Slave Ship (Author Biography)

Author Biography

Floyd Gaffney, in the Dictionary of Literary Biography, has compared Amiri Baraka (also known as LeRoi Jones or Imamu Amiri Baraka) to W. E. B. Dubois and Richard Wright as “one of the twentieth century’s most prolific and persistent social and moral critics of black experience in America.” Baraka’s political and literary career can be divided into three separate phases: a Beat Movement poet in the 1950s, a black nationalist poet, dramatist, essayist, and music historian in the 1960s, and a Marxist/ Socialist writer and activist in the 1970s.

Baraka was born Everett Leroy Jones, on October 7, 1934, in Newark, New Jersey, into an educated, middle-class African-American family. His father, Coyette LeRoy Jones, was a postal worker, and his mother, Anna Lois Russ Jones, was a social worker. He graduated from Barringer High School in 1951, spent a year at Rutgers University, and then transferred to Howard University, in Washington, D.C., which he attended from 1952 to 1954. Baraka, however, quit school to join the U.S. Air Force, where he spent three years stationed in Puerto Rico as a weatherman and gunner, from 1954 to 1957. He was dishonorably discharged. Baraka once stated in an interview that, while his experiences at a predominantly black university taught him about the “Negro sickness,” by which he referred to the prevailing effort to assimilate into white culture, his experiences in the armed forces taught him the “white sickness” of racism. In 1957, Baraka moved to the Lower East Side in New York City, where he became engaged with writers and intellectuals of the (mostly white) bohemian Beat Movement, such as Allen Ginsberg, who were concentrated in the East Village of Manhattan. Baraka worked at various small, alternative publishing and magazine businesses, as well as at a bookstore, and attended courses in Comparative Literature at Colombia University. It was during this time that Baraka met Hettie Roberta Cohen, a white Jewish woman, whom he married in 1958, and with whom he had two children. His first collection of poetry, Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note, was published in 1961, by Totem Press, a publishing company which he had founded in 1959.

In 1960, Baraka was invited to Cuba, along with other African-American writers, to celebrate the anniversary of Fidel Castro’s 1953 Marxist Revolution. Exposure to many politically committed writers in Cuba had a profound affect on Baraka’s political, and therefore literary, orientation. Whereas Baraka’s Beat poetry had been generally apolitical, his writing became consciously politicized as he adopted a black nationalist political stance. Baraka’s social history of blues and jazz music, Blues People: Negro Music in White America(1964), continues to be regarded as a seminal work of historical and musicological scholarship. In 1964, Baraka won notoriety and critical acclaim for his highly political play, Dutchman. His growing identification with black nationalism, which characterizes the second phase of his literary/political career, led to his divorce from his white wife and his move to Harlem shortly after the assassination of Malcolm X in 1965. There, he founded the Black Arts Repertory Theater in 1965, married a black woman, Sylvia Robinson, in 1966, and, in 1968, converted to Islam and changed his name to Imamu Amiri Baraka, which means “blessed spiritual leader”; his wife accordingly changed her name to Amina Baraka. In 1974, Baraka began the third major phase of his literary and political career when he declared himself a Marxist-Leninist, rejecting black nationalism, and dropping the religious title of “Imamu” from his name. His own account of his life is recorded in The Autobiography of LeRoi Jones(1984).

Baraka continued to be a presence in American mass culture when, in 1991, he protested the portrayal of Malcolm X in Spike’s Lee’s film, X, and when he appeared as a homeless poet in the movie Bulworth in 1998. Baraka retired from the State University of New York at Stonybrook and became Professor Emeritus in 1999, on his sixty-fifth birthday.