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New Breeds, Old Dreams

Liberator and Black Radical Aesthetics

After Malcolm’s death, thousands [of] heretofore unorganized Black students and activists became more radically politicized.… Never before had Black artists entered into such a conscious spiritual union of goal and purpose. For the first time in history there existed a “new” constellation of symbols and images around which to develop a group ethos. What was happening in Harlem was being repeated all over the United States. Black people were shaping a new concept of themselves both in the national and international sense. Where we were going, we did not know. But one thing was certain, we knew that, as James Brown says, we were a “New Breed.”

—Larry Neal, “On Malcolm X”

Larry Neal’s description of the emergence of a new wave of black artists would be a clarion call only second to that of Amiri Baraka’s Black Arts Repertory and Theater School (BARTS) manifesto. Similar to Michelle Wilkinson’s use of “socio-aesthetics,”1 black radical aesthetics include the cultural work infused with radical political visions, culturally independent formations, translocal and transnational in scope. Liberator’s demonstration of the search for a radical black aesthetic was central to its political vision. The political revolution would only be achievable through a demonstrable form of cultural remaking. In other words, culture was the soil on which politics were played out. In this sense, perhaps culture played a more central role in revolutionary imagining than it is given credit for through an explicit focus on political forms of campaigns, direct action protest, and electoral engagement. Moreover, stewardship in the realm of culture was as much about power as identity, empowerment, pride, and heritage.

Larry Neal’s expertise as cultural organizer, aesthetician, scribe, and social philosopher would capture and catalyze the transformative purpose connected with the years preceding Black Arts Movement activity, and continued throughout the range of organizing and institution building fashioned by him and Baraka, among numerous others. This chapter turns attention to some of the contours that map the “new constellation of symbols” of which Neal spoke. Though Neal and Baraka loomed large over this period as driving personalities, they were by no means the only two figures imprinting the era with similar tools and strategies. Critics, artists, activists, and poets such as these were not merely social commentators. Instead, they saw their work as an effective tool in a larger political endeavor. This work was as much about personal transformation as it was about transforming society and reimagining a just society. As Robin D. G. Kelley wrote, “For many black radicals seeking justice, salvation, and freedom, the vision of socialism proved to be especially compelling, even if incomplete.”2 Exploring the political and aesthetic dimensions of the self in the world facilitated the passage of multiple strategies for political and cultural mobilization. Neal’s espousal of black radical aesthetics would magnetize much of the activism espousing a specific, philosophical notion of black global identity in which art and cultural work played a pivotal role. Their productivity advocated an expansive diasporic, transnational knowledge of African cultures and a complex sense of the role of black culture in American contexts. As this chapter will show, artists and activists associated with Liberator saw their art and politics as two prongs in a singular black revolutionary project throughout the decade. As writer-activists, and torch bearers of a sort, cultural work of this new breed extended the long-held ancestral hopes of a liberated future.

Liberator’s coverage of aesthetic life and practices in this period evolved from basic advertising of local community events and Africa-inspired soirees to providing sophisticated and detailed analyses of the capitalist control of black cultural production. As a period of considerable anxiety over the creation of independent cultural institutions, the debates in which Liberator’s writers and readers engaged in also reveal great complexity across a range of different activities and articulations. Artists doubled as critics and critics tried on new lenses through which to view black art. Writers such as Clebert Ford and Larry Neal echoed general calls for autonomous institutions to service the aesthetic needs of African American communities across New York and the entire United States, in particular Ford’s advocacy of black theater production as instrumental to African American social progress. As a stage actor and theater activist, Ford’s writing in Liberator anticipated more assertive claims for an autonomous black theater that emerged in subsequent years, though he is all but unknown in the cultural histories of 1960s black radicalism.

Neal’s tenure as Liberator arts editor added seriousness and sophistication to the magazine’s discussion of radical aesthetics. Many of Neal’s most prominent and original articulations of black culture and politics in the mid-1960s were first published there. As the epitaph to this chapter indicates, Neal was one of many black cultural savants radicalized in the wake of Malcolm X’s assassination. What Neal called the “New Breed” proved to be the cultural complement to John Henrik Clarke’s announcement of “New Afro-American Nationalism” at the start of the decade. As key markers of black political and cultural life that came to fruition during the 1960s, both Neal’s and Clarke’s ascriptions contain the resurgence of an Africa-inspired militant nationalism and its impact on how U.S.-based African descendants challenged and interpreted the world around them. As the late scholar Richard Iton wrote,

In their choices regarding whether to conform or transform, resist or embrace, confront or disengage, the distinct substantive dimensions of political and cultural existence become more salient and germane. Questions of geography and genealogy have less purchase on Black thought as the inside and outside; the local, transnational, and global; and past, present and future become conjoined and in some respects conflated. Moreover, beyond the cataloguing of geographical presences and genealogical connections, there is the possibility of approaching Black identifications conceptually: as a matter of indexing a related set of sensibilities that resist quantification, physical or temporal classifications, and corporeal boundaries.3

Liberator’s advocacy of radical aesthetic practices in the 1960s includes black visual artists as well as jazz criticism, both key elements that help round out its approach to Black Arts, and one of its lasting contributions. It was the rare issue that did not include both cutting-edge cultural reviews and political analyses. Throughout the decade, Liberator interviews and commentaries covered the following areas: literature (especially novels and poetry), music (particularly jazz, but also blues and R & B), visual arts, theater, film, and sport. Liberator’s expansive analysis and explanation of these aspects of cultural life were as central to its overall influence on the period as its political analyses were. In this way, Liberator contributed to pivotal debates on black radical aesthetic practices that intersect with the politics of culture. Moreover, Liberator’s writers and subscribers took seriously the role of culture beyond mere artistic production and placed heavy emphasis on building independent institutions as part of a larger globally envisioned black radical project.

Afternoons in Africa: Liberator and the Celebration of African Culture

Attendant to the explosive interest in African independence was a growing attention paid to African cultures emanating from the African continent. Understanding and celebrating African culture took a variety of forms from the establishment of African cultural festivals in the United States and in Africa, and the production of new literacies about the numerous ethnic groups of a region, as well as its beliefs, habits, and of course, rituals.4 African Americans were as drawn to this cultural search as anyone in the state department. As African Americans had long made assertions of their Africanness in heritage even if they were now of the West, many took the political independence movement as an opportunity to reappraise the meaning of their citizenship. No longer merely tied to the coerced or embraced patriotism demanded by U.S. citizenship, African Americans were looking to Africa for cultural as much as political inspiration. The early activities of the Liberation Committee for Africa (LCA) stemmed from their efforts to create and sustain tangible connections to African and Caribbean communities scattered throughout the United States. From 1961 to early 1963, activists closely associated with Dan Watts worked under the auspices of the LCA. However, as their publishing arm grew, their activities would fall under the umbrella of the Liberator from 1963 onward. As the LCA sought to influence U.S. policy toward newly independent Africa, most of its activities were directed at the United Nations. While it monitored U.S. relationships with African diplomats, LCA associates built friendships and alliances of its own. Cultural and social events were always a part of its networking activity. It frequently held celebrations for political figures as well as association members. Most often these social events were intended to raise awareness about the association’s activities, gain allies, and, importantly, to raise funds to expand its efforts. They would host concerts, book fairs, lectures, and panels as ways to continue community outreach.

In the early period of the magazine, Liberator did not cover many arts and culture events, owing to its original targeting of U.S. imperialism by focusing on mainstream politics and observing and critiquing top-level government policies. However, attention to culture quickly increased as black consciousness began playing a more prominent role in black liberation politics. However, the pull of identification with Africa was frequently tied to issues of cultural proficiency. Through the writings of theater and social critic Clebert Ford, the socio-philosophizing of Larry Neal, and the poetic artistry of Askia Touré and others, the magazine emerged at the forefront of a new articulation of how cultural awareness and institution building served the global political needs of African Americans. These figures emphasized the role of culture in a newly awakening black consciousness and Liberator was the stage on which their analyses of the politics of black diasporic culture were first disseminated.

Though the theories of black art and aesthetics advanced by Ford, Neal, Touré, and Baraka had not yet arrived by early 1961, the LCA participated in the cultural life of New York City by sponsoring a number of events throughout the first two or three years of the magazine. Though not always driven by ideology, these events were efforts to inject a political perspective into the representation of African culture and African Americans’ knowledge (or lack thereof) about the African continent. The magazine’s earliest documentation of such events appeared in July 1961. At that time, LCA held an “African Night Festival,” which was attended by over 200 people, including students and diplomats from Africa and the Caribbean. LCA thanked the attendees of the gala “for making it possible to add a net profit of $214 to our treasury.”5 In another effort to raise funds for the committee’s work, the LCA announced an event entitled, “An Afternoon in Africa” that would feature an African fashion show and the music of Michael Olatunji that September.6

In the first month’s issue of 1962, the program for the Negro History Week celebration included speeches by the Ghana, Guinea, and UAR missions to the United Nations, alongside the performance of their “Freedom Now Suite,” by the dynamic jazz tandem, Max Roach and Abbey Lincoln. In honor of Lumumba, the night would also feature Ossie Davis and Ruby Dee who had recently staged Davis’ play, Purlie Victorious, which garnered the praise of critics and activists alike.7 Davis and Dee, who graced the cover of Liberator’s February 1963 issue, were part of a vanguard of black actors equipped with the talent that made them marketable to mainstream audiences to a degree. Yet their careers were also driven by an imperative to make art relevant to all aspects of black life. Black actors in New York, in particular, struggled against discriminatory practices that kept them off Broadway. Beveridge reported that black actors often picketed against tokenism in the theater industry. An ad hoc group, led by actor Clebert Ford and called the Committee for the Employment of Negro Performers, came together in an effort to organize this concern into a larger movement for equality on stage.8 Davis and Dee’s presence (even at this early point) added legitimacy to radicals and progressives, as they were as steadfast in their vision of racial and economic justice and African decolonization as they were established professional artists.

Though black actors struggled for marquee recognition, African musicians visiting or living in the United States often fared better. For example, the African Cultural Group of the U.S.A. was supported through the embassies of African countries at the United Nations. In the summer of 1962 this group sponsored an “African Symphony” at Carnegie Hall that featured Nigerian musical great Fela Sowande, then visiting the United States on a coveted Rockefeller fellowship. Sowande’s concert was part of a several month effort to introduce the U.S. audiences to West African culture. Attendees were treated to African music, dress and, of course, food.9 At these events guests were fed jollof rice, fish stew, and groundnut and palm nut soup, among other dishes. LCA encouraged families to serve staple West African dishes in their own homes and even published the recipes for groundnut soup and jollof rice in anticipation of an upcoming African embassy–sponsored event.10 All the newly independent African UN delegates were featured at these events alongside American personalities representing New York state government and U.S. representatives at the United Nations.11 It is important that these activists sought to maintain distance from U.S. government forces, which had their own designs on the relationship between African Americans and the African continent.12 Though LCA associates sought to build relationships with African diplomats, oftentimes this hinged upon political expediency. As Beveridge put it, once many of these officials realized what little influence on government policy the group had, they ceased to socialize with the same frequency. With small resources and limited social cache, LCA realized that they could play a more significant role disseminating black thought rather than planning the next soiree.

Responsible Arts Institutions: Liberator and Proto/Black Arts Criticism

In 1963, Afro-Panamanian writer Carlos Russell (no relation to Charlie) joined the executive board of the LCA. In March, his interview with prizefighter Sonny Liston appeared as the cover story.13 This was one of several interviews Russell conducted with notable cultural and political figures. His other interviewees included basketball star Bill Russell, Brooklyn minister Reverend Milton Galamison, and his most prominent, sit-down with Malcolm X. Russell was a writer of many talents. In addition to covering a number of different issues for Liberator, ranging from politics to cultural affairs, he was also a poet. One of his earliest Liberator poems was entitled, “Negritude,” in which he implored black people to “show thy soul!” and “let thy voice ring through the wistless [sic] winds.”14 Yet, another poem similarly implored African Americans to embrace rather than negate their black features: “Why can you not see that those things which God has given you—Black skin, hard and nappy hair … Are things for which you should be proud?”15 Here, Russell anticipated the more assertive “Black is Beautiful” and “Black and Proud” pronouncements that achieved popular currency later in the decade.

When Russell arrived from Panama he enrolled at DePaul University. After completing his studies he served as a director of youth programs in Chicago before relocating to New York. In New York, he intended to focus more on his writing, and through a variety of connections found the Harlem Writer’s Guild (HWG). Like many other budding writers who passed through the Guild, Russell honed his skills for a life committed to black global liberation. While young writers such as Carlos Russell, Charlie Russell and others cut their literary teeth under the tutelage of John Killens and John Henrik Clarke, elder literary giants, such as Langston Hughes continued to make their presence felt by mentoring and otherwise encouraging a younger generation of writers and activists. Hughes, for one, actively supported the efforts of younger writers and published several pieces of poetry in the pages of Liberator. For instance, inspired by an article on drug addiction in the ghetto, Hughes penned a poem entitled, “Junior Addict,” whose opening lines began:

The little boy who sticks a needle in his arm

And seeks an out in other worldly dreams,

Who seeks an out in eyes that droop

And ears that close to Harlem screams …16

Several of Hughes’s poems would be published in Liberator from 1963 until 1966, representing one of the last visible links between the Harlem Renaissance and the emergent Black Arts Movement. In the role of elder, Hughes’s presence loomed large and he remained a touchstone for many young black writers throughout the 1960s and after. With connections to the artistic royalty found in the Harlem Writers Guild, Davis and Ruby Dee, and even Hughes, Liberator padded the institutional credibility it acquired as a key player in the radical aesthetic constellation of New York City.

