 1972. Political writings during this period cover such topics as the development of a black value system and black political institutions and include the essay collection Raise, Race, Rays, Raze: Essays since 1965 (1971). However, by 1974 Baraka had undergone yet another reassessment of his cultural and political orientation. In a dramatic turnabout he rejected black nationalism and proclaimed himself a Marxist-Leninist-Maoist. After 1974 Baraka produced a great deal of socialist poetry and essays espousing revolutionary politics.

Literary Achievement

The most startling feature of Baraka's literary work is his arresting vocabulary, which communicates shocking states of emotion as well as ideas that indicate new intellectual dimensions and frontiers of the mind. He was a brilliant myth-maker, breaking icons and clichés and destroying the stereotypes and shibboleths of the old racist myth - the myth of race and sex in America. As poet, essayist, and playwright, he pressed for new cultural understanding in the turbulent society of modern America.

Baraka's writing reveals the influence of black music on his sensibilities. Jazz especially influenced the rhythms of his poetry, although the imagery and style of his early poetry reflect wide reading in classical poetry of all countries and especially the influence of contemporary "beat" poetry. However, his subject matter was from the start almost entirely the plight of African Americans.

During the 1960s Baraka wrote three volumes of poetry: Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note (1961), The Dead Lecturer (1964), and Black Magic Poetry (1969). His many plays of the period include Dutchman (1964), which won the Obie Award and marked the beginning of black revolutionary theater, The Slave, Slave Ship, Arm Yrself or Harm Yrself or Harm Yrself, Jello, and The Toilet. Experimental Death Unit #1, A Black Mass, Great Goodness of Life, and Madheart were published as Four Black Revolutionary Plays (1969). He authored three collections of non-fiction, Blues People (1963), Home, a group of social essays (1966), and Black Music (1967); a novel, The System of Dante's Hell (1965); and a group of short stories entitled Tales (1967). During this period he also edited The Moderns: An Anthology of New Writing in America (1963) and coedited an anthology of new African American writing, Black Fire (1968).

Later Works

While Baraka produced numerous political writings during the 1970s - some of which were later collected in 1984's Daggers and Javelins: Essays, 1974-1979 - his literary efforts of the decade include the drama collection The Motion of History, and Other Plays (1978), as well as The Sidnee Poet Heroical, in Twenty-Nine Scenes (1979). A first Selected Poetry was issued in 1979 in addition to such later verse collections as Reggae or Not! Poems (1981) and Transbluesency: The Selected Poems of Amiri Baraka/LeRoi Jones (1961-1995) (1995). Funk Lore (1996) features poems written from 1984 to 1995. Both 1995's Wise, Why's, Y's and 1996's Eulogies offer his insight into notable African American figures of the 20th century. Baraka's autobiography was published in 1984.

Further Reading

Examinations of Baraka's literary achievement may be found in William J. Harris The Poetry and Poetics of Amiri Baraka: The Jazz Aesthetic (1985), Henry C. Lacey, To Raise, Destroy, and Create: The Poetry, Drama, and Fiction of Imamu Amiri Baraka (1981), Lloyd Wellesley Brown, Amiri Baraka (1980), Werner Sollors, Amiri Baraka/LeRoi Jones: The Quest for a "Populist Modernism" (1978), Kimberly W. Bentson, Baraka: The Renegade and the Mask (1978), Theodore R. Hudson, From LeRoi Jones to Amiri Baraka: The Literary Works (1973), and Robert Elliot Fox, Conscientious Sorcerers: The Black Postmodernist Fiction of LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka, Ishmael Reed, and Samuel R. Delany (1987).

poet; writer; college teacher

Personal Information

Born Everett LeRoi Jones on October 7, 1934, in Newark, NJ; son of Coyette LeRoy and Anna Lois Jones; married Hettie Cohen, October 13, 1958 (divorced, August 1965); married Sylvia Robinson (Bibi Amina Baraka), 1966; children: (first marriage) Kellie Elisabeth, Lisa Victoria Chapman; (second marriage) Dbalaji Malik Ali, Ras Jua Al Aziz, Shani Isis, Amiri Seku, Ahi Mwenge
Education: Howard University.
Military/Wartime Service: U.S. Air Force, 1954-57.
Memberships: Founded Black Arts Repertory Theatre School, 1964, director, 1964-66; Spirithouse, co-founder, 1967-; Kimako's Blues People.

Career

Writer. Founded Yugen magazine and Totem Press, 1958; New School for Social Research, New York City, instructor, 1961-64; San Francisco State College, visiting prof, 1966-67; Yale Univ, visiting prof, 1977-78; George Washington University, visiting prof, 1978-79; State Univ of New York at Stony Brook, associate professor, 1983-85, professor of Afro-American studies, 1985-1999; poet laureate for New Jersey, 2002-03.

