photo by Alex Lear

THE MAGIC OF JUJU

CHAPTER 2: BAM’s Historical Background

            BAM Time-line. Our conceptual L/N/L (local/national/local) approach is now defined. The major contradictions have been considered. BAM itself is defined. With this much in place, we can now address the question of periodicity, i.e. when did BAM start, when did BAM end, why and how were the beginning and end dates chosen?

            When discussing social movements, establishing start and stop dates is often an arbitrary exercise. BAM is particularly difficult to pin down to a specific start and stop date because of the nature of its beginning in far flung, grassroots activities which were often unrelated to each other. Nevertheless, if we claim that BAM was an important movement then we need to be able to locate this movement in history. In keeping with our L/N/L conceptual model, I mark the beginning point of BAM in the national phase and the end point of BAM in the disruption/decline of the second grassroots phase.

            From this perspective, BAM begins in 1965, catalyzed into action by the assassination of Malcolm X in February 1965 which propelled a number of forces to make definitive moves and declarations. As we will see, LeRoi Jones joined forces with other Black activists/artists to found the Black Arts Repertory Theatre/School (BART/S) in March of 1965. Also, the staff of Black Dialogue decided to dedicate their 1965 debut issue to Malcolm. Additionally, with the passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Bill, the Civil Rights Movement was effectively ended and the stage was set for “Black Power” which “officially” begins as a social movement in 1966 but which, like BAM, had already been set in motion at the grassroots level prior to achieving national recognition.

            I designate 1976 as a transition point for BAM mainly because by then Broadside Press had gone into hiatus, The Journal of Black Poetry had ceased publication, and in April of 1976 Black World was shut down by John Johnson, the publisher. In a later chapter, I will discuss the ramifications of these and other factors in the decline of BAM activity. Although I use 1976 as a formal end point for the purposes of this study, I do not mark 1976 as the death of BAM.

            Well after 1976 the triad of BAM principles remained vital to a number of artists and institutions. However, after 1976 BAM was a much less dynamic force and often was in a reactive rather than proactive posture. In any case, I have chosen to focus on a 1965 (national birth) to 1976 (institutional disruption) as the decade of BAM’s apogee.

            Political Context. Both inherently and overtly political in content, BAM was the first American literary movement with a national reach to advance “social engagement” as a sine qua non of its mission. The “revolutionary” literature of the depression era 30s such as the communist-led John Reed clubs which promoted the work of Richard Wright and other Black writers of that period, did not have the national reach that BAM had. The focal points for the production of most of that Marxist-oriented work was Chicago and the Northeast corridor (particularly the New York area). BAM on the other hand was produced in the far west and in the deep south as well as in the Northern urban areas.

            We can not overstress the national reach of BAM. The Black Arts Movement was neither a one-city nor one-region phenomenon. Individuals and organizations nationwide were actively involved and accounted for both its vitality and its diversity.

            BAM broke from the immediate past of protest and petition (Civil Rights) literature and dashed forward toward an alternative that initially seemed unthinkable and unobtainable: Black Power. As a political reference, the phrase “Black Power” was not new. The slogan had earlier been articulated by Richard Wright, specifically in his 1954 book Black Power: A Record of Reactions in a Land of Pathos, which described the mid-fifties emergence of the independent African nation of Ghana. The more familiar, sixties use of the term originated in the Civil Rights movement in 1966 with SNCC (the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee) which was often described as the most militant of the major Civil Rights organizations.

            During the famous 1966 Meredith march, SNCC field workers Stokley Carmichael and Willie Ricks used the chant of “Black Power” as a counter to the speeches of Martin Luther King and other Southern Christian Leadership Committee (SCLC) leaders. While King was calling for equal rights, Carmichael and other SNCC workers would set up a call (“what do we want”) and lead their audiences in answering (“Black power”). At that time Black power was often translated to mean Black political and economic control of predominately Black towns, cities and counties in the deep south, especially in Alabama and Mississippi. Credible sources content that although Carmichael is often credited with popularizing the phrase “black power,” in fact Willie Ricks was the first person in SNCC to use the phrase and that Ricks passed the phrase on to a receptive Carmichael who popularized the phrase.

