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The Black Power movement of the 1960s developed out of anger about the way African Americans were treated in the United States. It emphasized black culture, history, pride, community, and rage. Spokesmen argued that black men were more damaged by racism than black women, that men should be the leaders, head of the household, and dominant. Black women were empowered and thrilled by the Black Power movement, including the Black Panther Party, but many had critiques of its male chauvinism, common to many nationalist movements. Female radical African American activists and Black Arts movement members sometimes did not find the intraracial cross-gender solidarity that they sought and were often disappointed.

This chapter analyses the resurgence of the jazz avant‐garde in New York in the mid‐1960s, focusing in particular upon musicians' negotiation of competing aesthetic, social, and economic imperatives. Through a detailed investigation of shifting patterns of reception in the jazz press, attention is drawn to a complex of factors that lifted the jazz avant‐garde from near obscurity in the early years of the decade, to a canonised status by 1965. Prominent amongst these factors was the politically radical discourse promoted by figures associated with the Black Arts Movement such as Amiri Baraka and Larry Neal, which conceived black avant‐garde musicians as shaping the spiritual foundation for revolutionary change. The articulation of a radical social purpose thus assisted the process of canonisation, although this canonisation brought no parallel economic success.

This chapter examines a range of Baraka's writings (poems, plays, and essays) from 1960 to 1979, during which time he changed from being a Beat‐affiliated writer (named LeRoi Jones) to a Black Cultural‐Nationalist, then a Pan‐Afrikanist, and finally a Third‐World Socialist. The opening discussion is of how Baraka in poetry collections like Black Magic (1969) and It's Nation Time (1970) developed a Black Arts potentialism that contrasts with Ginsberg's. Various plays that Baraka wrote in the 1960s are also examined—notably, A Black Mass (1966), Slave Ship (1967), and Great Goodness of Life: A Coon Show (1967). Drawing on Howard University's Amiri Baraka Archive (which includes FBI reports on his plays and speeches), the chapter presents new scholarship on his drama and his cultural activism with groups like the Republic of New Afrika. After examining how Baraka's potentialism reaches a spiritual apogee with his poetry collection Spirit Reach (1972), the concluding discussion contrasts such spiritualism with the didacticism of his Third‐World Socialist writings such as the poetry volume Hard Facts (1975).

Rita Dove's The Darker Face of the Earth examines the process of building ‘America’ out of partly African materials. Incest becomes a sign for the forced amalgamation of cultures that characterized plantation slavery, and the oedipal tropes of knowledge, parentage, desire, and narrative are made newly relevant by the particular racialized history of the United States. The politics of the Greek drama, whereby the hero is pitted against the community, are also interrogated by the various choices made by figures such as Augustus, the chorus and the conspirators. The issue of oedipally competing traditions is scrutinised via African-American tropes such as Esu, the talking book, and the tragic mulatto/a. Also examined is the cultural position of the dramatist herself, as a black woman writer and a member of the generation immediately after the Black Arts Movement.

Black women’s cultural production in the 1970s gained popular audience and critical acclaim for its frank disclosure of violence and inequity within black communities and by championing black feminist agency. This chapter situates black women’s literature and art in response to three intersecting sociopolitical movements roiling the nation: Black Power and Black Arts Movements, the emergence of second-wave feminism, and American involvement in Vietnam. The works in this chapter overturned long-standing expectations and stereotypes of respectability politics in depicting graphic, militarized violence; sexual openness; and skepticism about motherhood. In doing so, these works explored the attractions and shortcomings of militancy as a defense against domestic and national violence and promoted mutual respect between genders, sexual freedom, and the possibility of collaborative protest.

The chapter length introduction, “The Post Era,” historicizes both popular cultural (i.e. colorblindness and post-racialism) and scholarly attempts to periodize contemporary African American culture and literary aesthetics (i.e. post-soul, post-black, and postrace). It connects these conceptualizations with the revision of Du Bois’s idea of double consciousness. The introduction locates these shifts in the new millennium in the context of Black politics and the rise of Barack Obama. It also addresses the relationship of the current moment in African American literature with past movements, focusing especially on the post era’s repudiation of the Black Arts Movement.