Life's Work

Amiri Baraka is one of the most controversial writers in recent history, one whose influence on African-American literature has been profound. Plays, poems, novels, essays, short stories, jazz operas, and music criticism are all included in his body of work, and all have served as vehicles for his outspoken social and political commentary. According to Dictionary of Literary Biography contributor James A. Miller, he is "a protean personality, fond of manifestos and vehement repudiations, [who] has shifted guises and discarded identities with such astonishing rapidity that critics have often been frustrated, suspended in the act of defining a man who is no longer there, while his admirers have been left abandoned or challenged to readjust themselves to his new position." Maya Angelou thinks that Baraka is the world's greatest living poet.

Never Felt Comfortable in Academia

Born Everett LeRoi Jones in Newark, New Jersey, Baraka grew up in a family of distinctly middle-class aspirations. His parents, a housewife and a postal worker, encouraged Baraka to express himself through art and music. In an interview for Publishers Weekly with Calvin Reid, Baraka described a typical family gathering, "you had to sing or dance or tell stories or something. You couldn't just sit there, the old folks would think something was wrong with you. 'You can't sing boy?'" Baraka also recalled taking piano, drum, and trumpet lessons, drama class, and art school. One of a handful of blacks in his high school, Baraka loved sports and played baseball, basketball, football, and track. Baraka admitted to Reid, "If I had been a little bigger I would never have been a writer." Yet no matter what sports he joined or clubs he became a member of, Baraka was still seen by other students as an outsider. Baraka's parents took pride in the idea of their son succeeding at a mainly white school, but Baraka's unique status caused him tremendous feelings of alienation and isolation. Later in life he would mercilessly lampoon the values of assimilation his parents held dear.

Baraka won a scholarship to Rutgers University in 1951, but a continuing sense of cultural dislocation prompted him to transfer in 1952 to Howard University, a traditionally black college. He would eventually attack the school as the citadel of the black bourgeoisie he disdained, writing in an essay: "Howard University shocked me into realizing how desperately sick the Negro could be, how he could be led into self-destruction and how he would not realize that it was the society that had forced him into a great sickness." Despite his later criticism, however, Baraka benefitted greatly from his years at Howard. He studied philosophy, religion, and literature, and was exposed to the ideas of prominent black poets, music critics, and scholars. Baraka credited several of his teachers for providing a strong background in European classics as well as black American culture. In particular, he praises Sterling Brown for illustrating "the importance of the blues; that is was first a verse form and then the music flowed from that."

In 1954 Baraka left Howard without finishing his bachelor's degree, returned to Newark, and enlisted in the U.S. Air Force. Baraka served in Puerto Rico and Germany as a weatherman and gunner. He told Publishers Weekly, "it was the worst thing I could have done," but also explained that his years in the Air Force are where he got his real education. While stationed in Puerto Rico, Baraka was the base librarian. The library eventually became an informal meeting place where Baraka and several others would read and discuss various books, from Proust to Thomas Hardy to Kafka. Baraka was also writing poems during this time and sending them to several magazines such as, The New Yorker and Kenyon Review.

Artistic Philosophy Influenced by the Beat Generation

Three years later Baraka returned to civilian life, after being discharged from the Air Force for having too many books--among them, The Communist Manifesto. "Someone said I was a Communist. As it turned out, 40 years later, now it's true," Baraka chuckled while describing this incident during his interview with Publishers Weekly. At the time, the social and artistic phenomenon known as the Beat Generation was just beginning to touch the consciousness of a complacent America. The Beats were challenging the stagnant literary establishment and the rigid moral code of the country; Baraka quickly aligned himself with them, seeing them as fellow outsiders. The ideal shared by the Beats and Baraka was to look beyond, or rise above, racial barriers. Baraka explained to David Ossman in The Sullen Art: Interviews with Modern American Poets: "I'm fully conscious all the time that I'm an American Negro, because it's part of my life. But I also know that if I want to say, 'I see a bus full of people,' I don't have to say, 'I am a Negro seeing a bus full of people.' I would deal with it when it has to do directly with the poem, and not as a kind of broad generalization that doesn't have much to do with a lot of young writers today who are Negroes."