            So what did Carmichael mean? In a July 28, 1966 speech Carmichael comments:

            There is a psychological war going on in this country and it’s whether or not black people are going to be able to use the terms they want about their movement without white peoples blessing. We have to tell them we are going to use the term ‘Black Power’ and we are going to define it because Black Power speaks to us. We can’t let them project Black Power because they can only project it from white power and  we know what white power has done to us. We have to organize ourselves to speak from a position of strength and stop begging people to look kindly upon us. We are going to build a movement in this country based on the color of our skins that is going to free us from our oppressors and we have to do that ourselves.

            Everybody in this country is for “Freedom Now” but not everybody is for Black Power because we have got to get rid of some of the people who have white power. We have got to get us some Black Power. We don’t control anything but what white people say we can control. We have to be able to smash any political machine in the country that’s oppressing us and bring it to its knees. We have to be aware that if we keep growing and multiplying the way we do in ten years all the major cities are going to be ours. We have to know that in Newark, New Jersey, where we are 60% of the population, we went along with their stories about integrating and we got absorbed. All we have to show for it is three councilmen who are speaking for them and not for us. We have to organize ourselves to speak for each other. That’s Black Power. We have to move to control the economics and politics of our community. [Carmichael / pages 474-475, and476]

            BAM can not be understood apart from its beginnings in the Black power movement. In the article “The Black Cultural Revolution” (Kitabu Cha Jua, formerly the Journal of Black Poetry, Summer 1975) A. Muhammad Ahmed (Max Sanford, a founder and leader of RAM, the Revolutionary Action Movement) gives a detailed historical interpretation of Black Power’s beginnings. Ahmed maintains “The mass protest-year of our struggle started on February 1, 1960, when four black students staged a sit-in at Greensboro, N.C. Within weeks, black students throughout the south were demonstrating against public aspects of segregation.” [Ahmed / page 3] The sit-in is usually seen as part and parcel of the Civil Rights movement, but as Ahmed details in his article, there was a vigorous ideological struggle going on within the broad Civil Rights movement. The two camps may be simplistically identified as the assimilationist Civil Rights camp and the separatist Black Power camp. Although the assimilationist position as articulated by Martin Luther King/SCLC is the most well known and most celebrated, the Civil Rights movement was far from monolithic.

            Ahmed goes on to mention the involvement of CORE in the 1961 Freedom Rides. Ahmed then pinpoints the 1962 founding of RAM (Revolutionary Action Movement) as a leading ideological force in the development and spread of the Black Power ideology, an ideology which became the driving force of BAM.

            Some of these students began intensive study of Black history; some of their ideological leaders were Marcus Garvey, Robert Williams, Harold Cruse, the Honorable Elijah Muhammad, Malcolm X and Dr. Dubois… As these black student revolutionaries began to formulate ideas for their party, some decided to leave school and go into northern black communities and organize like SNCC did in southern communities. After some debate a name was chosen for their black student party; it was called the RAM party, later to become known as the Revolutionary Action Movement. RAM won the student elections at Central State, its whole slate gaining control of student government. That was in May of 1962. [page 4]

            As a result of the mass activism in the north and south, a conference was held in August, 1963, called the “Black Vanguard” conference. The students discussed the forthcoming March on Washington and how it would be compromised, and began formulating ideas of involving brothers form the street in the forefront of the movement. They decided to continue nationalist activism in the north, slowly building a nationalist consciousness.

