The assassination of Malcolm X, an eloquent exponent of Black nationalism, in 1965 in New York and the espousal of “Black Power” by previously integrationist civil rights organizations such as the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) helped to galvanize a generation of young Black writers into rethinking the purpose of African American art. Rejecting any notion of the artist that separated him or her from the African American community, the Black Arts movement engaged in cultural nation building by sponsoring poetry readings, founding community theaters, creating literary magazines, and setting up small presses. In 1968 poetry, fiction, essays, and drama from writers associated with the movement appeared in the landmark anthology Black Fire, edited by Baraka and Larry Neal. One of the most versatile leaders of the Black Arts movement, Neal summed up its goals as the promotion of self-determination, solidarity, and nationhood among African Americans.
To Black Arts writers, literature was frankly a means of exhortation, and poetry was the most immediate way to model and articulate the new Black consciousness that the movement sought to foster. Baraka’s Black Magic (1969) and It’s Nation Time (1970) typify the stylistic emphases of the poetry of this movement, particularly its preference for street slang, the rhythm of blues, jazz, and gospel music, and a deliberately provocative confrontational rhetoric. Important poets in this mode were Sonia Sanchez, Jayne Cortez, Etheridge Knight, Haki R. Madhubuti, Carolyn M. Rodgers, and Nikki Giovanni. Among the leading Black Arts playwrights, Baraka was joined by Ed Bullins, whose plays, such as Clara’s Ole Man (produced 1965) and The Fabulous Miss Marie (produced 1971), concentrated on the gritty existence of urban African Americans, earning three Obie Awards. Although fiction was not as important to the Black Arts movement as were poetry and drama, the mythopoeic short stories of Henry Dumas, collected in Ark of Bones, and Other Stories (1970), and the novels of John A. Williams, particularly The Man Who Cried I Am (1967), a roman à clef about a dying Black novelist intent on maintaining his political integrity in the face of government persecution, communicate the spirit of the new Black ideals. The “tell it like it is” temper of the 1960s spurred an unprecedented candor about race and placed a premium on authentic self-expression in African American autobiography. The Autobiography of Malcolm X (1965), a collaboration between Malcolm X and journalist-author Alex Haley, provided a standard that Anne Moody’s Coming of Age in Mississippi (1968), George Jackson’s Soledad Brother (1970), and Angela Davis’s Angela Davis: An Autobiography (1974) sought to emulate.
Reconceptualizing Blackness
Not all African American writers in the 1960s and early ’70s subscribed to the new credo of Blackness, however. While Gwendolyn Brooks switched publishers, from New York’s Harper & Row to Detroit’s Broadside Press, out of sympathy to the new movement, Robert Hayden was repelled by what he called “the chauvinistic and the doctrinaire.” Ishmael Reed, who reserved the right to lampoon any attempts to impose artistic orthodoxy on African American writing, embarked on his iconoclastic career with a series of parodic novels, The Free-Lance Pallbearers (1967), Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down (1969), Mumbo Jumbo (1972), and The Last Days of Louisiana Red (1974), the latter one taking aim at Black cultural nationalism. Adrienne Kennedy, another 1960s writer who was similarly more postmodernist than nationalist, made her avant-garde theater debut with stunningly innovative, nightmarish one-act plays, most notably Funnyhouse of a Negro (produced 1962) and The Owl Answers (produced 1963), which featured surrealist spectacles of Black women caught between African and European heritages. Offering no political solutions to her female characters’ tormented struggles for unity and purpose, Kennedy dramatized the potent psychological and social symbolic value of Black American women’s emotions and personal lives. Less openly resistant to the strictures of the Black Arts aesthetic but no less dedicated to faithful and nuanced presentations of a wide range of African American experience, Ernest J. Gaines and James Alan McPherson also broke into print during the 1960s, demonstrating a mastery of the short story that yielded for Gaines the much-applauded stories in Bloodline (1968) and for McPherson the equally celebrated collection Hue and Cry (1968). Gaines went on to create in The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman (1971) one of the most famous female characters in African American fiction, whose first-person narrative testifies to the dauntless progress of the Black folk whom she represents from bondage to the civil rights era. Jane Pittman joined Vyry Ware, the indomitable heroine of Margaret Walker’s historical novel Jubilee (1966), in liberating Black American women of the South from the stereotypes that had bound them to the “mammy” image while also serving notice to the male- and urban-oriented Black Arts movement that the voices and traditions of Black women, Southern Black culture, and the rural past offered much to the reconceptualizing of Blackness that the 1960s and ’70s had undertaken.