1. Jerry Gafio Watts, Heroism and the Black Intellectual: Ralph Ellison, Politics, and Afro-American Intellectual Life (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994).
2. Harold Cruse, The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual (New York: Morrow, 1967).
3. We can divide the black urban riots of the 1960s into three phases: (1) the early phase, which includes Harlem (1964) and Watts (1965); (2) the middle phase, which includes Newark (1967) and Detroit (1966); and (3) the third phase, which includes those riots that took place after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. (1968).
4. By civil rights intelligentsia, I mean individuals like Bayard Rustin, Robert Weaver, Kenneth Clark, John Hope Franklin, Thurgood Marshall, J. Saunders Redding, Martin Luther King Jr., Sterling Tucker, Roy Wilkins, and Whitney Young, as well as other intellectuals affiliated with organizations involved in the civil rights movement.
5. Stokely Carmichael left the United States for Guinea in West Africa. He also changed his name to Kwame Toure to honor Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana, a father of Pan-Africanism, and Seko Toure of Guinea, a leader who advocated freedom for his country from French colonial and neocolonial domination.
6. The National Conference of Black Political Scientists (NCOBPS), a black political science organization, was founded in March 1969. The NCOBPS is a separate organization from the American Political Science Association, and its annual meetings are not held in conjunction with the larger organization.
7. Surprisingly, to date, there is no comprehensive study of the history and status of black studies programs in American academia, although historian Nathan Huggins wrote a brief and rather cursory report on black studies for the Ford Foundation. See Nathan Huggins, Afro-American Studies: A Report to the Ford Foundation (New York: Ford Foundation, 1985).
8. The William J. Harris, ed., The LeRoi Jones / Amiri Baraka Reader does not contain a single sample or excerpt from Raise Race Rays Raze. It is as if Baraka were ashamed of those essays.
9. Martin Kilson, “Black Power: Anatomy of a Paradox,” Harvard Journal of Negro Affairs 2, no. 1 (1968): 30–34.
10. Imamu Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones), Raise Race Rays Raze: Essays since 1965 (New York: Random House, 1971), p. 98.
11. For a discussion and critique of the black aesthetic movement, see Houston A. Baker, The Journey Back: Issues in Black Literature and Criticism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), chap. 5, and Blues, Ideology, and Afro-American Literature: A Vernacular Theory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,1984); Charles Johnson, Being and Race: Black Writing since 1970 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988).
12. Some of these important works are Karl Mannheim’s Ideology and Utopia: An Introduction to the Sociology of Knowledge, trans. Louis Wirth and Edward Shils (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1936); Alvin Gouldner’s The Future of Intellectuals and the Rise of the New Class (New York: Seabury Press, 1979); Pierre Bourdieu’s Homo Academicus, trans. Peter Collier (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press 1988); Edward Shils’s The Intellectuals and the Powers and Other Essays (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1972); Robert Merton’s The Sociology of Science: Theoretical and Empirical Investigations (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1973); Lewis Coser’s Men of Ideas: A Sociologist’s View (New York: Free Press, 1965); Daniel Bell’s The Winding Passage: Essays and Sociological Journeys, 1960–1980 (New York: Basic Books, 1980); Norman Birnbaum’s The Radical Renewal: The Politics of Ideas in Modern America (New York: Pantheon, 1988); Seymour Martin Lipset’s Political Man: The Social Bases of Politics (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1981); Zygmunt Bauman’s Legislators and Interpreters (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1987); Robert Nisbet’s Tradition and Revolt: Historical and Sociological Essays (New York: Random House, 1968); and Raymond Aron’s The Opium of the Intellectuals (New York: Doubleday, 1957).
13. A much more elaborate discussion of the victim status can be found in Jerry G. Watts, “Victims’ Revolt: Afro-American Intellectuals and the Politics of Ethnic Ambivalence” (in progress).
14. Orlando Patterson, “The Moral Crisis of the Black American,” The Public Interest, no. 32 (Summer 1973): 52.
15. During his Black Arts days, Baraka mistakenly believed that the use of words that frightened whites would help emancipate blacks. What he could not acknowledge is that his most vociferous and vicious voice as a black nationalist was often directed to whites and, as such, remained dependent on their recognition.
16. The key texts in this area are by Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, trans. Charles Lam Markmann (New York: Grove Press, 1967), and The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Constance Farrington (New York: Grove Press, 1968); Albert Memmi, The Colonizer and the Colonized (Boston: Beacon Press, 1967); Jean-Paul Sartre, Anti-Semite and Jew, trans. George J. Becker (New York: Schocken Books, 1948); and Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, trans. Myra Bergman Ramos (New York: Seabury Press, 1974).
17. Ever concerned about the impression of whites, Wright stated that he had made a mistake in writing Uncle Tom’s Children. He wrote, “When the reviews of that book began to appear I realized that I had made a terrible mistake. I found that I had written a book which even bankers’ daughters could read and weep over and feel good about. I swore to myself that if I ever wrote another book, no one would weep over it; that it would be so hard and deep that they would have to face it without the consolation of tears.” See Richard Wright, “How ‘Bigger’ Was Born,” introduction to his Native Son (New York: Harper & Row, 1966), p. xxvii.
18. The idea of ethnic marginality is derived from Robert Park’s notion of the “Marginal Man.” I have updated the term to take into account the drastic changes in the quality of acculturation for black Americans.
19. For a discussion of Toomer and Gurdjieff, see Rudolph P. Byrd, Jean Toomer’s Years with Gurdieff: Portrait of an Artist, 1923–1936 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1990).
20. For a short introduction to this unique Afro-American intellectual, see Herbert Hunter and Sameer Y. Abraham, eds., Race, Class, and the World System: The Sociology of Oliver C. Cox (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1987), esp. Cox’s essays and the editors’ excellent introduction.
21. Jones’s estrangement from poor Negroes is mentioned in the first half of The System of Dante’s Hell.
22. Jean-Paul Sartre, What Is Literature? trans. Bernard Frechtman (New York: Harper & Row, 1965), p. 17. Sartre’s idea of words as loaded pistols sounds a great deal like Baraka’s late 1960s call for “poems that kill.”
23. Témoignage constitutes a competing rationale to engagement, for engagement presumes an intent to change the world. After all, témoignage easily justifies willed martyrdom. See David L. Schalk, The Spectrum of Political Engagement: Mounier, Benda, Nizan, Brasillach, Sartre (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1979), pp. 18–21. Although embrigadement has no English equivalent, the term could be understood as fanatical devotion, a devotion that is too emotional or suprarational.
24. Schalk, The Spectrum of Political Engagement, pp. 24–25.
25. Werner Sollors, Amiri Baraka / LeRoi Jones: The Quest for a Populist Modernism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1978), p. 1.
26. Addison Gayle Jr., The Way of the New World: The Black Novel in America (New York: Doubleday, 1976). p. 306.
27. Jean-Paul Sartre, Black Orpheus, trans. John MacCombie, in Black and White in American Culture: An Anthology from The Massachusetts Review, ed. Jules Chametzky and Sidney Kaplan (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1969), p. 415.
1. Throughout this manuscript, I use either Amiri Baraka or LeRoi Jones, although I try to coordinate my use of the names with the name he was using at the time under discussion. See Theodore Hudson, From LeRoi Jones to Amiri Baraka: The Literary Works (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1973), p. 3 and chap. 1. Many students of Jones mistakenly claim that he was born Everett LeRoi Jones. Jones describes his name change from LeRoy to LeRoi in The Autobiography of LeRoi Jones / Amiri Baraka (New York: Freundlich Books, 1984), p. 87. This book is henceforth cited as The Autobiography. In 1997 a longer, uncut edition of his autobiography appeared, entitled The Autobiography of LeRoi Jones (Chicago: Lawrence Hill Books, 1997). This later edition is cited as The Autobiography II. In the eyes of black Americans, the black lower-middle class and upper-working class often constitute the black middle classes.
2. LeRoi Jones, Blues People (New York: Morrow, 1963), p. 58.
3. Barbara J. Kukla, Swing City: Newark Nightlife, 1925–1950 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1991), p. 1.
4. Jones’s boyhood is described in detail in The Autobiography, pp. 1–41, quotation from p. 33.
5. Hudson, From LeRoi Jones, p. 9.
6. Although far more affluent and conspicuously consuming than the stable upper-working-class blacks that Jones knew in Newark, the “black bourgeoisie” that he discovered at Howard did not constitute an authentic bourgeois class in the sense in which Marx and other classical sociologists used the term. After all, the overwhelming majority of these Negroes had neither significant capital investments nor ownership of any means of production. Instead, I use the term black bourgeoisie here to refer to a black social stratum that functioned as the “elite” of black America. Undoubtedly, their tenuous class location sometimes led to immense efforts to reinforce their status through displays of wealth and economic frivolity. See Walter Dyson, Howard University: The Capstone of Negro Education (Washington, DC: Graduate School of Howard University, 1941); and Rayford Logan, Howard University: The First Hundred Years (New York: New York University Press, 1969).
7. Describing his days at Howard, Baraka wrote: “In fact, like I said, the only thing that I know I did a lot of at school was sit around and bullshit. Tell jokes, lie, insult people, and try to get out of schoolwork . . . .I learned to drink at school, to smoke cigarettes, and something else a little deeper but then I wasn’t even aware of that part of it” (The Autobiography, p. 74).
8. Hudson, From LeRoi Jones, p. 9. Jones marketed an image of Howard University that explains his lack of intellectual seriousness and political awareness. Howard University, though traditionally regarded as a social retreat, has also produced generations of serious black professionals, many of whom have contributed to the black struggle for equality. Less than a decade after Jones left Howard, many of its students became leaders of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). What Jones cannot seem to admit is that there may have been politically aware students at Howard (certainly among its many international students) but that he was simply not attracted to them.
9. See LeRoi Jones, “Philistinism and the Negro Writer,” in Anger and Beyond: The Negro Writer in America, ed. Herbert Hill (New York: Harper & Row, 1966), pp. 51–52.
10. Hudson, From LeRoi Jones, p. 10.
11. Owen Dodson was the chairman of the drama department at the time that the Baldwin play was produced at Howard, and perhaps Baraka’s comments were a description of Dodson.
12. James Hatch described this infamous dean of music: “The Howard director of music, Warner Lawson, son of a concert pianist, was an elitist. Under his directorship the choir by 1951 had become the unofficial chorus of the National Symphony Orchestra in Washington. Lawson forbade the playing of jazz in the music department, banning the saxophone completely. Gospel he excoriated. His approach to spirituals can be inferred from his remark to the National Music society; ‘I work entirely from the point of view of diction and concentration on consonants rather than vowels.’ He belonged to those teachers who determinedly pulled Blacks up and away from rural or ghetto roots.” James Hatch, Sorrow Is the Only Faithful One: The Life of Owen Dodson (Champaign-Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993), p. 206.
13. Jones, “Philistinism and the Negro Writer,” p. 52. Jones refers to Kenton’s “progressive jazz” style as a white reaction to bebop. Referring to “progressive jazz” as self-consciously intellectual, Jones called it “probably the ‘whitest’ music given the name jazz to appear in recent times.” Jones, Blues People (New York: Morrow, 1963), p. 206.
14. Jones, “Philistinism and the Negro Writer,” pp. 51–52.
15. See The Autobiography; pp. 63–93, esp. p. 85; quotation from p. 94.
16. See Baraka’s discussion of one of his initial attempts at “revolutionary” organizing in The Autobiography: “I also thought it should be a paramilitary organization” (p. 197).
17. Ibid., p. 92.
18. Ibid., pp. 94–123. Also see Hudson, From LeRoi Jones, p. 11.
19. Jones, “Philistinism and the Negro Writer,” pp. 52–53.
20. The Autobiography, pp. 103–4.
21. Not surprisingly, Jones was ashamed at having flunked out of Howard University. He wrote, “I never thought clearly about it [enlistment in the air force], I just acted. That was how I could get away, get off these streets, disappear again and be somewhere else other than being stared at by people who were putting together their own explanations of what had happened to me” (The Autobiography, pp. 94–95).
22. See Jake Ryan and Charles Sackrey, Strangers in Paradise: Academics from the Working Class (Cambridge, MA: South End Press, 1984); and C. B. Barney Dews and Carolyn Leste Law, eds., This Fine Place So Far from Home: Voices of Academics from the Working Class (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1995).
23. The Autobiography, p. 156.
24. Ibid., pp. 114–15.
25. Ibid.
26. Jones emphatically denied these accusations. See “Confessions of a Former Anti-Semite,” Village Voice, December 17–23, 1980, p. 19.
27. This is the term that Jones uses in his autobiography to refer to the air force.
28. Jones acknowledges that the “Little Rock” crisis was a transitional historical moment. See The Autobiography, p. 128.
29. Ibid., p. 125.
30. Ibid., pp. 91, 119. Bohemia refers to a geographical region in what is now the Czech Republic. The term bohemian, referring to an artistic subculture, was first used in France in reference to gypsies, who were thought to have come from Bohemia. Bohemian artists lived a precarious, gypsy-like life without predictability and conformity.
31. Werner Sollors, Amiri Baraka / LeRoi Jones: The Quest for a “Populist Modernism” (New York: Columbia University Press, 1978), pp. 18–19.
32. Ibid., p. 19.
33. Ibid., p. 20.
34. I borrowed the use of Mary Pratt’s notion of contact zone from Jon Parish, The Color of Jazz: Race and Representation in Postwar American Culture (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1997), p. 23.
35. Once in the Village, Jones learned that the image of interracial harmony was not quite accurate. For the racial underside of the Village bohemian scene, see Panish, The Color of Jazz, chap. 2.
36. In a 1970 interview, Baraka commented on the class location of his family: “I would say that we were not so much middle-class as working class. I think black people who had jobs, as my parents did, could be considered middle-class, but certainly not middle-class compared to what America is. . . . My parents had jobs, yes, but they were working class people. As I said, my father worked in the post office. My mother was a social worker, but she started out working in sweat shops before they started giving black women jobs. Then during the World War she got a job as, you know, in the government and after that she sort of maintained the social worker thing.” See Charles Reilly, ed., Conversations with Amiri Baraka (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1994), p. 71.
37. Of course, in 1950s America, there were a few wealthy black Americans but not enough to constitute a meaningful social formation.
38. A clue to Jones’s distance from the daily life of the black middle class was his uncritical reliance on E. Franklin Frazier’s distorted polemic The Black Bourgeoisie as a primary source of knowledge about this segment of black America. Several generations of black American intellectuals seeking to validate their supposed distance from black bourgeois values have invoked Frazier’s book as an accurate empirical depiction. For a critique of Frazier’s Black Bourgeoisie from the vantage point of a black leftist, see Oliver Cox’s introduction to Nathan Hare’s The Black Anglo-Saxons (New York: Marzani and Munsell, 1965).
39. Norman Podhoretz, “The Know-Nothing Bohemians,” Partisan Review 25, no. 2 (Spring 1958): 305–318.
40. One of Podhoretz’s most popular works is an autobiographical self-celebration entitled Making It (New York: Random House, 1968). Interestingly, many of my black graduate school peers found it a fascinating read (I did too), perhaps because Podhoretz’s reflections captured a parvenu intellectual sensibility, a sensibility that was a fundamental component of our lives. For an insightful discussion of Podhoretz’s reaction to the Beats, see Alexander Bloom’s Prodigal Sons: The New York Intellectuals and Their World (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986).
41. See Bloom, Prodigal Sons, pp. 303–4.
42. Norman Podhoretz, “The Know-Nothing Bohemians,” in his Doings and Undoings (London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1965), p. 146.
43. Ibid., p. 147.
44. Ibid.
45. See Leslie Fishbein’s Rebels in Bohemia: The Radicals of “The Masses,” 1911–1917 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1983); Christopher Lasch, The New Radicalism in America, 1889–1963: The Intellectual as a Social Type (New York: Knopf, 1965); Henry May, The End of American Innocence: A Study of the First Years of Our Time, 1912–1917 (Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1964).
46. For a discussion of Jean Toomer’s attachment to bohemian Gurdjieff circles, see Rudolph P. Byrd, Jean Toomer’s Years with Gurdjieff: Portrait of an Artist, 1923–1936 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1990).
47. Wini Breines, Young, White, and Miserable: Growing up Female in the Fifties (Boston: Beacon Press, 1992), chap. 4.
48. Hazel Barnes, An Existentialist Ethics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), chap. 7.
49. This is a liberal use of Murray’s construct. For its original meaning, see Albert Murray, The Hero and the Blues (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1973), p. 39.
50. Stuart D. Hobbs, The End of the American Avant Garde (New York: New York University Press, 1997), p. 159.
51. Barry Miles, Ginsberg: A Biography (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1989), p. 248.
52. See “Correspondence,” Partisan Review 25, no. 3 (Summer 1958): 472–73.
53. Podhoretz, “The Know-Nothing Bohemians,” pp. 151.
54. Ibid., pp. 151–52.
55. Ellis Amburn, Subterranean Kerouac: The Hidden Life of Jack Kerouac (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998).
56. Podhoretz, “The Know-Nothing Bohemians,” pp. 151–52.
57. Jones, “Correspondence,” p. 473.
58. According to biographer Barry Miles, by the early 1960s Kerouac had become openly anti-Semitic and racist. Miles finds this “shocking” because of Kerouac’s friendships with LeRoi Jones and Ted Jones and his love of jazz. But Miles certainly overstates the “friendship” between Jones and Kerouac. A fondness for jazz has absolutely no correlation with a fondness for or a hatred of actual living black people! Miles reports that by the early 1960s, Kerouac was a supporter of the Klan. In the summer of 1962, he helped build a cross and then burned it on the border of a Negro neighborhood. While it was burning, he jumped up and down, all the while hollering racist obscenities. Miles also reports that during Kerouac’s earliest years in New York, he would sometimes refuse to go to parties “if Negroes were going to be there.” See Barry Miles, Jack Kerouac: King of the Beats: A Portrait (New York: Henry Holt, 1998), p. 278.
59. This is mere speculation, but the viciousness of Jones’s later attacks on white bohemians could be construed as the articulation of repressed anger at them and himself for tolerating bohemian racists like Kerouac.
60. The Autobiography, p. 210.
61. Ibid., pp. 124–201; Sollors, Amiri Baraka / LeRoi Jones, p. 3, chaps. 1 and 2.
62. By “Village scene,” I mean the bohemian/artistic/deviant art worlds and intellectual circles that were thriving in the Village. I am not implying that the geographical space and urban residential area known as Greenwich Village was any less racist than any other neighborhood in New York. Indeed, in his autobiography Baraka describes several encounters with local racist street thugs in the Village.
63. See Norman Podhoretz, Making It (New York: Random House, 1968), and Breaking Ranks: A Political Memoir (New York: Harper & Row, 1979).
64. See Wayne Cooper’s excellent study, Claude McKay: Rebel Sojourner in the Harlem Renaissance: A Biography (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1987) chaps. 3 and 5, and also see Cooper’s introduction to The Passion of Claude McKay, ed. Wayne Cooper (New York: Schocken Books, 1973); Mae Gwendolyn Henderson, “Portrait of Wallace Thurman,” in The Harlem Renaissance Remembered, ed. Arna Bontemps (New York: Dodd Mead, 1972); and Byrd, Jean Toomer’s Years with Gurdjieff.
65. Harold Cruse, The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual (New York: Morrow, 1967), p. 355. Other black intellectuals then living in the Village included musicians Cecil Taylor and Archie Shepp, writers A. B. Spellman and Samuel Delaney, painters Vincent Smith and Bob Thompson, and theater producer Ellen Stewart.
66. Elias Wilentz, The Beat Scene (New York: Corinth Books, 1960), p. 101.
67. Sollors, Amiri Baraka / LeRoi Jones, p. 25.
68. Podhoretz was correct in claiming that Kerouac was engaged in a Crow-Jimism romanticization of blacks. Furthermore, it was far too predictable that Kerouac could romanticize blacks and Charlie Parker and yet do literally nothing to advance the cause of black civil rights. Kerouac was a jingoistic conservative, much like Podhoretz later became. Kerouac opposed the confrontational aspects of the civil rights movement. See Charles Jarvis, Visions of Kerouac (Lowell, MA: Ithaca Press, 1974), pp. 158–59.
69. As an aside, I cannot overlook the possibility that one of the issues that most infuriated Podhoretz about the Beat scene was the prevalence of interracial couples. In an essay published in 1963, Podhoretz admitted that there were certain social phenomena that forced him to recognize his own racism toward blacks. “How do I know that this hatred has never entirely disappeared? . . . I know it from the disgusting prurience that can stir in me at the sight of a mixed couple.” See Norman Podhoretz, “My Negro Problem—And Ours,” in his Doings and Undoings (London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1965), p. 367.
70. Sollors, Amiri Baraka / LeRoi Jones, p. 25. It is important to note here that the “Crow-Jane” that describes the interracial sexual reversal is not the “Crow-Jane” that appears as the subject of several of the poems in The Dead Lecturer. The “Crow-Jane” mentioned in Jones’s poems refers to a Western muse, a riff on a blues song by Mississippi Joe Williams and the “Crazy Jane” poems of William Butler Yeats. Kimberly Benston discusses Jones’s “Crow Jane” poems in Baraka: The Renegade and the Mask (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1976), pp. 115–20.