            In the fall of 1963 the Grassroots Conference was called in Detroit, calling together grassroots leaders of the then civil rights movement. The Grassroots conference took a black nationalist stand, supporting the Freedom Now Party, an all-black party organized during the March on Washington. [pages 6 – 7]

            In 1964 a group of black students at Fisk University formed a black nationalist student movement called ASM, the Afro-American Student Movement. ASM called the 1st National Afro-American Student Conference on Black Nationalism on May 1st to 3rd… The convening of the 1st National Afro-American Student Conference on Black Nationalism was the ideological catalyst that eventually shifted the civil rights movement into the Black Power movement. During the summer months, RAM organizers with the agreement of John Lewis, the then Chairman of SNCC, went into Mississippi to work with SNCC. RAM organizers soon came into conflict with white SNCC workers, who opposed an all-black force and the practice of self-defense; soon, RAM began a movement to force whites out of SNCC. [page 8]

A key participant in RAM’s infiltration of SNCC was poet, journalist and activist Rolland Snellings (Askia Muhammad Toure) who was also one of the main authors of SNCC’s Black Power position paper. This history is important because unless we understand the Black Power origins, we cannot appreciate the Black Aesthetic fruit.

            In the first grassroots period, the key ideological figures of BAM were writer Larry Neal (who was also a member of RAM) and activist/scholar Maulana Karenga, who, in the early sixties, was head of the Los Angeles chapter of Attorney Donald Warden’s Afro-American Association. Of course, the spiritual father of Black Power was Malcolm X, who inspired both Neal and Karenga.

            Neal became the major cultural savant/writer. Karenga, through the direct and indirect influence of his Kawaida philosophical formulation, became one of the main philosophers of Black Power. Larry Neal published widely in publications as diverse as the New York-based, activist-oriented Liberator magazine to the Chicago-based, status quo-oriented Ebony magazine. From academic journals to the major anthology of the period, Black Fire, co-edited by Neal and LeRoi Jones, Larry Neal’s influential writings would be widely quoted by BAM participants. Karenga’s direct influence was felt mainly through one 1968 essay, “Black Art: Mute Matter Given Force and Function,” published in Negro Digest. However, indirectly, through the spread of Kawaida, and especially the formulation of the “Nguzo Saba” (seven principles) and the “Kwanzaa” holiday, Karenga had a major influence. Additionally, when LeRoi Jones became an advocate of Kawaida, Karenga’s indirect influence became preeminent in BAM because of Jones’ popularity and propaganda prowess in producing articles and pamphlets such as “A Black Value System” (in the debut November 1969 issue of The Black Scholar) and Kawaida Studies: The New Nationalism (Third World Press: 1972), both of which were widely distributed and cited within Black nationalist circles.

            Of course there were others who were significant forces in helping to shape BAM ideology. Significant among them are Ed Spriggs and Askia Muhammad Toure. In addition to being a founding editor of Black Dialogue, poet Ed Spriggs was also a visual artist who taught printmaking at BART/S in the spring and summer of 1965. Moreover, Ed Spriggs was among the first wave of BAM independent Black filmmakers. In 1965 he was part of a small film collective which produced a half hour documentary on the Ephesian Church of God in Christ in Berkeley, California. The film included the early work of Edwin Hawkins who was the church choir director at the time. Between 1969 to approximately 1972, Ed Spriggs along with Larry Neal, Jim Hinton, Rufus Hinton (no relation), and Doug Harris formed a film collective which actively documented BAM and Black Power-oriented activities and events in and around New York City as well as along the east coast down to Washington DC. Examples of some of their work included Moving On Up (a documentary for the A. Phillip Randolph Institute’s Joint Apprenticeship Program in New York). In Newark they documented the Ken Gibson mayoral campaign, which was a showpiece of Baraka’s initial forays into electoral politics, and also they documented the Black Power conferences which featured speakers such as Maulana Karenga and Richard Hatcher. In Washington DC they documented the SCLC’s “Poor People’s Campaign.” From 1969-1975 Spriggs was head of the Studio Museum in Harlem which was the site for the famous Africobra exhibit (which we will discuss later). Also of note, Hoyt Fuller’s family selected Ed Spriggs to be the literary executor of Hoyt Fuller’s estate in 1981-1984. Along with the significant help of Richard Long of Atlanta University, Spriggs secured a permanent repository for Fuller’s collection in the Atlanta University Center’s Robert W. Woodruff Library.