Baraka took up residence in Greenwich Village, a center of the budding cultural revolution. He soon met and married Hettie Cohen, a young Jewish woman who shared his tastes in music and literature. Cohen worked for the Partisan Review, where Baraka's first published piece appeared in 1958. It was a defense of the innovations of Beat writing, declaring that young writers "must resort to violence in literature, ... to shake us out of the woeful literary sterility which characterized the '40s." Baraka and Cohen organized Yugen, a literary magazine showcasing the new poets. Baraka wrote a letter--on toilet paper stationery--to Beat poet Allen Ginsberg soliciting works and was rewarded with contributions from Ginsberg, Philip Whalen, Gregory Corso, Gary Snyder, Jack Kerouac, and other notables.

A vital relationship with Ginsberg developed. Baraka recalled in the Village Voice: "We talked endlessly about poetry, about prosody, about literature and it is clear to me that my poetry would not have evolved as it has without A. G.'s ideas. He let me in on poetry as a living phenomenon, a world of human concern, and literature as a breathing force in one's life, the task of a lifetime. I absorbed and grew because of these ideas, and even in resisting some of Ginsberg's other ideas, I still grew and developed because of contact with them." Baraka's association with Ginsberg, his editorship of Yugen, and establishment of Totem Press quickly made him one of the leading figures of the Greenwich Village scene. He began to write prolifically, contributing poetry and reviews of books and music to the important smaller magazines of the day.

Visit to Cuba Encouraged More Aggressive Social Activism

But even as he was becoming a key member of the Beat Generation, Baraka was drifting away from the movement. His fellow poets were, for the most part, apolitical. They criticized the system, but had no agenda for changing it. Baraka felt a growing sense of dissatisfaction with this kind of passivity. In 1960 he reached a turning point in his life when he visited Fidel Castro's Cuba. There he encountered many forceful, politically committed young artists and intellectuals who challenged him to abandon the Beat preoccupation with the soul and to tackle society's problems in a more aggressive fashion. Baraka did not change overnight; he did, however, return from Cuba with a new sense of political mission and a stronger identification with artists of the Third World than with those of the white vanguard. Though he remained a resident of Greenwich Village, he became increasingly involved in the social life of Harlem.

During the early 1960s Baraka seemed to regard himself as a bridge between the black and white worlds. He wrote two of his most serious works of fiction at this time, The System of Dante's Hell and Tales. Both reflect his struggle to pull away from Greenwich Village. He told Kimberly Benston in Boundary 2, "I was really writing defensively. I was trying to get away from the influence of people like [Robert] Creeley and [Charles] Olson. I was living in New York then and the whole Creeley-Olson influence was beginning to beat me up. I was in a very closed circle ... and I felt the need to break out." Still, he continued to work closely with Beat writers; in 1961 he and poet Diane Di Prima founded another important underground magazine, Floating Bear. The two were also instrumental in organizing the American Theatre for Poets. Baraka ridiculed the notion of a separate black society in his essay "Black Is a Country," insisting that "America is as much a black country as a white one. The lives and destinies of the white American are bound up inextricably with those of the black American." He clung to his belief in a world free of color lines even as he sought to establish for himself a stronger ethnic identity.

"The Dutchman" Exposed Disillusionment With Integration

Eventually Baraka's writing revealed the slow disintegration of his faith in racial harmony. In the poem "Black Dada Nihilismus" he ponders the many nonwhite cultures destroyed by Western civilization and concludes by calling on the African god Damballah for help in the destruction of the West. In his most well-known and highly praised play, Dutchman, he depicts a subway encounter between Lula, a white, Bohemian woman, and Clay, a young, middle-class, black man. At first Clay seems to represent the aspects of black life Baraka harshly criticized in his earlier works, while Lula appears to embody the values the author prized. Lula taunts Clay about his repressed identity, urging him to release his true black self. When he finally does, it pours forth as a violent tirade against Lula and the larger white world. At the drama's conclusion Lula calmly stabs Clay to death and sits back to await her next victim.

Dutchman "merges private themes, mythical allusion, surrealistic techniques, and social statement into a play of astonishing power and resonance," stated Miller. It won the 1964 Obie Award for best American play, was performed internationally, and propelled its author into a whirlwind of lectures, panel discussions, readings, and teaching assignments at liberal universities. Years after the play's debut Darryl Pinckley wrote in the New York Times Book Review, "[Baraka] is a highly gifted dramatist. Much of the black protest literature of the 60s now seems diminished in power, even sentimental. But 'Dutchman' immediately seizes the imagination. It is radically economical in structure, striking in the vivacity of its language and rapid shifts of mood."