71. From “For Crow Jane,” in LeRoi Jones, The Dead Lecturer (New York: Grove Press, 1964), p. 49.
72. Leslie Fiedler noted that some black bohemians created themselves in the image of Crow-Jimism in order to reap the “benefits” of bohemia’s racial patronage: “Moreover a new generation of Negroes is presently learning in Greenwich Village, or in Harvard College, to be what the hipster imagines it to be, imitating its would-be imitators.” Leslie Fiedler, Waiting for the End (New York: Stein & Day, 1964), p. 133.
73. Fishbein, Rebels in Bohemia, p. 162.
74. Ibid., p. 162. Though racist in his views of blacks as cultural exotics, Van Vechten was a serious supporter of black artists and writers. He is responsible for establishing the James Weldon Johnson Collection at Yale University, which now houses the papers of Richard Wright, Langston Hughes, Claude McKay, and Jean Toomer, among black writers. Van Vechten deposited his own papers in the library at Fisk University.
75. Norman Mailer, The White Negro: Superficial Reflections on the Hipster (San Francisco: City Lights, 1957).
76. James Baldwin, Nobody Knows My Name (New York: Dell, 1961), p. 230.
77. Bernard Rosenberg and Norris Fliegel, The Vanguard Artist: Portrait and Self-Portrait (Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1965), pp. 291–92. Rosenberg and Fliegel made the classic racially parochial error of granting universality to whites and racial specificity to blacks. When they wrote “artists are convinced,” what they really meant is “the white artists that we interviewed are convinced.” The omission of a racial designation for white artists indicates the degree to which the authors granted these artists the authority to make supposedly unbiased assessments of black artists, as if these white artists were somehow beyond the racial parochialism that dominated American society. Moreover, this study is so methodologically flawed that the entire chapter on the Negro artist is based on the summarized impressions of white artists concerning black artists. Worse, the authors use these white impressions to construct a psychological portrait of the Negro artist and do so without talking to even one black artist. This speaks to a racial superiority so thoroughly ingrained in the psyches of the artists and scholars as to be beyond consciousness.
78. Seymour Krim, “Anti-Jazz: A Question of Self-Identity,” in The Village Voice Reader, ed. Daniel Wolf and Edwin Fancher (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1962), pp. 98–103.
79. For an extraordinary discussion of the political implications of a parvenu status for intellectuals, see Zygmunt Bauman, Postmodernity and Its Discontents (New York: New York University Press, 1997), chap. 5.
1. Werner Sollors, Amiri Baraka / LeRoi Jones: The Quest for a “Populist Modernism” (New York: Columbia University Press, 1978), p. 3.
2. Theodore R. Hudson, From LeRoi Jones to Amiri Baraka: The Literary Works (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1973), p. 12.
3. Hettie Jones, How I Became Hettie Jones (New York: Dutton, 1990). Hettie Jones also wrote a dozen children’s books, helped write the history of an antipoverty agency, and raised two daughters. see Steven Watson, The Birth of the Beat Generation: Visionaries, Rebels, and Hipsters, 1944–1960 (New York: Pantheon Books, 1995), p. 269.
4. Watson, The Birth of the Beat Generation, p. 15.
5. LeRoi Jones / Amiri Baraka, The Autobiography of LeRoi Jones / Amiri Baraka (New York: Freundlich Books, 1984), p. 151. This book is henceforth referred to as The Autobiography.
6. See the 1979 Debra L. Edwards interview with Baraka republished in Charlie Reilly, ed., Conversations with Amiri Baraka (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1994), p. 147.
7. Hettie Jones, How I Became Hettie Jones, p. 74.
8. See the reprints of The Floating Bear: A Newsletter, nos. 1–37, 1961–69, ed. Diane di Prima and Le Roi Jones (La Jolla, CA: Laurence McGilvery, 1973), p. vii.
9. Watson, The Birth of the Beat Generation, p. 269.
10. Ibid. Jones’s relationship with Diane Di Prima was also at one point a sexual one, resulting in the birth of a son, for whom Jones evidently did not take responsibility. See The Autobiography, pp. 163, 180; and Aldon L. Nielsen’s Writing between the Lines: Race and Intertexuality (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1994), p. 234. Di Prima also mentioned an abortion that she had as a result of her sexual liaison with Jones. See Diane Di Prima, “Spring Thoughts for Freddie: A Memoir,” Evergreen Review 12, no. 55 (June 1968): 65–69, 82–83.
11. See Reilly, ed., Conversations with Amiri Baraka, p. 148.
12. In a newspaper article concerning the obscenity charges and his arrest, Jones complained that he could have spent the time sitting in jail writing but that they refused to give him a pen and paper. Moreover, he compared the arrest with his discharge from the army on false charges of subversive activity. He stated, “This is just the latest in a series of minor annoyances at the hands of the government. It’s getting to be a drag.” See “A Poet Laments Time Lost in a Courthouse,” New York Post, October 19, 1961.
13. The Floating Bear, no. 20.
14. For the Totem Press series, Jones edited The Scripture of the Golden Eternity, by Jack Kerouac, and Empty Mirror, by Allen Ginsberg.
15. In Amiri Baraka / LeRoi Jones, Sollors provides an example of the explicit influence of Eliot’s The Love Son of J. Alfred Prufrock on Jones’s earliest poetry.
16. William J. Harris, The Poetry and Poetics of Amiri Baraka: The Jazz Aesthetic (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1985), p. 35.
17. Reilly, ed., Conversations with Amiri Baraka, pp. 6–7.
18. LeRoi Jones, Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note . . . (New York: Totem/Corinth Books, 1961), p. 13.
19. Kimberly Benston, Baraka: The Renegade and the Mask (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1976), p. 98.
20. Jones, Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note, p. 15.
21. Ibid., p. 16.
22. Ibid., p. 17.
23. From the poem “The Death of Nick Charles,” in ibid., p. 32.
24. Although black women regular appear in Jones’s work as bourgeois straw women, in this instance he is specifically commenting on his sister.
25. From the poem “Hymn for Lanie Poo,” in Jones, Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note, p. 6.
26. Ibid., p. 11.
27. Jones, Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note, p. 47.
28. The Autobiography, p. 161.
29. Mayfield was a well-known black novelist and essayist. His novels include The Hit (1957), The Long Night (1958), and The Grand Parade (1961). He was one of the leaders of the expatriate black American colony in Accra, Ghana, during Nkrumah’s years in power. Wright was the author of a collection of poetry, Give Me a Child (1955), and a prize-winning novel, This Child’s Gonna Live (1969). Williams was the head of the NAACP chapter in Monroe, North Carolina. He had become nationally prominent as a result of his advocacy of black self-defense in Monroe. As a result of his advocacy of militant self-defense, he was suspended from his NAACP office by Roy Wilkins. Clarke was a black historian who attempted to inspire Afro-Americans to engage their African past. He was a mainstay in Harlem’s black intellectual community.
30. For a discussion of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee, see Van Gosse, Where the Boys Are: Cuba, Cold War America and the Making of a New Left (London: Verso, 1993). An excellent study, the Gosse text has, unfortunately, not been widely disseminated.
31. Ibid., p. 140.
32. See James Campbell, Exiled in Paris: Richard Wright, James Baldwin, Samuel Beckett, and Others on the Left Bank (New York: Scribner, 1995), p. 205: “Gibson’s troubles continued after leaving Paris. He came to be regarded by certain other people involved in the Fair Play for Cuba Campaign, such as the poet LeRoi Jones (later Amiri Baraka), as being a government agent.” I could find nothing to substantiate Campbell’s claims concerning Jones’s suspicions of Gibson. Unfortunately, Campbell does not offer documentation for the claim.
33. For discussions of Gibson’s treachery in Paris, see Michel Fabre, From Harlem to Paris: Black American Writers in France, 1840–1980 (Champaign-Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1991), pp. 249–50, and The Unfinished Quest of Richard Wright, trans. Isabel Barzun (New York: Morrow, 1973), pp. 461–71; and Ollie Harrington, Why I Left America and Other Essays (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1993), pp. 13–14, 19.
34. Sollors, Amiri Baraka / LeRoi Jones, p. 165.
35. The Autobiography, p. 163.
36. LeRoi Jones, “Cuba Libre,” in his Home: Social Essays (New York: Morrow, 1966), p. 42.
37. Ibid., pp. 61–62.
38. Ibid., pp. 63–67.
39. Ibid., pp. 65–66.
40. Ibid., p. 64.
41. Ibid., p. 83.
42. Sollors, Amiri Baraka / LeRoi Jones, p. 177.
43. Jones, Home, p. 86.
44. See Isaiah Berlin, “Two Concepts of Liberty,” in his Four Essays on Liberty (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969), pp. 118–72.
45. Jones, Home, p. 85.
46. Ibid., p. 92.
47. See Cheryl Lynn Greenberg, “Or Does It Explode”: Black Harlem in the Great Depression (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991).
48. Gerald Horne, Black Liberation / Red Scare: Ben Davis and the Communist Party (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1994). For a description of the presence of the Communist Party in Harlem affairs, see Mark Naison, Communists in Harlem during the Depression Years (New York: Grove Press, 1983).
49. Jones, Home, p. 93.
50. See W. E. B. Du Bois, “Criteria of Negro Art,” The Crisis, no. 32 (October 1926). For a discussion of this essay and Du Bois’s aesthetic outlook concerning black writing, see Ronald A. T. Judy, “The New Black Aesthetic and W. E. B. Du Bois, or Hephaestus, Limping,” Massachusetts Review, Summer 1994, pp. 249–82; and Keith E. Byerman, Seizing the Word: History, Art, and Self in the Work of W. E. B. Du Bois (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1994), chap. 5.
51. LeRoi Jones, “Myth of a Negro Literature,” in Home, p. 107.
52. David Lionel Smith, “The Black Arts Movement and Its Critics,” American Literary History 3, no. 1 (Spring 1991): 98.
53. Ibid.
54. Jones, Home, p. 118.
55. Ibid., p. 120.
56. Jones’s attitude toward Baldwin changed over time. The eulogy delivered by Baraka at the funeral service for Baldwin in 1987 is an unfettered and eloquent song of praise. See Amiri Baraka, Eulogies (New York: Marsilio Publishers, 1996), pp. 91–98.
57. Jones, Home, p. 164.
58. Ibid., pp. 164–65.
59. Theodore W. Allen documents the racist colonial domination of the Irish in The Invention of the White Race, vol. 1, Racial Oppression and Social Control (London: Verso, 1994).
60. See Ian Crump, “‘A Terrible Beauty Is Born’: Irish Literature as a Paradigm for the Formation of Postcolonial Literatures,” in English Postcoloniality: Literatures from around the World, ed. Radhika Mohanram and Gita Rajan (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1996), p. 40.
61. LeRoi Jones, ed., The Moderns: An Anthology of New Writing in America (New York: Corinth Books, 1963), pp. xiii–xiv.
62. Ibid., p. ix.
63. Jerry Tallmer, “Across the Footlights,” New York Post, March 24, 1964. The column was entitled “LeRoi Jones Strikes Again.”
64. LeRoi Jones, The Baptism and The Toilet (New York: Grove Press, 1967), pp. 17, 21.
65. Benston, Baraka: The Renegade and the Mask, pp. 200, 201.
66. Harold Clurman, The Naked Image: Observations on the Modern Theatre (New York: Macmillan, 1966), p. 90. Many critics have assumed that the play’s title is taken from the myth of the Flying Dutchman, who was condemned to sail forever with a crew of the living dead.
67. LeRoi Jones, Dutchman and The Slave (New York: Morrow, 1967), p. 11.
68. Ibid., p. 18.
69. Ibid., pp. 29–31.
70. Ibid., p. 33.
71. Ibid., p. 34.
72. Ibid.
73. Ibid., p. 35.
74. LeRoi Jones, “A Poem for Willie Best,” in his The Dead Lecturer (New York: Grove Press, 1964), p. 26.
75. Clurman, The Naked Image, pp. 90, 91.
76. Jones, Home, pp. 187, 188.
77. Howard Taubman, “The Theater: Dutchman,” New York Times, March 25, 1964.
78. C. W. E. Bigsby, A Critical Introduction to Twentieth-Century American Drama, vol. 3, Beyond Broadway (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), p. 399.
79. Jones, The Baptism and The Toilet, p. 53.
80. Ibid., pp. 58–59. It would have been a grand insult for a black homosexual to have expressed desire for the gang leader. That the homosexual love letter was written by a white boy only intensified the collective shame felt by the gang members. Jones uses the whiteness of Karolis both to intensify his homosexuality and his homosexuality to intensify his whiteness.
81. Sollors, Amiri Baraka / LeRoi Jones, p. 110.
82. Gerald Weales, The Jumping-off Place: American Drama in the 1960s (London: Macmillan, 1969), pp. 141–42.
83. Clurman, The Naked Image, p. 92.
84. Langston Hughes, “That Boy LeRoi,” New York Post, January 15, 1965, p. 38.
85. Sollors, Amiri Baraka / LeRoi Jones, p. 112.
86. Reilly, ed., Conversations with Amiri Baraka, pp. 130–31.
87. Jones, Dutchman and The Slave, pp. 43, 44.
88. Amiri Baraka, Selected Plays and Prose of Amiri Baraka / LeRoi Jones (New York: Morrow, 1979), p. 105.
89. Jones, Dutchman and The Slave, p. 60.
90. Ibid., pp. 66, 67.
91. Ibid., p. 72.
92. Ibid., p. 73.
93. Weales, The Jumping-off Place, pp. 142–43.
94. Clurman, The Naked Image, pp. 92–93.
95. Ibid., p. 93.
96. Reilly, ed., Conversations with Amiri Baraka, p. 14.
97. Ibid., p. 134.
1. Van Gosse, Where the Boys Are: Cuba, Cold War America and the Making of a New Left (New York: Verso, 1993), p. 187.
2. LeRoi Jones / Amiri Baraka, The Autobiography of LeRoi Jones / Amiri Baraka (New York: Freundlich Books, 1984), p. 168. This book is henceforth cited as The Autobiography.
3. Ibid., p. 169.
4. Harold Cruse, The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual (New York: Morrow, 1967), p. 363.
5. On Guard was short lived. In some respects, it had no political purpose outside of addressing the idiosyncratic needs of some black intellectuals to “do something.” The organization did become deeply involved in the struggle to defend Robert Williams, an NAACP official and self-defense advocate. But the Williams issue never captured the imaginations of most Harlemites.
6. Perhaps one indication of the marginalization of black intellectuals in the Village intellectual scene is their complete absence from the staff of the news weekly, the Village Voice, which began publishing in 1955. Billed as an alternative newspaper, its racial orientation was parochial. See Ellen Frankfort’s devastating critique The Voice: Life at The Village Voice (New York: Morrow, 1976).
7. Renato Poggioli, The Theory of the Avant-Garde, trans. Gerald Fitzgerald (New York: Harper & Row, 1971), pp. 97, 127.
8. Theodore R. Hudson, From LeRoi Jones to Amiri Baraka: The Literary Works (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1973), p. 117.
9. Charlie Reilly, ed., Conversations with Amiri Baraka (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1994), p. 100.
10. Ibid., pp. 91–92.
11. LeRoi Jones, The System of Dante’s Hell (New York: Grove Press, 1965), p. 7.
12. Ibid., p. 153.
13. Ibid., p. 11.
14. Ibid., pp. 11–12.
15. Ibid., p. 13.
16. Ibid., pp. 13, 21.
17. Ibid., pp. 31, 49.
18. In a review of the novel, the novelist John A. Williams made a similar point. “Sometimes . . . the novel becomes too personal. It is as if the writer were thinking: I’ll be damned if you’re going to understand this, reader. The writer’s symbols have little relationship to what we know or understand.” See John A. Williams, “LeRoi Jones’ Novel: Not a Novel,” New York Post, November 18, 1965, p. 34.
19. Jones, The System of Dante’s Hell, p. 79.
20. Ibid., p. 80.
21. Werner Sollors, Amiri Baraka / LeRoi Jones: The Quest for a “Populist Modernism” (New York: Columbia University Press, 1978), pp. 95–102, 139–146; and Kimberly Benston, Baraka: The Renegade and the Mask (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1976), pp. 10–30. Lloyd Brown’s discussion of The System of Dante’s Hell is also excellent. See Lloyd W. Brown, Amiri Baraka (Boston: Twayne, 1980), pp. 59–83.
22. Jones, The System of Dante’s Hell, p. 108.
23. Ibid., pp. 128, 139.
24. Ibid., p. 140.
25. LeRoi Jones, Black Magic: Collected Poetry, 1961–1967 (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1969), unnumbered inside page.
26. Ibid., p. 6.
27. Ibid.
28. For a discussion of Jones’s violation of bohemian ethics, see Isabel Eberstadt, “King of the East Village,” New York Herald Tribune, December 13, 1964, pp. 13–15.
29. Jones, Black Magic, p. 27.
30. Ibid., p. 9
31. Ibid., p. 10.
32. Ibid., pp. 10, 11.
33. Ibid., p. 17.
34. Ibid., p. 41.
35. Ibid., pp. 29–30.
36. LeRoi Jones, The Dead Lecturer (New York: Grove Press, 1975), p. 11.
37. Ibid.
38. Ibid.
39. Ibid. Sollors believes that the phrase “you are no brothers, dirty woogies” was directed against the black middle class, but I believe that Jones was expressing his alienation from the “typical” black.
40. Jones, The Dead Lecturer, p. 11.
41. Ibid., p. 15.
42. It was common for Jones to write as if white women were the property of white men.
43. Jones, The Dead Lecturer, p. 16.
44. Ibid., p. 26.
45. Ibid.
46. Ibid., p. 25.
47. Reilly, ed., Conversations with Amiri Baraka, p. 174.
48. Jones, The Dead Lecturer, p. 29.
49. LeRoi Jones, “The Politics of Rich Painters,” in The Floating Bear, no. 22, p. 246–47, 1962. Reprinted in Jones, The Dead Lecturer, pp. 32, 33.
50. Diane Di Prima and LeRoi Jones, The Floating Bear: A Newsletter, nos. 1–37, compiled in a serial book (La Jolla, CA: Laurence McGilvery, 1973), p. 569. Rivers was a bohemian mainstay in the Village. A painter, jazz musician, and designer of drama sets, Rivers was a friend of Jones. See Larry Rivers (with Arnold Weinstein), What Did I Do? The Unauthorized Autobiography (New York: HarperCollins, 1992).
51. Stuart D. Hobbs, The End of the American Avant Garde (New York: New York University Press, 1997), p. 153.
52. Ibid., p. 160.
53. Jones wrote a series of poems concerning his personal confrontation with the Western muse. Referring to this muse as “Crow Jane,” Jones addresses the terrifying and debilitation influence of Crow Jane on his psyche as writer. In attempting to grapple with an “anxiety of influence,” Jones wanted to sustain his creative ambitions without being overcome by a debilitating silence as the weight of tradition bore down on his verse. See Jones, The Dead Lecturer, pp. 48–53.
54. Ibid., p. 59.
55. Ibid., p. 60.
56. Ibid., p. 79.
57. Ibid.
58. Ibid.
59. Jones, Black Magic, unnumbered preface.
60. Ibid., p. 68.
61. Ibid., p. 93.
62. Ibid., p. 54
63. Ibid., p. 55.
64. Ibid., p. 108.
65. Ibid., p. 111.
66. Ibid., p. 112.
67. For a discussion of the relationship between the Beats and jazz, see Jon Panish, The Color of Jazz: Race and Representation in Postwar American Culture (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1997); and David Rosenthal, Hard Bop: Jazz and Black Music: 1955–1965 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), pp. 73–84.
68. For a good discussion of the appropriation of jazz by white “hipsters” in search of a vicarious marginal identity, see Andrew Ross, No Respect: Intellectuals and Popular Culture (New York: Routledge, 1989), esp. chap. 3.
69. LeRoi Jones, Black Music (New York: Morrow, 1967), p. 69.
70. Ibid., p. 70.
71. Ibid., p. 71.
72. See Noam Chomsky, “The Responsibility of Intellectuals,” in his American Power and the New Mandarins (New York: Pantheon Books, 1969), pp. 323–66.
73. Jones, Black Music, p. 13.
74. I cannot attest to the correctness of Jones’s claim that criticism that uses musical notations is inherently incapable of revealing anything significant about jazz. But I suspect that Jones is just displaying his ignorance of the formal musical qualities of jazz. Moreover, the claim can also be understood as a swipe against white critics. Although many white jazz critics did not use musical notation, the “idea of the white critic” is nevertheless cleverly invoked by Jones’s implication that formal musical techniques do not offer an insight into jazz. Besides, is the work of Gunther Schuller and other white jazz critics who concentrate on musical notations really useless?
75. Jones, Black Music, pp. 14–15.
76. Ibid., pp. 15–16.
77. Ibid., p. 20.
78. LeRoi Jones, Blues People: Negro Music in White America (New York: Morrow, 1963). Although it was published in 1963, Jones claimed that the book was written in 1961. See Reilly, ed., Conversations with Amiri Baraka, p. 156.