In addition to the HWG role as a literary training ground, many young writers and activists were also drawn to the Umbra Poets Workshop, a critical proto-Black Arts collective, which functioned as a writing workshop more than as a political unit, although most of its members and associates were engaged in a range of political activity and were themselves self-styled activists.17 Attentive to other formations throughout the city, Liberator reviewed Umbra’s self-named 1963 publication in the April issue that featured Hughes’s poem, calling it a marriage of “beauty and bitterness,” and quoting a few lines of its poetry. Staff writer Clebert Ford referenced Umbra in one of his many defenses of black nationalism and artistic expression. Askia Touré, a founding member of Umbra, published his first piece of poetry in Liberator around the same time as the Umbra collection appeared in print. “Cry Freedom,” a poem published in the May issue, introduced readers to a young fiercely political poet who would develop into a major figure of Black Arts. The Umbra review, though brief, reveals a growing interest in Black Arts consciousness in literature. These institutional sites of organized activity allowed die-hard activists and emergent writers to fashion a sense of duty to their craft and opened efforts to promote justice concerns simultaneously. These cultural workers exhibited an awareness of the world beyond their artistic production and imagined strategies that enabled the full array of their social claims.

While poetry and novels were suitable outlets for many, theater was also critical to the development of Black Arts in this early period. Though critics and artists such as Neal, Baraka, Bullins, and others are rightfully credited with shaping theater criticism, these figures overshadow lesser-known figures such as Clebert Ford who was first, in the pages of Liberator, to articulate the significance of the theater for African American artistic activity. Little is known of Ford, however; he seems to have receded into relative obscurity following the demise of the Black Arts Movement. Beveridge once described him as someone “who gave everything to the movement,” implying that he had little to fall back on once the movement unraveled.18

Ford developed his career as a stage actor who gained some attention for his role in Jean Genet’s The Blacks and had previously appeared on Broadway. Much as Robeson and Baraka were artists as well as critics and scholars of their art form, Ford wrote of the history of black people in theater while also establishing a fairly stable acting career. He was not simply an actor or a writer, but both, publishing reviews of plays and films, conducting interviews with artists, and theorizing black theater throughout 1963 until 1964. With Black Arts activity springing up among a host of U.S. translocalities, many turned their attention to black artistic expression on the home front. As Liberator coverage indicates, as the rise of Black Arts attention on continental African culture waned it was replaced by a determined search for and defense of autonomous cultural institutions throughout the United States.

Ford wrote that the time had come for African Americans to assume responsibility for producing art that reflected reality in all levels of media production. White writers, producers and directors, it seemed, were incapable of rendering black life in all of its dynamism and complexity. He began and ended his assessment of problems facing black people in theater by pointing to current musical productions, one of which centered on the life of early twentieth century black vaudeville performer, Bert Williams, entitled Star of the Morning. This play, written by People’s Theatre founder Loften Mitchell, directed by Edmund Cambridge, and produced by Houston Brummit, exemplified the kinds of roles black artists were to assume. “What is needed is total involvement in America’s theatrical currents, and on every level from producer to backstage, from set designer to choreographer, writer and director,” Ford wrote. He firmly believed that the ingredients were in place for such a transformation. White producers were incapable of accurately depicting black life, their token roles for black people did more harm than good, black audiences were ready to attend the theater, and there was a wellspring of talent waiting for greater exposure. Additionally, he claimed, black entrepreneurs were financially able to underwrite such projects. That these strides had not been made, that the “story of the Negro’s true American experience” had not been told, was “a tremendous loss to the entire world, black and white,” he argued. Ford’s case for full representation of black life and American society in theater mirrored demands for political power in society at large. The kinds of advances sought in explicitly political spaces could also be applied to the world of theater.

Like many of his peers, Ford viewed the struggle for artistic representation as central to a people’s expression of humanity. “Give the Negro an opportunity to truly express himself, not necessarily as a social problem but as a complete human being; not only as subservients [sic], singers and dancers alone, but as they truthfully exist in our society … the entire spectrum of human life as it exists in American life,” he concluded. Ford, who played a leading role in the Committee for the Employment of Negro Performers (CENP), blended his acting prowess with activism off-stage. A photo from a CENP protest outside of the Broadway musical comedy “How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying” showed marchers holding pickets using language that would be familiar to a public attuned to the fluctuations of civil rights protest that read “An Integrated Stage, An Integrated Theatre.”19 This May 1963 issue of Liberator signaled the magazine’s emergence into a formidable presence on the art-criticism scene geared toward black audiences and forecast greater attention paid to the arts featured in future issues. Included with Ford’s article was an excerpt from a forthcoming novel by Charlie Russell, poems by Rolland Snellings (Touré) and Desmond Victor, and Eleanor Mason’s article on African American women’s beauty standards. Yet, the sorts of appeals Ford offered were more in the mode of protest that politicized Black Arts writers came to reject. Soon after these calls for greater inclusion and exposure, Black Arts theater advocates would replace calls for integration with assertions of independence. However, Ford’s overall view is in keeping with a transitory political space that many occupied in this period.

Clebert Ford carved out a solid career in theater and cinema. Ford played in The Cool World, based on the book by Warren Miller in the spring of 1960, and Lorraine Hansberry’s Les Blancs (The Whites) in 1970 before starring in Melvin Van Peebles’ Ain’t Supposed to Die a Natural Death from 1971 until 1972. Back in 1963, Ford reviewed Jean Genet’s The Blacks (Les Negres) in Liberator. The Blacks, arguably Genet’s best-known play, was for Ford a tremendous success; indeed, the play became somewhat of a staple of proto-Black Arts activity and was staged in many of the theater houses opened to Black Arts productions. Among several notable African American actors, The Blacks featured Maya Angelou in a leading role. Prior to leaving the country for Cairo, Egypt and then to Accra, Ghana where she would work with other African American expatriates at the Institute of African Studies at the University of Ghana, Angelou had served as a Northern Coordinator for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. In Ghana, Angelou wrote for the Ghanaian Times and the African Review, and also worked with Shirley Graham Du Bois at the Ghanaian Broadcasting Corporation.20 About Genet’s play, Ford wrote: “No play that ever has been presented on an American stage has given the Negro an opportunity to so completely express himself in both artistic and ‘social’ terms.” For Ford, the play was an example of the direction black theater should take. Interestingly Ford also starred in the play. Yet, his review bears a certain degree of distance; he refused to simply praise the piece because he acted in it. In this way, he discussed the significance of the play’s symbolism without hyperbole. Being an Off-Broadway production, his review does not appear to be a marketing strategy to sell tickets though he may have used it as such. The apparent objectivity is less important than the fact that as an actor, Ford also played the role of critic, thereby underscoring the calls for ownership over the reception of the play, and an effort to define the terms on which the play would be evaluated, a salient feature of emergent Black Arts criticism. Ford’s dual function as artist and critic took him from the stage and into a discourse of black theater. In this arena his criticism symbolizes part of a larger dialogue or conversation rather than a manifesto, and allowed him to participate in a realm shared by other artists who also doubled as critics. There, he was but one voice among many.

Not all critics were as enthusiastic about The Blacks as Ford. Writing in Freedomways, Liberator’s estranged sister publication, for example, Jim Williams argued that the play took up space that could otherwise be filled by black playwrights. Making a case for the creation of a Harlem theater that would serve as a repertory for up-and-coming artists, directors and producers, he also challenged the play’s meaning, arguing: “… If one play, The Blacks, can run for three years with its song of futility, its message of hopelessness, and cynical nihilism,” then black audiences should be equally exposed to the work of Loften Mitchell, Langston Hughes, and William Branch, he argued.21 Ossie Davis, the venerable pillar of the New York arts community once told Charlie Russell in an interview: “Genet is a wonderful writer, but he cannot speak for me. He is speaking of a decadent civilization whose sun is setting. My people’s sun is on the rise. Where Genet negates, I affirm that which is human in man. My song is of hope, not despair.”22 Ford’s essay “The Responsibility of Black Artists” bears traces of Hughes’s 1926 essay “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain” and anticipated similar attempts to assign a specific responsibility to African American artists in the writings of Neal, Baraka and others such as Addison Gayle Jr. much later.

Ford, who had also been recently appointed to Liberator’s editorial board, saw in comedian Dick Gregory an example of how African American artists could participate in social justice efforts beyond their art. Highlighting Gregory’s participation in civil rights efforts in Greenwood, Mississippi, Ford argued that it was the black artist’s responsibility to not only create art that reflected social circumstance, but to physically enlist in doing the work required to bring about change.23 Though Ford identified a role for artists beyond their specific craft, artists associated with Liberator had long connected their work to larger justice concerns. Yet, as a stage actor his comments anticipated discussions on the special role of the theater in addressing these issues. The following year he would extend his discussion, focusing on Baldwin and advocating the creation of black community theater.

In its September and October issues, Liberator featured Los Angeles–based actor and playwright Frank Greenwood and his Afro-American Cultural Center Committee (AACCC). Greenwood, who was originally from Birmingham, AL, moved to L.A. from Chicago. His ties to the Left on the South Side of Chicago fueled his arts-organizing efforts as he traveled. Upon relocating to Los Angeles he organized the Touring Artists Group, a traveling theater ensemble and the predecessor of the AACCC. The magazine printed an excerpt from Greenwood’s play, Cry in the Night, which depicted a black man who is brutally beaten by police who suspect him a Muslim. It is not clear what inspired Greenwood’s play, but the Ronald Stokes incident that occurred months prior, leaving several L.A. Muslims dead and wounded at the hands of the LAPD, seems to have been a partial inspiration. As a part of its community engagement, Greenwood’s multi-talented group helped prevent the closing of Vernon Library (later renamed in honor of Los Angeles Sentinel founder and former California Eagle staffer, Leon H. Washington Jr.) by planning a craft fair, offering song-writing workshops, facilitating workshops on entrepreneurial strategies that might help counter staggering black unemployment, and offering cultural education courses for youth. These efforts reveal the depth of responsibility many black artists and cultural workers accepted. Greenwood and his wife, Vera, also appeared on local television, which helped to raise the profile of the group and its goals to hundreds of Los Angeles residents, many of whom called the station to ask how they could enlist their knowledge and skills.24

Though its artistic bent trickled through the early months of 1963, by October Liberator had discovered its footing and confidence as a journal of black politics and arts. As discussed earlier, this issue opens with an editorial questioning the purpose and stated intention of the March on Washington. Inside C.E. Wilson offered a detail review and criticism of the march. An opening article on the Ghanaian expatriate community was included alongside a tribute to the recently deceased W. E. B. Du Bois, just above a letter from British philosopher Bertrand Russell, expressing solidarity with the march. Underscoring the commitment to artists’ political engagement, Clebert Ford interviewed Dick Gregory, “a man of the people,” who had earlier been placed in a Chicago jail for “disorderly conduct” following a demonstration with CORE activists against school segregation.

Also included in this proto-Black Power/Arts-period October 1963 issue were Askia Touré’s “The New Afro-American Writer,” the first of three sections of Harold Cruse’s “Rebellion or Revolution?,” William Worthy’s call for the formation of an all-black political party, and a review of Baraka’s Blues People. Here, in one issue were central aspects of black radical thought and arts in this period, effectively revealing a coherence of black radical politics and aesthetics in progress. By this point the periodical boasted an eight-person executive board that included renowned artist Tom Feelings alongside Watts, Beveridge, James Finkenstaedt, Ford, Carlos Russell, Wilson, and Evelyn Kalibala. Liberator enjoyed an increasing readership, as well as subscriptions and encouragement from around the country. Longtime radicals such as Cyril Briggs (deceased in 1966) applauded the magazine’s efforts and ordered a subscription after noticing the article “Criticism is not Anti-Semitism,” by his “old friend, Dick Moore.”

If there was ever a blueprint for the Black Arts and Black Power movements it can be found in this issue. Here was open identification with Africa, and a particularly anti-capitalist, anti-colonialist viewpoint, an exploration of alternative political models through the call for a third political party, the markings of a gender critique, and radical aesthetics in full view. The general mood of the militancy was expressed in Touré’s article, which highlighted a new wave of young politically aggressive writers who embraced Black Nationalism. “These young people are mainly a thoroughly educated, politically sophisticated group,” he wrote, a cohort “destined to play an increasingly dominant role in Afro-American affairs.” While Touré’s article was concerned with the present upsurge in youth militancy, Harold Cruse, one of Touré’s intellectual mentors, argued for a radical appraisal of contemporary appeals for social inclusion and social change. Cruse urged a rethinking of both “integration” among liberals, and “revolution” among radicals. Published in three parts, Cruse sought to provide an explanation for why liberal ideals failed to create the change implied in the term, and why radical ideas fell short of their revolutionary potential.

Charlie Russell’s review of Blues People noted the passion and scholarly appeal of Baraka’s cultural history of black America. Its publication in this issue befitted the blending of arts, history, memory, liberated consciousness and politics Liberator’s reputation entailed. In Russell’s words, “Blues People poses basic questions about the nature of the society the Negro so urgently seeks to enter, and the disdainful manner in which that society has viewed the artist.” Baraka saw music as a mirror of black progress in much the same manner that Clebert Ford viewed the theater. After receiving mentorship by veteran Harlem Writer’s Guild activists, Charlie Russell had found a home in Liberator. Over the next few years he would continue publishing on a number of subjects for the magazine, including analyses of current events or features on particular groups, but throughout his career Russell was most comfortable reviewing the jazz scene.