By mid-1964 Baraka had completely rejected the cultural and political values of the Beats and had begun verbally attacking his Greenwich Village friends, white liberals, and the white community in general. His anti-bourgeois stance had been transformed into a militant black nationalism inspired by Malcolm X. An integrated society was not only impossible, he now believed, but undesirable. Ironically, Baraka's diatribes against the white world boosted his popularity even further--at least temporarily. For a time he was swamped by invitations to hip, white, New York City high-society parties. But he meant what he said about turning his back on that world. "Now there could be absolutely no ties with whites, and certainly not any intimate ones," he later wrote. "These in themselves, we reasoned, would make us traitors." By the end of 1965 he had ended his marriage to Hettie Cohen, broken his ties with the white literary establishment, and moved to Harlem.

Embraced Black Nationalism, Then Marxism

In Harlem he founded the Black Arts Repertory Theatre School. It was a short-lived but highly influential project that revolutionized black theater in the United States. Contemporary dramas shaped by black nationalist philosophy were performed there and institutions modeled after it sprang up all over the country. The theater--which was funded with federal money--was shut down by police in 1966, allegedly because an arms cache had been discovered there. Returning to his birthplace, Newark, Baraka dropped the name LeRoi Jones in favor of the Bantu Muslim appellation Imamu (meaning "spiritual leader," later dropped) Ameer (later changed to Amiri, meaning "blessed") Baraka ("prince"). He also married Sylvia Robinson, who changed her name to Amina Baraka. The couple opened the Spirithouse to help Newark both culturally and spiritually. In the essay "state/meant" he summarized his new sense of purpose: "The Black Artist's role in America is to aid in the destruction of America as he knows it. His role is to report and reflect so precisely the nature of the society, and of himself in that society, that other men will be moved by the exactness of his rendering and, if they are black men, grow strong through this moving, having seen their own strength, and weakness; and if they are white men, tremble, curse, and go mad, because they will be drenched with the filth of their evil."

As the dominant black theorist and artist of the late 1960s, Baraka was responsible for shifting the focus of black literature from an integrationist art that conveyed a raceless and classless vision to a literature rooted in the black experience. The era over which he presided is considered the most important in black arts since the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s. And despite Baraka's rejection of the ideal of an integrated world, his work affected all races. As Native American author Maurice Kenny wrote in The Kaleidoscopic Torch, "He opened tightly guarded doors for not only Blacks but poor whites as well and, of course, Native Americans, Latinos and Asian-Americans. We'd all still be waiting for the invitation from the New Yorker without him. He taught us all how to claim it and take it."

As a black nationalist political leader, Baraka was a key figure in the organization of the Congress of African Peoples in 1970 and the National Black Political Assembly in 1972. But by 1974 he had undergone yet another reassessment of his cultural and political orientation. In a dramatic turnabout he rejected black nationalism and proclaimed himself a Marxist-Leninist-Maoist. He stated in the New York Times: "It is a narrow nationalism that says the white man is the enemy.... Nationalism, so-called, when it says 'all non-blacks are our enemies,' is sickness or criminality, in fact, a form of fascism." Since 1974 Baraka has produced a great deal of socialist poetry and essays and names the destruction of the capitalist state and the creation of a socialist community as his goal. William J. Harris quoted him in The Poetry and Poetics of Amiri Baraka as saying: "I think fundamentally my intentions are similar to those I had when I was a Nationalist. That might seem contradictory, but they were similar in the sense that I see art as a weapon, and a weapon of revolution. It's just now that I define revolution in Marxist terms.... I came to my Marxist view as a result of having struggled as a Nationalist and found certain dead ends theoretically and ideologically, as far as Nationalism was concerned and had to reach out for a communist ideology." Nonetheless, Baraka's many philosophical shifts are far from capricious, attested Arnold Rampersad, who wrote in The Kaleidoscopic Torch: "His change of heart and head is testimony to his honesty, energy, and relentless search for meaning.

Baraka, though continuing to create works to encourage, strengthen, and enlighten his community, began to teach as well. In addition to teaching at the New School for Social Research, he also taught at San Francisco State College, Yale, and George Washington University. He began a teaching career at the State University of New York-Stony Brook (SUNY). He started as an assistant professor, making his way to professor of African studies in 1985.

Controversial Poem Created Backlash

In 1999, after twenty years teaching at SUNY, Baraka retired, but remained an activist, frequently accepting reading and speaking engagements. As the political climate in the United States became increasingly more conservative, Baraka's work has managed to retain its revolutionary ardor. Soon after the September 11, 2001 terrorist attack on the World Trade Center, Baraka composed his provocative poem, "Somebody Blew Up America", which was essentially focused on American imperialism but was also partly inspired by several conspiracy theories including the theory that George Bush and the Israeli government had previous knowledge of the attack. The poem was online weeks after the attack and Baraka read the poem at several venues including college campuses.

