1 Amiri Baraka Early life 1934–1965

Amiri Baraka Early life (1934–1965)

Baraka was born in Newark, New Jersey, where he attended Barringer High School. His father Coyt Leroy Jones worked as a postal supervisor and lift operator. His mother Anna Lois (née Russ) was a social worker.^[12] Jazz was something Baraka became interested in as a kid. He wanted to be just like Miles Davis. "I wanted to look like that too — that green shirt and rolled up sleeves on Milestones...always wanted to look like that. And be able to play "On Green Dolphin Street" or "Autumn Leaves" ... That gorgeous chilling sweet sound. That's the music you wanted playing when you was coming into a joint, or just looking up at the sky with your baby by your side, that mixture of America and them changes, them blue African magic chants." The influence of jazz can be seen throughout his work later in life.^[13]

He won a scholarship to Rutgers University in 1951 but transferred in 1952 to Howard University. His classes in philosophy and religious studies helped lay a foundation for his later writings. He subsequently studied at Columbia University and The New School without taking a degree.
In 1954, he joined the United States Air Force as a gunner, reaching the rank of sergeant. This was a decision he would come to regret. He once explained: "I found out what it was like to be under the direct jurisdiction of people who hated black people. I had never known that directly." This experience was yet another that influenced Baraka's later work.^[14] His commanding officer received an anonymous letter accusing Baraka of being a communist.^[15] This led to the discovery of Soviet writings in Baraka's possession, his reassignment to gardening duty, and subsequently a dishonorable discharge for violation of his oath of duty.^[15] He later described his experience in the military as "racist, degrading, and intellectually paralyzing".^[16] While he was stationed in Puerto Rico, he worked at the base library, which allowed him ample reading time, and it was here that, inspired by Beat poets back in America, he began to write poetry.
The same year, he moved to Greenwich Village, working initially in a warehouse of music records. His interest in jazz evolved during this period. It was also during this time that he came in contact with the avant-garde Black Mountain poets and New York School poets. In 1958 he married Hettie Cohen, with whom he had two daughters, Kellie Jones (b. 1959) and Lisa Jones (b.1961). He and Hettie founded Totem Press, which published such Beat poets as Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg.^[17][18] In cooperation with Corinth, Totem published books by LeRoi Jones and Diane di Prima, Ron Loewinsohn, Michael McClure, Charles Olson, Paul Blackburn, Frank O'Hara, Gary Snyder, Philip Whalen, Ed Dorn, Joel Oppenheimer and Gilbert Sorrentino and an anthology of four young female poets, Carol Berge, Barbara Moraff, Rochelle Owens, and Diane Wakoski. They also jointly founded a quarterly literary magazine, Yugen, which ran for eight issues (1958–62).^[19] Through a party that Baraka organized, Ginsberg was introduced to Langston Hughes while Ornette Coleman played saxophone.^[20]
Baraka also worked as editor and critic for the literary and arts journal Kulchur (1960–65). With Diane di Prima he edited the first twenty-five issues (1961–63) of their small magazine The Floating Bear.^[9] In October 1961, the U.S. Postal Service seized The Floating Bear #9; the FBI charged them for obscenity over William Burroughs' piece "Roosevelt after the Inauguration".^[20] In the autumn of 1961 he co-founded the New York Poets Theatre with di Prima, the choreographers Fred Herko and James Waring, and the actor Alan S. Marlowe. He had an extramarital affair with di Prima for several years; their daughter, Dominique di Prima, was born in June 1962.
Baraka visited Cuba in July 1960 with a Fair Play for Cuba Committee delegation and reported his impressions in his essay "Cuba Libre".^[21] There he encountered openly rebellious artists who declared him to be a "cowardly bourgeois individualist"^[22] more focused on building his reputation than trying to help those who were enduring oppression. This encounter led to a dramatic change in his writing and goals, causing him to become emphatic about supporting black nationalism.
In 1961 Baraka co-authored a "Declaration of Conscience" in support of Fidel Castro's regime.^[23] Baraka also was a member of the Umbra Poets Workshop of emerging Black Nationalist writers (Ishmael Reed and Lorenzo Thomas, among others) on the Lower East Side (1962–65).
His first book of poems, Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note, was published in 1961. Baraka's article "The Myth of a 'Negro Literature'" (1962) stated that "a Negro literature, to be a legitimate product of the Negro experience in America, must get at that experience in exactly the terms America has proposed for it in its most ruthless identity". He also stated in the same work that as an element of American culture, the Negro was entirely misunderstood by Americans. The reason for this misunderstanding and for the lack of black literature of merit was, according to Jones:
In most cases the Negroes who found themselves in a position to pursue some art, especially the art of literature, have been members of the Negro middle class, a group that has always gone out of its way to cultivate any mediocrity, as long as that mediocrity was guaranteed to prove to America, and recently to the world at large, that they were not really who they were, i.e., Negroes.
As long as black writers were obsessed with being an accepted middle class, Baraka wrote, they would never be able to speak their mind, and that would always lead to failure. Baraka felt that America only made room for white obfuscators, not black ones.^[24][25]
In 1963 Baraka (under the name LeRoi Jones) published Blues People: Negro Music in White America, his account of the development of black music from slavery to contemporary jazz.^[26] When the work was re-issued in 1999, Baraka wrote in the Introduction that he wished to show that "The music was the score, the actually expressed creative orchestration, reflection of Afro-American life ... That the music was explaining the history as the history was explaining the music. And that both were expressions of and reflections of the people."^[27] He argued that though the slaves had brought their musical traditions from Africa, the blues were an expression of what black people became in America: "The way I have come to think about it, blues could not exist if the African captives had not become American captives."^[28]
Baraka (under the name LeRoi Jones) wrote an acclaimed, controversial play titled Dutchman, in which a white woman accosts a black man on the New York City Subway. The play premiered in 1964 and received the Obie Award for Best American Play in the same year.^[29] A film of the play, directed by Anthony Harvey, was released in 1967.^[30] The play has been revived several times, including a 2013 production staged in the Russian and Turkish Bathhouse in the East Village, Manhattan.^[31]
After the assassination of Malcolm X in 1965, Baraka changed his name from LeRoi Jones to Amiri Baraka.^[32] At this time, he also left his wife and their two children and moved to Harlem, where he founded the Black Arts Repertory/Theater School (BARTS) since the Black Arts Movement created a new visual representation of art. However, the Black Arts Repertory Theater School remained open for less than a year. In its short time BARTS attracted many well-known artists, including Sonia Sanchez, Sun Ra and Albert Ayler.^[33] The Black Arts Repertory Theater School's closure prompted conversation with many other black artists who wanted to create similar institutions. Consequently, there was a surge in the establishment of these institutions in many places across the United States. In December 1965^[34] Baraka moved back to Newark after allegations surfaced that he was using federal antipoverty welfare funds for his theater.^[35]
Baraka became a leading advocate and theorist for the burgeoning black art during this time.^[26] Now a "black cultural nationalist", he broke away from the predominantly white Beats and became critical of the pacifist and integrationist Civil Rights Movement. His revolutionary poetry became more controversial.^[9] A poem such as "Black Art" (1965), according to Werner Sollors of Harvard University, expressed Baraka's need to commit the violence required to "establish a Black World".^[36]
Baraka even uses onomatopoeia in "Black Art" to express that need for violence: "rrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr ... tuhtuhtuhtuhtuhtuht ..." More specifically, lines in "Black Art" such as "Let there be no love poems written / until love can exist freely and cleanly", juxtaposed with "We want a black poem. / And a Black World", demonstrate Baraka's cry for political justice during a time when racial injustice was rampant, despite the Civil Rights Movement.^[37]
"Black Art" quickly became the major poetic manifesto of the Black Arts Literary Movement, and in it, Jones declaimed, "we want poems that kill", which coincided with the rise of armed self-defense and slogans such as "Arm yourself or harm yourself" that promoted confrontation with the white power structure.^[7] Rather than use poetry as an escapist mechanism, Baraka saw poetry as a weapon of action.^[38]
In April 1965, Baraka's "A Poem for Black Hearts" was published as a direct response to Malcolm X's assassination, and it further exemplifies the poet's uses of poetry to generate anger and endorse rage against oppression.^[39] Like many of his poems, it showed no remorse in its use of raw emotion to convey its message.^[40] It was published in the September issue of Negro Digest and was one of the first responses to Malcolm's death to be exposed to the public.^[41] The poem is directed particularly at black men, and it scoldingly labels them "faggots" in order to challenge them to act and continue the fallen activist's fight against the white establishment.
Baraka also promoted theatre as a training for the "real revolution" yet to come, with the arts being a way to forecast the future as he saw it. In "The Revolutionary Theatre", Baraka wrote, "We will scream and cry, murder, run through the streets in agony, if it means some soul will be moved."^[42] In opposition to the peaceful protests inspired by Martin Luther King Jr., Baraka believed that a physical uprising must follow the literary one.
Baraka's decision to leave Greenwich Village in 1965 was an outgrowth of his response to the debate about the future of black liberation.^[43]