Taking a break from his acting career to write, Ford offered a review of recently produced plays with recommendations for future productions. He argued that the activity and agitation occurring throughout the country had also seeped into the theater. A member of The New Group, an ensemble that performed Off-Broadway productions, Ford again assumed the role of participant and critic, proudly asserting that over fifty African Americans had worked on this production. Though emphasizing the theater, Ford also evaluated the strides of black actors on television. He saw 1963 as a signal of changing times, eagerly identifying shows, films, and plays that cast black actors in specific roles or those that had all-black casts. Ford’s concern was whether or not the performance world of mass communication could depict the reality of black life. Television shows as East Side, West Side, were criticized for the authenticity of its characters as was a show called The Nurses, which ran an episode featuring Ruby Dee and Carl Lee. Theatergoers got a chance to see Langston Hughes’s Tambourines to Glory, as well as several productions by Jewish playwright David Merrick, which featured black actors. The Ballad for Bimshire (in which Ford played), The Worlds of Shakespeare, In White America, and Walk in Darkness, a play about black soldiers in World War II, were all featured on Off-Broadway stages earning the acclaim of a small but dedicated theatergoing audience.25

Ballad for Bimshire was a Barbadian-inspired musical directed by Ed Cambridge, starring Ossie Davis, Frederick O’Neal, Christine Spencer, and Jimmy Randolph.26 Davis, speaking to Charlie Russell on the set of the play, discussed the seemingly contradictory impulses black artists endure. On one hand artists were driven by the desire to express themselves; on the other, their productions had to be financially successful.27 Davis, who by this time had some mainstream success among African American theatergoers, still struggled to finance and distribute his own productions. His play, Purlie Victorious was well received, running for eight months between September, 1961 and May, 1962 for a total of 261 performances.28 Much of the success of this play could be contributed to the efforts of John Henrik Clarke and Sylvester Leaks, who became the play’s official marketing team, writing letters to churches, schools, and organizations and recommending group trips as fundraisers.29 Featuring other left-connected cultural luminaries Ruby Dee, Godfrey Cambridge, and Beah Richards, the play was an Off-Broadway success. Davis sought to expand the reception of the satirical piece, converting it into a film version under the title Gone are the Days in 1963. Yet, the film had a far shorter run than had the play, showing in only one theater and away from Harlem, as Davis begrudgingly remarked to Russell. According to film historian, Donald Bogle, were it not for Davis’ association with the film, it would have been overlooked completely. This was evidence that for black artists moving from stage to silver screen was not as easy as it might have seemed.30 Like many of the period, Davis believed that African Americans should produce art that reflected their lives. His open identification with strands of Black Nationalism, civil rights militancy, and socialism throughout his life established his credentials in an array of movement circles.

Embracing the black nationalist impulse developing in this period or perhaps influenced by the presence and writing of Harold Cruse, Clebert Ford penned the prescient article “Black Nationalism and the Arts.” There, he entered the debate concerning the need for black-centered arts and institutions. Black Nationalist art, whether in theater, music (especially jazz), or dance, should not suffer a lack of skill, he argued. “On the one hand there is an absolute need for black oriented activity in the American theatrical scene, and on the other hand we as black artists must strive for professional excellence,” he wrote. In addition to achieving professional respectability in performance, black artists must also begin to produce a collective of professionals, that is, black people should stage plays, hire and pay actors, and develop playwrights. “Once this is done on a community level and in the professional arena of Broadway and Off-Broadway there will develop a truly nationalistic expression in our theatre,” he argued.31 Placing institutional concerns slightly ahead of political sentiment would, he thought, preserve and extend black cultural expression. Institutions, he thought would reflect, cultivate, and encourage Black Nationalism. In this way, more openly nationalistic themes could be pursued independent of the pressure of white mainstream audience tastes, which feared the growing expression of an assertively anti-white artistic sentiment. Charlie Russell’s article “Leroi Jones will get us all in trouble,” which appeared in June, signaled white fears of an explicitly Black Nationalist theater.32 Ford’s pieces recall Cruse’s discussion of the role of culture in instigating revolutionary change. Cruse’s exploration of Black Nationalism’s roots appeared in the two month’s between Ford’s articles at the start of the year and when his writings resumed, which helps explain Ford’s downgrade of integrating theater and increasing emphasis on Black Nationalist themes, including a collective sense of empowerment and a shared political destiny. Ford took a break from writing while performing, and returned to Liberator pages in July and August of 1964.

Upon his return he reviewed James Baldwin’s Blues for Mr. Charlie, in Liberator’s July issue. Blues debuted in April and ran throughout August 1964 at the American National Theatre and Academy Playhouse (ANTA) for a total of 148 performances under the direction of Burgess Meredith, and featured Al Freeman Jr., Rip Torn, and Diana Sands.33 Though Ford was impressed, he argued that Baldwin placated white fears. Conversely, Baldwin, “the official angry Negro” of choice as approved by white critics and the general public, was met with “increasing disenchantment and disillusionment” in the black community, Ford noted. He calculated that “fully fifty percent of ‘Blues’ is devoted to a white point of view,” and concluded: “if Baldwin finds himself becoming more alienated from the black community he has only himself to blame.” Ford believed Baldwin was ultimately interested in white acceptance rather than autonomy and independence. Integration appeared to be Baldwin’s goal, not liberation from white supremacy. In either case, Baldwin’s talent, if not his perspective impressed Ford.34 Roy Johnson reviewed Blues after its uptown debut at the Alhambra Theatre two years after it appeared on Broadway, and echoed Ford’s concern, writing that “so many of Baldwin’s works,” lacking revolutionary sentiment, “can’t go the distance.”35 Early on, Liberator looked to Baldwin as a burning flame in the liberation struggle. Yet, like most, he was not above criticism. The shifting view on Baldwin’s work seemed to mirror larger shifts throughout the movement. Political desires of black artist-activists and intellectuals had moved past fomenting white liberal guilt. In the contested political space Liberator helped occupy, status quo white American worldviews were deemed wholly insignificant.

Baldwin’s success (and failure) with white audiences was additional fodder for Clebert Ford’s assertive call for an autonomous theater. He argued that a viable theater movement was the necessary next step in social progress as far as arts were concerned. In this regard, he believed that the community and the theater could reinforce one another to the health and longevity of both. “A reciprocal relationship may then be realized between the community and the black artist—the one providing audience and stage, the other giving of his talents, informing, educating, inspiring, entertaining,” he wrote. He pointed to examples in the Jewish community and in the Free Southern Theatre among the black community of Jackson, Mississippi where successful community theater endeavors were underway. Actors and playwrights Gilbert Moses, Doris Derby and John O’Neal led the Jackson group, and Ford quoted at length from their mission statement. This southern theater movement signaled that black artists in the North frequently looked South for inspiration.36 Above all, Ford wanted the full realities of black community life around the country reflected on stage and on film.37 Yet, the experiences of black life in the United States mirrored in key ways black life around the world.

The reality of African experiences was left out of such period films as Zulu, directed by Cy Endfield, and starring British upstart actor Michael Caine in his first leading role as Lieutenant Gonville Bromhead. Ford reviewed the film, which debuted in the UK in January 1964. Zulu represented the negative stereotyping of the past, according to Ford. Here were tall, blond-haired, blue-eyed British soldiers fighting “black bodies falling at a ratio of 100 natives per 1 white bullet,” he wrote. Though allegedly inspired by true events, Ford wondered what this subject matter would look like in the hands of black directors and producers. He pondered whether black women’s bodies would have been as gratuitously exposed as they were in the film. Ford noted that black women’s bodies were displayed as nude items of pleasure, whereas white women were always shown wearing clothes. “The white woman is still sacrosanct, while the black woman remains a tool of the western white man’s sexual fantasy,” he wrote, displaying a gender critique that had yet to fully emerge in film criticism by African American or white critics. Zulu was yet another example of the need for black controlled art.38 Ford’s review of Zulu proved to be his last published piece in Liberator. It is unclear why he stopped writing for the magazine; the demands of his acting career may be a partial explanation. He continued acting throughout the decade, but his time with Liberator had ended. He is listed on the editorial board for the last time in November 1965.

Ford’s analyses of the theater in Liberator represent serious attempts to grapple with the direction of Black Arts. His writings are a bridge to the more assertively revolutionary nationalist writings of Larry Neal, Askia Touré and Amiri Baraka, who called for an alternative worldview that would catapult the creation of new arts institutions. Other theater organizers such as Woodie King, Barbara Ann Teer, Ed Bullins, would continue such efforts throughout the decade and long after. King, who relocated to New York from Detroit, and whose New Federal Theatre continues to produce plays to this day, was a persistent critic of the financial constraints that dogged black theater, and an unrelenting advocate of its independence.39

While Ford argued for true depictions of black life on the stage, stating that the struggle for black theater mirrored the struggle for African Americans generally, Baraka called for a theater that would completely do away with western ideals. Beginning with the 1964 presentation of Dutchman, Baraka stated unequivocally the new direction he thought Black Arts should take. Charlie Russell reviewed the play in the June issue of Liberator during its run at the Cherry Lane Theatre in Greenwich Village, starring Robert Hooks and Jennifer West.40 Russell noted the new assertiveness in Baraka’s vision revealed in the play. As one Baraka critic noted, the playwright successfully challenged the historical caricature and stereotype of African Americans as faithful assimilationists in Dutchman. In this way he utilized the metaphor of masking, a defining feature of African American cultural experience.41 Baraka’s no-holds-barred approach spoke to the intolerance of liberalism and prefaced his manifesto for a revolutionary theater a year later. As Touré recalled, even some white Liberator associates began to worry about the tone of Baraka’s work.42 While Baraka’s ideas percolated, his seemingly vanguard role in Black Arts would grab the attention of even the most casual onlookers. Nonetheless, though many feared him, Larry Neal was one critic who seemed to immediately embrace him.

In addition to providing analyses of new directions in theater, Liberator also printed the work of playwrights it featured. One example is Douglas Turner Ward’s one-act play, Happy Ending, which was published in two parts in December 1964-January 1965. Years later, Ward’s group, the Negro Ensemble Company, would experience internal disagreements that resulted in new theater formations, most notably Barbara Ann Teer’s National Black Theatre. Later, Liberator would publish Baraka’s one-act Black Mass, as well as short stories by Woodie King Jr.43

Like Love at First Sight: Larry Neal, Liberator, and Black Arts Criticism

Though Larry Neal would emerge as a major theorist of Black Arts, he made his Liberator debut in an October 1964 review of the upcoming presidential election.44 Askia Touré recruited Neal to Liberator. As Touré recalled, when Dan Watts met Neal “it was like love at first sight.”45 Watts was known for his acceptance of younger more politically militant, vocal writers. Neal, who had recently completed coursework for a Master’s of Arts degree in Folklore at the University of Pennsylvania, quickly became a core Liberator associate. Watts appointed him to the position of arts editor, a key staff position, beginning in May 1965, though he had published several influential articles prior to that announcement. Touré jokingly remembered that Watts never provided him an official title though he was responsible for bringing Neal to the staff and had published in the magazine dating back to 1963, including a few cover stories.46

In December, Neal published two articles: a commentary on Lorraine Hansberry’s play A Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window, and a review of Ralph Ellison’s collected essays, Shadow and Act. Though he appreciated the many lines of inquiry Ellison pursued, what Neal called his search for truth, he intimated that younger contemporary writers were turning in a different direction. Having rejected the value system of western society and “its stuffy artiness” these younger artist-intellectuals were “trying to understand the values of what can be called African culture(s),” ostensibly choosing life over “the death-centered focus of Western culture.” Neal appreciated Ellison’s contributions, however. He believed Ellison was “one of the best novelists of our time,” and that if one truly wanted to learn the craft of writing, they should look no further than Invisible Man. In this light, Neal identified Ellison’s gifts, while embracing a new path. Though Neal displayed restraint in his critique of Ellison, he left no doubt about the Black Arts Movement’s transitional and transformative new approach.47

The following year, Neal turned close attention to Baraka, focusing on two plays: The Slave and The Toilet as exemplars of new theater forms. Neal heaped high praise on Baraka’s work and concluded that “Both plays are among the most socially-conscious literary works in the history of Afro-American and American drama.”48 Though Neal wrote on a number of subjects pertaining to black life in the period, his cultural analyses made the most significant impact, although as discussed previously he often provided straightforward political commentary. For example, he wrote passionately about the system of welfare, its parasitic qualities and of the need for fundamental change to that system. Though welfare could be understood in terms of class, he argued: “It is not merely, for us, a question of workers being exploited, but rather examining the role that this particular service plays in perpetuating oppression.”49 And though Neal could speak of the structural oppression of the welfare system, for him, the structure of American society was internally corrupt and morally bankrupt. “Black people are more and more the victims of a horrible delusion—democracy,” he wrote, castigating civil rights leaders for their appeals to the American government. “Black people still have not recognized that the issue is state power and land. These things are not obtainable within the morality or the law that enslaves us,” he continued.50 In these articles, which dealt with social relations and state authority, Neal expressed a more assertive political voice than is often revealed in his cultural essays though a similar strategy can also be detected there. They demonstrate Neal’s ability as a political thinker as well as a cultural critic and artist. Moreover, they hint at Neal’s organizing abilities. He spoke in an everyday language that many could understand. As one of Neal’s closest associates, Amiri Baraka remembered, “Larry came at a period of rising political intensity, struggle and consciousness. He passed it on, like the black baton of our history to any who knew him or was moved or influenced by him—by anyone who could read.”51

Neal’s writing on culture and the cultural aspects of revolutionary change are perhaps his most influential and memorable. As a critic, he set the tone for radical aesthetics of the period, second only to his good friend Baraka. Like his firebrand comrade, Neal took Malcolm X’s assassination as a directive to exhaust every possibility to achieve black peoples’ liberation employing whatever tools one had in their repertoire. Neal sense of radicalism was informed as much by Malcolm’s aesthetic as his revolutionary vision. “What I liked most about Malcolm was his sense of poetry,” Neal wrote, “His speech rhythms, and his cadences that seemed to spring from the universe of black music … My ears were more attuned to the music of urban black America—that blues idiom music called jazz. Malcolm was like that music.”52 A political understanding of African Americans desires could only be achieved through black culture, he would argue, acknowledging a perspective that had been carried in African American thought since the turn of the century. According to Neal, Baraka’s Blues People came the closest to a theory of culture Neal envisioned. Reviewing local events that foreshadowed the flowering of Black Arts, Neal identified a conference focusing on black culture whose theme was “The Role of the Afro-American Artist,” which featured notable Black Arts figures and contributors, including Watts, Baraka, Patterson, Cruse, Baba Adefumi, Selma Sparks, Clayton Riley, C. E. Wilson, photographer Leroy McLucas, Queen Mother Audley Moore, A. B. Spellman, Max Stanford (Muhammad Ahmad), and Josef ben Jochannen (known as “Dr. Ben”). Convened at the Kappa Alpha Psi fraternity house, Neal noted with some hyperbole that this was the first meeting of its kind in Harlem.