79. Jones, Blues People, p. 65.
80. Ibid., pp. 17–18.
81. Since its publication in 1963, numerous works have appeared that have advanced the scholarship in this area. Some of the better-known studies are Charles Keil, Urban Blues (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966); Norman E. Whitten Jr., and John F. Szwed, eds., Afro-American Anthropology: Contemporary Perspectives (New York: Free Press, 1970); Ben Sidran, Black Talk: How the Music of Black America Created a Radical Alternative to the Values of Western Literary Tradition (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1971); Lawrence Levine, Black Culture and Black Consciousness: Afro-American Folk Thought from Slavery to Freedom (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977); Robert Farris Thompson, Flash of the Spirit (New York: Random House, 1983); and Sterling Stuckey, Slave Culture: Nationalist Theory and the Foundations of Black America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987).
82. Reilly, ed., Conversations with Amiri Baraka, p. 250.
83. Jones, Blues People, pp. 123–24.
84. One of the problems in Jones’s analysis is that he uses the designation “middle class” far too liberally. The so-called black middle class that emerged in the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century was disproportionately working class. As such, many of its members were employed in positions that were designated as “colored jobs.” Although they may have wanted to whitenize themselves, their jobs often were predicated on their ability to stay within the existing racial parameters.
85. This is the accusation that Norman Podhoretz, in Know Nothing Bohemians, leveled against black Beats.
86. Jones also thought that the acculturation of Jews and white ethnic Americans was a cultural disaster and something to fight against. Of course, he was never forced to devise a social theoretical outlook that could explain how white ethnic groups and blacks could resist the homogenizing tendencies of the capitalist marketplace.
87. Robert Stepto, From behind the Veil: A Study of Afro-American Narrative (Champaign-Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1979).
88. In discussing the appropriation of jazz by whites, Jones continually charts how the dynamism, innovation, and spontaneity of the jazz as played by black musicians turned into watered-down imitations and commodities in the hands of whites. He titled the chapter in Blues People in which he discusses this phenomenon “Swing—From Verb to Noun.” Its arguments later appeared in Jones’s 1964 essay on the greater importance of “arting” over the artifact. See Jones, “Hunting Is Not Those Heads on the Wall,” in his Home: Social Essays (New York: Morrow, 1966), pp. 173–78.
89. For an excellent discussion of this verb/noun distinction in Jones’s thought, see Nathaniel Mackey, “Other: From Noun to Verb” in Jazz among the Discourses, ed. Krin Gabbard (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995), pp. 76–99.
90. Wasn’t it significant that even in bebop, Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker made a point of hiring white musicians for some of the earliest bands? See the discussion of white jazz musicians in bebop in Scott DeVeaux, The Birth of BeBop: A Social and Musical History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), pp. 18–19. For a discussion of the problematic treatment and status of white jazz musicians in the jazz community as well as the critical literature on jazz, see Charley Gerard, Jazz in Black and White: Race, Culture, and Identity in the Jazz Community (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1998). Gerard also contests Jones’s inability to grant white jazz musicians their proper respect and recognition.
91. According to one student of avant-garde jazz, Jones was instrumental in creating the sense of the music as politicized. See David G. Such, Avant-garde Jazz Musicians: Performing “Out-There” (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1993), pp. 26–28.
92. One study that reiterates Jones’s discussion of the centrality of politics to bebop and other forms of black music is Frank Kofsky’s Black Nationalism and the Revolution in Music (New York: Pathfinder Press, 1970). For a more nuanced discussion of the politics of bebop, see Eric Lott’s “Double V, Double Time: BeBop’s Politics of Style,” in Gabbard, ed., Jazz among the Discourses, pp. 243–55.
93. Lisa E. Davenport, “Jazz and the Cold War: Black Culture as an Instrument of American Foreign Policy,” in Crossing Boundaries: Comparative History of Black People in Diaspora, ed. Darlene Clark Hine and Jacqueline McLeod (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999), pp. 282–315.
94. This does not mean that black jazz musicians did not have an oppositional political consciousness. It does, however, mean that Monk, Diz, and others were not interested in creating propaganda. They were far too committed to their craft to subsume art under political directives. For a discussion of the links between politics and jazz, see Charles Hersch, Democratic Artworks: Politics and the Arts from Trilling to Dylan (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1998), esp. chap. 4. Also see David Rosenthal, Hard Bop: Jazz and Black Music, 1955–1965 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992).
95. This aspect of heroin addiction is discussed in Ben Sidran, Black Talk: How the Music of Black America Created a Radical Alternative to the Values of Western Literary Tradition (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1971), pp. 112–14, 120–21.
96. Jones, Blues People, pp. 201–2.
97. Sidran, Black Talk, p. 112.
98. For an additional discussion of the role of heroin in jazz communities, see Gerard, Jazz in Black and White, pp. 84–90.
99. Ralph Ellison, Shadow and Act (New York: Vintage Books, 1964), pp. 247–58.
100. LeRoi Jones, “The Changing Same (R & B and New Black Music),” in Jones, Black Music, pp. 180–211.
101. While Ellison offers a perceptive critique of Blues People, he also deliberately misreads the text in order to bolster his polemical intentions. See Kimberly W. Benston, “Ellison, Baraka, and the Faces of Tradition,” Boundary 2, vol. 6, no. 2 (Winter 1978): 333–54.
102. Andrew Ross, No Respect: Intellectuals and Popular Culture (New York: Routledge, 1989), p. 76.
103. Newsweek, April 13, 1964, p. 60.
104. Raymond Vernon, “A ‘Dialogue’ with White Liberals,” in his The Black Revolution and the White Backlash (New York: Merit Publishers, 1964). This pamphlet was a collection of articles from The Militant.
105. Reilly, ed., Conversations with Amiri Baraka, p. 8.
106. Ibid., p. 10.
107. Ibid.
108. Ibid., p. 11.
109. Jack Newfield, “LeRoi Jones at Arms: Blues for Mr. Whitey,” Village Voice, December 17, 1964, pp. 1, 12.
110. Ibid., p. 12.
111. Isabel Eberstadt, “King of the East Village,” New York Herald Tribune, December 13, 1964, p. 13.
112. Jones, Home, pp. 179–80.
113. Ibid., p. 183.
114. Ibid.
115. Ibid., p. 186.
116. Ibid., p. 190.
117. Ibid., pp. 192–93.
118. Ibid., p. 197.
119. Ibid., pp. 208–9.
120. For a short description of the militant voice of Archie Shepp, see Such, Avant-garde Jazz Musicians, pp. 25–26.
121. In her autobiography, Hettie Jones refers to set of the play The Slave as the “ingenious collapsing scenery by Larry Rivers.” See Hettie Jones, How I Became Hettie Jones (New York: Dutton, 1990), p. 220.
122. In his autobiography, Larry Rivers described the incident somewhat differently: “There was a Life versus Art symposium at the Village Vanguard, featuring LeRoi and Archie Shepp, the jazz saxophonist, myself, and some other white artists. The Vanguard evening began with talk about the art-lit-jazz scene. Soon things began to get wild. LeRoi told me I was making art for a bunch of uptown fags. Archie brought up the twelve million blacks in the Congo annihilated by slavery and the Belgians. I began to make an allusion to the Holocaust, trying to see just exactly what I felt about Germans. Before I finished half a paragraph, Archie pointed his finger at me and shouted, ‘there you go again, always bring up the fucking Jews.’ He couldn’t talk about his pain without Jews bringing up theirs! The intimidated moderator threw the ball to the audience. LeRoi’s and Archie’s responses to the questions amounted to: There’s only one kind of white—Whitey who hates Negroes.” See Larry Rivers, with Arnold Weinstein, What Did I Do? The Unauthorized Autobiography (New York: Harper-Collins, 1992), p. 432.
123. Cruse, The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual, p. 486. In his autobiography, Larry Rivers noted that after this occasion, he and Jones did not speak to each other for more than twenty years. See Rivers, What Did I Do, p. 432.
124. Cruse, The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual, p. 486.
125. Ibid. While these whites were in Mississippi assuaging their consciences, Shepp remained in New York City, away from the fray.
126. The Autobiography, pp. 189, 193. Neither Cruse nor Jones provides specific dates for Jones’s “angry black man” harangues. It is therefore somewhat difficult to determine whether they are referring to similar events. Cruse claimed that the one he attended was held at the Village Vanguard. Jones comments on two different events, one held at the Village Gate and the other at the Village Vanguard. I have assumed that the event that Cruse witnessed at the Village Vanguard was the same one that Jones describes as having been held at that club because both mentioned Jones’s attack on Larry Rivers as having taken place there.
127. LeRoi Jones / Amiri Baraka, The Autobiography of LeRoi Jones (Chicago: Lawrence Hill Books, 1997), p. 285 (The Autobiography II).
128. The Autobiography, pp. 193, 194.
129. Jones acknowledged that part of his motivation for speaking in such inflammatory tones was the fact that he was not strong enough to act. See The Autobiography, p. 189.
130. Ibid., p. 193.
131. Ibid.
132. David Burner, Making Peace with the 60s (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996), p. 58.
133. Ibid.
134. The Autobiography, p. 161. The excerpt is from “A Poem Some People Will Have to Understand,” in Jones, Black Magic, p. 6.
135. Thomas Wolfe, Radical Chic and Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers (New York: Harper & Row, 1970).
136. This excerpt from the interview with Cecil Taylor was published in Alfred Willener’s The Action-Image of Society: On Cultural Politicization, trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith (New York: Pantheon Books, 1970), p. 254.
137. Stephen Schneck, “LeRoi Jones, or Poetics and Policemen or, Trying Heart, Bleeding Heart,” in Five Black Writers, ed. Donald Gibson (New York: New York University Press, 1970), pp. 193–94.
138. The Autobiography, p. 198. Unable to accept full responsibility for his unprincipled actions, Jones typically attempted to mask his irrationality behind the mention of social deterministic claims. His claims could be non sequiturs. For instance, he tells us that “we carried the fanaticism of the petty bourgeoisie.” When did the petty bourgeoisie become intrinsically fanatical? Why is fanaticism only a petty bourgeois affair? Why can’t he simply say, “we were fanatics?”
1. See Jones’s discussion of the breakup in LeRoi Jones / Amiri Baraka, The Autobiography of LeRoi Jones / Amiri Baraka (New York: Freundlich Books, 1984), pp. 190–201. This book is henceforth cited as The Autobiography. Throughout his autobiography, Jones displays his anxiety not only over not being psychologically “black” enough but also over the possibility of being exposed as such by other blacks. He talks about his fear that he could no longer dance after having lived with whites in the Village and after having been laughed at by blacks in Harlem when dancing at a party. He was, of course, afraid of being accused of dancing like a “white boy” (p. 210).
2. The shallowness of Jones’s reflections on Cohen is disturbing, and the entire autobiography is unreflective. Gerald Early aptly stated, “Ultimately, the autobiography is most revealing in letting us see how little a certain kind of black intellectual can understand himself.” Gerald Early, Tuxedo Junction: Essays on American Culture (New York: Ecco Press, 1989), p. 205.
3. The Autobiography, pp. 144, 146. The actual quotation is more mean-spirited. “Maybe we liked sleeping with each other, but there was never any passion.”
4. Ibid., p. 142.
5. I mention his beard and sunglasses only to substantiate my general point that Jones was overly concerned, if not obsessed, with projecting the “correct” style as a means of telling others just who he was. Concerning his group of Village-based black nationalist activists-in-waiting, Jones wrote, “I had a cap, hunting jacket and round dark glasses, the dress of our little core” (The Autobiography, p. 200).
6. Ibid., p. 148.
7. LeRoi Jones, Home: Social Essays (New York: Morrow, 1966), p. 223.
8. This emphasis on ethnic identity essentially prohibited Jones from viewing the vast cultural differentiations within black America as legitimate. Ironically, this idea that “blackness” inhabits only those spaces from which whites are absent gives whites an infinitely richer range of options for “authentic existences” and a far more resilient and potent ethnicity. Martin Kilson understood this dynamic when he discussed the ways in which black ethnicity was often externally defined. See Kilson’s “Blacks and Neo-Ethnicity in American Political Life,” in Ethnicity: Theory and Experience, ed. Nathan Glazer and Daniel P. Moynihan (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1975).
9. In the preface to Home, Jones informs the reader of his reified identity. “By the time this book appears, I will be even blacker” (p. 10).
10. Hettie Jones, How I Became Hettie Jones (New York: Dutton, 1990), p. 223.
11. Eugene Victor Wolfenstein, Psychoanalytic-Marxism: Groundwork (New York: Guilford Press, 1993), p. 338.
12. See Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, trans. Charles Lam Markmann (New York: Grove Press, 1967), chap. 2. Fanon’s arguments became sacred scriptures for militant Afro-American activists during the middle and late 1960s. Brilliant and provocative, Fanon was more than occasionally wrong or muddled. Unfortunately, all too often Fanon’s ideas were incorporated by fundamentalist black militants with a literalness that would compare favorably to the Southern Baptist Convention’s interpretation of the Bible.
13. Amiri Baraka, “Confessions of a Former Anti-Semite,” Village Voice, December 17, 1980, p. 20.
14. See the discussion of the renegade and renegadism in Lewis Coser’s The Functions of Social Conflict (New York: Free Press, 1966), pp. 67–71.
15. The Autobiography, p. 147.
16. In a moment of generous reflection on LeRoi’s decision to leave her, Hettie Jones compared her husband with her father: “Both these men, Cohen then Jones, first loved me for myself and then discarded me when that self no longer fit their daughter/wife image. If I hadn’t been myself all along I might have been left next to nothing. Still, while they loved me they sometimes saw in me more than I did, and for those times I owe them.” She was absolutely correct in her formulation that LeRoi left her after she no longer fit his image of a wife. See Hettie Jones, How I Became Hettie Jones, p. 216.
17. Baraka, “Confessions of a Former Anti-Semite,” p. 20.
18. Ibid.
19. Theodore R. Hudson, From LeRoi Jones to Amiri Baraka: The Literary Works (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1973), p. 15.
20. Baraka, “Confessions of a Former Anti-Semite,” p. 19.
21. From the poem “For Tom Postell, Dead Black Poet,” in LeRoi Jones, Black Magic: Collected Poetry, 1961–1967 (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1969), p. 154. The poem was written in 1965 or 1966.
22. Werner Sollors, Amiri Baraka / LeRoi Jones: The Quest for a “Populist Modernism” (New York: Columbia University Press, 1978), p. 199.
23. When asked by an interviewer in 1981 if there were any misconceptions about his life and work that he wanted to clarify, Baraka answered, “No, except that people are always catching you where you were.” That is, Baraka is implicitly asking us to ignore his past as if his present were a progressive culmination of all that went before and therefore the negation and erasure of his past. See D. H. Melhem, Heroism in the New Black Poetry: Introductions and Interviews (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1990), p. 259.
24. Liberator 6, no. 1 (January 1966); reprinted in Baraka’s Black Magic, p. 116.
25. Isaac Deutscher, “The Ex-Communist’s Conscience,” in his Heretics and Renegades (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1969).
26. The Autobiography, pp. 210, 215.
27. In the second edition of his autobiography, Baraka lambastes Hettie Jones’s memoir of their life together, contending that it is full of lies. He refutes her claims that her desire to write was put “on hold” in order to raise their two daughters and to allow him time and space to create. Moreover, he asserts that she thoroughly overstated her commitment to political activism. Baraka even chides Hettie Jones for her “racist dismissal of what I went on to do” after he left her and the two children. Now it may be true that How I Became Hettie Jones is full of lies. I am certainly in no position to vouch for its accuracy, but her claims seem far more plausible than Baraka’s refutations. For Baraka’s severe commentary on Hettie Jones and her memoir, How I Became Hettie Jones, see LeRoi Jones / Amiri Baraka, The Autobiography of LeRoi Jones (Chicago: Lawrence Hill Books, 1997), pp. xxi–xxii. This later edition is henceforth cited as The Autobiography II.
28. The marriage separation is discussed in The Autobiography, pp. 167–201. Hettie Jones provides a more nuanced discussion of the “messy” departure of Jones from his family and life in the Village. See her How I Became Hettie Jones, pp. 217–39.
29. Michael Dyson briefly describes the sexism of Malcolm X in his Malcolm X: Myth and Reality (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994). Also see the short commentary by bell hooks concerning Malcolm’s sexism in her essay collection, Teaching to Transgress (New York: Routledge, 1995).
30. Eugene Victor Wolfenstein, The Victims of Democracy: Malcolm X and the Black Revolution (New York: Guilford Press, 1993), pp. 336–37.
31. Jones claims to have met with Malcolm in January 1965, one month before his murder. Jones says that on that occasion, Malcolm told him that black activists like himself had to begin to create a viable united front among blacks. See Joe Wood, ed., Malcolm X: In Our Own Image (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1992), p. 29.
32. The Baraka play A Black Mass is based on the Nation of Islam’s Yacub myth.
33. See Amiri Baraka, ed., African Congress: A Documentary of the First Modern Pan-African Congress (New York: Morrow, 1972), pp. 44–56.
34. The Autobiography, p. 202.
35. Jones used the idea of the prodigal son to describe his life journey. In the preface to Home, he wrote, “And there is a sense of the Prodigal about my life that begs to be resolved” (p. 9).
36. Harlem in this sense refers not only to a specific neighborhood in upper Manhattan but also metaphorically to all the black inner-city areas in America’s largest cities.
37. Like many other writers, the French critic Genevieve Fabre claims that Jones and BART received $40,000 from the federal government. See Genevieve Fabre, Drumbeats, Masks, and Metaphor: Contemporary Afro-American Theatre, trans. Melvin Dixon (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983) p. 19. In his autobiography, Jones states that there were many differing reports as to the amount of money they received: “We must have got away with a couple hundred grand and even more in services when it was all over” (The Autobiography, p. 211).
38. See Allen J. Matusow, The Unraveling of America: A History of Liberalism in the 1960s (New York: Harper & Row, 1984), pp. 257–60.
39. Michael L. Gillette, Launching the War on Poverty: An Oral History (New York: Twayne, 1996), p. 209.
40. The Autobiography, p. 212. Michelle Wallace, noted feminist, cultural critic, and native of Harlem, recalled that in 1965 as a young teenager, she, her sister, and her mother, the artist Faith Rheingold, “took classes at Amiri Baraka’s newly inaugurated School of Black Arts in Harlem.” See Michelle Wallace, Invisibility Blues: From Pop to Theory (London: Verso, 1990), p. 194.
41. The Autobiography, p. 213.
42. Fabre, Drumbeats, Masks, and Metaphor, p. 20.
43. See Matusow, The Unraveling of America, p. 259; and Daniel P. Moynihan, Maximum Feasible Misunderstanding: Community Action in the War on Poverty (New York: Free Press, 1970), p. 150.
44. “Tax Funds a ‘Hate The Whites’ Project,” U.S. News and World Report, December 13, 1965, p. 16.
45. The Autobiography, pp. 211–15.
46. Time, March 18, 1966, p. 28.
47. The Autobiography, p. 214.
48. In admitting to his immaturity without calling it such, Jones reflected on BART’s loss of HARYOU funding, stating that had he and others around BART had “a good grasp of skating on the thin ice of government grants and with a smart grantsman around we could have not only bit deeper into the federal pie, we could have gotten some of the foundation money . . . we made it easy for them [federal government] to take us off—we acted so wild and woolly” (The Autobiography, pp. 214–15).
49. See Lewis Coser’s Greedy Institutions: Patterns of Undivided Commitment (New York: Free Press, 1974) Greedy institutions demand total commitment from their members and have historically been attractive to those who are isolated, deprived, or uprooted. Such institutions can included the priesthood of the Catholic Church or the community that perished in Jonestown, Guyana, under the leadership of Jim Jones.
50. The Autobiography, pp. 231–32.
51. See The Autobiography of Malcolm X (New York: Grove Press, 1965); and Wolfenstein, The Victims of Democracy, chaps. 6 and 7. Malcolm X documents how he began to think reflectively only after he left the Nation of Islam. Concerning his newly founded intellectual freedom, he stated, “And that was how after twelve years of never thinking for as much as five minutes about myself, I became able finally to muster the nerve, and the strength to start facing the facts, to think for myself” (The Autobiography of Malcolm X, p. 306).
52. The idea of “cultural capital” is most often associated with the work of Pierre Bourdieu. However, my usage of the term is derived from Alvin Gouldner’s discussion in The Future Intellectuals and the Rise of the New Class (New York: Seabury Press, 1979).
53. LeRoi Jones, “Philistinism and the Negro Writer,” in Anger and Beyond: The Negro Writer in the United States, ed. Herbert Hill (New York: Harper & Row, 1966), p. 54.
54. Ibid.
55. Ibid., pp. 58–59.
56. Jones, Home, p. 107.
57. Martin Kilson, “Black Power: Anatomy of a Paradox,” Harvard Journal of Negro Affairs 2, no. 1 (1968).
58. Martin Kilson, “Politics and Identity among Black Intellectuals,” Dissent, Summer 1981, p. 340.
59. Ironically, Baraka is the best refutation of this position. His current Marxism is as intellectually confining as his previous black nationalism was. Surprisingly, Kilson shares Baraka’s belief that his movement to “Marxism” indicates intellectual growth.