In 2002 Baraka was named poet laureate of New Jersey, a position that has been challenged by many individuals and groups, including the Anti-Defamation League. James Haba, a poet who was on the committee to choose a new poet laureate told The New York Observer, "He is clearly a major literary figure. Every anthology of American literature in the 20th century will include some mention of him, or some of his work. He was born in New Jersey and lives in New Jersey. On what grounds don't you nominate him?" In September of 2002, Baraka read "Somebody Blew Up America" at the Geraldine R. Dodge Poetry Festival in front of 2,000 people. Afterward, the poem came under heavy criticism which lead Governor McGreevey to ask for Baraka' apology and for him to step down from his appointment as poet laureate. Baraka wrote a lengthy statement defending his poem, explaining the irony of Bush's war on terrorism, that blacks in America have been victims of political and cultural terrorism for centuries. Needless to say, Baraka refused to apologize and refused to resign as poet laureate. On the contrary, as Stanley Crouch, a columnist for the New York Daily News pointed out, "I do not think he should resign or be asked to step down. Those people in New Jersey chose a buffoon, and now they should experience the embarrassment of having been so naíve.... It seems to me that part of democracy means that you periodically--or often--have to hear things you disagree with. Part of democracy means enduring people not like yourself."

In his statement regarding "Somebody Blew Up America" Baraka said, "No, I will not apologize, I will not resign. In fact I will continue to do what I have appointed to do but still have not been paid to do.... We feel that this state and indeed this nation and this world is desperately in need of the deepest and most profound human values that poetry can teach." However, on January 29, 2003, the New Jersey Senate voted to abolish the poet laureate position. As in the past, this will not deter him. Amiri Baraka has shown tremendous courage in bringing forth change in not only the black community of Newark, New Jersey, but for many throughout the African diaspora.

Awards

John Hay Whitney fellowship, 1960-61; Longview Award for best essay of the year, 1961, for "Cuba Libre"; Obie Award, 1964, for Dutchman; Guggenheim fellowship, 1965-66; Yoruba Academy fellow, 1965; second prize at the First World Festival of Negro Arts, Dakar, Senegal, 1966, for The Slave; Doctorate of Humane Letters, Malcolm X College, 1972; Rockefeller Foundation fellow, 1981, 1989; National Endowment for the Arts poetry award, 1981; New Jersey Council for the Arts award, 1982; Before Columbus Foundation award, 1984; American Book Award, 1984; Drama Award, 1985; Langston Hughes medal, 1989; Ferroni award, Italy, and foreign poet award, 1993; Playwright's award, Black Drama Festival, Winston-Salem, North Carolina, 1997; University of Connecticut Wallace Stevens poetry prize, 1998; One Hundred Black Men, Rutgers University, 1998.

