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This chapter discusses Sanchez’s poetry and her distinguished voice under the banner of “soniasanchezism,” showing her creativity and aesthetic awareness through her sensibility to the larger society, her involvement in the civil rights and Black Arts movements, and her open mind to the bricolage of genres in her writing. In her free-verse poems she has found freedom to boldly voice her thoughts and feelings and in her haiku she has learned not to limit herself in borrowing a non-black genre to enrich her writing and express her Black Arts aesthetic. To a large extent, Sanchez’s poetry expresses African American cultural sensibility through descriptions of beauty, dignity, love, memory, loss, pain, and pride in blackness. Her voice is dynamic and colloquial, her language is innovative and graphic, and her aesthetic is bold and unexpected.  

This chapter focuses on the death of James Baldwin, which made a big impact on Sonia Sanchez’s life. When Sanchez first read James Baldwin’s Go Tell It on the Mountain, she knew she was home. Seeing Baldwin on TV, she immediately felt a kinship with this man whose anger and disappointment with America’s contradictions transformed his face into a warrior’s face, whose tongue transformed massacres into triumphs. When Sanchez first met him in the late 1960s, she was stricken by his smile smiling out at the New York City audience he had just attacked. Sanchez, however, focuses on the next to the last time they spoke in Atlanta, when Atlanta was just coming out from under serial murders. At the time, Atlanta looked on Baldwin as an outsider attempting to stir up things better left unsaid.

This chapter explores the Nation of Islam conversion of activists Sonia Sanchez and Gwendolyn Simmons, after the assassination of Minister Malcolm X. Why political activists found a political home in the Nation post-1965 underscores how the Nation filled a vacuum as a Black Power alternative. Believers wanted the promises of wealth and protection, and the University of Islam evidenced the building of an independent Nation and it served to ground the movement’s teachings to children. Sonsyrea Tate’s schooling underscores how girls and teenagers were made into Muslim women for a Black Nation. The remaking of women into an Islamic womanhood at times clashed with revolutionary change.

The introduction asks: How do we tell a story of Islam in the United States that foregrounds the lives and experiences of women of color throughout the 20^th-21^st centuries? The chapter asserts that Black American Muslim women are central to the history of Islam in the United States, and considers the lived experiences of being Muslim, as mediated by categories of race and gender. The chapter introduces the concepts of lived religion and the racial religious form to consider how Islam has existed in the U.S. cultural imaginary as both a lived experience and a racial and gendered trope. It argues U.S. Muslim women navigate Islam’s presence through a process of affective insurgency, in which they create their identities against existing cultural norms.

This chapter examines the reverence for departed jazz musicians and the practices of fellow musicians, creative artists, institutions, and the public to celebrate their memory. By heralding its prominent members who are now its ancestors, the jazz community proclaims the importance of memorializing these musicians, of continuing to perform their music, and of inheriting the improvisational spirit to interpret their works according to the religious and spiritual locations of the reverential performers themselves. African American religious practices of celebrating Duke Ellington, Ella Fitzgerald, and Mary Lou Williams chart the new lives—or afterlives—that these deceased musicians gain from those left to interpret their legacies anew. And among African American celebrants, the creative works of many African American women produce a significant record of religious and spiritual interpretations of jazz virtuosity.