60. The discussion of ideology in J. G. Merquior’s The Veil and the Mask: Essays on Culture and Ideology (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1979) is illuminating and has the added virtue of being free of jargon. My conception of ideology has also been influenced by Raymond Williams’s Marxism and Literature (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977); Terry Eagleton’s Literary Theory: An Introduction (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983), and Ideology: An Introduction (London: Verso, 1991); and the excellent discussions of John B. Thompson in his Studies in the Theory of Ideology (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1984).
61. See Irving Howe’s World of Our Fathers (New York: Touchstone Books, 1976), pp. 204–8.
62. For insightful discussions of various forms of Afro-American nationalism, see the work of historian Wilson Moses, particularly The Golden Age of Black Nationalism (Hamden, CT: Archon, 1978), Alexander Crummell: A Study of Civilization and Discontent (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), and The Wings of Ethiopia: Studies in African-American Life and Letters (Ames: Iowa State University Press, 1990).
63. For a perceptive discussion of the problematic relationship between Baraka and the broader black community, see the contentious essay by Jennifer Jordan, “Cultural Nationalism in the 1960s: Politics and Poetry,” in Race, Politics and Culture: Critical Essays on the Radicalism of the 1960s, ed. Adolph Reed (New York: Greenwood Press, 1986).
64. “Interview: Imamu Amiri Baraka,” The Black Collegian, March/April, p. 30.
1. The white critics on the panel included Richard Gillman of Newsweek and Gordon Rogoff of the Tulane Drama Review. See Genevieve Fabre, Drumbeats, Masks, and Metaphor: Contemporary Afro-American Theatre, trans. Melvin Dixon (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983), p. 23.
2. “The Revolutionary Theater” was originally published in Black Dialogue. When it appeared in Liberator, it did so as a reprint. I can only assume that Liberator had a much larger audience. See Abby Arthur Johnson and Ronald Maberry Johnson, Propaganda and Aesthetics (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1991), p. 177. Later, the article was included in Jones’s essay collection Home: Social Essays (New York: Morrow, 1966).
3. Jones, Home, pp. 210–11, 213, 214.
4. Ibid., p. 215.
5. According to one theater scholar, The Conquest of Mexico tears “away the civilizing aspirations of colonialism by presenting the realities of conquest and revealing its essential evil through the psychological effects of the conquistadors on a people whom Artaud believed to be ‘natural.’” See Christopher Innes, Avant Garde Theatre: 1892–1992 (London: Routledge, 1993), p. 89.
6. Jones, Home, p. 211.
7. Daphne S. Reed, “LeRoi Jones: High Priest of the Black Arts Movement,” Educational Theatre Journal 22, no. 1 (March 1970): 58.
8. Robert Brustein, The Theatre of Revolt: Studies in Modern Drama from Ibsen to Genet (Boston: Atlantic Monthly Press / Little, Brown, 1964), pp. 369–70.
9. Ibid., p. 370.
10. According to John Peter, Artaud’s idea of theater was centered on theatrical events. Theater was supposed to generate an ecstatic union with a stunning and dazzling event that appealed to the mind but not to reason. Peter wrote, “I do not know another piece of writing about the theatre that reminds one so strongly of the atmosphere of a Nazi rally.” Artaud dedicated his pamphlet The New Revelations of Being to Adolph Hitler. See John Peter, Vladimir’s Carrot: Modern Drama and the Modern Imagination (London: Andre Deutsch, 1987), pp. 296–97.
11. For an extensive collection of Artaud’s writings, see Antonin Artaud, Selected Writings, ed. Susan Sontag (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1976), pp. 215–76.
12. Jones, Home, p. 251.
13. LeRoi Jones, Black Magic Poetry: 1961–1967 (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1969), pp. 116–17.
14. This idea may have originated in my reading of David L. Smith, “Amiri Baraka and the Black Arts of Black Art,” Boundary 2, vol. 15, nos.1–2 (Fall 1986/Winter 1987): 248.
15. For a discussion of the centrality of homophobia in Jones’s black arts writing, see Phillip Brian Harper, Are We Not Men? Masculine Anxiety and the Problem of African-American Identity (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), chap. 2.
16. By revenge art, I mean art that is intended to wound someone in retaliation for a previous action. I want to distinguish “revenge art” from revenge-motivated art, for one can be motivated by revenge but not create revenge art.
17. Larry Neal, “The Black Arts Movement,” in The Black Aesthetic, ed. Addison Gayle (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1971), pp. 257, 258.
18. The idea of the “death and/or decline of the West” has a long and varied history in Western intellectual thought. For a survey of this tradition, see the tendentious history of this idea written by Arthur Miller, The Idea of Decline in Western History (New York: Free Press, 1997).
19. Addison Gayle, The Way of the New World: The Black Novel in America (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1976), p. 313. Note the silent comparative invocation of Jews: We “had survived numerous holocausts.”
20. Because the teleology of the black power and black arts crowds did not depend on appeals to or changes in the collective conscience of white Americans, it was able to appear more secular and racially autonomous than the Christian-influenced teleologies of black social change as advanced by Martin Luther King Jr. Such appearances were false, however, for all teleological systems of thought grant the ultimate authority for social change to some transhistorical, suprahuman force like God or History.
21. Charlie Reilly, ed., Conversations with Amiri Baraka (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1994), pp. 32–33.
22. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Sense and Non-Sense, trans. Hubert L. Dreyfus and Patricia Allen Dreyfus (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1964), pp. 177–78.
23. Interview with Austin Clarke, in Reilly, ed., Conversations with Amiri Baraka, p. 37.
24. According to Philip Rieff, theorizing is a distancing mechanism. When comparing Norman Mailer with Herbert Marcuse, Rieff wrote, “‘The White Negro’ (1957) is not a work of theory but of tactics. Marcuse’s work remains intractably theoretical; at cross-purposes with any revolution, theory carries a repressive implication. Theory admits no blind obediences. Being tactical, Mailer’s work is more useful.” See Philip Rieff, Fellow Teachers (New York: Harper & Row, 1973), p. 103.
25. Jones had previously argued that the reasons that the white woman was sexually attracted to the black man “was because he was basic and elemental emotionally (which is true for the nonbrainwashed black, simply because there is no reason he should not be; the black man is more natural than the white simply because he has fewer things between him and reality, fewer wrappers, fewer artificial rules).” See LeRoi Jones, “American Sexual Reference: Black Male,” in his Home, pp. 221–22.
26. I am, of course, referring to the arguments presented by Herbert Marcuse in One-Dimensional Man (Boston: Beacon Press, 1964); and by Philip Rieff in The Triumph of the Therapeutic: Uses of Faith after Freud (New York: Harper & Row, 1966).
27. Renato Poggiolo, The Theory of the Avant-Garde (New York: Harper & Row, 1971).
28. The idea of “rituals of rebellion” came from my reading of Martin Kilson’s work on political development, particularly Political Change in a West African State (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1964). Kilson attributes the idea to Max Gluckman.
29. As a Marxist, Baraka referred to them as compradors.
30. Max Scheler, Ressentiment, ed. Lewis Coser and trans. William W. Holdheim (New York: Schocken Books, 1961), p. 48.
31. When asked if there was a black aesthetic, Giovanni responded, “As the black-aesthetic criticism went, you were told that if you were a black writer or a black critic, you were told this is what you should do. That kind of prescription cuts off the question by defining parameters. I object to prescriptions of all kinds. In this case the prescription was a capsulized militant stance. What are we going to do with a stance? Literature is only as useful as it reflects reality.” See Claudia Tate, ed., Black Women Writers at Work (New York: Continuum Press, 1985), p. 63.
32. Don L. Lee, “Toward a Definition: Black Poetry of the Sixties (after LeRoi Jones),” in The Black Aesthetic, ed. Gayle, p. 232.
33. My distinctions are simplistic and intended only for use as heuristic devices.
34. Gayle, ed., The Black Aesthetic, p. 4.
35. Morris Dickstein argues that during the 1960s, white critics of black literature engaged in racial patronization of black writers, resulting in inflated praise of inferior works. Although this may have been the case, Dickstein unfortunately does not mention any specific instances. Given the significance of his claim, the absence of documentation is irresponsible. One could read Dickstein and think that Donald Goines was nominated for a National Book Award. I did not uncover this tendency. See Morris Dickstein, Gates of Eden: American Culture in the Sixties (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), p. 158.
36. Gayle, ed., The Black Aesthetic, p. xxxiii.
37. Karl Mannheim, Ideology and Utopia (London: Routledge, 1968).
38. Discussions of Bambara, Brooks, Clifton, Evans, Giovanni, Rodgers, Lorde, and Sanchez can be found in Mari Evans, ed., Black Women Writers (1950–1980): A Critical Evaluation (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1984). An excellent discussion of Cortez can be found in Aldon Lynn Nielsen, Black Chant: Languages of African-American Postmodernism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). Extended interviews with Cortez, Sanchez, and Brooks can be found in D. H. Melhem, Heroism in the New Black Poetry (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1990). For a discussion of Teer, see Barbara Lewis, “Ritual Reformulations: Barbara Ann Teer and the National Black Theatre of Harlem,” in A Sourcebook of African-American Performance: Plays, People, Movements, ed. Annemarie Bean (New York: Routledge, 1999), pp. 68–82.
39. Toni Cade Bambara, ed., The Black Woman: An Anthology (New York: Penguin Books, 1970), p. 7.
40. See “Ralph Ellison: His Literary Work and Status,” a special issue of Black World 20, no. 2 (December 1970).
41. Gayle, ed., The Black Aesthetic, p. xxii.
42. In some respects, Gayle’s claims represent a rudimentary variant of reader-response criticism. For a description of the major theorists and theoretical tendencies in this arena, see Vincent B. Leitch, American Literary Criticism: From the 30s to the 80s (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), chap. 8.
43. Gayle, The Way of The New World, p. 379.
44. Ron Karenga, “Black Art: A Rhythmic Reality of Revolution,” in The Black Aesthetic, ed. Gayle, pp. 31–32, 36.
45. James Cunningham, “Hemlock for Black Artist: Karenga Style,” Negro Digest (January 1968); reprinted in New Black Voices: An Anthology of Contemporary Afro-American Literature, ed. Abraham Chapman (New York: New American Library, 1972), pp. 483–89.
46. George Kent, Blackness and the Adventure of Western Culture (Chicago: Third World Press, 1972), p. 200.
47. Reilly, ed., Conversations with Amiri Baraka, p. 22.
48. Ameer Baraka, “The Black Aesthetic: We Are Our Feelings,” Black World 18, no. 11 (September 1969): 5–6, and Amiri Baraka, Raise Race Rays Raze (New York: Random House, 1971), p. 118.
49. Baraka, Raise Race Rays Raze, p. 117.
50. Ibid., p. 123.
51. For an insightful discussion of Locke and aesthetics, see George Hutchinson, The Harlem Renaissance in Black and White (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), chaps. 6 and 14. For additional pieces by Locke concerning issues related to a black aesthetic, see his The Negro and His Music and Negro Art: Past and Present (New York; Arno Press, 1969).
52. Alain Locke, “Negro Youth Speaks,” in The New Negro, ed. Alain Locke (New York: Atheneum, 1977), pp. 47–48.
53. Richard Wright, “Blueprint for Negro Literature,” in Richard Wright Reader, ed. Ellen Wright and Michel Fabre (New York: Harper & Row, 1978), pp. 36–49.
54. Sterling Brown, the critic, wrote Negro Poetry and Drama and The Negro in American Fiction (New York: Atheneum, 1978). For an overview of his poetry, see Sterling Brown, The Collected Poems of Sterling Brown (New York: Harper & Row, 1980). For a discussion of Sterling Brown, see Sterling Stuckey, Going through the Storm: The Influence of African American Art in History (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), chap. 8. Any discussion of the influence of Langston Hughes on a subsequent generations of black writers must begin with the two-volume biography of Hughes by Arnold Rampersad: The Life of Langston Hughes, vol. 1, 1902–1941, “I, Too, Sing America” (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), and vol. 2, 1941–1967, “I Dream A World” (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988); the excellent biography by Faith Berry, Before and beyond Harlem: A Biography of Langston Hughes (New York: Wings Books, 1992); and Charles Nichols, ed., Arna Bontemps-Langston Hughes Letters: 1925–1967 (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1980). For a representative sample of Brown’s writings on Afro-American politics, literature, music, and folklore, see Mark A. Sanders, ed., A Son’s Return: Selected Essays of Sterling A. Brown (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1996).
55. A comprehensive and informative treatment of Brown can be found in Joanne V. Gabbin, Sterling Brown: Building the Black Aesthetic Tradition (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1985). Also see the special Sterling A. Brown issue of Callaloo 21, no. 4 (Fall 1998).
56. For a celebration of Sterling Brown, see Stephen E. Henderson, “A Strong Man Called Sterling Brown,” reprinted from Black World (September 1970) in Dudley Randall, ed., Homage to Hoyt Fuller (Detroit: Broadside Press, 1984), pp. 156–63.
57. Stephen E. Henderson, ed., Understanding the New Black Poetry, Black Speech and Black Music as Poetic References (New York: Morrow, 1973), esp. Henderson’s introduction.
58. Henry Louis Gates Jr., Figures in Black: Words, Signs, and the “Racial” Self (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), p. 33.
59. Henderson, Understanding the New Black Poetry, p. 80.
60. Stephen E. Henderson, “Saturation: Progress Report on a Theory of Black Poetry,” in Homage to Hoyt Fuller, ed. Randall, p. 198.
61. Houston A. Baker Jr., Blues, Ideology, and Afro-American Literature (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), pp. 84–85.
62. Gates, Figures in Black, pp. 32–35.
63. David Lionel Smith, “Chicago Poets, OBAC, and the Black Arts Movement,” in The Black Columbiad: Defining Moments in African American Literature and Culture, ed. Werner Sollors and Maria Diedrich (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994), pp. 257–58.
64. For a discussion of Reed’s relationship to the Black Aesthetic movement, see Patrick McGee, Ishmael Reed and the Ends of Race (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997); and Reginald Martin, Ishmael Reed and the New Black Aesthetic Critics (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1988). Reed makes many statements “off the cuff” which, when reviewed, do not stand true. He excels at generating controversy. However, in his nonfiction and interviews, Reed often displays a superficiality of thought that is quite stunning. For proof of this, read any three of the interviews in Bruce Dick and Amritjit Singh, eds., Conversations with Ishmael Reed (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1995).
65. Joe Goncalves, “‘When State Magicians Fail’: An Interview with Ishmael Reed,” Journal of Black Poetry 1, no. 12 (Summer/Fall 1969): 73, 76, 77.
66. Sandra Hollin Flowers, African American Nationalist Literature of the 1960s (New York: Garland, 1996), pp. 44–45.
67. Timothy Phoenix, “Black Writers Must Be Free,” Liberator 7 (August 1967): 10.
68. Clarence Major, The Dark and Feeling: Black American Writers and Their Work (New York: Third Press, 1974), p. 19.
69. Abby Arthur Johnson and Ronald Maberry Johnson, Propaganda and Aesthetics: The Literary Politics of Afro-American Magazines in the Twentieth Century (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1991), p. 183. Toure’s “open letter” to Baraka originally appeared in Black Dialogue 3 (Winter 1967/68): 3–4.
70. Johnson and Johnson, Propaganda and Aesthetics, p. 183.
71. Stanley Crouch, “Toward a Purer Black Poetry Esthetic,” Journal of Black Poetry 1, no. 10 (Fall 1968): 28.
72. Stanley Crouch, “Books,” Journal of Black Poetry 1, no. 10 (Fall 1968): 90.
73. Lorenzo Thomas, “Neon Griot: The Functional Role of Poetry Readings in the Black Arts Movement,” in Close Listening: Poetry and the Performed World, ed. Charles Bernstein (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998).
74. Larry Neal, “And Shine Swam On,” in his Visions of a Liberated Future: Black Arts Movement Writings, ed. Michael Schwartz (New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 1989), pp. 20–21.
75. Amiri Baraka, introduction to Beer Cans, Bullets, Things & Pieces, by Arthur Pfister (Detroit: Broadside Press, 1972), and republished in Nielsen, Black Chant, p. 19.
76. Dudley Randall, “The Black Aesthetic in the Thirties, Forties, and Fifties,” in The Black Aesthetic, ed. Gayle, pp. 213–14.
77. Jean-Paul Sartre, What Is Literature? trans. Bernard Frechtman (New York: Harper & Row, 1965), p. 72. An extended discussion of Wright can be found in the chapter “For Whom Does One Write?”
78. Richard Wright, Native Son (New York: Harper & Row, 1966), p. xxvii. “How Bigger Was Born” appears as the introduction to this volume.
79. One scholar wrote, “Whereas to preceding generations, the Negro’s ‘double consciousness’ had been his unique resource, to Baraka’s young contemporaries it became the primary symptom of his malady. In their writings, derogatory references to Du Bois’s Idea were frequent, even as they embraced him and included him in their pantheon of heroes. Instead was projected the ideal of a unified non-Western sensibility, merging ideas of a distinctive and peculiar racial Geist, a separate culture, and a Black Nation.” Sigmund Ro, “‘Descerators’ and ‘Necromancers’: Black American Writers and Critics in the Nineteen-Sixties and the Third World Perspective,” Callaloo 25, vol. 8, no. 3 (Autumn 1985): 573.
80. Charles Fuller, “Black Writing Is Socio-Creative Art,” Liberator, April 1967, p. 8.
81. One of the ironies of the celebration of jazz and the blues that was so prevalent during the Black Arts period was the unwillingness of many black arts literary critics to concede that black musicians had phenomenal respect for artistic forms and their craftsmanship. In a fit of honest dogmatism, Baraka even began to criticize black jazz musicians for their concerns for artistic form. He even claimed that Junior Walker and the All Stars, a popular Motown group known for its complex and intriguing musical scores (e.g., Shotgun and Road Runner), was engaged in a more substantive artistic venture than were Albert Ayler and Ornette Coleman. And Baraka wasn’t joking. See Baraka, Raise Race Rays Raze, p. 120.
82. Larry Neal, “The Black Contribution to American Letters: Part II, The Writer as Activist—1960 and After” in The Black American Reference Book, ed. Mabel Smythe (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1976), p. 783.
83. Ibid., p. 784. Neal and Baraka were cofounders of the Black Arts Repertory Theater/School and coeditors of Black Fire. Consequently, his omission of Baraka is all the more conspicuous and significant.
84. For a rather extensive discussion of the idea, see Gene H. Bell-Villada, Art for Art’s Sake and Literary Life: How Politics and Markets Helped Shape the Ideology and Culture of Aestheticism, 1790–1990 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1996).
85. Werner Sollors, Amiri Baraka / LeRoi Jones: The Quest for a “Populist Modernism” (New York: Columbia University Press, 1978), p. 193.
86. Ibid., p. 194.
1. I do not know why the black middle class has not been more supportive of black intellectual infrastructures. In a provocative, often quoted, but deeply flawed essay, Cornel West makes the mistake of listing his speculations as if they are empirical facts that can suffice as proof for various assertions: “In addition to the general anti-intellectual tenor of American society, there is a deep distrust and suspicion of black intellectuals within the black community. This distrust and suspicion stem not simply from the usual arrogant and haughty disposition of intellectuals toward ordinary folk, but, more importantly, from the widespread refusal of black intellectuals to remain, in some visible way, organically linked with African American cultural life. The relatively high rates of exogamous marriage, the abandonment of black institutions and the preoccupation with Euro-American intellectual products are often perceived by the black community as intentional efforts to escape the negative sigma of blackness or are viewed as symptoms of self-hatred.” Cornel West, “The Dilemma of the Black Intellectual,” in his Keeping Faith: Philosophy and Race in America (New York: Routledge, 1993), p. 71. There is no proof that most or even many black Americans think of black intellectuals as racially self-hating.
2. Among the best studies of the various “white” intellectual infrastructures that helped produce the Harlem Renaissance are those by George Hutchinson, The Harlem Renaissance in Black and White (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995); and Ann Douglas, Terrible Honesty: Mongrel Manhattan in the 1920s (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1995).
3. David Levering Lewis, When Harlem Was in Vogue (New York: Knopf, 1981).
4. For a thorough discussion of Tuskegee, see Louis Harlan, Booker T. Washington, II: The Wizard of Tuskegee, 1901–1915 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983); and James Anderson, The Education of Blacks in the South, 1860–1935 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988).
5. For glimpses of Carter G. Woodson as a developer of a black intellectual infrastructure, see August Meier and Elliott Rudwick, Black History and the Historical Profession, 1915–1980 (Champaign-Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1986), esp. chap. 1.
6. Jacqueline Goggin, Carter G. Woodson: A Life in Black History (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1993), pp. 32, 114.
7. For Du Bois’s experiences at The Crisis, see David Levering Lewis, W. E. B. Du Bois: Biography of a Race, 1868–1919 (New York: Henry Holt, 1993), chaps. 15–19. I do not want my discussion of Du Bois’s treatment as editor of The Crisis to suggest that he should have been given a free hand to run the magazine according to his personal whims. After all, it was the house organ of an organization.