Works

Selected writings

• Plays
• Dutchman [and] The Slave, Morrow, 1964.
• The Toilet, Sterling Lord, 1964.
• The Baptism: A Comedy in One Act, Sterling Lord, 1966.
• The System of Dante's Hell, Grove, 1965.
• Slave Ship, Jihad, 1967.
• Arm Yourself or Harm Yourself! A One-Act Play, Jihad, 1967.
• Four Black Revolutionary Plays: All Praises to the Black Man, Bobbs-Merrill, 1969.
• (Contributor) New Plays from the Black Theatre, edited by Ed Bullins, Bantam, 1969.
• J-E-L-L-O, Third World Press, 1970.
• (Contributor) Black Drama Anthology, edited by Woodie King and Ron Milner, New American Library, 1971.
• (Contributor) Spontaneous Combustion: Eight New American Plays, edited by Rochelle Owens, Winter House, 1972.
• What Was the Relationship of the Lone Ranger to the Means of Production?: A Play in One Act, Anti-Imperialist Cultural Union, 1978.
• The Motion of History and Other Plays, Morrow, 1978.
• The Sidnee Poet Heroical, in Twenty-Nine Scenes, Reed & Cannon, 1979.
• Selected Plays and Prose of LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka, Morrow, 1979.
• Primitive World, music by David Murray, New York, 1984.
• General Hag's Skeezag, New York, Mentor, 1992.
• Also author of the plays Home on the Range and Police, published in Drama Review, Summer 1968, Rockgroup, published in Cricket, December 1969, and Black Power Chant, published in Drama Review, December 1972.
• Screenplays
• Dutchman, Gene Persson Enterprises, Ltd., 1967.
• Black Spring, Black Arts Alliance (San Francisco), 1968.
• A Fable (based on The Slave), MFR Productions, 1971.
• Supercoon, Gene Persson Enterprises, Ltd., 1971.
• Poetry
• April 13 (broadside), Number 133, Penny Poems (New Haven), 1959.
• Spring & So Forth (broadside), Number 111, Penny Poems, 1960.
• Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note, Toteni/Corinth, 1961.
• The Dead Lecturer, Grove, 1964.
• Black Art (also see below), Jihad, 1966.
• Black Magic (also see below), Morrow, 1967.
• A Poem For Black Hearts, Broadside Press, 1967.
• Black Magic: Sabotage; Target Study; Black Art; Collected Poetry, 1961-1967, Bobbs-Merrill, 1969.
• It's Nation Time, Third World Press, 1970.
• Spirit Reach, Jihad, 1972.
• Afrikan Revolution: A Poem, Jihad, 1973.
• Hard Facts: Excerpts, People's War, 1975.
• Spring Song, Baraka, 1979.
• AM/TRAK, Phoenix Bookship, 1979.
• Selected Poetry of Amiri Baraka/LeRoi Jones, Morrow, 1979.
• In the Tradition: For Black Arthur Blythe, Jihad, 1980.
• Reggae or Not! Poems, Contact Two, 1982.
• The Leroi Jones/Amiri Baraka Reader, New York, Thunder' Mouth Press, 1993.
• Wise Why's Y's: The Girot's Tale, Third World Press, 1996
• Transbluency: The Selected Poetry of Amiri Baraka/Leroi Jones (1961-1995), New York, Marsilio, 1995.
• Funk Lore: New Poems (1984-1995), Los Angeles, Littoral Books, 1996.
• Essays
• Blues People: Negro Music in White America, Morrow, 1963.
• Home: Social Essays (contains "state/meant"), Morrow, 1966.
• Black Music, Morrow, 1968.
• Raise, Race, Rays, Raze: Essays Since 1965, Random House, 1971.
• Strategy and Tactics of a Pan-African Nationalist Party, Jihad, 1971.
• Kawaida Studies: The New Nationalism, Third World Press, 1972.
• Crisis in Boston!, Vita Wa Watu--People's War, 1974.
• Daggers and Javelins: Essays, 1974-1979, Morrow, 1984.
• (With wife, Amina Baraka) The Music: Reflections on Jazz and Blues, Morrow, 1987.
• Other
• The Disguise (broadside), [New Haven], 1961.
• Cuba Libre, Fair Play for Cuba Committee (New York City), 1961.
• (Contributor) Soon, One Morning, edited by Herbert Hill, Knopf, 1963.
• The System of Dante's Hell (novel), Grove, 1965.
• Striptease, Parallax, 1967.
• Tales (short stories), Grove, 1967.
• Focus on Amiri Baraka: Playwright LeRoi Jones Analyzes the 1st National Black Political Convention (recording), Center for Cassette Studies, 1973.
• The Autobiography of LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka, Freundlich, 1984.
• Conversations With Amiri Baraka, 1994.
• Eulogies, 1996.
• Jesse Jackson & Black People, Third World Press, 2003.
• Jubilee, National Geographic, 2003.
• Works represented in more than 75 anthologies, including A Broadside Treasury, For Malcolm, The New Black Poetry, Nommo, and The Trembling Lamb. Editor with Diane Di Prima, The Floating Bear, 1961-1963. Contributor to periodicals, including the Evergreen Review, Poetry, downbeat, Metronome, the Nation, Negro Digest, and the Saturday Review.

Further Reading

Books

• Amiri Baraka: The Kaleidoscopic Torch, edited by James B. Gwynne, Steppingstones Press, 1985.
• Baraka, Amiri, The Autobiography of Leroi Jones/Amiri Baraka, Freundlich, 1984.
• Baraka: The Renegade and the Mask, edited by Kimberly A. Benston, Yale University Press, 1976.
• Benston, Kimberly A., Imamu Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones): A Collection of Critical Essays, Prentice-Hall, 1978.
• Black Theatre, U.S.A., edited by James V. Hatch, Free Press, 1974.
• Brown, Lloyd W., Amiri Baraka, Twayne, 1980.
• Contemporary Literary Criticism, Gale, Volume 1, 1973, Volume 2, 1974, Volume 3, 1975, Volume 5, 1976, Volume 10, 1979, Volume 14, 1980, Volume 33, 1985.
• Cook, Bruce, The Beat Generation, Scribner, 1971.
• Dace, Letitia, LeRoi Jones (Imamu Amiri Baraka): A Checklist of Works By and About Him, Nether Press, 1971.
• Dictionary of Literary Biography, Gale, Volume 5: American Poets Since World War II, 1980, Volume 7: Twentieth-Century American Dramatists, 1981, Volume 16: The Beats: Literary Bohemians in Postwar America, 1983, Volume 38: Afro-American Writers After 1955: Dramatists and Prose Writers, 1985.
• Fox, Robert Elliot, Conscientious Sorcerers: The Black Post-Modernist Fiction of LeRoi Jones/Baraka, Ishmael Reed and Samual R. Delany, Greenwood Press, 1987.
• Harris, William J., The Poetry and Poetics of Amiri Baraka: The Jazz Aesthetic, University of Missouri Press, 1985.
• Hudson, Theodore, From LeRoi Jones to Amiri Baraka: The Literary Works, Duke University Press, 1973.
• Lacey, Henry C., To Raise, Destroy, and Create: The Poetry, Drama, and Fiction of Imamu Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones), Whitson, 1981.
• Ossman, David, The Sullen Art: Interviews with Modern American Poets, Corinth, 1963.
• Sollors, Werner, Amiri Baraka/LeRoi Jones: The Quest for a "Populist Modernism,"; Columbia University Press, 1978.