In the same article, Neal announced the arrival of Black Arts with the opening of BARTS on 130th street and Lenox Avenue, and recalled the “explosive evening of good poetry” that kicked off the week culminating with theater school’s opening. A small, but loud parade down Lenox Avenue led Black Arts supporters and community members to the brownstone where the new theater was located. Neal, cocreator of this new wave of activity, celebrated the banner-carrying parade, saying, “It was Garvey all over again,” as it recalled the Jamaican leader’s penchant for elaborate parades through Harlem in the 1920s. A jazz concert and a panel discussion on “The Black Artist and Revolution” rounded out the inaugural events.53 From that moment forward, Black Arts energy would continue to blaze across the Northeast and spark similar movements around the country. The evolving perspectives, theories and philosophies that help to define the movement would continue throughout the year and the remainder of the decade.

Carrying on a style of mentorship that Killens, Clarke, and others pioneered, Neal would continue to give definition to this movement through his reviews and analyses of black music, visual art, theater, and literature. Watts’ eager acceptance of Neal into the Liberator ranks was beginning to yield positive results. For Neal, his work was no mere exercise in public intellectualism for its own sake. His was an earnest attempt at shifting the power of definition, that is, the capacity to define and to ascribe positive and negative meaning to aspects of black, and by extension, American culture. Neal believed that power should be in the hands of black people, artists, activists and community members. Writing of the Pulitzer Prize advisory board’s failure to recognize the life achievement of Duke Ellington, Neal wrote that the black community should not be upset that a white cultural institution failed to recognize Ellington’s genius. Black artists should not continue to seek praise from “a society that oppresses us, exploits us,” for its “acceptance” would constitute but “another instrument of enslavement,” he argued. Moreover, he added, American society lacked the ability to truly judge black artistry.54 Here was Neal’s attempt to delink the oppressive nature of the white cultural establishment through the strategic mobilization of African diasporic artistic and political desires. Black empowerment meant that “the Black public, Black musicians and artists,” should set the standards for evaluating the quality of black art.

A similar perspective is found in Neal’s approach to the history of black literature. In a three part series entitled “The Black Writer’s Role,” he evaluated the major black male writers of the day—Wright, Ellison, and Baldwin—and their approach to the question of the writer’s responsibility. Curiously absent from this list is Langston Hughes, who Neal was likely to have the most in common with. Regardless, Neal believed that all black writers, and especially the supremely gifted among them, had an essential obligation in the shifting political climate of the period. “The writer must accept the responsibility of guiding the spiritual and cultural life of his people,” he wrote. In his role as literary and cultural historian, Neal placed great emphasis on what can be called cultural genealogy.55 That is, he located the present blossoming in black cultural and political expression within a history of black cultural activity. Turning first to Richard Wright, Neal saw some of the ingredients of a self-defined literary tradition that drew upon values germane to black experiences in America. Black writers were to embrace rural and urban regional experiences, as well as the ethos of the church and the street. Ultimately, Neal saw in Wright a defense of Black Nationalism, though simultaneously couched in Americana. Neal saw in Wright’s work a value placed upon a uniquely articulated black worldview and pride based on experience.56

As he had done earlier, Neal turned again to Ralph Ellison. Spending the bulk of the essay on Invisible Man and a few of Ellison’s articles written in the 1940s, Neal sought to examine the possible directions of black literature. Neal viewed Ellison as a “repository of Afro-American myth, folklore, rhymes and blues,” and a “master of language, rhythm, irony and humor” who had not escaped black culture, as some had argued, but who had stopped short of utilizing his knowledge of black culture to inform black leadership. Neal viewed the writer’s function as one that represented community outlooks, needs and desires, drawing upon a firm sense of African, Afro-diasporic, and African American history. “The writer’s role is to articulate, not only, his perceptions, but those of his people,” he wrote. “He functions in any capacity that the situation demands. His work is directed to black people, whites are incidental to it.” Though Ellison assisted the general reception of black cultural forms, Neal was unsure whether his intentions were to help black people or to simply entertain whites. Though Ellison had earlier asserted the psychological utility of black culture, he had since moved away from that position, Neal argued. As such, Neal believed Ellison to be wasting his talents.57 The space provided in Liberator, however, was inadequate to fully address this issue. In an article written toward the end of the decade, Neal expounded upon the issues he had raised earlier. Interestingly, Neal appeared in the process of deepening his understanding of Ellison. His self-reflection revealed to him that Ellison was the “most engaging” of all the African American male writers of his generation.58 The picture accompanying his analysis of Ellison announced Neal’s recent appointment as Liberator arts editor, though according to Neal his tenure in that role began sometime earlier.59 A scholarly-looking Neal dressed in jacket and tie sporting dark rimmed eyeglasses with a neatly trimmed Afro and mustache evidenced the “sartorial splendor” he was known for.60

In between his studies of the craft of black writers, Neal’s two-part series “Development of Leroi Jones” told as much about the generation of writers in their 30s (born in the mid to late 1930s) as it did about the fiery poet-playwright and lifelong cultural organizer. Neal described the tide in militancy that marked this younger generation of writers in a manner that recalled Askia Touré’s 1963 Liberator article, “The New Afro-American Writer.” As mentioned, Neal’s “Black Writer’s Role” series was arguably the most notable of his Liberator writings aside from his unveiling of Baraka. To use a sports analogy, Neal was both ring announcer and corner man for the new literary heavyweight champion Baraka was in the process of becoming. Though he at least mentioned Baraka in several of his writings from this period, in the January and February issues of 1966, Neal returned to discuss Baraka directly, rounding out his definition of the activist-intellectual’s place in the new literary movement. He argued that Baraka, like others of his generation, were in search of what he called a “unified identity” that included spiritual development, an embrace of revolutionary principles, a concept of Third World unity, and an emphasis on a distinct aesthetics and ethics.

In the first installment Neal traced the emergence of Baraka, identifying key turning points in his personal and artistic life, particularly his Howard University education, his Greenwich Village lifestyle (although Baraka lived in Chelsea and the Lower Eastside mostly), which included numerous friendships with white writers and artists, and his marriage to Hettie Cohen.61 In the second installment Neal sought further explanation of Baraka’s development, expounding on his ideas and his art. In the preface to this article, Neal underscores the white literary establishment’s disdain for Baraka’s new direction and the overall attitude of Black Arts. Neal’s discussion highlights Baraka’s Blues People, juxtaposed by Dutchman, in an attempt to explain and justify the new approach of black artists to effectively break from the confines of western cultural norms, definitions and expectations. Though the full expression of Black Arts activity was still in its developmental stage, Neal anointed Baraka as “the most articulate spokesman” of the new revolutionary spirit. While Neal celebrated Baraka’s talents, his criticism avoided becoming maudlin, primarily because the movement was so new that “it is too soon to predict where all of this is going.”62

Neal observed that black writers around the world were essentially in the same predicament. In a supplemental article to the “Black Writer’s Role” series, Neal reported on an American Society of African Culture (AMSAC) writer’s conference that he attended. The conference featured Barbadian writer George Lamming who had been invited to speak on general themes addressed in African and Caribbean literature. Neal was not all that impressed with Lamming though he spoke favorably of In the Castle of My Skin, published in 1953. Neal believed Lamming was confused about for whom he was writing. Operating from within a Black Arts frame of reference where the politics of the writer should be discernable to the reader, Neal critiqued Lamming for his ambivalence, writing “Lamming had spent two hours discussing black literature with no discernable audience in mind.” “Who is the Black writers’ audience? Who are we writing for—our ‘neocolonialist masters’ or our own people?” Neal asked with some disgust. Ultimately, Neal came to a conclusion that typified the militancy of the period, marking a clear break with an earlier generation of writing. He concluded: “Essentially, we are a glorified proletariat accepting an occasional crumb from the tables of the establishment—an establishment which has yet to concede that our work has anything but exotic value. Under such conditions, the Black writer is another variation of the court jester—a literary Stepinfechit performing for an audience of white onlookers.”63 Here again Neal provided a sweeping history of black twentieth century literature from the Harlem Renaissance writers down to Ellison and John O. Killens. Neal argued that prior to Black Arts, black literature had not reached its full development as an art for the people in perpetual opposition to white literary standards and criticism. What he and others called the black revolution in literature was launched from two primary platforms: theater and poetry. Neal judged the novel as out of step with contemporary conventions: “the novel is a passive form,” he wrote. With an overhaul in theater and poetry already underway, the novel, he argued, distanced a largely working-class audience from the urgency of the moment. Whereas the novel had previously epitomized the highest level of literary respectability, Neal argued that the immediacy of Black Arts required more direct forms. In theater, he identified Douglas Turner Ward, Baraka, and Ed Bullins. In poetry, there were David Henderson, Touré, Ishmael Reed, Marvin Jackmon (Marvin X), Ernie Allen, Hernton, Bibbs, Carol Freeman, Welton Smith, Ronald Stone, and others, according to Neal.64 Though not all of these writers embarked on careers as poets, Neal was impressed with the frequency and force of their productivity. Moreover, that Liberator published Baraka’s one-act play Black Mass in its June, 1966 issue, is further evidence of the salient role of black theater in this period. Neal’s view is instructive for demonstrating the exploratory nature of the Black Arts Movement. The artists were courageous and possessed with purpose. They often knew what they were eschewing but the result of that work was not always clear. In other words, the project was always the work of improvisation. In this sense, many looked to jazz for inspiration and in that regard they were closer to Ellison that they may have wanted to acknowledge.

Askia Touré shared Neal’s vision and sense of urgency. He wrote to Neal of the importance of poetry, specifically the epic poem. Touré sought to “produce literature as well as social action,” in a tradition of excellence that stretched back to the “supreme propagandists” of the early twentieth century. Though he was no stranger to the South owing to his North Carolina roots, he was forced to relocate to Atlanta from New York following Malcolm’s assassination. Touré argued that epic poetry reflected “psychic changes and growth by which people come to self-realization,” a critical but necessary stage in what he viewed as an emergent nationalism. He identified David Henderson’s “Keep On Pushin’,” Hernton’s “Jitterbuggin’ in the Streets,” Neal’s “Lenox Avenue Sunday,” and his own “Sunrise” and “Cry Freedom” (the latter appeared in Liberator in 1963) as exemplars of the epic form.65 Touré held a long view of history, mining African diasporic experience to discover a lineage of creative resistance and skilled navigation of some of the most difficult terrain of modern society.

The handwritten letter to Neal reveals Touré’s determined search for a clear program and also of the growing impatience with nationalist claims that stopped short of a blueprint for change. In his view, the younger generation was not as clear about which direction to head next as the black writer-activist. Many of the younger radicals had argued that earlier movements had not moved far enough toward a revolutionary program. Here was Touré critiquing his own generation in a way that many, including Touré himself, had not stated publicly. Ranging from culture to politics and media criticism, its central thrust included a call to return South and a critique of the factions developing among nationalists, cultural nationalists, and Marxists, who all claimed to be in search of that all-illusive sense of power.

Though Black Arts/Black Power developed in various corners of the nation, Touré lamented the regionalization apparent in the movement, even as he imagined the South more open to the possibility of expanding Black Arts than New York City was at this point. He viewed regional divisions as a handicap; that activists were so spread out that their regions became more important than the widespread advancement of liberation politics. The lack of unity reflected the lack of coherence. “What did radicals want?” he asked. “If ‘Charlie’ asked most of us, or a group of us ‘militants,’ what we wanted, there’d almost be a fist-fight between the factions that would develop: ‘Back to Mother Africa!’ ‘Separate states!’ ‘Black Revolution!’ would be the factional cries, he imagined. He ended the letter stating that “I find that our people are more impressed by institutions than words.” Touré and Neal were in constant dialogue about the future direction of black politics, often revealing a sense of frustration and vulnerability that was not easily expressed.