8. See Genna Rae McNeil, Groundwork: Charles Hamilton Houston and the Struggle for Civil Rights (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1983); Richard Kluger, Simple Justice: The History of Brown v. Board of Education and Black America’s Struggle for Equality (New York: Knopf, 1976); and J. Clay Smith Jr., Emancipation: The Making of the Black Lawyer, 1844–1944 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993).
9. Some of these essays are reprinted in Larry Neal, Visions of a Liberated Future: Black Arts Movement Writings, ed. Michael Schwartz (New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 1989). Neal’s writings on Jones are not included in this collection.
10. John H. Johnson, with Lerone Bennett Jr., Succeeding against the Odds (New York: Warner Books, 1989), p. 289.
11. In his autobiography Johnson wrote, “Later, when the Freedom Movement ebbed, the circulation of Black World dropped from 100,000 to 15,000 and I discontinued the renamed Negro Digest for the second time” (ibid.).
12. Haki Madhubuti, “Blacks, Jews and Henry Louis Gates, Jr.,” in his Claiming Earth: Race, Rage, Rape, Redemption (Chicago: Third World Press, 1994), p. 68.
13. I could uncover only very scanty evidence to suggest that any anti-Israeli sentiments were ever prominently displayed in Black World. The October 1975 issue published a copy of an appeal by a group known as Black Americans in Support of Israel Committee (B.A.S.I.C.). The appeal had been previously published in the New York Times. It was entitled “An Appeal by Black Americans for United States Support to Israel” and was attributed to the A. Philip Randolph Institute, which was under the directorship of Bayard Rustin. Black World viewed this appeal as an affront and republished it with a response entitled “A Resolution Condemning the Appeal by So-Called Black Leaders Calling for United States Support to Israel.” It was written by Jomo Logan, who belonged to an organization called A.F.R.I.C.A. The response argued that because the Organization of African Unity (OAU) had endorsed the Arabs in the Middle East conflict with Israel, black Americans should endorse the Arab position. In addition, it condemned Israel for the role it was supposedly playing in the exploitation of black diamond miners in South Africa. Logan stated that “the Zionists have been the allies of imperialism in all its activities in Africa, Asia, Latin America and the African-American communities in the United States. Thus by so doing, the Jews have denied and continue to deny the right of self-determination for Black people that they are trying to force in the Middle East for themselves.” Jomo Logan, “A Resolution Condemning the Appeal by So-Called Black Leaders Calling for United States Support to Israel,” Black World, October 1975, p. 41. Perhaps this article was seen as anti-Semitic, although it is more accurate to refer to it as anti-Zionist.
14. When interviewed by the literary critic Robert Stepto, novelist Ralph Ellison was asked to comment on the special issue of Black World on his work. Annoyed by the journal’s treatment, Ellison’s response points to the contradictory impulses of the journal’s political slant, given the class orientation of the journal’s publisher. Unfortunately, Ellison seems to have believed that the highly uneven criticism of him in that one issue made the entirety of the journal useless. Concerning his critics in that issue, he wrote, “But I can say this for them. Safe behind the fence provided by a black capitalist, they had one big ‘barking-at-the-gate’ go at me. They even managed to convince a few students that I was the worst disaster that had ever hit Afro-American writing. But for all of their attacks I’m still here trying—while if I’m asked where is Black World today my answer is: Gone with the snows of yester-year / down the pissor—Dadaa, Da-daa, and good riddance!” See “Study and Experience: An Interview with Ralph Ellison,” in Chant of Saints: A Gathering of Afro-American Literature, Art, and Scholarship, ed. Michael S. Harper and Robert B. Stepto (Champaign-Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1979), p. 461.
15. For a discussion of the fate of small black publishing firms during the early 1980s, see Melba Joyce Boyd, “Out of the Poetry Ghetto: The Life/Art Struggle of Small Black Publishing Houses,” Black Scholar, July/August 1985, pp. 12–24.
16. Ahmed Alhamisi, “On Spiritualism and the Revolutionary Spirit,” Journal of Black Poetry 1, no. 15 (Fall/Winter 1971): 89.
17. LeRoi Jones and Larry Neal, eds., Black Fire: An Anthology of Afro-American Writing (New York: Morrow, 1968), p. xvi. Jones maintained his relationship with his white agent, Sterling Lord, throughout the Black Arts era.
18. Thomas C. Dent, Richard Schechner, and Gilbert Moses, eds., The Free Southern Theater (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1969).
19. For a discussion of the problems of funding black theaters, see Errol Hill, ed., The Theater of Black Americans, vol. 2, esp. the essays by Ellen Foreman, “The Negro Ensemble Company: A Transcendent Vision” (pp. 72–84), and Lindsay Patterson, “Black Theater: The Search Goes On” (pp. 147–52). Also see Mance Williams, Black Theatre in the 1960s and 1970s: A Historical-Critical Analysis of the Movement (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1985), esp. chap. 3.
20. See Thomas D. Pawley, “The Black Theatre Audience,” in The Theater of Black Americans, vol. 2, ed. Hill, pp. 109–19; and Williams, Black Theatre in the 1960s and 1970s.
21. Studies of black studies include Johnnella E. Butler, Black Studies: Pedagogy and Revolution (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1981); Armstead Robinson, Craig C. Foster, and Donald Ogilvie, eds., Black Studies in the University (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1969); Nathan Huggins, A Report to the Ford Foundation on Afro-American Studies (New York: Ford Foundation, 1985); Robert L. Harris Jr., Darlene Clark Hine, and Nellie McKay, Three Essays: Black Studies in the United States (New York: Ford Foundation, 1990); Molefi Asante, “A Book Review Essay: A Note on the Nathan Huggins Report to the Ford Foundation on African American Studies,” Journal of Black Studies 17, no. 2 (December 1986): 255–62; and John Blassingame, ed., New Perspectives on Black Studies (Champaign-Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1971).
22. Vincent B. Leitch, American Literary Criticism: From the 30s to the 80s (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), p. 360.
23. When black subjects were included in the curriculum, it was usually in reference to problems in need of solution. Need we remember Du Bois’s question in The Souls of Black Folk, “How does it feel to be a problem?”
24. For a scathing, polemical critique of the failure of black studies programs at white institutions, see Don L. Lee, “The New Pimps / or It’s Hip to Be Black: The Failure of Black Studies,” in his From Plan to Planet: Life Studies: The Need for Afrikan Minds and Institutions (Detroit: Broadside Press, 1973), pp. 55–61. Just as I was about to celebrate the intelligence of this critique, I read the following nonsensical statement “We need original thinkers who can politically deal with the right and the left (p. 59). Perhaps it was my stupidity to have assumed that even a dogmatic, religious nationalist like Lee could have recognized variation in the thoughts of white intellectuals. Moreover, in this essay, Lee refers to the fictitious The Report from Iron Mountain as if it were an authentic report of a hidden white plot in the making.
25. For an extensive history of Umbra, see Michel Oren, “The Umbra Poets Workshop, 1962–1965: Some Socio-Literary Puzzles,” in Studies in Black American Literature, vol. 2: Belief vs. Theory in Black American Literary Criticism, ed. Joe Weixlmann and Charles J. Fontenot (Greenwood, FL: Penkevill Publishing, 1986), pp. 177–223, 180.
26. Of course, it is debatable whether or not Ishmael Reed should be considered a participant in the Black Arts movement.
27. Oren, “The Umbra Poets Workshop,” p. 177.
28. Abby Arthur Johnson and Ronald Maberry Johnson, Propaganda and Aesthetics: The Literary Politics of Afro-American Magazines in the Twentieth Century (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1991), p. 164.
29. See David Lionel Smith, “Chicago Poets, OBAC, and the Black Arts Movement,” in The Black Columbiad: Defining Moments in African American Literature and Culture, ed. Werner Sollors and Maria Diedrich (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994), pp. 253–64.
30. For a more expansive introduction to OBAC, see Carole A. Parks, ed., Nommo: A Literary Legacy of Black Chicago (1967–1987) (Chicago: OBAhouse, 1987).
31. Smith, “Chicago Poets, OBAC, and the Black Arts Movement,” pp. 259, 257, 258.
32. Ibid., p. 260.
33. See “An Interview with Topper Carew,” Saturday Review, July 18, 1970, pp. 46–48.
34. Tony Brown’s show Black Journal was a national version of these types of programs.
35. Charles Johnson, Being and Race: Black Writing since 1970 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988), p. 120.
36. I say this not to imply that academic literary criticism is the ultimate arbiter of what is or is not good writing. After all, for most of the twentieth century, academic literary taste relegated blacks and most white females to an artistic scrap heap. Yet because even black critics also now “ignore” these works, the Black Arts movement is slowly being forgotten. The reason could, however, be the result of the professionalization of black literary studies, a professionalization that gains more cultural capital from situating black writing in established traditions, as opposed to celebrating those who intentionally remained outsiders.
37. Johnson, Being and Race, p. 22.
38. See Jerry G. Watts, Heroism and the Black Intellectual: Ralph Ellison, Politics, and Afro-American Intellectual Life (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994), esp. chap. 2.
39. Peter Gay, Weimar Culture: The Outsider as Insider (New York: Harper & Row, 1968).
40. In this sense, Baraka was following some of Harold Cruse’s dictates, as described in his The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual (New York: Morrow, 1967).
1. Gerald Weales, “The Day LeRoi Jones Spoke on Penn’s Campus: What Were the Blacks Doing in the Balcony?” New York Times Magazine, May 4, 1969, pp. 38–40.
2. LeRoi Jones, Black Magic Poetry: 1961–1967 (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1969), p. 225.
3. Gwendolyn Brooks, Report from Part One (Detroit: Broadside Press, 1972), pp. 168. The episode is also mentioned on p. 85.
4. The Black Arts crowd was of two minds concerning the authenticity of traditional black religious worship. On the one hand, they viewed the black Christian Church as a model for reaching the black masses. On the other hand, they viewed the message of the church and even its fever pitched emotionalism as antithetical to the black emancipation struggle.
5. For a discussion of performance poetry in Beat bohemia, see Lorenzo Thomas’s excellent “Neon Griot: The Functional Role of Poetry Readings in the Black Arts Movement,” in Close Listening: Poetry and the Performed Word, ed. Charles Bernstein (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), pp. 300–23.
6. Ibid., p. 306.
7. Jones, Black Magic Poetry, p. 115.
8. Ibid., p. 135.
9. Ibid., p. 142.
10. Ibid., p. 154.
11. Ibid., pp. 205–6.
12. Ibid., p. 121.
13. Ibid., p. 217.
14. Ibid., p. 186.
15. Ibid., p. 140.
16. Ibid., p. 148.
17. I remember that some black activists in Washington would say, “it’s nation time,” while others would assert, “it’s nation-building time.”
18. Imamu Amiri Baraka, It’s Nation Time (Chicago: Third World Press, 1970), p. 7. On the title page, the author’s name is listed as Imamu Amiri Baraka, but immediately underneath this is the name LeRoi Jones, in smaller letters and enclosed in parentheses. Why did a black nationalist publishing firm like Third World Press feel compelled to clarify Baraka’s historical identity?
19. Ibid., p. 8.
20. Ibid., pp. 8, 10, 11.
21. Ibid., pp. 15, 16.
22. Ibid., p. 22.
23. Amiri Baraka, Selected Plays and Prose of Amiri Baraka / LeRoi Jones (New York: Morrow, 1979), p. 202.
24. Stiff, wooden, dead-in-life white folks need to be destroyed (burned). Blacks, dynamic fire, need to destroy them. However, a black who doesn’t understand that white folks need to be burned is probably as dead-in-life as they are and either needs to be burned or might burn himself.
25. Baraka, Selected Plays, p. 204.
26. Ibid., pp. 212–13.
27. Imamu Amiri Baraka and Fundi, In Our Terribleness (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1970). There are no printed page numbers in In Our Terribleness, so I will not use notes for my discussion of this text.
28. The essay originally appeared in the journal Black Scholar in 1969.
29. I remember receiving a copy of this booklet during the summer before my first year at Harvard College, sent to me by Harvard’s black student organization. Fascinated, I was nevertheless baffled by the booklet precisely because I did not know why I was supposed to pay attention to the arbitrary views of this unfamiliar person who called himself Imamu. Besides, I wondered just what this return to traditional African values had to do with my desire to attend Harvard. Only later did I discover that these African values were, in fact, “California African” names. That aside, the booklet was useful as a centerpiece of numerous late-night dorm conversations about the responsibility of black students to the black community. It is not clear to me that the nationalist penchant, as embodied in Baraka’s booklet, for raising such important questions was ever supplanted (for later generations of black students) by an equally effective alternative discourse. However, the discussions generated by texts like Baraka’s were often based on a limited range of ethnically legitimate answers. The subcultures that arose around such texts produced a “constrained inquisitiveness.”
30. Imamu Amiri Baraka, Raise Race Rays Raze: Essays since 1965 (New York: Random House, 1971), pp. 4, 5.
31. Ibid., pp. 11–12.
32. Ibid., p. 19.
33. Ibid., p. 18.
34. Ibid., p. 25; see also Donald M. Allen, ed., New American Poetry, 1945–1960 (New York: Grove Press, 1960), p. 25.
35. LeRoi Jones, ed., The Moderns: An Anthology of New Writing in America (New York: Corinth Books, 1963).
36. Baraka, Raise Race Rays Raze, p. 33.
37. Ibid., pp. 33–34.
38. Ibid., p. 98.
39. Ibid., pp. 98–99.
40. Ibid., p. 99.
41. Ibid., p. 112.
42. Ibid., pp. 112–13.
43. Part of the Black Arts movement intellectuals’ animus toward the Negro Ensemble Theater stemmed from the theater’s decision to locate outside a black community, which they considered to be an admission of the difficulty black theaters faced in trying to attract a sustaining audience. This approach to theater also differed drastically from the community development ethos championed by the Black Theater movement.
44. Baraka, Raise Race Rays Raze, p. 39.
45. Ibid., p. 40.
46. Ibid., p. 41.
47. Ibid., p. 42.
48. Ibid. p. 43.
49. The Nation of Islam had a smaller black membership than the NAACP. The Nation of Islam had a much larger following of “sympathetic” black nonmembers than actual members. Many of these nonmember sympathizers had been drawn to the Nation through Malcolm, so when Malcolm was assassinated, many of them ceased to be as sympathetic to the organization. Certainly, Baraka was an example of such a sympathizer. Baraka’s discussion of the reasons for the Nation’s appeal is wrong. First, the Nation of Islam was relatively small for the very reasons that Baraka erroneously claimed lay behind its appeal. That is, its totality was too demanding for most blacks. Claude Andrew Clegg III, a biographer of Elijah Muhammad, estimated that at its height during the early 1960s, the Nation of Islam had about 20,000 members nationally. However, Clegg notes that estimates of the Nation’s membership have ranged from 5,000 to 250,000. See Claude Andrew Clegg III, An Original Man: The Life and Times of Elijah Muhammad (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997), p. 115.
50. Baraka, Raise Race Rays Raze, p. 120.
51. Ibid., p. 30.
52. Perhaps Baraka was so devoted to his quasi-religious, black nationalist worldview that he actually believed his rewriting of history. If so, he rewrote history as he wished it had been. According to Baraka’s mythical narrative, (1) Malcolm was the uncontested leader of black people; (2) white America trembled at the sound of his voice; and (3) Martin Luther King Jr., Roy Wilkins, and Whitney Young were popularly recognized by blacks as well-intentioned weaklings at best and Uncle Toms at worst.
53. Baraka, Raise Race Rays Raze, pp. 125, 126.
54. Ibid., p. 129.
55. Ibid., p. 130.
56. Ibid., pp. 130, 131.
57. Jan Carew, review of Raise Race Rays Raze, by Amiri Baraka, New York Times Book Review, June 27, 1971, p. 4.
58. Ibid., p. 31.
59. Addison Gayle Jr., The Way of the New World: The Black Novel in America (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1976), pp. 310–11.
60. Ibid., p. 311.
61. Ibid., p. 312.
1. Apparently Baraka did not use these criteria when writing In Our Terribleness, a text that romanticizes black life “on the block.” Devoid of self-reflection, Baraka can state simultaneously that “a slave cannot be hip—it is a contradiction” and yet, a slave could be “terrible.”
2. Amiri Baraka, “Black Revolutionary Poets Should Also Be Playwrights,” Black World 21, no. 6 (April 1972): 5.
3. Charlie Reilly, ed., Conversations with Amiri Baraka (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1994), p. 236.
4. LeRoi Jones, Four Black Revolutionary Plays (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1969), pp. 7–8.
5. See Henry C. Lacey, To Raise, Destroy, and Create: The Poetry, Drama, and Fiction of Imamu Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones) (Troy, NY: Whitston Publishing, 1981), pp. 133–39.
6. Theodore R. Hudson, From LeRoi Jones to Amiri Baraka: The Literary Works (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1973), p. 164.
7. Mattias Gardell, In the Name of Elijah Muhammad: Louis Farrakhan and the Nation of Islam (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996), p. 148. For the complete story of Yacub and the invention of white people, see Elijah Muhammad, Message to the Blackman in America (Chicago: Muhammad’s Temple no. 2, 1965), pp. 103–22.
8. Jones, Four Black Revolutionary Plays, pp. 27–28.
9. Ibid., p. 39.
10. Larry Neal, Visions of a Liberated Future: Black Arts Movement Writings, ed. Michael Schwartz (New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 1989), p. 73.
11. Jones, Four Black Revolutionary Plays, p. 89. “Why No Jello” is signed Ameer Baraka, even though the name LeRoi Jones appears on the title page and cover of the collection.
12. LeRoi Jones, Jello (Chicago: Third World Press, 1970), pp. 11, 13.
13. It is not incidental that Benny was identified as a Jew earlier in the play, thus targeting him as one of the exemplary targets of Jones’s antiwhite invectives against exploitative Jewish store owners in black neighborhoods.
14. Hudson, From LeRoi Jones, p. 165.
15. Werner Sollors, Amiri Baraka / LeRoi Jones: The Quest for a “Populist Modernism” (New York: Columbia University Press, 1978), p. 210.
16. Jones, Four Black Revolutionary Plays, p. 47.
17. Ibid., pp. 50–51. Note that Baraka considers it is an invective of the highest order to call a man “woman.” This is a common rhetorical practice among urban black males.
18. Ibid., p. 55. (Presumably this is supposed to represent Malcolm X.)
19. Reilly, ed., Conversations with Amiri Baraka, p. 72.
20. Kimberly Benston, Baraka: The Renegade and the Mask (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1976), p. 213.
21. Amiri Baraka, The Motion of History and Other Plays (New York: Morrow, 1978), p. 138.
22. Ibid., p. 143.
23. Ibid., pp. 144, 145.
24. Harry J. Elam Jr., “Social Urgency, Audience Participation, and the Performance of Slave Ship by Amiri Baraka,” in Crucibles of Crisis: Performing Social Change, ed. Janelle Reinelt (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996), p. 13.
25. Ibid.
26. Leslie Catherine Sanders, The Development of Black Theater in America: From Shadows to Selves (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1988), p. 171.
27. Augusto Boal, Theatre of the Oppressed (New York: Theatre Communications Group, 1985).
28. Elam, “Social Urgency,” p. 23.
29. Lacey, To Raise, Destroy and Create, p. 157.
30. Hudson, From LeRoi Jones to Amiri Baraka, p. 171.
31. Benston, Baraka, p. 217.
32. Published in Drama Review 12, no. 4 (Summer 1968).
33. Published in Black Theatre, no. 5 (1971): 16–17. A shorter ritual piece, “Black Power Chant,” was first published in Black Theatre, no. 4 (1970): 35. “Chant” was first published in Black Theatre, no. 5 (1971): 16–17.
34. Published in Drama Review 12, no. 4 (Summer 1968).
35. Ibid., p. 108.
36. Ibid., pp. 110–11.
37. Sollors, Amiri Baraka / LeRoi Jones, p. 207.
38. Benston, Baraka, pp. 219–20.
39. The script of the play can be found in Ed Bullins, ed., New Plays from the Black Theatre (New York: Bantam Books, 1969), pp. 1–20.
40. Ibid., p. 9.
41. Ibid., p. 10.
42. Published in Woodie King and Ron Milner, eds., Black Drama Anthology (New York: Columbia University Press, 1972), pp. 25–31.
43. Ibid., p. 27.
44. Ibid. Once again he is referring to Sly Stone of Sly and the Family Stone singing group.
45. Ibid., pp. 27, 28.
46. Published in King and Milner, eds., Black Drama Anthology, pp. 11–23.
47. The defeat of the Mafia at the hands of militant blacks was a common theme in “blaxploitation” films of the 1960s and 1970s. Recall the plot of Shaft.