            Although little known outside of intimate BAM circles, Askia Muhammad Toure was another significant catalyst who constantly sought to reach out to diverse peoples and involve them in BAM related activities. Toure was a member of the New York-based literary group Umbra, a key member of RAM, a writer for Liberator magazine, a founding member of BART/S (Black Arts Repertory Theatre/School), an organizer with SNCC, and a writer for Black Dialogue, Soulbook and The Journal of Black Poetry.

            Amiri Baraka argues for the importance of Askia Toure and Larry Neal. Writing about the formation of BART/S, Baraka proclaims, “Both Larry and Askia were among the chief catalysts for that blazing and progressive, though short-lived, institution. Larry Neal and Askia Toure were my models in the middle 60s for Black Art.” [Baraka / “The Wailer,” page x, page xii]

            Of course there were numerous others, including organizers and theorists such as Imari Obadele, head of the Republic of New Afrika, a nationalist formation whose avowed goal was the securing of reparations and the establishment of an independent Black nation in the deep south. Particularly important because of his international contacts and reputation was Robert Williams, the former Monroe, North Carolina NAACP leader who was forced out of the country after advocating and organizing armed resistance (self-defense) to klan attacks in the late fifties. In exile, Robert Williams continued to be a beacon of resistance first while in Cuba and later while in China. Williams operated Radio Free Dixie, a radio broadcast from Cuba into the United States, and also printed and distributed a newsletter, The Crusader.

            On the religious front, the leader who had the greatest Black Power impact on Christianity was Jeramogi Albert Cleage, who founded Black Christian Nationalism and organized the Black-oriented Christian church, The Shrine of the Black Madonna. The task these and other leaders undertook was cogently articulated by Malcolm X:

            We must recapture our heritage and identity if we are ever to liberate ourselves from the bonds of white supremacy. We must launch a cultural revolution to unbrainwash an entire people.

            Our cultural revolution must be the means of bringing us closer to our African brothers and sisters. It must begin in the community and be based on community participation. Afro-Americans will be free to create only when they can depend on the Afro-American community for support and Afro-American artists must realize that they depend on the Afro-American for inspiration. [Malcolm X / page 427]

            The Influence of Malcolm X. If there is a spiritual father of Black Power and a single major influence on BAM literary production, that person is Malcolm X, aka El Hajj Malik El Shabazz. Time after time, when you read essays, commentaries, autobiographical statements, and literary introductions, not to mention the hundreds of poems written by activists and artists from the sixties, the name and influence of Malcolm X jump off the page at you. Why? Why would a political leader have such a profound literary influence?

            In 1973 Dingane Joe Goncalves, the editor of The Journal of Black Poetry wrote:

            If you want to grasp the importance of Malcolm, compare the late writings of Sonia Sanchez or Imamu Baraka with their early, pre-Malcolm works. Bro. Imamu and Sis. Sonia would certainly acknowledge Malcolm’s influence. Check out the change of tone and language, the irony and just plain dynamite that developed–and things will become obvious.

            The fact is, Malcolm X had a fantastic impact, like Garvey in his time, on all the Black Arts. Malcolm’s influence on Black Poetry in particular is only too obvious — yes, and it is just as obvious in all the Black Arts. [Dingane / “A Review of Dynamite Voices, Don L. Lee,” pages 89 and 90]

            To confirm Dingane’s observation about Malcolm’s influence on Baraka and Sanchez, note the following: Amiri Baraka has written numerous articles, essays and poems citing Malcolm’s influence. Perhaps the most stellar example of Baraka’s hommages to Malcolm is the widely anthologized April 1965 poem, “A Poem For Black Hearts”  which was first published in Negro Digest in September of 1965. In addition to her well known poem “Malcolm” which is included in the 1969 anthology For Malcolm X, Sonia Sanchez also wrote an epic poem for multiple youth voices called “Malcolm/Man Don’t Live Here No Mo” which was first published in The Journal of Black Poetry (#15, 1971).