The chapter is anchored in a survey of African American-owned small presses, literary journals, and magazines to demonstrate how the Black Arts Movement’s editors negotiated readerly taste and institutional politics to bring Black Arts to the masses. I consider, for example, Dudley Randall at Detroit’s Broadside Press, Naomi Long Madgett at Lotus Press (also Detroit), and Haki Madhubuti (Don L. Lee) at Chicago’s Third World Press alongside Hoyt Fuller’s work for periodicals in Chicago (Negro Digest/Black World), and Nommo, the small literary journal of the Organization of Black American Culture. The chapter also reveals how post-civil rights black literary publics formed and considers how, for example, the establishment of Howard University Press in 1974 extended the black intellectual tradition’s effort to recover a “usable past.”

This chapter explores how the agenda of the Black Arts movement (BAM) was shaped by and paradoxically instituted by a collaboration of competing and contradicting factors. Black American artists, activists, and intellectuals, identified themselves as “Black Artists,” many of them favored a socially progressive agenda for obtaining cultural empowerment for black communities. Black resistance to white American domination has always been pacifist, militarist, or a combination of the two, a contradiction that proved to be essential in the formation of BAM ideals of diversity.

This chapter discusses the contributions of female artists, activists, and intellectuals from the Black Arts Movement (BAM) to the expansion of black aesthetic. The BAM fulfilled its ideological aims through numerous artistic, activist, and intellectual, collaborations from its key participants and its very own critics. This chapter points out that BAM’s female artists such as Johari Amini, Carolyn Rodgers, and Angela Jackson, not only promoted the black American female perspective but also showed a degree of commitment to an inclusive concept of Black Art.

This chapter examines the Black Mural Movement in the context of religious imagery by focusing on the evolution of Joseph W. Evans Jr.'s art. In 1986 Evans illustrated the motto of Chicago's Trinity United Church of Christ (TUCC), “Unashamedly Black and Unapologetically Christian” with a painting of a Jesus with dark brown skin and tightly curled black hair, his arms outstretched around a smiling African American family. This image of a black Christ was Evans's vision of being black and Christian. In the 1970s Evans joined TUCC, where the pastor, Jeremiah Wright Jr., promoted Black Liberation Theology and recommended specific texts and sermons for the artist to study that transformed his conception of Christ. This chapter first considers black theology and pan-Africanism at TUCC before discussing the influence of the Black Arts Movement and the muralist William Walker on Chicago. It also assesses the impact, in terms of style and content, of the murals on Chicago's South Side on Evans's work and concludes with an overview of TUCC's stained glass program.

This chapter focuses on the creation of independent Black educational institutions as another articulation and enactment of a Black self-determinist politics of Black achievement. This chapter specifically focuses on the Institute of Positive Education (IPE), an independent Black institution influenced by the Black Power and Black Arts movements. Like many community control advocates, these Black education reformers were not interested in pursuing integration. The architects of IPE–-including Soyini Walton, Carol Lee, and Haki Madhubuti—rejected the state’s ability to provide an adequate education for Black students. Instead, they circumvented the public school system and the financial support of the state by creating an independent school—the New Concept Development Center—with an African-centered curriculum and programming based in a Black community. By bypassing the state-run education system, the educators and operators of independent Black institutions worked within a set of political possibilities and constraints different from those of organizations that sought engagement with the state. Concerns about IPE’s scale and financial viability foreshadow the organization’s move to open charter schools.

