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.