            Perhaps one of the most cogent statements about Malcolm’s influence is contained in the introduction to For Malcolm X, a tribute anthology edited by Dudley Randall and Margaret G. Burroughs.

            John Oliver Killens says in Black Man’s Burden that if a black man walked with his wife in a southern country fair, and some drunken white slapped his wife on the buttocks, he had three choices. He could pretend he didn’t see it, he could grin, or he could die. In such situations some black men have chosen to die, but many more have lived, but not without a diminution of spirit, of soul, of self-respect. What they admire in Malcolm is that he didn’t bite his tongue, but spelled out the evil done by the white man and told him to go to hell. There is no black man, regardless of his agreement or disagreement with Malcolm’s politics, goals, or racial theories, whether he’s a serf in Mississippi, a cat on the corner in Chicago, or a black bourgeois in Westchester, who didn’t feel a stiffening of his spine and pride in his blackness when he saw or heard Malcolm take on all comers, and rout them. [Dudley Randall and Margaret Burroughs, pages xxi-xxii]

            Larry Neal is quite specific in his citing of Malcolm as an aesthetical as well as political influence.

            What I liked most about Malcolm was his sense of poetry: his speech rhythms, and his cadences that seemed to spring from the universe of black music. Because I was not reared in the black church I was something of an anomaly among Northern blacks. I did not have ready access to the rhetorical strategies of Martin Luther King. My ears were more attuned to the music of urban black America–that blues idiom music called jazz. Malcolm was like that music. He reminded many of us of the music of Charlie Parker and John Coltrane–a music that was a central force in the emerging ethos of the black artistic consciousness. Malcolm was in the tough tradition of the urban street speaker. But there was a distinct art in his speeches, an interior logic that was highly compelling and resonant. [Neal / “New Space,” page 125]

            To fully appreciate Malcolm’s impact we must keep in mind several factors. First, there is a natural confluence between BAM’s performance orientation and Malcolm’s widely admired oratorical skills. Second, during the BAM era, Malcolm’s speeches were very popular and were widely circulated on records and cassette tapes, thus reinforcing the power of the spoken word. Finally, the impact of Malcolm’s best-selling, and still widely available, autobiography, encouraged reading in general and also specifically encouraged an interest in Black power-oriented literature. These factors significantly contributed to Malcolm’s strong influence on BAM poets and writers, i.e. Black people who use words to communicate.

            Whereas some might argue that King was Malcolm’s equal as an orator, no one can argue with the fact that Malcolm went far beyond King as a critical anti-establishment voice who offered new visions. Where King proposed civil rights, Malcolm proposed human rights. Where King proposed non-violence, Malcolm proposed self-defense. Where King proposed “integration,” Malcolm proposed Black power. Malcolm’s voice was the embodiment of the Black power sentiments both in content as well as in the stylistic flourishes of well-timed phrasing, non-western references (especially Islam and Pan-Africanism), and audacious metaphors designed to appeal to grassroots sensibilities (e.g. “house negro”/”field negro”). Moreover, the majority of Malcolm’s speeches were made on behalf of and directly to Black people. He seldom spent time trying to convert Whites. All of this was exactly what a majority of the BAM poets strove to articulate in their Black power-oriented poetry.

            Larry Neal further defined Malcolm’s impact and inspiration.

            Then we began to hear Malcolm, the black voice skating and bebopping like a righteous saxophone solo–mellow truths inspired by the Honorable Elijah Muhammad, but shaped out of Malcolm’s own style, a style rooted in black folk memory, and the memory of his Garveyite father. We could dig Malcolm because the essential vectors of his style were more closely related to our own urban experiences. He was the first black leader, in our generation, to resurrect all of the strains of black nationalism lurking within us.