This chapter examines the Black Arts movement (BAM) of the 1960s and 1970s and uses the notion of “black post-blackness” as a way to understand the continuity between the BAM and twenty-first-century African American aesthetics. It challenges the claims of post-black advocates about the lack of room for experimentation, abstraction, and play in 1960s and 1970s black aesthetics. During this time, it argues that black aesthetics was a domain for improvisation, abstraction, and performance in ways that get ignored by proponents of post-blackness who want to see the concept as a wholly new and unique thing. It also explains how the BAM pivoted on a dialectic between collective mirrors and collective collages that layered and gave blackness depth; this depth was a spatial and temporal strategy of resistance that insisted on blackness as the past, present, and future. Finally, it asserts that black aesthetics’ time of entanglement is what the post-black performances erase.

This chapter discusses the grassroots Black Arts movement of Chicago and specifically looks at the Organization for Black American Culture (OBAC). It explains that OBAC was considered as a branch of the Black Arts Movement (BAM). However, OBAC’s aesthetic was inspired by its own unique, culturally specific objectives through the artistic and entrepreneurial collaborations among important figures and institutions that aimed to support the artistic and progressive culture in Chicago. OBAC’s agenda was influenced by the broader national movement, and its participants collaborated with BAM artists in other cities such as New York, Detroit, and Philadelphia.

This chapter examines the previously neglected role of the sonnet in the Black Arts movement of the 1960s and 1970s. Leading theorists of the movement denounced the sonnet as a paradigmatic “white” form that constrained black self-expression and had to be excluded from the black nation. The demand for an oral, authentic, collective poetry led poets to dismantle the traditional sonnet structure and adapt the form to cultural nationalist demands. The chapter reviews the role of traditional poetic forms in the black aesthetic and discusses strategies of camouflaging or demarcating the sonnet in the work of June Jordan, Joe Mitchell, Conrad Kent Rivers, Quincy Troupe, and Margaret Walker. These strategies confirm the view in recent scholarship that the Black Arts movement exerted both a confining and a creative influence on poets of the time.

This chapter discusses two Black Arts writers who benefited from War on Poverty patronage: Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones) and Gwendolyn Brooks. In The System of Dante’s Hell and In the Mecca, the two writers developed distinct versions of participatory art. Like much of Baraka’s Beat-period work, The System of Dante’s Hell thematizes his dissatisfaction with the white counterculture and desire to create art that could connect him with black urban audiences. However, the novel draws on the counterculture’s essentialist conception of lower-class culture in ways that would continue to shape Baraka’s cultural nationalist output of the late 1960s. In contrast, Brooks’s In the Mecca rejects the immersive drama that defines Baraka’s Black Arts. Inspired by her Community Action Program–sponsored work with Chicago’s Blackstone Rangers, the collection insists that minority poets use the resources of poetic form to achieve a calibrated distance from their lower-class subjects.

This chapter explores the early career of Chicago-born painter Charles White, and argues that the artistic production of young black artists became intricately intertwined with protest politics during the 1930s. As a young man, White educated himself in the history of African Americans by discovering books like The New Negro, the definitive collection of the Harlem Renaissance, and by joining the Arts Craft Guild, where White and his cohorts taught each other new painting techniques and held their own exhibitions. These painters developed as artists by identifying with the laboring people of Chicago and by pushing to expand the boundaries of American democracy. African American artists like White thus came to represent the vanguard of the cultural movement among workers in the 1930s, making Chicago's South Side the center of the black arts movement.

This essay examines representations of slavery produced during the peak of the Black Power movement, across a range of fields, including historiography, psychology, political analysis, theater, fiction, popular film, and literary and cultural criticism. Focusing on a cohesive body of work informed by the Black Arts Movement (by writers such as Amiri Baraka, Ronald Fair, Blyden Jackson, John Oliver Killens, Loften Mitchell, Joseph Walker, and John A. Williams) that is largely missing from the canon of post-civil rights literature about slavery, the essay argues that the formal innovations of these literary texts, such as speculative devices of temporal simultaneity and depersonalized modes of characterization, were directly sparked by Black Power discourses of psychological, political, and historical transformation.