48. Published in book form as The Sidney Poet Heroical: in 29 Scenes (New York: I. Reed Books, 1979).
49. It is not clear why Baraka attacks Belafonte so viciously in this play, because Belafonte had been one of the most active black entertainers in the civil rights movement. Moreover, he had come to Newark in 1970 to help Kenneth Gibson’s campaign. Perhaps Baraka disapproved of Belafonte’s and Poitier’s interracial marriages. In his autobiography, Baraka mentions a earlier confrontation with Belafonte during his days at BART: “We pulled some thoroughly juvenile delinquent shit on Harry Belafonte—after demanding some money which he wouldn’t give up, writing his name on some paper and then tearing the paper up as if that signified his imminent disposal. But it didn’t work, Belafonte wasn’t cowed by such shallow theatrics.” LeRoi Jones / Amiri Baraka, The Autobiography of LeRoi Jones / Amiri Baraka (New York: Freundlich Books, 1984), p. 217.
50. Mel Gussow, Theatre on the Edge: New Visions, New Voices (New York: Applause, 1998), pp. 118, 119.
51. Mel Gussow, “Baraka Discusses Politics as an Art,” New York Times, March 13, 1973, p. 30.
52. See Komozi Woodard, A Nation within a Nation: Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones) and Black Power Politics (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999), pp. 148, 194, 200.
53. Baraka was not adverse to creating frivolous “black art.” One need only read the rite that he created for the coronation of black queens. A black version of the coronation of the Rose Bowl queen, Baraka’s ersatz-African ritual is resplendent with libations, Swahili chants and stools, and African attire. Not surprisingly, even this supposedly female-centered ritual ends with the former Negro woman, now the African Queen, chanting “sifa ote mtu” (all praises to the black man). That Baraka can state that this ritual should be used instead of the “derivative European-oriented rites” is beyond credulity. Doesn’t the entire project of crowning these ceremonial queens on college campuses emanate from white American practices? Actually, Baraka’s ritual is a paradoxical admission of the “Americanness” of its creator and the black students participating in it, but evidently this paradox was lost on the Imamu. Nevertheless, after reading this, I was led to wonder whether someone had created ersatz-African debutante balls or even ersatz-African Greek fraternities and sororities. See Imamu Ameer Baraka’s “The Coronation of the Black Queen,” Black Scholar, June 1970, pp. 46–48. The fact that this silliness was published in the Black Scholar is just more evidence of the degree that this supposedly serious black nationalist intellectual organ was captured by a vapid blackness at the expense of rigor.
1. LeRoi Jones / Amiri Baraka, The Autobiography of LeRoi Jones (Chicago: Lawrence Hill Books, 1997), pp. 320–21. This longer, uncut edition of Jones’s autobiography, which was published in 1997, is henceforth cited as The Autobiography II.
2. LeRoi Jones / Amiri Baraka, The Autobiography of LeRoi Jones / Amiri Baraka (New York: Freundlich Books, 1984), p. 239. This book is henceforth cited as The Autobiography.
3. Ibid., pp. 240–41.
4. Despite his admission of guilt about the death of this young woman, Baraka does not discuss the reasons. Why did she die? Did she have access to decent prenatal health care? Did she practice some sort of alternative health care as a result of her attachment to the Yoruba religion, New York style? Did Baraka? Was there any attempt to save the unborn child? See ibid., p. 241.
5. LeRoi Jones, Black Magic: Collected Poetry, 1961–1967 (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1969), p. 196. The poem “The World Is Full of Remarkable Things” was also dedicated “for little Bumi” (p. 193).
6. The Autobiography, pp. 248, 256.
7. The Autobiography, pp. 268–69.
8. The poem was reprinted in Houston Baker’s essay “Our Lady: Sonia Sanchez and the Writing of a Black Renaissance,” in Studies in Black American Literature, vol. 3: Black Feminist Criticism and Critical Theory, ed. Joe Weixlmann and Houston A. Baker Jr. (Greenwood, FL: Penkevill, 1988), p. 184.
9. Amiri Baraka, “Confessions of a Former Anti-Semite,” Village Voice, December 17, 1980, p. 20.
10. The Autobiography, p. 327.
11. Gerald Horne, Fire This Time: The Watts Uprising and the 1960s (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1995), p. 3.
12. Lewis M. Killian, The Impossible Revolution, Phase II: Black Power and the American Dream (New York: Random House, 1975), p. 94.
13. Kerner Commission, Report of the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, March 1, 1968), pp. 60–61. For a more extensive report of the Detroit riot, see Sidney Fine, Violence in the Model City: The Cavanagh Administration, Race Relations, and the Detroit Riot of 1967 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1989); and Thomas J. Sugrue, The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996).
14. Kerner Commission, Report, pp. 30–38; quotation from pp. 37–38.
15. According to the Kerner Commission’s report, the New Jersey National Guard numbered only 303 blacks in a force of 17,529.
16. Kerner Commission, Report, p. 38.
17. The Autobiography, p. 260.
18. Ibid., p. 262. At his trial, Jones claims to have repeatedly prayed “All praise to Allah” while being beaten by the police. See Village Voice, November 11, 1967, p. 3.
19. Ron Porambo, No Cause for Indictment: An Autopsy of Newark (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1971), pp. 34–35.
20. The Autobiography, p. 265.
21. Ibid.
22. Jones, Black Magic, p. 225.
23. Minneapolis Star, October 24, 1967, p. 5a.
24. The statement was written by Di Prima, Ginsberg, Olson, and Corso. A copy can be found in Beinecke Library, Yale University (LeRoi Jones Pamphlets, Box 6). P.E.N. took a position opposing the sentence given to LeRoi Jones, and a LeRoi Jones defense committee was established. An advertisement for the defense committee stated that it was “urgently in need of funds to carry on its work.” Freedomways 8, no. 1 (Winter 1968): 6.
25. In a 1963 essay entitled “Black Writing,” Jones wrote, “The Negro writer writing about his own life is in trouble too—so that some maniac can say to you as Gregory Corso said to me recently, “Black writers are stuck because they’re always talking about their people.” See LeRoi Jones, Home: Social Essays (New York: Morrow, 1966), p. 163.
26. Ginsberg’s resilient loyalty and fondness for Baraka are conveyed in an interview that was taped for the St. Clair Bourne documentary film, In Motion, Amiri Baraka. The interview was published in James B. Gwynne, ed., Amiri Baraka: The Kaleidoscopic Torch (New York: Steppingstones Press, 1985), pp. 76–83.
27. The Autobiography, pp. 269–72.
28. “Poetic Justice,” Newsweek, January 15, 1968, p. 24. Time’s coverage of the trial included a picture of Baraka, Amina, and their child. The article does not take the position that the trial or the sentencing was unjust or unusual.
29. The peculiar case of Angela Davis was that she was considered both revolutionary and unjustly prosecuted. She became a cause célèbre for her assumed role or lack thereof in the 1969 California courtroom shoot-out that involved the younger brother of George Jackson. Her incarceration was seen by many as a miscarriage of justice. But she was popularly granted a revolutionary status for having participated in the incident, even though she claimed she had not. Either way, as a victim of injustice or as a revolutionary, her image was enhanced. For a more extensive discussion of the Angela Davis affair, see her autobiography, Angela Davis: An Autobiography: With Freedom on My Mind (New York: Bantam Books, 1975), and the collection of essays that she edited while in prison, If They Come in the Morning (New York: Signet Books, 1971). There is, of course, the possibility that Jones and Davis were guilty as charged but proclaimed their innocence for obvious reasons.
30. As late as 1981, Baraka still thought that the state might attempt to kill him. See the interview with Baraka in D. H. Melhem, Heroism in the New Black Poetry: Introductions and Interviews (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1990), pp. 244–45.
31. Harold Cruse, Rebellion or Revolution (New York: Morrow, 1968), p. 188.
32. The Autobiography, p. 266.
33. Robert L. Allen, Black Awakening in Capitalist America (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1969) p. 133.
34. Chuck Stone, “The National Conference on Black Power,” in The Black Power Revolt: A Collection of Essays, ed. Floyd B. Barbour (Boston: Porter Sargent, 1968), pp. 189–98.
35. Evidently places like Haiti and Liberia did not exist for these conference participants.
36. Allen, Black Awakening, p. 138. Allen describes how the Black Power conference held in Philadelphia one year later was even more closely tied to corporate America. The call to the Philadelphia meeting was sent out on the letterhead stationary of the Clairol Company.
37. K. Komozi Woodard, “The Making of the New Ark: Imamu Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones), the Newark Congress of African People, and the Modern Black Convention Movement. A History of the Black Revolt and the New Nationalism, 1966–1976” (Ph.D. diss., University of Pennsylvania, 1991), p. 108.
38. For a description of the 1967 Newark riot, see Tom Hayden’s Rebellion in Newark: Official Violence and Ghetto Response (New York: Vintage Books, 1967).
39. Allen, Black Awakening, pp. 114–19.
40. Ibid., p. 136–39.
41. Ibid., p. 115.
42. House Committee on Un-American Activities, Charles Kinney, testimony, Hearing before the Committee on Un-American Activities, Subversive Influences in Riots, Looting, and Burning: Part 4 (Newark, N.J.), 90th Cong., 2d sess., April 23 and 24, 1968, p. 1944.
43. Tom Hayden, Reunion: A Memoir (New York: Random House, 1988), p. 127.
44. Interestingly, while Jones was trying to pacify Newark blacks, Karenga was doing the same on the West Coast. Robert Allen writes: “Following the assassination of Martin Luther King, Karenga met secretly with Los Angeles Police Chief Thomas Reddin, and he played an important part in preventing the outbreak of riots in that city.” Allen, Black Awakening, p. 139.
45. The Autobiography, p. 274.
46. Allen, Black Awakening, p. 115.
47. See The Autobiography, pp. 230–313. In fairness, I should note that even the most critical observers of black nationalist politics (except for Robert Allen and a very few others) did not at this early date foresee the limitations of black mayors and black electoral activities. Furthermore, who could have known that Gibson would have been so weak kneed and visionless? Compared with others in this first generation of black mayors, Gibson was one of the worst.
48. See James Boggs, “The City Is the Black Man’s Land,” in his volume of collected essays, Racism and the Class Struggle: Further Pages from a Black Worker’s Notebook (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1970), pp. 39–50.
49. Allen, Black Awakening, p. 115.
50. The Autobiography, p. 240.
51. Ibid., pp. 266, 267.
52. Ibid. Jones changed his name on several occasions. Everett LeRoy Jones became Leroy Jones who became LeRoi Jones, who became Ameer Barakat, who became Amiri Baraka, who later became Imamu (Spiritual Leader) Amiri Baraka and is now once again Amiri Baraka. Jones’s penchant for acquiring new names may be a sign of his objectified self-identity. To alter one’s identity, one need only to call oneself by a different name.
53. We should not overlook the irony of acquiring an Arabic name. Arabs were deeply implicated in the African slave trade. Second, Swahili was a language created when the Arabs dominated black East Africans.
54. Charlie Reilly, ed., Conversations with Amiri Baraka (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1994), p. 36.
55. Reilly, Conversations with Amiri Baraka, pp. 37–38.
56. For a discussion that engaged and disputed Karenga’s understanding of the blues, see Larry Neal, “The Ethos of the Blues,” Black Scholar 3, no. 10 (Summer 1972): 42–48.
57. The Autobiography, p. 248.
58. Horne, Fire This Time, p. 200.
59. The Autobiography, p. 253.
60. Martin Kilson, “The New Black Intellectuals,” Dissent, July/August 1969, p. 306. The Kilson formulation is somewhat ingenious and can be enhanced by an understanding of Antonio Gramsci’s concept of the organic intellectual. When revised for the contemporary American context, Gramsci’s formulation allows us to place these “paraintellectuals” in a richer political context. Kilson’s paraintellectuals are the organic intellectuals of the black urban lower-classes. See Antonio Gramsci, Selections From the Prison Notebooks, ed. Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith (New York: International Publishers, 1971), pp. 3–23; Also see the discussion of intellectuals in Christine Buci-Glucksmann’s Gramsci and the State, trans. David Fernback (London: Lawrence and Wishard, 1980); and Carl Boggs’s The Two Revolutions: Gramsci and the Dilemmas of Western Marxism (Boston: South End Press, 1984).
61. The Quotable Karenga (Los Angeles: Saidi Publications, 1967).
62. An excerpt from The Quotable Karenga can be found in Floyd Barbour, ed., The Black Power Revolt (Boston: Porter Sargent, 1968), pp. 162–70.
63. For a discussion of racism in American historiographical studies of black Americans, see David Novick, That Noble Dream: The “Objectivity Question” in American History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988).
64. Armstead Robinson, Craig C. Foster, and Donald Ogilvie, eds., Black Studies in the University (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1969), pp. 45–46.
65. Since his emergence as a “paraintellectual” during the mid-1960s, Karenga has increasingly found acceptance in academic circles, particularly in black studies programs. Legitimated by a Ph.D., Karenga now lectures in black studies programs and to black students throughout the United States. His Introduction to Black Studies (Los Angeles: Kawaida Publications, 1982) has become a standard text in many black studies courses. In the winter of 1984 I first met Karenga when he served as a discussant on a panel for which I delivered a paper as part of the annual meeting of the Western Political Science Association. Karenga did not bring up having once been a militant black cultural nationalist, and he has long since changed his rhetorical style and mastered the lingo of the academy. Today, therefore, one could not accurately label Karenga a paraintellectual, for he does engage in serious intellectual exchange and argues and writes without being dominated by his utilitarian political sensibilities. Yet he has chosen to remain his individual self by retaining his name/title Maulana and his African attire. Still an advocate of Kawaida, Karenga’s political vision has become far more expansive and progressive than it was during the 1960s. In recent years he has been studying ancient African civilizations.
66. For a discussion of Karenga’s cultural Pan-Africanism, see Nagueyalti Warren, “Pan-African Cultural Movements: From Baraka to Karenga,” Journal of Negro History 75, nos. 1–2 (Winter/Spring 1990): 16–28.
67. The Autobiography, p. 252.
68. The Nugzo Saba had a significant impact on black college students, as many of the black student centers created on white campuses during the late 1960s were given names like Umoja House or Ujamaa Center.
69. Maulana Karenga, Kwanzaa: Origin, Concepts, Practice (Los Angeles: Kawaida Publications, 1977); and Haki R. Madhubuti, Kwanzaa: A Progressive and Uplifting African-American Holiday (Chicago: Third World Press, 1972).
70. Robert Weisbrot, Freedom Bound: A History of America’s Civil Rights Movement (New York: Penguin Books, 1991), p. 229.
71. For an excellent discussion of the commodification of black culture during the Black Power era, see William L. Van Deburg, New Day in Babylon: The Black Power Movement and American Culture, 1965–1975 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992).
72. In a 1975 New York Times article discussing the ideological shifts then occurring among Jones and his nationalist peers, one black intellectual commented, “To know Baraka’s position tomorrow read Karenga today.” See Charlene Hunter, “Black Intellectuals and Activists Split on Ideological Direction,” New York Times, April 28, 1975, p. A1.
73. It is perhaps not incidental that Karenga, like Father Divine and Elijah Muhammad, had the desire and authority to rename his followers, as if to give them totally new existences. Black autocracy, particularly black religious autocracy, has a tradition.
74. The Autobiography, pp. 253–54.
75. Ibid.
76. Nathan Joseph and Nicholas Alex discussed the importance of uniforms to the maintenance of a group: “For his peers . . . the uniform underscores a common membership, allegiance to the same set of rules, and the probability of similar life experiences. If he is an outsider, the uniform stresses the differences in status, norms and way of life. It serves, then, to bind the wearer to his peers and to separate him from outsiders . . . from his own group he will obtain self-esteem through conformity: from other groups, he may obtain self-prestige by conflict.” See “The Uniform: A Sociological Perspective,” American Journal of Sociology 77, no. 4 (January 1972): 726.
77. See Adolph Reed, “Black Particularity Reconsidered,” Telos, no. 39 (Spring 1979): 71–93.
78. From interviews with several members of Baraka’s former security detail, I learned that both Karenga’s and Baraka’s followers were usually armed. Moreover, before the installation of FAA metal detectors at airports, Karenga’s followers would travel by plane completely “strapped.”
79. See the impressive trilogy by Richard Slotkin, Regeneration through Violence (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1973), The Fatal Environment (New York: Atheneum, 1985), and Gunfighter Nation (New York: Atheneum, 1992). To make this analogy work in the case of urban blacks and Baraka, we must change the context and perhaps view the urban landscape (Baraka’s black internal colonies or nations) as divinely ordained “black space” that both is occupied by whites (in terms of economic control) and serves as the geographical and mythical backdrop for the realization of black freedom and manhood.
80. As a young person in Newark, Jones had never formally joined a gang, although he had been on the periphery of one.
81. Kenneth O’Reilly, ed., Racial Matters: The FBI’s File on Black America, 1960–1972 (New York: Free Press, 1989), and Black Americans: The FBI Files (New York: Carroll & Graf, 1994); and Ward Churchill and Jim Vander Wall, Agents of Repression: The FBI’s Secret Wars against the Black Panther Party and the American Indian Movement (Boston: South End Press, 1988).
82. The Autobiography, p. 279.
83. A comprehensive and damning appraisal of Karenga’s behavior in postriot Watts can be found in Bruce Michael Tyler, “Black Radicalism in Southern California, 1950–1982” (Ph.D. diss., University of California at Los Angeles, 1983). Tyler documents Karenga’s role as a state functionary who spent more time trying to control oppositional black organizations than he did confronting the racist social order. While I cannot confirm many of Tyler’s claims concerning Karenga, it does seem clear that Karenga and US wanted to be recognized by the powers that be as the only valid black militant organization. Once having obtained that status and the police protection that accompanied it, Karenga’s organization could effectively neutralize other black groups. In effect, Karenga and US functioned as adjunct arms of the state but did so under the guise of being revolutionary—a good hustle, indeed. Unfortunately, Tyler’s thesis is based on the silly idea that had Karenga and the cultural nationalists not been present, a revolutionary struggle might have broken out in Watts in the guise of more riots or even war. This is patently nonsense. Perhaps there would have been more rioting, but there is no reason to think that it would have been elevated to “revolutionary” actions. Karenga was not crazy in trying to squash urban rioting in Los Angeles. After all, the second time around, the state would have been more deeply invested in asserting its control. However, Tyler convincingly argues that the cultural nationalism espoused by Karenga functioned in a therapeutic fashion. This may have been rational on Karenga’s part, but it was not the image that Karenga was marketing of himself and his organization nationally. For a sophomoric and ultimately pathetic attempt to defend Karenga against all accusations of complicity with the police, see Scot Ngozi-Brown’s “The US Organization, Maulana Karenga, and Conflict with the Black Panther Party: A Critique of Sectarian Influences on Historical Discourse,” Journal of Black Studies 28, no. 2 (November 1997): 157–70.
84. Allen, Black Awakening, p. 139.
85. For a discussion of Karenga’s open participation in antiriot pacification programs, see Horne, Fire This Time.
86. Newton’s dissertation was written for the History of Consciousness program at the University of California at Santa Cruz. It was later published in book form. See Huey P. Newton, War against the Panthers: A Study of Repression in America (New York: Harlem River Press, 1996).
87. I have no way of verifying Perry’s claims concerning Hubert.
88. M. Wesley Swearingen, FBI Secrets: An Agent’s Expose (Boston: South End Press, 1995), p. 83.
89. Tyler, “Black Radicalism in Southern California,” pp. 374–77.
1. David J. Garrow, ed., The Montgomery Bus Boycott and the Women Who Started It: The Memoir of Jo Ann Gibson Robinson (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1987); Cynthia Stokes Brown, ed., Ready from Within: Septima Clark and the Civil Rights Movement: A First Person Narrative (Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 1990);
Kay Mills, This Little Light of Mine: The Life of Fannie Lou Hammer (New York: Plume, 1994); Carol Mueller, “Ella Baker and the Origins of “Participatory Democracy,” in Women in the Civil Rights Movement: Trailblazers and Torchbearers, 1941–1965, ed. Vicki L. Crawford, Jacqueline Anne Rouse, and Barbara Woods (New York: Carlson, 1990); Annette K. Brock, “Gloria Richardson and the Cambridge Movement,” in Women in the Civil Rights Movement, ed. Crawford et al. For an extensive treatment of Robinson, see Cynthia Griggs Fleming, Soon We Will Not Cry: The Liberation of Ruby Doris Smith Robinson (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1998); and Daisy Bates, The Long Shadow of Little Rock: A Memoir (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 1987).
2. Sara Evans, Personal Politics: The Roots of Women’s Liberation in the Civil Rights Movement and the New Left (New York: Vintage Books, 1980); Mary King, Freedom Song (New York: Morrow, 1987); Belinda Robnett, How Long? How Long? African-American Women in the Struggle for Civil Rights (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), pp. 99–121.
3. Robnett, How Long? How Long? pp. 180–82.
4. Note that the black power era was before the American military accepted females into its ranks.
5. Eldridge Cleaver, Soul on Ice (New York: Dell, 1968), p. 189.
6. Phobic white responses to black militancy occasionally linked black assertiveness to communism. Anthony Imperiale, the leader of white ethnic backlash in Newark during the late 1960s and early 1970s, sometimes publicly referred to LeRoi Jones and his black nationalist peers as “communists.” See L. H. Whittemore, Together: A Reporter’s Journey into the New Black Politics (New York: Morrow, 1971), pp. 197–98. Perhaps this should not be surprising, since many white southerners viewed the civil rights movement as communist inspired.