An older generation of writers still loomed large over the incipient Black Arts universe. Long after Baldwin’s distance from Liberator, and his extended expatriate stay in Europe, Neal still sought to mark the stretch between Baldwin and the new movement. Before departing from Liberator ranks, Neal devoted his last “Black writers’ role” commentary to an analysis of Baldwin. As had some, he had come to view Baldwin with mixed results. On the one hand, he appreciated Baldwin’s sense of social commitment and held respect for the Harlemite’s long-standing quest for racial justice. Yet, on the other hand, Baldwin seemed to be torn between his blackness and his American citizenship; a familiar concern held among a number of Baldwin’s observers. Baldwin, according to Neal, wanted to save America by forcing the country to face the truth about the history and condition of African Americans, which in turn would reveal the true nature of the country.

In Neal’s view, Baldwin’s unresolved Du Boisian Double Consciousness prevented him from fully developing into an artist/writer of the people. In other words, from Neal’s vantage point, Baldwin’s yearning for America to face its true self betrayed his devotion to the black community generally, and left American liberalism unchecked. “His uncertainty over identity and his failure to utilize, to its fullest extent, traditional aspects of Afro-American culture, has tended to dull the intensity of his work,” Neal wrote. Though as a critic he could highlight the limitations in Baldwin’s artistry, Neal knew the Harlem-bred essayist and playwright could not be ignored. Though Baldwin’s work was apparently “suffused with a[n] incisive sense of self-pity … it never fails to engage our attention, even when it is unsuccessful.”66 In July 1966, Neal returned to political analysis and offered up a stringent critique of liberalism. His writings on culture had consistently eschewed white liberal judgment of black art, but in this piece he turns directly to the question of liberal writers of African American experience, which he noted were, in the main, of Jewish heritage. Here, Neal joined the ranks of Baldwin, Eddie Ellis, Dan Watts, and other Liberator writers who sought to explain the contradictions in relations between Jews and African Americans.67

In what turned out to be his final Liberator article, Neal reported on the recently convened Black Arts convention, “Forum 66” held in Detroit the previous June. Earlier that month he was married to Evelyn Rodgers in a traditional or “neo-traditional” Yoruba ceremony, over which Baba Oseijerman Adefumi presided.68 Adefumi also headed up Harlem People’s Parliament and participated in the Detroit conference advocating the revolutionary potential of the Tanzanian economic philosophy Ujaama as a path forward. At the conference, Neal shared a panel with poet Dudley Randall, Soulbook editor Bobb Hamilton, and Detroit poet Oliver LaGrone. The conference also featured crusading journalist Charles P. Howard, RAM leader Max Stanford, Denise Nicholas, John Killens, and representatives from the Detroit-based theater Concept East founded by Woodie King. Neal noted the ideological tensions that surfaced at the meeting, particularly at the panel on black nationalism and politics, where Marxists, nationalists, and those advocating repatriation to Africa debated the merits of their positions.69 As James Smethurst has written, Detroit proved to be a major locus of Black Arts activity in this period. More important, the Midwest was known for its institution-building activity, which was relatively more secure than its coastal counterparts.70 Though Liberator was New York–based, it reached Detroit and as far west as California on a fairly consistent basis. It is quite likely that given his prominent role on the magazine’s staff, Neal and others carried copies of the magazine with them on their travels around the country. Again, longtime Detroit-based radicals such as James and Grace Lee Boggs wrote letters to the editor commenting on articles published in the magazine. James published his analyses of Black Revolution in Liberator as late as 1970, and James and Grace Lee both were close to many of RAM’s East Coast associates. Though separated by geography and local exigencies, such vehicles as Liberator, Soulbook, DRUM, and Broadside Press often closed the distance between cities and movements for many in and around black radical artistic and political circles. Moreover, these sites served as strategic organizing tools that linked translocal networks of activists and potential organizers.

Larry Neal would continue to write, publish, and participate in various efforts around the country years after his Liberator service expired. In subsequent years, he wrote for or appeared on a number of television projects focused on black experience. He wrote introductions for reprint editions of Jonah’s Gourd Vine and Dust Tracks on a Road by Zora Neale Hurston at the end of the decade.71 He also lectured at City College of New York, Wesleyan, Yale, and Williams College. Two of his most lasting contributions, however, were the anthology Black Fire (1968), which he coedited with Baraka, and Black Boogaloo, published the same year. In the summer of the following year, Neal published a long article in Ebony magazine, wherein he further explained the major thrusts of the Black Arts Movement and its relationship to Black Power for a more mainstream black audience.72

Though Neal was the most notable and respected Black Arts intellectual on Liberator’s staff, it was theater critic Clayton Riley who announced the formation of Baraka’s Black Arts theater to readers in April 1965 after attending a March fundraiser for the group. The benefit showcased a few plays, including Baraka’s The Toilet and Experimental Death Unit #1, Charles Patterson’s Black Ice, and Nat White’s The Black Tramp. Though Riley promised to critically review the pieces in a future column, he encouraged readers to send what financial help they could to get this promising theater initiative off the ground.73 In May, Riley reviewed the emergent Black Arts poetry scene in and around New York City. Baraka’s BARTS, which was in the process of opening its doors in Harlem, staged a poetry reading that featured the standout male poets of the new movement. These included Jones and Neal, LeRoi Bibbs, Albert Haynes, David Henderson, Calvin Hernton, Charles Patterson, Lorenzo Thomas, Ishmael Reed, and Steve Young. Riley’s article heaped critical praise on this gathering of poets, and expressed his delight in being part of the scene.74 Poetry by Jones, Hernton and Thomas, along with Frederick Douglas Richardson, Eliot Black, Joe Johnson and Carlos Russell, followed Riley’s rehash of the Black Arts poetry event. Also included in this May issue was Riley’s long review of Baldwin’s “The Amen Corner,” which starred Bea Richards as Sister Margaret, the play’s main character.

Debuting at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre, Richards’ command performance in the play was its only saving grace, according to Riley. He thought that in the twelve years since Baldwin had first written the play, certain of its scenes should have been rewritten to make for better drama. Frank Silvera’s direction and his acting in the role of Luke, Sister Margaret’s estranged husband, were severely criticized by Riley. “More than anyone else in the cast, Silvera seems to need direction badly,” he wrote, “and here again he bears responsibility for any inadequacies in that area—he is the director.” Limping from one big moment to the next, he warned Liberator readers, “the play regularly becomes tedious.” Writing in the New York Times, critic Howard Taubman, partially agreed with Riley’s take, calling the play “sketchy” and “slow.” Though he found more use in the supporting cast than did Riley, both critics agreed that “The Amen Corner” was a must-see, if for no other reason than to experience the talent of Beah Richards.75 Though Riley berated his skills on the stage, Frank Silvera was part of a cadre of theater organizers whose workshops advanced black theater throughout the decade and into the 1970s.76

Following Neal’s departure, the bulk of the theater criticism fell on the shoulders of Riley, yet another underrated cultural critic on the Black Arts scene. Again, Riley was one of the earliest Liberator witnesses to the flourishing of Black Arts consciousness. Lesser-known writers, such as Eddie Ellis, who would become a founding member of the NY chapter of the Black Panthers would also contribute to Liberator’s analyses of the theater, as seen by his piece “Is Revolutionary Theatre in Tune with the People?” published at the end of 1965. Riley, however, more than other writers emerged as the magazine’s ambassador of the cultural scene following Neal’s departure. He joined the Liberator staff in 1964. His writings focused on major aspects of black cultural life including sports, film, theater and literature. His musings on athletics, however, distinguish him among peer critics, with the exception of Carlos Russell, who also published a number of articles that featured black athletes. Riley’s first two articles interrogated the world of athletics, specifically taking stock of the black professional athlete.

In his first essay, Riley offers an account of the importance of basketball to inner city youth. Their dreams and aspirations live and die on those courts, he wrote. At the uptown playground at 114th and Lenox, where “nobody plays for the exercise,” Riley met two young men, one with the hope of one day striking it rich through his talent on the court, and another whose days of glory were behind him though he was relatively still a young man. Riley discusses the onlookers as well and the dreams they hold for the young men who run up and down the court in a “smooth, knowledgeable—almost dance-like” manner. In Riley’s hands, what on the surface looked like an appreciation of God-given skills, was a thinly veiled critique of American society. Riley revealed the systematic roadblocks that dashed dreams and left young men ill-prepared for the reality that lay ahead. Riley noted the circumstances that many of the young men on the court faced: “Racing up and down the stone floor at 114th and Lenox are players who were making headlines as schoolboys a few years ago. Some came to rest on the block because nobody cared enough to tell them what subjects it was necessary to take in order to go on to college. Others drifted in and out of anonymous southern schools, earning degrees in a few cases which in turn earned them puzzled stares or patronizing smiles when they returned to the city and attempted to get jobs.” And though he could acknowledge such iconic figures as “[Oscar] Robertson, [Bill] Russell, [Elgin] Baylor, [Wilt] Chamberlain, and [Walt] Bellamy [who] once ran on the stone, wooden or ‘dust bowl’ courts of Harlems all over this nation,” he noted that most of the young men he witnessed that day, even if they made it, would merely be entertainment for “the vice-presidents, magnates, millionaires and rulers they must never think of becoming.”77 Through sports, Riley was able to critique America’s treatment of black youth in a way that was far less polemical, but no less radical, than Cruse’s or C. E. Wilson’s overt critiques of liberalism or capitalism. Riley provided a view of black life unseen to many but no less important to analyzing the effects of deindustrialization and state restructuring in this period.

The following month, Riley turned his attention to the boxing ring. Similar to his analysis of playground basketball in Harlem, he encouraged readers to think of the sport of boxing in a political context. Boxing, especially at the professional level, necessarily carried with it an implicit commentary on race in American society, especially considering the careers of Jack Johnson, Joe Louis, Floyd Patterson, Sonny Liston, and later Muhammad Ali. Ali’s brash in-your-face manner stoked fears in many, and his embrace of Islam in 1964 only worsened matters. Riley suspected that recent calls among mainstream sports writers to ban boxing had more to do with the fact that more black and brown boxers were not only winning championships—actually dominating the sport, especially at the heavyweight division—but were also taking home handsome purses, than a concern for the sport’s brutal violence.78 “It is becoming … increasingly difficult for the overseers of boxing’s vast plantation to rob their chattel any longer,” he wrote.79 With a few articles under his belt, Riley was appointed to the editorial board in August 1964, thus providing the magazine a sense of stability in a crucial period of its transition.

Riley resumed his sports commentary the following month, writing on racism in American baseball in response to a derogatory statement made at black ballplayers by Alvin Dark, the manager of the San Francisco Giants from 1961 until 1964. According to Riley, Dark mentioned to a reporter that “his team’s Negro and Spanish-speaking ballplayers were not as mentally alert as the club’s white players.” For Riley, such comments were not only indicative of the times, they also spoke to the core of America’s racial fears and prejudices. As Adrian Burgos Jr. points out in his exemplary study of baseball and race, America’s national past time offers up a case study in American race relations, patterns of racialization, and labor ownership, constituting a complex web of politics and sports.80 And while writer Dave Zirin has argued against the exploitation of sports for political purposes, he acknowledges its political implications when he writes: “… we can pretend sports isn’t political just as well as we can pretend there is no such thing as gravity if we fall out of an airplane.”81 Clayton Riley continued to analyze America’s racial politics through the prism of sports. Analyzing the 1964 Winter Olympic games in Japan, Riley argued that the treatment black people received in their home country should have led them to boycott the games. Though Riley could not discern whether such a movement was afoot among black Olympians, his perspective would be confirmed at the summer games in Mexico four years later.

What advocate and professor Harry Edwards interpreted as the revolt of the black athlete was well underway in the spring of 1964, although their respective publications, written in response to the controversy surrounding the Mexico City games, appeared at the end of the decade.82 As one example, Liberator editorial board member Carlos Russell interviewed basketball star Bill Russell, the brother of the magazine’s staff writer, Charlie. Calling him “the bearded revolutionary of basketball,” he spoke of his outlook on social change and political leadership. “I wear my Blackness as a badge of honor,” Russell was quoted as saying. Shown on the cover of this month’s issue dribbling a basketball in full Boston Celtics uniform, this brief conversation allowed readers a glimpse of the star athlete’s thinking, which many were either unaccustomed to hearing or willfully ignored. Russell’s outspokenness demonstrated that many black athletes were unafraid of using their visibility to convey the depth of their ideas and perspectives on social issues beyond the courts and playing fields.83

Riley extended his Olympic reporting in December, pointing out the number of black athletes who participated in the games as well as their state of origin. Emphasizing the racial climate of the period, Riley wrote that most of the players, whether they were from the North or the South, would be summarily walked to the broom closet for employment upon their return from the games. Their Olympic experience would be little more than a line on their resume, but would not open the doors of greater opportunity, he asserted, writing: “Now that they are home, many of them [are] forgotten already and all of them no more than second class golden, silvered, or bronzed colonials.”84 Riley brought a humility and passion to his articles, an additional quality that distinguished his writing from that of his peers. Whether analyzing the American Football League’s decision to move the All-Star game from New Orleans to Houston because of racist treatment of professional players in that city, or when describing “Slug,” a made-up youth game slightly similar to handball played in the ghettoes, Riley stressed the greater humanity and dignity of his subjects despite the conditions they faced. Yet, he could also be unforgiving and harsh in his criticism, especially concerning professional athletes.

