M46 Ted Joans

Proposition for a Black Power Manifesto (1971)

Ted Joans (1928–2003) was a prolific underground artist and Beat poet who popularized Surrealism in the United States – ‘Jazz is my religion and Surrealism is my point of view,’ he once said. He collaborated with the Chicago Surrealist Group, contributing to their ad hoc periodical Arsenal, and he was a friend of André Breton, who championed Joans’s poetry and ‘jazzaction’ paintings. Joans embraced Surrealism’s international character, living between North America, Europe and Africa, and calling himself ‘a tri-continental poet’; he also loved Surrealism’s ribald ability to antagonize bourgeois pretentiousness. Yet, ultimately, it was the movement’s belief in the freedom of the imagination, and how this could bring about radical social change – as championed by earlier Surrealists such as Étienne Léro (M4) and the founder of Négritude, Aimé Césaire (M7) – that Joans subscribed to. Convinced that Surrealism had its roots in Africa rather than Europe, he used it to promote the black struggle for civil rights in the US as well as to support the wider goals of Pan-Africanism (M39).

In 1969, at a time of rising activism in the US, with the Black Panthers and the development of the black consciousness movement, Joans wrote his powerful longform poem ‘Black Power Manifesto’ (first published, in French, as ‘Proposition pour un Manifeste BLACK POWER pouvoir noir’) in order to agitate for a self-assertive black art that celebrated its African ancestry. The much shorter version reproduced here, which was written at some point in 1971, first appeared in Arsenal: Surrealist Subversion, No. 2 in the summer of 1973. It nevertheless still powerfully evokes the spirit of the era.

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Black Power is the vanguard of the insurrection inside America today.

Black Power is that marvelous explosive mixture which has accumulated since the first Black slave uprising – Always the same motive: FREEDOM!

Black Power is dreams that are carried out into reality. Black Power has the real and beyond the real in which to move. Our African ancestry has enriched us with this marvelous surreality.

Black Power is not out to win the Civil Rights struggle, but to win the Human Rights struggle. Black Power is like jazz, it is based upon the freedom of the spirit.

That spirit is black. Black people must never lose their freedom of spirit.

Black Power is fanatical for freedom.

Black Power is Black people charting their own destiny.

Black Power is marvelous and beautiful.

Black Power is a fierce black hope. Black Power is determined to surmount all obstacles.

Black Power is black truth.

Black Power! Black Power!