Periodicals

• American Theater, May 2000; January 2002.
• Associated Press, January 30, 2003.
• Black American Literature Forum, Spring 1980; Spring 1981; Fall 1982; Spring 1983; Winter 1985.
• Booklist, September 15, 1996; January 1, 1997; February 15, 1999.
• Boundary, Volume 2, Number 6, 1978.
• Chicago Defender, January 11, 1965.
• Chicago Tribune, October 4, 1968.
• Detroit Free Press, January 31, 1965.
• Detroit News, January 15, 1984; August 12, 1984.
• downbeat, January 2, 1964; August 1987.
• Ebony, August 1967; August 1969; February 1971.
• Esquire, June 1966.
• Essence, September 1970; May 1984; September 1984; May 1985.
• Jet, January 16, 1975; July 23, 1984.
• Modern Drama, February 1971; Summer 1972; September 1972; June 1974; Spring, 1997.
• Ms., September 1983.
• Nation, October 14, 1961; November 14, 1961; March 13, 1964; April 13, 1964; January 4, 1965; March 15, 1965; January 22, 1968; February 2, 1970.
• Negro Digest, December 1963; February 1964; August 1964; March 1965; April 1965; March 1966; April 1966; June 1966; April 1967; April 1968; January 1969; April 1969.
• New York Daily News, October 22, 2002.
• New Yorker, April 4, 1964; December 26, 1964; March 4, 1967; December 30, 1972.
• New York Review of Books, January 20, 1966; May 22, 1964; July 2, 1970; October 17, 1974; June 11, 1984; June 14, 1984.
• New York Observer, October 21, 2002.
• New York Times, April 28, 1966; May 8, 1966; August 10, 1966; September 14, 1966; October 5, 1966; January 20, 1967; February 28, 1967; July 15, 1967; January 5, 1968; January 6, 1968; January 9, 1968; January 10, 1968; February 7, 1968; April 14, 1968; August 16, 1968; November 27, 1968; December 24, 1968; August 26, 1969; November 23, 1969; February 6, 1970; May 11, 1972; June 11, 1972; November 11, 1972; November 14, 1972; November 23, 1972; December 5, 1972; December 27, 1974; December 29, 1974; November 19, 1979; October 15, 1981; January 23, 1984; October 18, 2002.
• New York Times Book Review, January 31, 1965; November 28, 1965; May 8, 1966; February 4, 1968; March 17, 1968; February 14, 1971; June 6, 1971; June 27, 1971; December 5, 1971; March 12, 1972; December 16, 1979; March 11, 1984; July 5, 1987; December 20, 1987.
• Newsweek, March 13, 1964; April 13, 1964; November 22, 1965; May 2, 1966; March 6, 1967; December 4, 1967; December 1, 1969; February 19, 1973.
• Publishers Weekly, October 7, 1996; December 30, 1996; May 1, 2000;
• Record, October 17, 2002; October 18, 2002; October 20, 2002.
• Saturday Review, April 20, 1963; January 11, 1964; January 9, 1965; December 11, 1965; December 9, 1967; October 2, 1971; July 12, 1975.
• Star-Ledger, October 14, 1999; February 25, 2002; October 1, 2002; November 4, 2002.
• Studies in Black Literature, Spring, 1970; Volume 1, Number 2, 1970; Volume 3, Number 2, 1972; Volume 3, Number 3, 1972; Volume 4, Number 1, 1973.
• Time, December 25, 1964; November 19, 1965; May 6, 1966; January 12, 1968; April 26, 1968; June 28, 1968; June 28, 1971.
• Village Voice, December 17, 1964; May 6, 1965; May 19, 1965; August 30, 1976; August 1, 1977; December 17-23, 1980, October 2, 1984.
• Washington Post, August 15, 1968; September 12, 1968; November 27, 1968; December 5, 1980; January 23, 1981; June 29, 1987.
• Washington Post Book World, December 24, 1967; May 22, 1983.