Toward the end of 1964, Jackie Robinson published a partially biographical account of baseball’s experiment with integration, entitled Baseball Has Done It.85 Riley reviewed the book for Liberator and expectedly wrote the book off as “a badly written and frequently garbled tract” that sought to exploit to the climate of racial tension surrounding the civil rights struggle. Riley acknowledged that Robinson was for him a one-time hero, and wishes that it were 1947 again instead of 1964. However, placing aside his personal criticisms of Robinson’s public life and baseball career, Riley asserts that the former Brooklyn Dodgers second baseman’s analysis was flawed. Robinson, seeking to lend a voice of integrity to the integration debate, spoke of the benevolence and courage of team owners who hired black players. Riley, however, noted that Robinson should have been more honest by highlighting the financial incentives for ball clubs to integrate. In other words, it was revenues, not respect, that drove baseball to open its gates to black players.86 In this regard, Robinson was the polar opposite of Bill Russell, who proudly wore his blackness, and perhaps as important, advocated a structural critique of the professional sports world of which he was a proud member. Robinson instead trumpeted his Americanness. Though Robinson often took controversial and unpopular political stances that brought disfavor from the black community, by the end of the decade his respectability was partially restored when he publicly supported St. Louis Cardinals outfielder Curt Flood’s principled stance against major league baseball’s trade policy in 1969.87

Though, with few exceptions, athletics are not always thought of as a major aspect of Black Arts and Black Power, sports and sports figures are no less significant as markers for the radicalism of the decade.88 Black athletes not only responded with their own expressions of black consciousness, but many also participated in demonstrations or used their platforms to express solidarity with the larger movement for social transformation. Nowhere was this evident than in Muhammad Ali’s protest of the Vietnam War. By the late 1960s, Liberator, like the rest of Black America, had forgiven Ali for his abandonment of Malcolm X during his crisis with Elijah Muhammad. Animus seemed to be replaced by an understanding. Malcolm’s assassination forced many people to recalibrate their stances. By that time, Ali had arguably supplanted Malcolm at the pinnacle of a highly visible form of black masculinity. Whereas Malcolm stood for a renewed political vision, here was Ali, an exemplar of a celebrity with out-of-this-world talent who shunned the spotlight in defense of his principles and the values he developed under the guidance of the Nation of Islam. For Liberator, Ali represented the antithesis of Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society. While the Vietnam War represented the struggle against communism in the eyes of mainstream Americans, to African Americans who eschewed the harness of the political status quo, it represented the unapologetic face of global white supremacy. In this sense, Ali was “the Establishment’s Vietcong.”89

Though a knowledgeable critic of sports, Riley’s contribution to Liberator is also found in his film reviews. Throughout the decade Riley followed theater and film closely, reviewing such films as Guns at Batasi, a laughable portrait of postcolonial African nationalism, and Nothing But a Man, directed by Michael Roemer, which featured Abbey Lincoln, Ivan Dixon, and Yaphet Kotto. Riley enthusiastically endorsed the latter film with praise that seemed to anticipate the film’s now classic status.90 A month later, his review of the summer blockbuster The Pawnbroker, directed by Sidney Lumet, pointed out the stellar roles played by Raymond St. Jacques and Brock Peters, who would become cinematic fixtures throughout the decade and into the 1970s.91

An ad announcing the arrival of Felix Greene’s film China! shared the page with Riley’s Pawnbroker review. Billed as “the only major film by an American or British producer since the Communist revolution,” the film made its New York debut at the Carnegie Hall Cinema. According to its billing it would be “a shattering eye-opener to all Americans!” Riley reviewed “China!” in his theater column in July 1965. Accompanying the film was a short that featured the Peking Symphony Orchestra. China! showed a nation on the move, a film whose every scene was an educational moment, according to Riley. “In scene after scene, activity fills the life of these people. No one loafs, no one drags [their] feet. The nation works, the nation learns, the nation moves,” he wrote. It did not matter to Riley that the film could be considered Maoist propaganda. He welcomed a depiction of the country that countered the West’s projection of the country “as a vast conglomeration of war machinery.” Anticipating ensuing controversy, he recommended that readers go see the film and decide its value for themselves.92 Toward the close of the year, Riley recommended that readers view theatrical presentations of German playwright Bertolt Brecht’s The Exception and the Rule, and Langston Hughes’s The Prodigal Son, both of which were staged at the Greenwich Mews in the Village.93

By 1966, Liberator writers epitomized radical aesthetic criticism found in virtually every corner of black thought. The writings of Ford, Neal, Riley and others shaped the magazine’s criticism of U.S. popular and political culture. They searched for arts and criticism that spoke to and for the black community with a language and possessing the spirit of rebellion those communities would understand, as Neal maintained during his years on the staff. Though there was no set political or interpretive “line” these critics adhered to, there was a sense of a unified vision of how black cultural productions could advance the political and social struggles black people faced generally. Additionally, these artists and critics often communicated how different elements worked together such as when Riley reviewed four theatrical productions in jazz terms, imagining each of the plays as a different musician’s instrument. In doing so, they often exceeded their own expectations. Critics such as Riley fashioned a distinctive style and form of politically informed cultural criticism and searched out the places beyond mainstream society’s radius of newsworthiness.94 While Ford, Neal, Touré, and Riley articulated the need for black controlled theater and literary institutions, photographer Roy DeCarava, painter Joe Overstreet, and others, carried these demands into visual arts.

Painting the Revolution, and Shooting it Too: Visual Artists and Liberator

Black Arts visual artists continue to escape wide scholarly attention. That a recently published book entitled Art and Social Change, does not include one artist of the Black Arts era working prior to 1968 is indicative of such neglect.95 Appreciably, recent studies have begun to critically appraise Black Arts era visual artists, especially muralists.96 Though this is a welcome addition to the much-needed appraisal of this movement, more is required. In this sense, then, I briefly turn attention to Liberator efforts to highlight the work of visual artists, who like their literary counterparts in the movement, helped articulate the radical aesthetic practices available in this period.

Included in its influential coverage of radical aesthetic activity, Liberator featured a number of visual artists, profiling their art and the galleries where they staged their works. In a previous chapter I review its coverage of Harlem-based artist Valerie Maynard. The magazine was equally attentive to visual artists such as Abdul Rahman, Wyndam Porter, Bedwick Thomas, Milton Martin, and Joe Overstreet, as well as photographers Leroy McLucas, Roy DeCarava, and even Dan Watts throughout its peak years. Illustrators Leo Carty and Tom Feelings also featured their work in Liberator. Feelings designed the Liberator’s logo, a sketch of a man in profile sitting at a restaurant booth in a dark suit that recalled a similar famous photograph of Malcolm X. Later, he and his wife, Muriel, would publish in Liberator an excerpt of their influential children’s book Zamani Goes to Market, published in 1970.97 Several of Feelings’s drawings were prominently displayed in the November 1966 issue of the magazine under the heading, “African Impressions.” Carty, along with Harold Esannason formed a publicity team that advertised local artist events and gallery openings. Carty and Esannason, who shared some of the magazine’s distribution duties, also staged a viewing of their own work entitled, “Le Monde Des Noires” (The Black World) at the Kamoinge Gallery (also known as the Gallery), which was located uptown at 248 West 139th Street in the fall of 1964.98

Art historian Erina Duganne discusses the Kamoinge Workshop collective as standing both inside and outside Black Arts.99 She argues that the Kamoinge photographers sought to represent both individual and collective standpoints, but that they were ambivalent about the depiction of their photographs as solely representative of black life, especially in regard to Harlem. Because many of the members did not live in Harlem (rather, many lived on the Lower East Side), she asserts that “while many Kamoinge members felt an emotional affiliation toward Harlem and often photographed there, defining their production solely in terms of generalized understandings of this locale fixed their images as the product of a collective expression, not unlike the one prescribed by supporters of the Black Arts Movement.”100 Another reading may suggest that there was much more of a fluid relationship between the Lower East Side and Uptown than is often accounted for.101 It is likely that several of the Kamoinge members would have shared ideas and concepts with artists of other mediums beyond the workshop. That De Carava published work in periodicals such as Liberator, a critical site of activity of the proto-Black Arts and Black Arts Movement, is a noteworthy example of the fluid and transient nature of black artists spaces in this period.

Although Duganne argues that these artists were “transcending race,” we might also appreciate the significance of the collective’s decision to adopt an African-inspired title for the group.102 The naming of the groups and individuals taking on new names are the earliest markers of the identity shifts in the period. They could have just as easily called themselves the Negro Photography Group, or the Black Photographers Workshop, but in choosing “Komoinge,” they allied themselves with several registers of black self-assertion and an embodiment of black internationalism. Whether or not the Kamoinge Workshop members agreed on the evolving and often elastic tenets of the Black Arts Movement, there is no question that they operated within a black tradition of photography and art.

Roy DeCarava’s photography captured the everyday sensibilities of Harlem. Often, his subjects were shown in the midst of everyday life activities. Liberator featured his work in its March and April issues of 1965. As early as 1955, he collaborated with Langston Hughes in The Sweet Flypaper of Life.103 And by 1962, he had compiled material for a book that included his photographs interspersed with his own poetic descriptions, which was not published for nearly four decades. What eventually became The Sound I Saw: Improvisations on a Jazz Theme is DeCarava’s photo diary of the New York jazz scene.104 Keeping this in mind, it is clear that the revolutionary imagination was not only painted in vivid, robust colors, but also captured by the focus, snap and flash of radical, conscious and observant photographers.

Other groups, such as Abdul and Rose Rahman’s 20th Century Creators, which also got its start in and around Harlem, issued a straightforward approach concerning the intended purpose of their work. The Rahmans worked out of the Universal Art Studio in the Bronx and, like many artists, offered workshops at schools, churches, and community centers to both make a living and extend their artistry to local communities.105 Other affiliates of the 20th Century Creators, such as Virgin Island–born Brooklyn artist Bedwick Thomas, explicitly connected their work to Black Arts. Thomas, whose art was partially inspired by jazz, also associated with the jazz and art collective POMUSICART (a name that stood for “Poetry, Music, and Art”). “Besides my basic love of art, the desire to awaken and elevate the stature of my people will compel me to dedicate my life to art and the development of our culture,” he told Liberator.106 In this way, the magazine reflected an affinity for unknown community based artists, some of whom, such as Wyndham Porter and Milton Martin, were just beginning their careers. Yet readers were encouraged to look out for and support their work. In this way, Liberator played the role of popularizer, providing a space of imagination and improvisation, attempting to provide greater exposure to artists who might have otherwise had difficulty getting the public’s attention.

Prior to his departure, Neal sat down in conversation with Joe Overstreet, a visual artist who taught painting at BARTS. Overstreet told Neal that like music, his art was intended to reflect a community vision of the world. Inspired by Romare Bearden, Jacob Lawrence, and small collectives such as Harlem’s Yoruba painters, Overstreet’s surname aptly connoted the centrality of community themes in his work. Though he saw the value of staging work in galleries, such as Harlem’s Afra-Arts, which was located on Convent Avenue, Overstreet advocated “painting on billboards and fences where building construction is going up.”107 Interestingly, this view anticipates the call for an assertive street based visual art movement that blossomed in the 1970s. It can be argued that urban artists, some of whom became known as graffiti artists throughout the decade, find their roots in Black Arts visual culture. Black Arts muralists are equal partners to the musicians and poets of the period, and in their own right represent pioneers of art that “took it to the streets,” in the popular vernacular of the day.

Groups such as the Organization of Black American Culture (OBAC) and Africobra were instrumental and innovative in community reclamation efforts throughout the 1960s and 1970s, though these and other outdoor artists suffered the general backlash against Black Arts/Black Power. Neal was determined to locate every facet of black life in relation to the project of liberation. His interviews and critical essays were central to his efforts to think through aspects of the movement that were more appreciated for artistry at the expense of possible spiritual meanings. Sites such as the Studio Museum in Harlem became a temporary home to Overstreet and similar-minded artists including Al Loving, Frank Bowling, Edward Clark, and Howardena Pindell.108 By the 1970s, Overstreet and others were deploying art that exhibited more abstract tendencies, which some critics associate with the “new Black music,” the musical, revolutionary jazz accompaniment to a radical liberation project.