7. Claude Andrew Clegg III, An Original Man: The Life and Times of Elijah Muhammad (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997), p. 102.
8. Elijah Muhammad, Message to the Blackman (Chicago: Muhammad’s Temple no.2, 1965), pp. 59–60.
9. Patricia Hill Collins, “Learning to Think for Ourselves: Malcolm X’s Black Nationalism Reconsidered,” in Malcolm X: In Our Own Image, ed. Joe Wood (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1992), p. 74.
10. Ossie Davis, “Our Shining Black Prince,” in Malcolm X: The Man and His Times, ed. John Henrik Clarke (New York: Macmillan, 1969), p. xii.
11. Cavalier Magazine, January 1966, p. 23.
12. LeRoi Jones, “American Sexual Reference: Black Male,” in his Home: Social Essays (New York: Morrow, 1966), pp. 221–22.
13. Perhaps I need not mention that had a white person written such vulgarity, he or she would have been resoundingly condemned by the newly blackenized black literati. Instead, Baraka’s foolishness was often accepted as raw and disturbing but undoubtedly insightful and ethnically authentic.
14. Jones, “American Sexual Reference,” pp. 216–17. The idea of the white man as an effeminate, intellectual weakling is dramatized in Jones’s play The Slave.
15. Robyn Wiegman, American Anatomies: Theorizing Race and Gender (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995), p. 107.
16. Besides insisting that his rapes of black and white women were acts of political rebellion, Cleaver’s Soul on Ice also provided us with vicious homophobic commentaries on black homosexuals, particularly James Baldwin. Michele Wallace accurately states that one of Cleaver’s “most dubious contributions was the idea that black homosexuality was synonymous with reactionary Uncle Tomism.” See Michele Wallace, Black Macho and the Myth of the Superwoman (London: John Calder, 1979), p. 67. Cleaver, whose homophobia exceeded that of Jones, could not possibly have denounced James Baldwin more viciously than to have claimed that Baldwin wished to have a white man’s baby. It was an indication of the degree to which “black macho” nonsense had become hegemonic in the black power era that a thug like Cleaver was allowed to denounce an ethnic treasure like Baldwin and receive very little criticism from the black intelligentsia. Jones’s denunciations of homosexuality may originate from the same roots as his diatribes against interracial sex/marriage. That is, he might have been guilty of attempting to exorcise a haunting past. In a letter from Peter Orlovsky to Allen Ginsberg dated September 25, 1963, Orlovsky wrote, concerning Jones, “I hope Leroy is happy and alright. Sorry I didn’t make love with him when he wanted me to. John was right when he said I was scared.” Winston Leyland, ed., Allen Ginsberg and Peter Orlovsky: Straight Hearts’ Delight: Love Poems and Selected Letters (San Francisco: Gay Sunshine Press, 1980), p. 216.
17. Jones, Home pp. 227, 228.
18. bell hooks, Ain’t I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism (Boston: South End Press, 1981), p. 96.
19. Martin Duberman, The Uncompleted Past (New York: Random House, 1969), p. 135.
20. Literary scholar Robyn Wiegman argues that Jones’s mention of the black rapist of white women is part of a larger tradition: “Throughout the twentieth century, black male writers have repeatedly turned to the figuration of the black rapist as both a protest and warning, purposely revising the mythic encounter between black men and white women as part of a challenge to the history of mutilation.” She includes Richard Wright’s Bigger Thomas in this tradition as well as an episode in Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man. See Wiegman, American Anatomies, p. 104.
21. Cleaver, Soul on Ice, p. 14.
22. In Soul on Ice, Eldridge Cleaver quotes from Jones’s poem “Black Dada Nihilismus,” chiefly those lines calling for the raping of white girls and their fathers and the cutting of their mothers’ throats. Cleaver then comments on the poem: “I have lived those lines and I know that if I had not been apprehended I would have slit some white throats. There are, of course, many young blacks out here right now who are slitting white throats and raping the white girl. They are not doing this because they read LeRoi Jones’ poetry, as some of his critics seem to believe. Rather, LeRoi is expressing the funky facts of life” (p. 15). It remains one of the sickest legacies of the 1960s that the moral perversion expressed in Jones’s poem would be considered somehow “revolutionary” and, worse, that the pathology expressed in Cleaver’s behavior did not undermine his revolutionary credibility. The opposite occurred; Cleaver’s past as a rapist enhanced his revolutionary credibility.
23. Wiegman, American Anatomies, p. 107.
24. Max Scheler, Ressentiment, ed. Lewis Coser and trans. William W. Holdheim (New York: Schocken Books, 1961). Concerning his attitude during this period in his life, Jones wrote: “There was a deep anti-white feeling I carried with me that had grown deeper and deeper since I left the Village . . . to the extent that I merely turned white supremacy upside down and created an exclusivist black supremacist doctrine, that was bullshit.” See LeRoi Jones / Amiri Baraka, The Autobiography of LeRoi Jones / Amiri Baraka (New York: Freundlich Books, 1984), p. 245. This book is henceforth cited as The Autobiography.
25. The crucial texts in this regard were Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth and Black Skin, White Masks. In his autobiography, Baraka states: “But we made the same errors Fanon and Cabral laid out, if we had but read them, understood them. . . . Crying blackness and for all the strength and goodness of that, not understanding the normal contradictions and the specific foolishness of white-hating black nationalism. The solution is not to become the enemy in blackface” (p. 323).
26. For a discussion of Jones’s homosexual past and his inability to accept this aspect of his identity, see Ron Simmons, “Baraka’s Dilemma: To Be or Not to Be,” in Black Men on Race, Gender, and Sexuality: A Critical Reader, ed. Devon W. Carbado (New York: New York University Press, 1999), pp. 317–23.
27. Elaine Brown, A Taste of Power: A Black Woman’s Story (New York: Pantheon, 1992), p. 109.
28. Angela Davis, An Autobiography: With My Mind on Freedom (New York: Bantam, 1974), pp. 159–60.
29. The Autobiography, p. 275.
30. Ibid.
31. This essay was republished in Baraka’s essay collection Raise Race Rays Raze: Essays since 1965 (New York: Random House, 1971).
32. Baraka, Raise Race Rays Raze, p. 148. Note also that in this essay, Baraka was quite comfortable with the idea of complementary sexes, even though he is quoted earlier as calling “complementary” a Karenga play of words that, in reality, meant unequal.
33. hooks, Ain’t I a Woman, p. 95.
34. Jones, Raise Race Rays Raze, p. 148.
35. Ibid., p. 149.
36. Ibid., p. 151.
37. Ibid., p. 152.
38. Imamu Amiri Baraka, ed., African Congress: A Documentary of the First Modern Pan-African Congress (New York: Morrow, 1972), p. 177.
39. Ibid., p. 179.
40. This quotation is found in The Combahee River Collective Statement written by the Combahee River Collective and reprinted in Barbara Smith, ed., Home Girls: A Black Feminist Anthology (New York: Kitchen Table, Women of Color Press, 1983), p. 278.
41. See Lee Rainwater and William L. Yancey, The Moynihan Report and the Politics of Controversy (Cambridge, MA: Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press, 1967).
42. Robert Staples, The Black Woman in America: Sex, Marriage and the Family (Chicago: Nelson-Hall, 1973), p. 176.
43. One scholar offered a rather sophisticated argument in support of the claim that misogyny was present in Dutchman and The Slave in ways the prefigured the sexism in Baraka’s black arts dramas. See Beth McCoy, “A Nation’s Meta-language: Misogyny in Amiri Baraka’s Dutchman and The Slave,” in Staging the Rage: The Web of Misogyny in Modern Drama, ed. Katherine H. Burkman and Judith Roof (Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1998), pp. 54–75. While I find McCoy’s arguments compelling, they also strike me as hyperacademic and pedantic in the style of so much of the theory in the humanities today. In order to substantiate her readings of these two plays, McCoy is forced to create an analytical narrative that goes far beyond the impressions conveyed by these plays to a “normal” and reasonable audience. That is, she is so concerned with discussing the hidden meanings of the play that she appears to overlook the fact that its message also had to be apparent to the audience if it was to convey a political statement.
44. hooks, Ain’t I a Woman, p. 106.
45. LeRoi Jones, Four Black Revolutionary Plays (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1969), p. 81.
46. Ibid., pp. 82, 83.
47. James Cone, For My People: Black Theology and the Black Church (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1984), p. 131.
48. “Black Theatre Discovers the New Lafayette,” Black Theatre, no. 5 (1971): 37.
49. The Autobiography, p. 276.
50. Amiri Baraka and Amina Baraka, eds., Confirmation: An Anthology of African American Women (New York: Quill, 1983), p. 15.
51. Ibid., p. 16.
52. LeRoi Jones / Amiri Baraka, The Autobiography of LeRoi Jones (Chicago: Lawrence Hill Books, 1997) (The Autobiography II), p. xvi.
1. See Harold Gosnell, Negro Politicians (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1935); Dianne Pinderhughes, Race and Ethnicity in Chicago Politics: A Reexamination of Pluralist Theory (Champaign-Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1987); and William J. Grimshaw, Bitter Fruit: Black Politics and the Chicago Machine, 1931–1991 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992).
2. Robert Curvin, “Black Ghetto Politics in Newark after World War II,” in Cities of the Garden State: Essays in the Urban and Suburban History of New Jersey, ed. Joel Schwartz and Daniel Prosser (Dubuque, IA: Kendall Hunt, 1977), p. 146.
3. George Sternlieb and Robert W. Burchell, Residential Abandonment: The Tenement Landlord Revisited (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University, Center for Urban Policy Research, 1973), pp. 5, 41.
4. Harold Kaplan, Urban Renewal Politics: Slum Clearance in Newark (New York: Columbia University Press, 1963). In explaining the criteria that led him to conclude that Newark had been highly successful at urban renewal, Kaplan wrote, “Throughout this study the term ‘success’ is used synonymously with high levels of clearance activity. Defined in this way, success may be measured by the number of blocks cleared, the number of new dwelling units constructed, or the total amount of funds spent. It is a quantitative, not qualitative index; it deliberately avoids questions involving the appropriateness of particular versions of renewal policy” (p. 2).
5. Robert Curvin, “The Persistent Minority: The Black Political Experience in Newark” (Ph.D. diss., Princeton University, 1975), pp. 22, 25.
6. Ibid., p. 21.
7. Ibid., pp. 36, 33.
8. Ibid., p. 42. For a list of these positions, see pp. 47–49.
9. Ibid., p. 89.
10. In 1966, Gibson had no organization and only $2,000 in campaign funds. See Bette Woody, Managing Crisis Cities: The New Black Leadership and the Politics of Resource Allocation (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1982), p. 77.
11. Throughout urban America, community action agencies became infrastructures for the emergence of community leaders. See Frances Fox Piven and Richard Cloward, Regulating the Poor: The Functions of Public Welfare (New York: Vintage Books, 1972), esp. chap. 10.
12. LeRoi Jones / Amiri Baraka, The Autobiography of LeRoi Jones (Chicago: Lawrence Hill Books, 1997), pp. 349, 350. This later edition is henceforth cited as The Autobiography II.
13. Leonard Cole, Blacks in Power: A Comparative Study of Black and White Elected Officials (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1976), p. 140.
14. This quotation from the New York Times, April 14, 1968, is found in Curvin, “The Persistent Minority,” p. 68.
15. K. Komozi Woodward, “The Making of the New Ark: Imamu Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones), the Newark Congress of African People, and the Modern Black Convention Movement. A History of the Black Revolt and the New Nationalism, 1966–1976” (Ph.D. diss., University of Pennsylvania, 1991), p. 164.
16. Hutchins further developed his critique of Baraka and the United Brothers’ strategy in an unpublished essay that was circulating at the time: “If there is a weakness in the United Brothers approach it is the question of whether or not black control of Newark by 1970 can actually fundamentally change the lives of blacks in the city. It is no secret that economic power is moving to the suburbs. . . . In the long run Newark (though now a pace setter) cannot be separated from what happens around the nation. . . . Black control of some cities where blacks are the majority (or have a plurality) is not the answer to racism in 20th century America. It may be that black people will have to have blacks in power over them within the confines of this system before they can truly recognize the necessity to organize against capitalism as well as the racist aspects of America.” See Robert L. Allen, Black Awakening in Capitalist America (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1969), pp. 119–20.
17. Curvin noted that a third black candidate was later endorsed as a United Brothers candidate when a second at-large city council seat became vacant. Ironically, this third candidate had at first been considered too close to Addonizio. See Curvin, “The Persistent Minority,” p. 68.
18. For example, one of the symbolic resolutions called for “staunch resistance by draft-age black youth against being used as cannon fodder for this racist imperialistic war,” which was passed unanimously. See K. Komozi Woodard, A Nation within a Nation: Amiri Baraka (Leroi Jones) and Black Power Politics (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999), p. 108.
19. Nikki Giovanni, “Black Poems, Poseurs and Power,” Negro Digest 18, no. 8 (June 1969): 31.
20. Some of them remained top aides to Gibson once he became mayor.
21. L. H. Whittemore, Together: A Reporter’s Journey into the New Black Politics (New York: Morrow, 1971), p. 103.
22. Ibid., p. 103. According to Whittemore, this latter comment was directed to the white business establishment of Newark which had somehow let it be known that according to their informal plans, 1974, and not 1970, would be the year of a black ascension to the mayoralty. In their minds, 1970 was too soon, whatever that meant. Gibson’s comment about “puppets and Uncle Toms” supposedly let the white power structure know that it was not their choice to make.
23. Baraka believes that the energy spent by Imperiale, Addonizio, and their supporters denouncing him as a black racist and extremist backfired. Not only did their attacks on him help unite blacks, but it also kept the focus of their energy and scrutiny away from candidate Gibson. Moreover, when juxtaposed with Gibson’s more issue-oriented campaign, the hysteria of their ad hominem attacks on Baraka made Gibson appear even more “mayoral.” See Amiri Baraka, “The Creation of the New Ark,” chap. 12. This unpublished manuscript is housed in the Amiri Baraka Collection of the Moorland-Spingarn Research Center, Howard University.
24. Whittemore, Together, p. 105. Perhaps it is significant that Addonizio ignored the Puerto Ricans in his description of the convention. Blacks, I presume, occupied a more central position in white racist demonology.
25. Amiri Baraka, Raise Race Rays Raze (New York: Random House, 1971), p. 163.
26. Baraka uses this racial reification of black Americans throughout his analysis in his unpublished manuscript “The Creation of the New Ark,” in which he calls black politicians who did not follow his black nationalist agenda “white-like.”
27. Nathan Wright Jr., ed., What Black Politicians Are Saying (New York: Hawthorn Books, Inc.1972), p. 111. Gibson’s essay is entitled “Newark and We,” pp. 110–25. It is not clear to whom Gibson is referring as constituting “those whose political motives will not allow”—perhaps his white antagonists on the city council or Anthony Imperiale or even Baraka.
28. Ibid., p. 124.
29. Ron Porambo, No Cause for Indictment: An Autopsy of Newark (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1971), pp. 7–8.
30. Woody, Managing Crisis Cities, p. 105.
31. Wright, ed., What Black Politicians Are Saying, p. 116.
32. David Llorens, “Ameer (LeRoi Jones) Baraka,” Ebony, August 1969, p. 80; Curvin, “The Persistent Minority,” p. 203.
33. Woodard, A Nation within a Nation, p. 120.
34. Ibid., p. 122.
35. David Llorens, “Ameer (LeRoi Jones) Baraka,” Ebony, August 1969, p. 78.
36. Fox Butterfield, “Experimental Class in Newark School Is Indoctrinated in Black Subjects,” New York Times, April 10, 1971, p. 42.
37. Interview with Imamu Amiri Baraka in The Black Collegian 3, no. 4 March/April 1973): 30–33.
38. Woodard, A Nation within a Nation, p. 132.
39. Curvin, “The Persistent Minority,” p. 200.
40. Black New Ark 2, no. 11 (October 1973): 7.
41. New York Times, March 7, 1973, p. 47; and Leonard A. Cole, Blacks in Power (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1976), p. 171.
1. Martin Luther King Jr., Stride towards Freedom: The Montgomery Story (New York: Harper Bros., 1958).
2. In what must be construed as a phenomenally naive statement, NAACP attorney Thurgood Marshall was quoted in the New York Times only a day or two after the Brown decision as saying that school segregation would be completely ended within five years and that all forms of segregation would be eliminated by the hundredth anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation (1965). See Richard Klugar, Simple Justice (New York: Knopf, 1976), p. 714.
3. Instead of desegregating public schools, whites opened “private” all-white academies subsidized by county funds. See Bob Smith, They Closed Their Schools: Prince Edward County, Virginia, 1951–1964 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1965); Daniel Berman, It Is So Ordered: The Supreme Court Rules on School Segregation (New York: Norton, 1966); and Kluger, Simple Justice, p. 778.
4. For a description of Ike’s pathetic immorality on racial issues, see Earl Ofari Hutchinson, Betrayed: A History of Presidential Failure to Protect Black Lives (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1996), chap. 4. Also see Kenneth O’Reilly, Nixon’s Piano: Presidents and Racial Politics from Washington to Clinton (New York: Free Press, 1995). In his memoirs, Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court Earl Warren reminisced about a moment during the Brown deliberations when he was invited to the White House for dinner. The president had also invited John W. Davis, the lead attorney for the forces wanting to maintain racial segregation. Clearly, the president was trying, inappropriately, to influence the man whom he had appointed as chief justice. Warren described the moment: “During the dinner, the President went to considerable lengths to tell me what a great man Mr. Davis was. At the conclusion of the meal . . . we filed out of the dining room to another room. . . . The President . . . took me by the arm, and, as we walked along, speaking of the Southern states in the segregation cases, he said, ‘These are not bad people. All they are concerned about is to see that their sweet little girls are not required to sit in school alongside some big overgrown Negroes.’ . . . Shortly thereafter the Brown case was decided, and with it went our cordial relations.” Earl Warren, The Memoirs of Earl Warren (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1977), pp. 296–97.
5. A comprehensive discussion of the Emmett Till lynching can be found in Stephen J. Whitfield’s A Death in the Delta: The Story of Emmett Till (New York: Free Press, 1988).
6. Robert Weisbrot, Freedom Bound: A History of America’s Civil Rights Movement (New York: Plume, 1991), p. 93.
7. I use the term renewed because historian Penny Von Eschen convincingly showed that during the 1940s there was significant agitation in the Afro-American community about African decolonization. See Penny Von Eschen, Race against Empire: Black Americans and Anticolonialism, 1937–1957 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997).
8. For a short discussion of the history of African students at Lincoln University, see the essay by Lincoln’s former president, Horace Mann Bond, “Forming Afri-can Youth at Lincoln University,” in Black Homeland, Black Diaspora: Cross Currents of the African Relationship, ed. Jacob Drachler (Port Washington, NY: Kennikat Press, 1975), pp. 114–19. Like Howard University, Lincoln University has a tradition of educating Africans.
9. Harold Isaacs, The New World of Negro Americans (New York: John Day, 1963), pp. 288–89.
10. See Jean Van Lierd, ed., Lumumba Speaks: the Speeches and Writings of Patrice Lumumba, 1958–1961, trans. Helen R. Lane with an introduction by Jean-Paul Sartre (Boston: Little, Brown, 1972). As Sartre notes, the United States’ desire to murder Lumumba is somewhat baffling, since he was not trying to nationalize Western business interests in the Congo (contrary to what Baraka, in his autobiography, later claimed concerning Lumumba). Moreover, Lumumba’s speeches show that he was not a sophisticated political thinker. But how could Lumumba have been a sophisticated political thinker, given the meager exposure and education offered to him and other colonized Africans in the Congo?
11. Madeleine G. Kalb, The Congo Cables: The Cold War in Africa—From Eisenhower to Kennedy (New York: Macmillan, 1982). According to Kalb, the United States supposedly feared a Communist takeover of the Congo should Lumumba become its first head of state and was in the process of planning Lumumba’s assassination when he was killed.
12. The Belgian Congo’s Katanga Province was the region richest in natural resources and minerals. If Katanga had seceded from the rest of the Congo, the new nation would have lost much of its wealth.
13. LeRoi Jones / Amiri Baraka, The Autobiography of LeRoi Jones / Amiri Baraka (New York: Freundlich Books, 1984), p. 181. This book is henceforth cited as The Autobiography.
14. Some of the major studies of Pan-Africanism are George Padmore, Pan-Africanism or Communism (New York: Doubleday, 1972); W. E. B. Du Bois, The World and Africa (New York: International Publishers, 1965); Imanuel Geiss, The Pan-African Movement: A History of Pan-Africanism in America, Europe and Africa, trans. Ann Keep (New York: Africana Publishing, 1974); Colin Legum, Pan-Africanism: A Short Political Guide (New York: Praeger, 1962); Ronald W. Walters, Pan-Africanism in the African Diaspora: An Analysis of Modern Afrocentric Political Movements (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1993); and American Society of African Culture, ed., Pan-Africanism Reconsidered (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1962).