On-line

• www.kirjasto.sci.fi/baraka.htm
• www.poets.org

— Joan Goldsworthy and Christine Miner Minderovic

(Amiri Baraka, b. 1934)

1961	Preface to a Twenty-Volume Suicide Note. Jones's first collection explores modern alienation outside of the context of racial identity with which Jones would be later associated. Born Everett LeRoy Jones in Newark, New Jersey, the writer attended Howard University and, after a dishonorable discharge from the air force, moved to Greenwich Village in 1957, where he founded and edited the avant-garde magazines Yugen (1958-1962) and Floating Bear (1961-1969).
1963	Blues People: Negro Music in White America. Jones's important cultural study treats the black experience in America as reflected in the development of the blues and jazz, underscoring the music's social, economic, and psychological roots.
1964	Dutchman. Initiating black revolutionary drama of the 1960s and 1970s, Jones causes a sensation with his play about a black man taunted and eventually murdered by a white woman on a New York City subway. It wins the Obie Award for best play. His next plays are The Toilet, about a white homosexual beaten by a gang of blacks, and The Slave, in which a black revolutionary leader converses with his white former wife. The latter is, in Jones's words, "the last play where I tried to balance and talk to blacks and whites."
1964	The Dead Lecturer. Jones's second collection shows his increased racial consciousness, a break with Western literary conventions, and angry protest directed at white society.
1966	Home: Social Essays. Jones's first collection of sociopolitical essays includes the important "Cuba Libre," tracing the raising of Jones's political and racial consciousness, and "The Legacy of Malcolm X, and the Coming of the Black Nation".
1967	Slave Ship. The play is a searing historical pantomime dramatizing the experiences of Africans on a slave ship to America.
1971	Raise, Race, Rays, Raze: Essays Since 1965. This collection of writing on black nationalism and the black theater includes the essay "7 Principles of US: Maulana Karenga & the Need for a Black Value System", showing the influence of black nationalist Ron Karenga (b. 1941).
1984	The Autobiography of LeRoi Jones. Written while the writer was serving a sentence in a Harlem halfway house for a domestic dispute, this memoir chronicles Jones's developing political ideas, from his Newark boyhood through his black nationalist period.

IN BRIEF: n. - United States writer of poems and plays about racial conflict (born in 1934).

Quotes:

"The landscape should belong to the people who see it all the time."

• Born: October 07, 1934, Newark, NJ
• Active: '60s, '70s, '80s
• Genres: Jazz
• Instrument: Vocals
• Representative Songs: "Black Dada Nihilismus", "Freedon Suite", "Poetry By Amiri Baraka

Biography

Poet, playwright, critic, and novelist Amiri Baraka (born Everett LeRoi Jones) is best known to the jazz community for his two books, Blues People: Negro Music in White America, published in 1964, and Black Music in 1967, both as LeRoi Jones. Long before this, however, Baraka was identified with the New York School of poets and the Beats (he was included in Donald Allen's seminal anthology The New American Poetry). His first book of poetry, Preface to a Twenty-Volume Suicide Note was published in 1961. With Diane Di Prima he founded and edited the legendary Floating Bear newsletter. Baraka founded the Black Arts Repertory Theater/School and won an Obie award for his play Dutchman in 1964. He was an outspoken leader in the Black Nationalist movement in the late '60s and was a close associate -- as well as spiritual godfather -- to the Black Panther Party. He changed his name to Imamu Amiri Baraka, and later dropped "Imamu" (a Muslim word for "spiritual leader") in 1970. Remaining an activist, Baraka dropped his nationalist stance in 1974 and adopted a Marxist/Leninist one and is regarded as one of the most influential African-American writers of the 20th century. He recorded the wildly controversial play Black Mass with Sun Ra & His Arkestra in 1968 (issued on the Jihad label) and the amazing New Music New Poetry with saxophonist David Murray in 1980 on India Navigation. Baraka has added one more volume to his shelf of music criticism, The Music: Reflections on Jazz and Blues, which he and Amina Baraka, his wife, published in 1987. Baraka has taught at SUNY Buffalo and Columbia University, and he is currently a professor of Africana studies at SUNY, Stony Brook. He lives in Newark, NJ. ~ Thom Jurek, All Music Guide

New Music New Poetry Buy this CD

This entry is from Wikipedia, the leading user-contributed encyclopedia. It may not have been reviewed by professional editors (see full disclaimer)