Organized Freedom: Jazz Criticism and the Sound of Liberation

Thelonious Monk’s appearance on the cover of the February 28, 1964, issue of TIME magazine inspired the feeling that mainstream attention was long overdue. According to Amiri Baraka, reviewing Monk’s six-month residency at the Five Spot in Down Beat, the cover story was supposed to appear in November of 1963, but the assassination of President Kennedy pushed it back to a later date.109 Baraka, like many, wondered what the mainstream attention would mean for Monk, and for the black community. He worried that widespread reception would reduce the quality of Monk’s music. Monk, considered ahead of his time by some, if not from another universe altogether, came to represent an avant-garde class of artists by the time his gig at the Five Spot began. Baraka, Jayne Cortez and Ted Joans, among others viewed the eclectic pianist with reverence, hearing in his music a legacy of African American cultural experience, and its future. As Robin Kelley has posited, Monk simultaneously represented the avant garde, a new form of masculinity in music, and the nonconformity of the period. At the same time, however, Monk rejected the “avant garde” tag, and was sharply, and perhaps ironically, critical of artists such as Ornette Coleman who sought a freer expression of jazz. Though many appeared to appreciate Monk because he seemed to focus on the music rather than on race and politics, Kelley shows that Monk’s social outlook and political opinions were often ignored by critics and in the mainstream press.110 For one, Liberator guest critic Theodore Pontiflet was skeptical of Monk’s newly found notoriety, viewing this as but another page in the history of exploitation of black musicians. Emphasizing the presence of Monk’s white benefactor, Pontiflet feared a return of the white patronage that haunted black artists since the turn of the century.111

While many jazz artists of the 1960s embraced politics (here I mean that at various times they have participated in public demonstrations, played at benefit concerts for a given cause, or wrote and performed music in the name of a political figure or movement), white liberal jazz critics have more often than not looked with disfavor upon these efforts. Conversely, Black Arts artists and critics sought, in Larry Neal’s words, “to link in a highly conscious manner, art and politics in order to assist in the liberation of Black people.”112 The avant-garde explosion in jazz complicated the Black Arts liberation project that dominated the period. Although liberals and radical critics could celebrate Monk—albeit for ostensibly different reasons—many asked if the “new music” brought the art closer to the people, or moved it away from the community altogether.

Charlie Russell and Larry Neal, along with a few guest writers, such as Marc Brasz, Pontiflet, Nadi Qamar, A. B. Spellman, and Robert Bowen, carried the bulk of Liberator’s jazz criticism and documentation in the mid-1960s. The magazine’s coverage of the scene in and around New York accompanied a flourishing of new musicians and a new direction in the music. Its peak coverage lasted for roughly four years from 1963 until 1967, though it continued to publish jazz and music criticism throughout the remaining years of the magazine’s publication. In the August 1964 issue of the periodical, Russell asked simply: “Has Jazz Lost Its Roots?” The article, a conversation with pianist Cecil Taylor, sought to locate the new direction in jazz and noted that the music had moved a long distance from the sounds of his father’s day.113 Russell acknowledged that the new music was often hard to listen to and recalled that once the “swing of the music left, the music left the people.”114

Russell resumed his reportage on the jazz scene in November in conversation with Coltrane quartet bassist Jimmy Garrison. Garrison had previously played with Ornette Coleman, who is perhaps the musician most associated with the emergence of free jazz or the New Black Music.115 The following month he included a write-up on trumpeter Calvin Strickland, founder of the Harlem-based twenty-five-member group, POMUSICART, Inc.116 Russell placed the origins of this group in a kind of community needs assessment, as did Black Arts efforts broadly, justifying the arrival of black cultural institutions as earlier writers had done for the theater. POMUSICART sought to not only impact African Americans’ cultural life, but intended to equally contribute to its educational livelihood through the building of a jazz library. Inspired by the tragic life of Charlie Parker, Strickland argued that musicians and other artists had to “perpetuate our own culture,” in order for it to be sustained. Russell observed that POMUSICART members resembled “a Saturday Night prayer meeting,” rather than an assemblage of cutting-edge artists. Without a building, they organized events at the signature meeting ground of the era, Hotel Theresa, though their efforts largely went unnoticed by critics and community alike, he wrote.117 Yet POMUSICART’s Harlem-based programs are an indication that not all artists were attracted to downtown clubs such as the Five Spot (of course, this was not even an option for many black artists).

Debates between black and white critics raged throughout the remainder of the decade.118 Black artists and writers often issued strident critiques of the presence of white writers, who, they argued, did not understand enough about African American experience to effectively describe what they were witnessing. Some white writers, such as Nat Hentoff and Norman Mailer, both fixtures of the American cultural landscape in this period, were often perceived as intruders at worst and at best opportunists. Though this debate could also be found in the world of the theater, nowhere did this debate rage with as much ferocity as it did in jazz.119 Music periodicals such as Down Beat often featured the strident opinion of black writers staking out their freedom claims, and white writers justifying their role as witnesses and interpreters. Liberator, as “the voice of the Afro-American” (as its masthead read) was one of the critical sites of this debate. That it dropped the “protest movement” end of its subtitle indicates a nuanced shift from earlier movements. Black artists were no longer appealing to white sensibilities and reward structures, as the term protest would suggest. Instead, they were in the process of creating a distinct self-reflective register “above examination by Western analytical methods,” as Larry Neal once stated. To put it simply, protest, especially in a more or less liberal integrationist sense, was passé.

Echoing Neal’s call for African Americans, especially cultural workers, to steep themselves in black folk culture, Charles Hobson, writing in January 1965, argued for increased appreciation of the gospel music foundation of much of the contemporary music, including jazz and especially blues.120 The focus on cultural roots and ancestral identity among writers paralleled the equally aggressive drive toward the future among musicians. Ornette Coleman’s music represented the drive toward a style of jazz free of the constraints of earlier approaches. As mentioned, Coleman influenced a number of artists, including Jimmy Garrison. Yet, he also alienated some older musicians such as Thelonious Monk who once argued that Coleman had not created anything new.121 Charlie Russell resumed his critical appraisal of the jazz scene through an interview with Coleman. The subheadings of the interview reveal Coleman’s many battles and tensions, and tell a story of their own: “Love and Hate Confrontation”; “Self-imposed Retirement”; “Records Sell, But No Money”; “Hostile Reception to His Music”; “Jazz Is Sound Put to Motion”; “White America Does Not Want Negro Artists”; “Old Musical Standards Must Be Discarded”; “Dares to Be Himself”; “Critics Fail to Accept Their Responsibility.”122 “Ornette Coleman’s name belongs with other names like Archie Shepp, Cecil Taylor, LeRoi Jones, Sun Ra, Grachan Moncur III, Joe Overstreet,” Russell wrote. For him these figures represented what he termed an “iconoclastic aggregate” that influenced the period, setting new artistic and political agendas and establishing a new horizon for black aesthetics.123

Neal’s article, “Black Revolution in Music,” appeared in September 1965 and featured drummer Milford Graves, who could also be situated in Russell’s “iconoclastic” grouping. Neal argued that Graves had to be understood within a spiritual, explicitly nonwestern frame of reference. The spiritual aspect of Graves’s playing, alongside that of the likes of Guiseppe Logan and Don Pullen, was the connective tissue between musician and community, he claimed. However if these artists were to serve as representatives of community yearning, Neal still felt compelled to ask why it seemed that many in the community could not grasp the New Music, a subject he took up in a subsequent interview with saxophonist Archie Shepp.

Shepp was born in Fort Lauderdale, FL, moved to Philadelphia as a youth, and then, following undergraduate studies at Goddard College in Vermont, he relocated to New York City, residing mostly on the Lower East Side but also in Harlem. While many people saw their art as extensions of black community strivings, Shepp, like Charlie Russell, remarked that black artists were separated from the communities they sought to represent partially due to economic constraints that made it difficult to earn a living as a musician. Therefore, many of Shepp’s peers played downtown rather than in Harlem. Shepp, who had released Fire Music in the spring of 1965, made music with the movement in mind, at once revealing historic specificity, ethics, and social justice aesthetics. The album included a dedication to Malcolm X, entitled “Malcolm, Malcolm, Semper Malcolm” (Malcolm, Malcolm, Always Malcolm). Yet he also believed there was a moment when playing music was not enough of an engagement with the tide of the movement.124 In other words, the music could, and perhaps should, reflect the movement, but it was not the movement itself.

This larger dimension can be found in nearly all Shepp’s albums throughout the decade. In 1969 he recorded such songs as “New Africa,” composed by trombonist Grachan Moncur III, and “Bakai,” (named after a Bangladesh village), which was first recorded by Coltrane in the late 1950s. And by the early 1970s, he would compose such politically themed albums as Attica Blues, which included the triumphant-sounding tribute, “Blues for Brother George Jackson,” in January 1972, and The Cry of My People that September. The latter album is an example of the jazz–visual art synthesis at the core of radical aesthetics in this period. The album cover art for Cry featured the artwork of Africobra founding member Nelson Stevens, who also designed and directed dozens of mural projects in western Massachusetts in the 1970s as director of the Summer Public Arts program from 1974 until 1977. He is perhaps best known for his massive (26′ x 12′) mural, “Centennial Celebration of the Birth of Tuskegee,” which was completed in 1980.125 The Cry of My People is, in many ways, a sampling of black musical history, being steeped in the blues, gospel, and jazz, and thus offers up a musical legacy.

Baraka sat for an interview with Shepp around the time of Neal’s conversation with the saxophonist. Here, ample space was provided for Shepp to expand on some of the ideas he offered in the Neal interview. Though the bulk of their conversation is devoted to a discussion of the technical or stylistic changes occurring in the music—differences in chord progression, melody, rhythm, and so on—they also discussed the social and political aspects of the music; the place of the sound in the world. “The Negro musician is a reflection of the Negro people as a social and cultural phenomenon. His purpose ought to be to liberate America aesthetically and socially from its inhumanity,” he told Baraka, in terms that could be heard from most artists closely associated with Black Arts. Shepp believed that an artist was but a creatively gifted “reporter … an aesthetic journalist of America.” In his view, jazz artists were cultural documentarians of an indigenous art form that bespoke present conditions while invoking an ancestral past, not merely gifted musicians.126 Although Baraka had published several poems in Liberator and received ample attention there, he did not publish any of his seminal articles of jazz criticism in the magazine as he also had access to periodicals as Kulchur, Negro Digest, Down Beat, and later Cricket in this period.127

Neal’s push for an aesthetic bereft of white influence often elicited debate. One such exchange occurred between him and jazz critic Frank Kofsky, who challenged Neal’s interpretation of the black revolution in jazz. Yet Kofsky’s problem was not that Neal had affirmed the Black Nationalist thrust of the New Music. Rather, he took umbrage with Neal’s apparent eschewing of Marxism in his analysis of black cultural productivity. Again, Neal seized the occasion to emphasize the “spiritual reality” or, echoing Baraka, the “World Spirit” of jazz music and black culture that his writing sought to explain. In what may be an example of what theorist Gayatri Spivak has termed “strategic essentialism,”128 Neal argued that the spiritual aspects of the music were drawn from the subjective experiences of African Americans.129 The effort to challenge and dismantle western evaluative standards was at the heart of the Black Arts project. Though Kofsky would, by the end of the decade, show himself to be an astute critic of the jazz industry, at this point he, like Hentoff and Mailer, reminded Black Arts radical critics of the urgency of developing their own standards and tools to measure the social impact of aesthetic representation.130 In any case, Neal left Liberator in the fall of 1966 after a short but impactful stint as associate editor of arts and culture. However, the periodical’s engagement with jazz criticism would continue after his departure.

Though the spiritual dimension was difficult for some people to grasp, most admirers of John Coltrane allow the possibility of an otherworldly mission in his music. Upon hearing Coltrane at the Lincoln Center, Islamic instrumentalist Nadi Qamar imagined witnessing an “Islamic prayer chant echoing from marble mosque walls, or a giant oud or veena in the hands of a master.” Reviewing that event, Qamar perceived the limitations of the term “jazz” itself. As he stated: “The indigenous music of exiled American-born Africans does not need (1) Europeans to name it JAZZ, which means ‘to play around with,’ and that is exactly what is happening to most of the artists involved; (2) to be dubbed ‘the new thing,’ because there is nothing new.”131 As shown in this example, for many, the very terminology used to describe the art form was constricting. The new identity shifts taking place in this period, whether in the form of embracing new religious practices, taking on new names, or blending nonwestern global influences into one’s art, required, at least initially, a rethinking of the music. Coltrane’s Lincoln Center performance would be one of his last. His death in 1967 at the age of forty was arguably as momentous as the passing of Malcolm X two years earlier.132 As did Liberator’s writers in the wake of Malcolm’s death, Paul Anthony’s tribute alleged that Coltrane’s early death was “a product of this racist system.”133

Qamar followed up his commentary on the futility of applying European or western labels to black expressive culture in a June 1966 article aptly titled, “The Black Music Predicament.” In this article, he arguably surpasses the critique of the business of the arts offered by Baraka and Neal, asserting that “only Black musicians can properly, and completely evaluate Black music.” Whereas Neal played a pioneering role in Black Arts criticism and Baraka went to great lengths to wrest the critic’s pen from white jazz scene observers, Qamar argues for the abolition of the nonartist critic altogether. Notwithstanding the limitations of such a claim, it is evidence of the frustration of many toward the exploitative nature of jazz record production and club promotion. For Qamar, the nomenclature used to describe this “indigenous music” was part of the seemingly colonial relationship artists had to the industrial side of the music. If jazz was but a reflection of black people’s experience rendered in music, then the commodification of jazz—indeed its very packaging as such—could be an aspect of a larger controlling apparatus, he argued, asserting: “Jazz is a word coloring the contemporary expressions of black musicians with a melting pot ideology.”134 If Black Power represented the demise of liberalism in politics, the new music, as vague as that term may have been, symbolized a rejection of liberalism in the cultural realm. In this same (June 1966) issue, Liberator showcased the photography of Ray Gibson (no relation to Richard). The photography exhibit was entitled, “Spiritual Voices of Black America.” Though this title may have conjured up visions of the Fisk Jubilee Singers, Mahalia Jackson, or the SNCC Freedom Singers, featured in the exhibit were torchbearers of the new movement in jazz: bassist Henry Grimes, the ethereal pianist and composer Sun Ra, trombonist Grachan Moncur III, drummer Sunny Murray, and saxophonist Marion Brown.