15. John Henrik Clarke, “Pan-Africanism: A Brief History of an Idea in the African World,” Présence Africaine 145, no. 1 (1988): 28.
16. Manning Marable, Blackwater: Historical Studies in Race, Class Consciousness and Revolution (Dayton, OH: Black Praxis Press, 1981), p. 102.
17. Walters, Pan Africanism in the African Diaspora, p. 43.
18. But even this is not a sacred category. Even though racial designations often vary according to area, membership in the Pan-African world was usually extended to any person of African descent, without regard for the quantity of African “blood” in his or her veins. As it emerged in the United States, Pan-Africanism often internationalized the criteria for determining black racial identity prevalent in the United States.
19. For an example of Du Bois’s liberal Pan-Africanism, see his essays “Liberia, the League and the United States,” Foreign Affairs 11, no. 4 (July 1933): 682–95, and “Pan-Africa and New Racial Philosophy,” The Crisis 40 (November 1933): 247–62; and Benjamin Nnambi Azikiwe, Liberia in World Politics (London: A. W. Stockwell, 1935). Azikiwe later became the first president of the newly independent nation of Nigeria. Also see Cedric J. Robinson, “W. E. B. Du Bois and Black Sovereignty,” in Imagining Home: Class, Culture and Nationalism in the African Diaspora, ed. Sidney Lemelle and Robin D. G. Kelley (London: Verso, 1994), pp. 145–57; and I. K. Sundiata, Black Scandal: America and the Liberian Labor Crisis, 1926–1936 (Philadelphia: Institute for the Study of Human Issues, 1980). Finally, see Colin Leys, Underdevelopment in Kenya: The Political Economy of Neo-Colonialism, 1964–1971 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1975).
20. See President Nyerere’s welcoming speech to the delegates attending the Sixth Pan-African Congress in Dar es Salaam in 1974 in Resolutions and Selected Speeches from the Sixth Pan African Congress (Dar es Salaam: Tanzania Publishing House, 1976), pp. 3–10; and Seko Toure’s speech at the Sixth Pan-African Congress in ibid., pp. 11–17. See also Amilcar Cabral’s “Connecting the Struggles: An Informal Talk with Black Americans,” in his collection of essays, Return to the Source: Selected Speeches of Amilcar Cabral, ed. Africa Information Service (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1973). Walter Rodney wrote a highly contentious speech condemning liberal Pan-Africanism that he intended to give to the Sixth Pan-African Congress. Although he recognized liberal Pan-Africanism as the dominant form of Pan-Africanism on the African continent, he claimed that it was the Pan-Africanism of the African petty bourgeoisie. See Walter Rodney, “Towards the Sixth Pan-African Congress: Aspects of the International Class Struggle in Africa, the Caribbean and America,” in Resolutions and Selected Speeches from the Sixth Pan African Congress (Dar es Salaam: Tanzania Publishing House, 1976), pp. 21–34.
21. Adelaide M. Cromwell, ed., Dynamics of the African Afro-American Connection: From Dependency to Self-Reliance (Washington, DC: Howard University Press, 1987), pp. 43–45.
22. During the late 1960s and early 1970s, the ideas of Senegal’s Cheikh Anta Diop influenced the thought of black Americans who favored black cultural nationalism and/or Pan-Africanism based on shared cultural cores. See Diop, The African Origins of Civilization: Myth or Reality (New York: Lawrence Hill, 1974), and esp. The Cultural Unity of Negro Africa (Paris: Presence Africaine Press, 1970). See Kwame Anthony Appiah, In My Father’s House: Africa in the Philosophy of Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), esp. chap. 2. Padmore’s ideas on Pan Africanism can be found in his many books, including How Britain Rules Africa (London: Wishart Books, 1936), Africa and World Peace (London: Secker and Warburg, 1937), Africa: Britain’s Third Empire (London: Dennis Dobson, 1949), Pan-Africanism or Communism (London: Dennis Dobson, 1956), and a book he edited, Colonial and Coloured Unity, a Programme of Action: History of the Pan-African Congress (Manchester: Panaf Services, 1947). For a discussion of Du Bois’s Pan-Africanism, see Imanuel Geiss, The Pan-African Movement, chaps. 12 and 18; Manning Marable, W. E. B. Du Bois: Black Radical Democrat (Boston: Twayne, 1986); and Robinson, “W. E. B. Du Bois and Black Sovereignty,” pp. 145–57. For a collective discussion of the Pan-Africanist politics of Robeson, Du Bois, Alpheus Hunton, and others who created the Council on African Affairs, see Penny M. Von Eschen, “African Americans and Anti-Colonialism, 1937–1957: The Rise and Fall of the Politics of the African Diaspora” (Ph.D. diss., Columbia University, 1994). A revised version of this dissertation was published as Race against Empire. For James’s ideas on Pan-Africanism, see C. L. R. James, A History of Pan-African Revolt (Washington, DC: Drum and Spear Press, 1969), and his essay “Towards the Seventh: The Pan-African Congress—Past, Present and Future,” in his essay collection At the Rendezvous of Victory (London: Allison and Busby, 1984), pp. 236–50.
23. For a discussion of the mass marketing and consumption of African artifacts during the Black Power era, see William L. Van Deburg, New Day in Babylon: The Black Power Movement and American Culture, 1965–1975 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992).
24. The lecture that he delivered at the congress was subsequently published as “Tradition and Industrialization” (chap. 2) in Wright’s essay collection, White Man Listen (New York: Doubleday, 1957). See also Michel Fabre, The World of Richard Wright (Oxford: University Press of Mississippi, 1985), p. 201.
25. The proceedings of this congress are published in Imamu Amiri Baraka, ed., African Congress: A Documentary of the First Modern Pan-African Congress (New York: Morrow, 1972).
26. Ibid., p. 108.
27. Ibid., pp. 117–18.
28. The Congress of African Peoples is discussed in The Autobiography, pp. 289–312.
29. In his autobiography, Baraka notes that at the time of the Atlanta congress, Karenga was either mentally unstable or in a drug-induced stupor as a result of stress following the murder of two Panthers by members of Karenga’s US on the UCLA campus. Karenga was paralyzed with fear of retaliation by the Panthers.
30. K. Komozi Woodard, “The Making of the New Ark: Imamu Amiri Baraka, the Newark Congress of African People, and the Modern Black Convention Movement: A History of the Black Revolt and the New Nationalism, 1966–1976” (Ph.D. diss., University of Pennsylvania, 1991), or Woodard’s A Nation within a Nation: Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones) and Black Power Politics (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999), esp. chap. 5.
31. At no point in his discussion of CAP in his autobiography does Baraka reflect on any of its shortcomings other than its various positions on issues.
32. Alphonso Pinkney, Red, Black and Green: Black Nationalism in the United States (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976), p. 135.
33. In private conversations, I asked two members of his Newark coterie if they ever questioned Baraka on matters of “theory” or strategy, and both told me that they did not engage in give-and-take discussions with him. Rather, their task was to listen to him.
34. On December 8, 1970, the United States along with France, Great Britain, and Spain abstained from voting on a UN Security Council resolution that condemned Portugal’s November 22, 1970, invasion of the Republic of Guinea. The United States formally accepted the findings of the UN special mission that determined that Portugal had in fact invaded the country. The United States claimed, however, that such behavior did not merit UN sanctions against Portugal. For a more extended discussion of U.S. complicity in Portuguese colonialism, see Congressman John Conyers’s essay, “Portugal Invades Guinea: The Failure of U.S. Policy towards Africa,” in What Black Politicians Are Saying, ed. Nathan Wright Jr. (New York: Hawthorn Books, 1972), pp. 94–109.
35. Walters, Pan-Africanism in the African Diaspora, p. 71.
36. Manning Marable, Race, Reform and Rebellion: The Second Reconstruction in Black America, 1945–1990 (rev. 2d ed.) (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1991), p. 134.
37. Donald R. Culverson, “The Politics of the Anti-Apartheid Movement in the United States, 1969–1996,” Political Science Quarterly 111, no.1 (1996): 127–49.
38. Walters, Pan-Africanism in the African Diaspora, pp. 84–85.
39. I am not claiming that the problem with the “theorists” associated with the leadership of the African Liberation Support Committee was that they were “ideological.” Instead, I am claiming that their ideology was problematic because it was dogmatic and constituted a totalizing truth, much like a fundamentalist religious belief.
40. Although their aggressiveness toward one another is baffling to me, such behavior was not unusual for highly politicized, marginalized formations. After all, such internecine warfare was commonplace throughout the history of the American Communist Party.
41. Of course, Ethiopia and Liberia were “independent” African nations at the time of Ghana’s founding.
42. For a discussion of Nkrumah as a charismatic leader, see David E. Apter, “Nkrumah, Charisma, and the Coup,” in Philosophers and Kings: Studies in Leadership, ed. Dunkwart A. Rustow (New York: Braziller, 1970), pp. 112–47. And for a brief but critical description of the Nkrumah regime in Ghana, see Manning Marable, African and Caribbean Politics: From Kwame Nkrumah to the Grenada Revolution (London: Verso, 1987), chap. 2. After the coup, Nkrumah lived the remainder of his life in exile in Guinea where Seko Toure gave him the honorary title of Joint Head of State of Guinea. After a long bout with cancer, Nkrumah died in Bucharest, Romania, on April 27, 1972. On July 7, 1972, his body was flown to Accra where it lay in state before being buried.
43. Ronald Segal, African Profiles (rev. ed.) (Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1963), p. 312.
44. Dorothy Shipley White, Black Africa and De Gaulle: From French Empire to Independence (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1979), pp. 201–11. This book is useful for factual data, but the author’s interpretative presuppositions are so closely wedded to the belief that de Gaulle was a great figure that she seriously entertains the racist idea that France colonized Africa out of a benevolent desire to give it the richness of French culture and that Africans needed French culture whether they knew it or not. Also see Wole Soyinka, The Open Sore of a Continent: A Personal Narrative of the Nigerian Crisis (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), p. 36.
45. For a discussion of Toure’s political thought and behavior, see Charles F. Andrain, “The Political Thought of Seko Toure,” in African Political Thought: Lumumba, Nkrumah, and Toure, ed. W. A. E. Skurnik (Denver: Monograph Series in World Affairs, University of Denver, 1968), pp. 101–35; R. W. Johnson, “Seko Toure and the Guinean Revolution,” African Affairs 69, no. 277 (October 1970): 350–65; Ladipo Adamolekun, Sekou Toure’s Guinea: An Experiment in Nation Building (London: Methuen, 1976); Claude Riviere, Guinea: The Mobilization of a People, trans. Virginia Thompson and Richard Adloff (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1977); and Lansine Kaba, “Rhetoric and Reality in Conakry,” Africa Report 23, no. 3 (May/June 1978): 43–47. For examples of Toure’s thought, see Ahmed Seko Toure, Africa on the Move (London: Panaf Books, 1979), and his Pan-Africanist manifesto, The United States of Africa (Conakry, Guinea: Government Press Office, 1977).
46. A typical narcissist in his overestimation of the “brilliance” of his own mind, Toure was the precursor to Karenga and Baraka. Of course, Toure always feared that he might actually be an unremarkable thinker, which of course he was. Karenga and Baraka certainly had similar fears and justifiably so. After all, one does not imagine secure thinkers believing in the need to induce followers to defer to them intellectually in the manner devised by Toure, Karenga, and Baraka.
47. David Lamb, The Africans (New York: Random House, 1982), p. 223.
48. Marable, African and Caribbean Politics, p. 182.
49. Walters, Pan-Africanism in the African Diaspora, p. 66.
50. For examples of Nyerere’s writings and speeches, see his Freedom and Unity: A Selection from Writings and Speeches, 1952–1965 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1967), Freedom and Socialism: A Selection from Writings and Speeches, 1965–1967 (Dar es Salaam: Oxford University Press, 1968), and Freedom and Development: A Selection from Writings and Speeches, 1968–1973 (Dar es Salaam: Oxford University Press, 1973).
51. Imamu Amiri Baraka, “‘Towards Pan-Africanism’: Tanzania Independence Anniversary,” Black World, March 1972, pp. 65–67.
52. Walters, Pan-Africanism in the African Diaspora, pp. 66–67.
53. Julius K. Nyerere, Ujamaa: Essays on Socialism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1968), pp. 1–12.
54. Lerone Bennett Jr., “Pan-Africanism at the Crossroads: Dreams and Realities Clash as Delegates Debate Class and Color at Historic Congress in Tanzania,” Ebony, September 1974, pp. 148–52, 154–60.
55. Julius Nyerere, “Opening Speech,” in Resolutions and Selected Speeches from the Sixth Pan African Congress (Dar es Salaam: Tanzania Publishing House, 1976), p. 8.
56. Resolutions and Selected Speeches from the Sixth Pan African Congress, p. 16.
57. Ibid., p. 88.
58. Carlos Moore attended as a representative of the International Committee to the Second World Black and African Festival of Arts and Culture in Lagos. According to Hoyt Fuller, at President Nyerere’s reception at the state house, Moore, a critic of Castro and Cuban racism, had a confrontation with the Cuban delegation that almost turned violent. The Cuban delegation lodged a protest against Moore’s presence, and he was soon on a plane to Lagos. See Hoyt Fuller, “Notes from a Sixth Pan-African Journal,” Black World, October 1974, p. 80.
59. Fuller, “Notes,” p. 81.
60. Imamu Amiri Baraka, “Some Questions about the Sixth Pan-African Congress,” Black Scholar, October 1974, pp. 45, 46.
1. There was one black member of the U.S. Senate, Republican Edward Brooke from Massachusetts. Brooke did not formally join the Congressional Black Caucus.
2. For a discussion of the origins of the Congressional Black Caucus, see Congressman William L. Clay’s Just Permanent Interests: Black Americans in Congress, 1870–1992 (New York: Amistad Press, 1993), chap. 5.
3. Manning Marable, Race, Reform, and Rebellion: The Second Reconstruction in Black America, 1945–1990 (rev. 2d ed.) (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1991), p. 122.
4. The National Black Assembly was the name given to the grassroots infrastructure that was supposed to be created by the National Black Political Convention. For the sake of consistency, I refer to it here as the latter.
5. Peter Marris and Martin Rein, Dilemmas of Social Reform: Poverty and Community Action in the United States (2d ed.) (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), pp. 241, 252.
6. The defeat of Hubert Humphrey in 1968 was particularly devastating to black liberal Democrats and supporters of civil rights. Humphrey was “Mr. Civil Rights,” a title earned from his earliest days as mayor of Minneapolis when he pushed for and won a civil rights plank on the 1948 Democratic Party platform. A comprehensive discussion of Humphrey and the black freedom struggle can be found in Timothy N. Thurber, The Politics of Equality: Hubert H. Humphrey and the African American Freedom Struggle (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999).
7. Reg Murphy and H. Gulliver, The Southern Strategy (New York: Scribner, 1971); Joseph A. Aistrup, The Southern Strategy Revisited: Republican Top-Down Advancement in the South (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1996); Kevin P. Phillips, The Emerging Republican Majority (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1970); and see Dan T. Carter’s From George Wallace to Newt Gingrich: Race in the Conservative Counterrevolution, 1963–1994 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1996) and The Politics of Rage: George Wallace, the Origins of the New Conservatism, and the Transformation of American Politics (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995).
8. Earl Ofari Hutchinson, Betrayed: A History of Presidential Failure to Protect Black Lives (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1996), chap. 7; and Kenneth O’Reilly, ed., Nixon’s Piano: Presidents and Racial Politics from Washington to Clinton (New York: Free Press, 1995), esp. chap. 7.
9. See Daniel P. Moynihan, Maximum Feasible Misunderstanding: Community Action in the War on Poverty (New York: Free Press, 1970).
10. Even Liberator magazine, a voice of black nationalism, endorsed Nixon’s “black capitalism” agenda.
11. In July 1967 President Lyndon Johnson issued an executive order creating a national commission on civil disorders. Its mission was to explain the causes of the urban rioting. Chaired by Otto Kerner, the former governor of Illinois, the commission issued the Report of the National Commission on Civil Disorders (1967). On p. 1, the “two-nations” wording appears.
12. I am speculating that Chisholm may have used sexism as an excuse. But she held no such reservations about participating in the Democratic National Convention, although it too was run by sexist males, who in this instance happened to be white and much more powerful.
13. During the summer of 1968 while out on bail (for his arrest during the Newark riot), Baraka ran for a seat on a Newark Community Council. The council was responsible for overseeing the spending priorities of the Federal Model Cities Program in Newark. He came in twelfth in a field of nineteen candidates who were competing for four positions. See the interview of Baraka by Tish Dace, “LeRoi Jones / Amiri Baraka: From Muse to Malcolm to Mao,” Village Voice, August 1, 1977, p. 13.
14. Hatcher’s speech was printed in Black Scholar 4, no. 1 (September 1972): 17–22. The quotation is from p. 21.
15. In his opening address, Jesse Jackson, head of PUSH, asserted the need for a black political party. Unlike Hatcher, Jackson was not an elected official and therefore was somewhat “freer.” Smith argues that a majority of the delegates probably supported the creation of a black political party. However, Jackson soon moderated his position, asserting that mass political mobilization would have to come before a black political party could be formed.
16. For a report on the platform debate in the New York State delegation, see “Platform Formed by State Blacks: They’ll Present It to Parley Opening in Gary on Friday,” New York Times, March 6, 1972, p. 28.
17. The official version of the National Black Political Agenda was issued on May 19, Malcolm X’s birthday.
18. Coleman Young and Lonnie Wheeler, Hard Stuff: The Autobiography of Coleman Young (New York: Viking Press, 1993), pp. 189–90.
19. Ibid., p. 190.
20. I attended a lecture at the Yale Law School in the mid-1970s in which Mayor Richard Hatcher explicitly cited Baraka as the moving force in and organizational key to the success of the Gary gathering.
21. Ronald W. Walters, Black Presidential Politics in America: A Strategic Approach (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1988), p. 87.
22. Bill Strickland, “The Gary Convention and the Crisis of American Politics,” Black World, October 1972, pp. 22–23.
23. For criticism of the NAACP’s warped understanding of ethnic pluralist politics, see Harold Cruse, Plural but Equal: Blacks and Minorities in America’s Plural Society (New York: Morrow, 1987), pp. 351–63. Cruse’s understanding of cultural pluralism is equally flawed, for he writes as if ethnic groups have an “unofficial official” status as political units in American politics. That is, he confuses American pluralism with what political scientists have sometimes called “consociational politics.” Robert C. Smith describes the thinking of Roy Wilkins and his attempt to control the convention agenda even before it took place in We Have No Leaders: African Americans in the Post–Civil Rights Era (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996), pp. 46–47.
24. Thomas A. Johnson, “N.A.A.C.P. Aide Opposes Draft of Black Preamble,” New York Times, March 10, 1972, p. 20.
25. Paulette Pierce, “The Roots of the Rainbow Coalition,” Black Scholar, March/April 1968, p. 11.
26. Although I am commenting on Pierce’s specific analysis of the Gary convention, her article provides an important discussion of the historical linkages between the political energies unleashed by the 1972 Gary convention and Jesse Jackson’s decision to run for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1984.
27. Smith, We Have No Leaders, p. 50.
28. Walters, Black Presidential Politics, p. 88.
29. Barbara A. Reynolds, Jesse Jackson: The Man, the Movement, the Myth (Chicago: Nelson-Hall, 1975), p. 249; and Ethel Payne, “The Moment of Truth at Gary and Beyond,” Chicago Defender, March 18–24, 1972.
30. See the special to the New York Times, March 16, 1972, entitled “Hatcher Reviews Parley of Blacks: Seeks Softer Busing Stand—Deplores Vote on Israel.” Hatcher claims in this article that the Israeli amendment “snuck through” late in the convention after most of the delegates had left the floor. He said, “I did not see any strong anti-Israeli sentiments on the floor . . . it was a very unfortunate resolution.”
31. Walters, Black Presidential Politics, pp. 91–92. These two documents are found in abbreviated form in William Clay’s Just Permanent Interests.
32. Walters, Black Presidential Politics, p. 92.
33. Congressmen William Clay writes, “Although Congressmen Charles Diggs and Walter Fauntroy played leading roles in planning and executing the Gary Convention, they were not acting as agents of the Congressional Black Caucus.” See Clay, Just Permanent Interests, p. 204.
34. Imamu Amiri Baraka, “Black and Angry,” Newsweek, July 10, 1972, pp. 35–36. The article also contains a photograph of a serious, stern-faced Baraka and another one of a group of excited delegates at the Gary convention.
35. Ibid., p. 35.
36. Ibid., pp. 36, 35.
37. Smith, We Have No Leaders, p. 54.
38. Among the few important black figures in attendance were Jesse Jackson, Atlanta Mayor Maynard Jackson, and Congressmen John Conyers, Ronald Dellums, and Parren Mitchell.
39. Smith, We Have No Leaders, p. 60.
40. Ibid., p. 61.
41. Smith, We Have No Leaders, p. 64.
42. Ibid., p. 70.
43. Ibid., pp. 63–64.