A model of the self-made African-American national, poet and propagandist Imamu Amiri Baraka is a leading exponent of black nationalism and latent black talent. Baraka, who was originally named Everett LeRoi Jones, earned a reputation for militancy among radical contemporaries Stokely Carmichael, Huey P. Newton, and the Black Panthers. He has thrived as activist, poet, and playwright of explosive oratories produced on the stages of New York, Paris, Berlin, and Dakar, Senegal.
Baraka was born on October 7, 1934, in Newark, New Jersey, to upscale parents. He attended Rutgers University and Howard University on scholarship, but was ousted due to his poor performance. After graduate work at Columbia University and the New School for Social Research and a dismissal from the United States Air Force for suspicious activities, he influenced the black community’s economy and politics and earned a reputation as a polemical dramatist and Beat poet.
Baraka’s early success derives from a play, A Good Girl Is Hard to Find (1958), and Preface to a Twenty-Volume Suicide Note (1961), an introduction to a life’s work revealing the black man’s pain. While living with wife Hettie Cohn in Manhattan, he established Yugen, a neo-bohemian review, and Totem Press. He journeyed to Cuba in 1960, which radicalized his thinking about oppression in the third world. Newly energized, he wrote Blues People: Negro Music in White America (1963), and edited The Moderns: An Anthology of New Writings in America (1963). The bluntness of his radical thinking, as displayed in The Dead Lecturer: Poems (1964), influenced the establishment of the American Theater for Poets.
Baraka’s early flash of brilliance did not go unnoticed. In his late twenties, he earned a John Hay Whitney Fellowship and an Obie for the violent drama Dutchman (1963), a taut, menacing vehicle for black consciousness-raising. It succeeded off-Broadway the same year he produced The Toilet, The Baptism, and The Slave. The latter is an explosive drama depicting racist confrontations of the times. A kingpin of the Black Arts Movement by 1964, Baraka was visiting scholar at the University of Buffalo. After his adoption of a Muslim name, he settled in Harlem to write J-E-L-L-O (1965), a denunciation of a public figure, and autobiographical fiction, The System of Dante’s Hell (1965), which earned him a Guggenheim Fellowship. His work sharpened in Home: Social Essays (1966) and fueled the drive for the Black Arts Repertory Theater School, one of New York City’s cultural landmarks. He completed Arm Yourself or Harm Yourself (1967) and collaborated with Larry Neal on Black Fire: An Anthology of Afro-American Writing (1968).
Outside these literary coups, Baraka’s Marxist-Leninist activism has placed him in positions of power. In March 1972, he led the National Black Political Convention in Gary, Indiana, which drew 3,500 delegates from the United States and the Caribbean and prefaced a permanent consortium, the Congressional Black Caucus. While residing in Newark, he focused on black activism and Afro-Islamic culture with the establishment of Spirit House, a gathering spot and drama center. After his arrest on a concealed weapons charge, he pursued black nationalism through an Afro-centric cult, the Temple of Kawaida.
As Baraka developed black community, his artistry altered from dense obscurities to the positive, youth-centered style of Langston Hughes. His anthology, Black Magic: Sabotage, Target Study, Black Art: Collected Poetry 1961–1971 (1969), demonstrates his emergence as an American writer respected by outspoken peers. Perpetually in print, he produced short fiction in Tales (1967) and issued additional nonfiction, In Our Terribleness: Some Elements and Meanings in Black Style (1969) in collaboration with Billy Abernathy; Raise Race Rays Raze: Essays Since 1965 (1971); and Afrikan Congress: A Documentary of the First Modern Pan-African Congress (1972).
In his mature years, Baraka published The Motion of History, Six Other Plays (1978), containing the pageant Slave Ship, which was staged off Broadway. He anthologized verse in Selected Poetry of Amiri Baraka/LeRoi Jones (1979) and previously unpublished autobiography in Selected Plays and Prose of Amiri Baraka/LeRoi Jones (1979). At age 50, he issued The Autobiography of LeRoi Jones (1984), followed by more prose commentary in Reflections on Jazz Blues (1987). His honors include a National Endowment for the Arts award and a Guggenheim fellowship.