For its second annual benefit concert, the NYU chapter of CORE booked Cecil Taylor, the pianist who was hailed as one of the leaders of the new music. In the August issue of Liberator, critic Marc Brasz reviewed Taylor’s performance, calling it “the ineluctability of Black.” “Ineluctable,” meaning “inevitable, not to be avoided or escaped,” seems to have been the perfect description of the sound of liberation. As Scott Saul has written, for Liberator, “jazz was music that refuted the logic of the melting pot, music of unalloyed Black conception.”135 For Brasz, Taylor’s work that night embodied “the torture of a death poem” recalling Baraka’s 1965 poem “Black Art,” in which he desires “poems that kill.” The following month, poet and critic A .B. Spellman reviewed the budding career of Marion Brown (an Atlanta native, former Howard University student, and neighbor of Baraka on the Lower East Side), whose saxophone prowess helped fill the void left by Coltrane, if such was at all possible. Brown and his group had achieved what Spellman could not help but call “organized freedom.”136

Spellman’s 1966 book, Four Lives in the Be-bop Business, which critically examined the lives and careers of Cecil Taylor, Ornette Coleman, Herbie Nichols, and Jackie McLean, marked a career on the upswing. Liberator jazz critic Marc Brasz reviewed Spellman’s book in December, arguing that it confirmed what he already knew: that Black Art was High Art. Brasz called on readers to embrace these recollections as their own, since their biographies were communal in nature. Their singular experiences told a collective struggle.137 In many respects, jazz offered a similar generative quality derived from artists forming a union, a collectivity, with a shared purpose crafted out of their individuality. For the poets who emerged toward the end of the decade, this collective individuality would advance Black Arts into the 1970s with its similar stories of depressing limitations and brilliant achievements. If jazz artists and criticism occupied much of Liberator’s pages, it also gave as much space to the jazz poetry of the period.

Poetic Jazz Aesthetics on Stage and Off

The Original Last Poets’ album Right On!, which was also the name of a film produced by Woodie King and directed by Herbert Danska, featured group members David Nelson, Felipe Luciano and Gylan Kain received attention by Liberator writer Clayton Riley. Danska had recently co-wrote and directed the film Sweet Love, Bitter, based on the 1961 John A. Williams novel Night Song, starring Dick Gregory and featuring Robert Hooks. The Last Poets were organized after a public poetry reading at Mount Morris Park in Harlem (now renamed Marcus Garvey Park) on Malcolm X’s birthday in 1968. As Abiodun Oyewole recalled, he was in the original group along with Nelson and Kain. Luciano emerged as a replacement for Nelson, who eventually returned to the group years later. Personality differences between Kain and Oyewole, lead to Kain’s departure. In any case, with all of the changes to their line-up, the album and the film of the same name would feature Nelson, Kain, and Luciano. Like their Black Arts mentors, the group was conscious of the need for community education and institution building. For a time they operated workshops and readings at a place they called East Wind, which was on 125th street between Fifth and Madison.138

In an interview with New Orleans-based Black Arts poet Kalamu ya Salaam, King spoke about the process and difficulty involved in making the film. King was one of the few artists and theater organizers of the period who successfully combined his creative prowess with business acumen. Up to this point he had earned a living acting in television commercials, which allowed him to sponsor a number of ventures. His multiple projects helped him put up $100,000 of his own money to produce the film, which showed at several venues throughout the city. At the start of the shoot Kain and Nelson refused to work with Umar Bin-Hassan and Oyewole, apparently owing to the latter’s streetwise activities. Nelson, a former Detroit high school classmate of King’s, would temporarily help mend the differences between the poets and eventually they were able to shoot the film. Unable to keep the peace much longer, the group broke into a fight during the three-month shoot, which resulted in the departure of Felipe Luciano from the group for full-time activity with the Young Lords, and the release of the group from King’s management company.139

Yet the film had raised some eyebrows, despite the internal conflict exploding behind the scenes. A critic writing in the New York Times called the seventy-eight-minute film a “cinema-of-the-rooftops” and compared the performance of Nelson, Luciano and Kain to a “hard driving evangelical performance.”140 The critic’s reference to the divine recalled Kain’s Christian fundamentalist upbringing though he had long since left the church. Like many disillusioned with western religion, he once said that Christianity sapped black people’s potency.141 Though Umar’s presence was left from the final edit of the film, he and King shaped a friendship out of the chaos. King later produced a play called Suspenders written by Umar, directed by Al Freeman Jr. and starred Clarence Williams III, two actors who would become fixtures in the post–Black Arts media landscape, carving out relatively successful Hollywood careers.142

Prior to their split, Nelson, Luciano, and Kain rendered their album for the theater under the umbrella of King’s Concept East in the summer of 1969. Liberator theater critic Clayton Riley encouraged readers to bear witness to the three-man performance-poetry ensemble’s unique “mixture of all recollection.” The group’s poetry wove together gospel music, street-alley brawls, beauty and barbershop therapy evoking “history [and] celebrations of forgotten other times,” he wrote. Debuting downtown at the Paperback Theatre, which was located along Second Street, the group’s performative gestures and linguistic cadences brought the dark realities of black ghetto life to the stage. Significantly, Riley also underscored the nexus between African American and Puerto Rican cultural life when he wrote that Luciano’s role brought “the clearest marriage between Puerto Rico and Harlem we may ever see.”143 Luciano’s “Puerto Rican Rhythms” vividly captures Riley’s observation. Prefacing his recitation with the words: “taking you into el barrio now” at once located the poem in the physical landscape of Spanish Harlem, and also invited listeners to a review of Puerto Rican historic migration to New York City.144

After Luciano left The Last Poets (amid internal turmoil), immediately, and partially due to the encouragement of Amiri Baraka, he took up a leadership role in the Young Lords. Liberator carried a photo of the recently formed Young Lords Party on the cover of its February 1970 issue. The photo, which featured leaders Yoruba Guzman and Luciano accompanied a photo essay that featured another male leader, Raphael Viera, alongside minister of finance Juan “Fi” Ortiz and minister of education Juan Gonzales explained the formation of the group and its recent initiatives. In particular, Liberator highlighted their garbage collection protest against the deteriorating social ecology, as well as their infamous occupation of the First Spanish Methodist Church of East Harlem, which lasted for over ten days, from just after Christmas in 1969 through the first week of the New Year, and catapulted the group into the national spotlight.145 Liberator coverage of this group is evidence of cross-cultural political and expressive activity. Indeed, Michelle Wilkinson has documented a shared history of socio-aesthetic parallel activity between the Black Arts and Puerto Rican Arts Movements in this period through the work of Miguel Algarín, Jeff Donaldson, Juan Sanchez, Faith Ringgold, and Miguel Piñero.146 Though Liberator writers were attentive to the Young Lords’ growing influence, this was the only coverage it devoted to that formation.

The recorded version of The Last Poets’ Right On! revealed a sense of poetic democratization that jazz musicians, with their continuous sharing of the stage through alternate solos, had performed to great effect. Each of the poets composed or was the lead performer on six individual pieces, for a total of eighteen tracks on the album. And while one led, the other two would improvise, adding linguistic layers reminiscent of urban discursive communities that were bilingual and often trilingual, to a given piece. Though their ability to draw large, mostly black and Latino working-class crowds revealed The Last Poets’ local celebrity, Liberator music critic and poet Ron Welburn, writing in November 1970, was not impressed with the labeling of their work as “the new Black blues” and, ostensibly, an extension of the description of jazz as the new black music. It is interesting that Welburn distinguished Luciano’s political involvement in the Young Lords from his appraisal of the album, perhaps seeking to evaluate it on artistic registers exclusively.

What little positive acknowledgment he had for their self-titled album stemmed from the ugly truths it aired. “Black people will laugh at what the Brothers put down, and what they put down is a sad sad truth, and laughter becomes sad self-flagellation,” he wrote. pointing out the bitter irony of their work. “The Last Poets mock, cajole, mimic, harass and insult, and blow away Niggers. So laughing to keep from crying about the hang-ups of Niggers is indeed the new blues,” he lamented. Welburn was forced to conclude however that their poetry was indicative of the times, though the abrasive, brash style may have lacked a degree of sophistication he had come to expect (or desire) of black poetry. According to Welburn, The Last Poets, for all their urban revelations, fell far short of the tradition set forth by Langston Hughes, Melvin Tolson, Robert Hayden, Aimé Césaire, Derek Walcott, Wole Soyinka, Tom Dent, and others. Though David Nelson could proclaim, “Poetry Is Black,” and assert that black people were poetry, blackness was not a strong enough aesthetic adhesive to link content and form. Instead, he accused them of straying from the legacy set by poets of an earlier generation and “legitimizing the worst kind of poetry.”147 Later, he compared Stanley Crouch’s Ain’t No Ambulances for No Nigguhs Tonight (FDS-105) to the debut of The Last Poets, praising the former for its “explanatory manner that paints surreal pictures” over the latter’s blatant obscenity.148

Welburn’s critique seemed to touch on the central recurring question and challenge of black artistic production in the twentieth century, that is, whether political subjectivity should overshadow form. Nonetheless, The Last Poets survived Welburn’s criticism, in large part due to their ability to capture raw energy perhaps strategically at the expense of poetic integrity, though it is evident that they took their art seriously. In the future, Felipe Luciano would remake himself as a political leader, Gylan Kain would record the solo quasi-political jazz–street poetry albums Blue Guerilla and Kain (in the mid-1970s), and Abiodun Oyewole and Umar Bin-Hassan would continue recording albums throughout the decade as The Last Poets. Despite Welburn’s critique there was an affective power in The Last Poets’ style of performance poetry.

Though often hampered by the masculinist rhetoric of the era, these recordings add to the performance traditions of African descendants that reach back to West African griots and long-standing forms of ancestral veneration. The spontaneity of these recordings provides a clear connection to the advancement of Black Arts into the seventies. Much of Black Arts poetry, theater and jazz especially, mastered and utilized spontaneity and improvisation to great effect, providing a sort of movement punctuality that could only be achieved by being in the moment.

Conclusion

Liberator’s radical aesthetic was expansive in its embrace of cultural production, critical analysis, and the envisioning of independent black cultural institutions. On the page and off, its role in shaping what I have called the black radical aesthetics of the period reflected an expansive pattern of translocality that linked sites of cultural and political struggle globally. Though African independence drove early debates about African diasporic identities and cultural integrity, as the decade unfolded, activists were concerned with mining the reservoir of African American cultural tradition as much as they expressed a revived interest in cultural practices exclusive to ethnic communities and national identity throughout Africa. While Liberator stood as an example of an independent black institution, its pronouncements on cultural revolution were largely drawn from the perspectives and tastes of individual writers as they wrestled with the purpose and direction of their work. Undoubtedly Liberator writers and subscribers were in constant conversation about the role of African American culture in black radical politics. These debates inseparably linked cultural and political autonomy.

As we have seen, culture arguably stirred community energies and passions to greater effect than explicit political demands. Reviewing the writing of Clebert Ford, Larry Neal, Clayton Riley, and others reveals an evolution, or at the very least an ebb and flow, of black perspectives toward the role of culture in black liberation politics. Liberator’s coverage of visual artists of the period included black muralists and photographers. One of the lasting aspects of radical politics in this period was in aesthetics. Though there were intense efforts to build alternative political parties as late as 1976, by and large, activists were unable to solidify the support required to construct and sustain a consistently autonomous black politics. The black radical cultural production—music, film, and literature, especially short stories and poetry—in this period forms a reservoir of aesthetic activities critically interpreted by Larry Neal, Amiri Baraka, Clebert Ford, Clayton Riley, and others that extended well into the 1970s. While many of the male radical aestheticians took to cultural criticism to express their political desires, women such as Abbey Lincoln, Sonia Sanchez, and Maya Angelou held forth on panels, at conferences, and in interviews, but most of all through their transcendent cultural work. Following the peak years of the mid-1960s, the Liberator staff dwindled down to a third of its original size, due to a combination of internal differences, effects of the liberation movement, and weakening financial support, as well as other factors. Liberator suffered debilitating changes to key staff positions, although some people were able to hang on despite the raucous shifts. Dan Watts proved to be a polarizing figure that alienated as many people as he had welcomed into the fold. With the publication showing serious signs of collapse by 1968 and experiencing obvious setbacks by 1969, the penetrating analysis of western imperialism, the sensitive treatment of working-class and poor black people, and the theorizing of imaginative radical cultural work that readers had come to expect from Liberator seemed to have faded away.

However, similar to its attention to the issues women faced in the movement, the Liberator made every effort to stay relevant by publishing articles on such groups as the Black Panther Party and the Young Lords Party and figures such as Angela Davis that were garnering national attention. Coverage of the Afro-Puerto Rican organization the Young Lords, which was based in Spanish Harlem although originating in Chicago, directly connected the Liberator back to its New York base, though it still strove—through a last-ditch effort at reorganization—to provide coverage of events occurring nationwide as well as those deserving attention internationally. Though the Liberator staff writers spoke with a defiant international consciousness, they were still largely New Yorkers who struggled in the communities in which they lived and worked. In short, its globally situated translocalism ultimately brought Liberator back to the home front.