            In the precise sense of the word, his stance was radical, rooted in a long strand of flesh-filled nights, and sea deaths, and cotton deaths, and revolutionary deaths; Malcolm was the Opener, the Son of the Word made flesh, and for the first time in our lives, we had a voice to offset the weaknesses and the temptations that we saw around us. [Neal / “New Space / The Growth of Black Consciousness in the Sixties,” page 29]

            Larry Neal, more presciently than any other writer of his time, perceived the larger picture which connected BAM to Black Power and Black Power to Black history.

            One thing is clear, though. As we move into the seventies, many of the things that concerned us in the early sixties are no longer as important as we once thought they were. We fought for the right to eat a meal in some cracker restaurant in the deep South, but now that that right has been assured by the Federal Government, black people are no longer interested in such things. Perhaps it was the victory itself that turned us off. Perhaps it was the acute awareness that finally what we wanted was not the cup of coffee in the cracker restaurant, but something more substantive than that. If we could get it, we wanted the land that the restaurant was built on. We wanted reparations. We wanted power. We wanted Nationhood.

            All the major activities that were directed towards the question of liberation and Black Power spring from an ethos, a group spirit. What we have to understand, I think, is that somewhere in the maw of this ethos which continuously manifests itself, are the techniques and means of our liberation. It is not a question of falling into one bag, tenaciously holding on to it as if there were no other. That would be the route to suicide. Rather, what we should be about is a meaningful synthesis of the best that our struggles have taught us. This is a more difficult task than feeling secure in our own particular, and often narrow, endeavors. What we need, above all, is a widening of our perceptions, especially in terms of our own history.

            For example, take the concept of “Black Consciousness.” When the thing got really going, black people in different places developed unique and often contradictory attitudes towards it; they operated out of the principle along a variety of different styles. Some people joined the Muslims. Some people stopped eating certain foods. Other people, just as sincere as the first group, began to relish those very same tabooed foods. Some people put on African clothing. Most wore naturals. Some wore brighter colors. Some raised hell in school. Some left their white wives and husbands. Some joined RAM or the Black Panther Party. Some dug B.B. King, and some dug Coltrane. But shit. It was all good and on time. It was collective motion/energy that could be harnessed and organized.

            At times one would walk the streets and feel it in the air–black people asserting that they were each the bearers of an ethos. The beautiful became more beautiful; the black woman assumed more of her rightful place in the psyche of black artists; brothers greeted each other warmly. This was especially true after some catastrophic upheaval like Newark or Watts. Black people spoke to each other in strange tongues which they did not understand, but yet spoke well. Harlem, blighted and dope ridden, oozed an atmosphere of love and concrete spirituality. Black consciousness manifested itself collectively and resolutely upon large segments of the black community. [Neal / “New Space / The Growth of Black Consciousness in the Sixties,” pages 9 and 11-12]

            Although many BAM participants, as well as most detractors, were unaware of the depth and details of BAM’s historic Black Power background, Black Power is nonetheless the foundation of BAM via the influence of Malcolm X, RAM organizers and Karenga. Black Power came to be associated with a militant advocacy of armed self-defense, separation from “racist American domination” and a pride in and assertion of the goodness and beauty of Blackness. In this sense, Black Power was both the content and the style of BAM expressions.

            As Larry Neal, perhaps the leading theoretician/critic of the Black Aesthetic, proclaimed in “The Black Arts Movement,” his major theoretical essay: “Black Art is the aesthetic and spiritual sister of the Black Power concept. We advocate a cultural revolution in art and ideas. The cultural values inherent in Western history must either be radicalized or destroyed, and we will probably find that even radicalization is impossible.” [Neal / “The Black Arts Movement,” page 29] The commercialization and commodification of post-modern literary culture attest to the accuracy of Neal’s reservation about the impossibility of radicalizing American culture.

            Civil Rights vs. Black Power. Encouraged by the 1954 “Brown vs. Board of Education of Topeka” Supreme Court school desegregation ruling, the Civil Rights Movement organized and focused African American discontent with the status quo. Moreover, once this discontent was put into motion the genie could not be put back into the bottle. There was no going back to the way things “used to be,” back to the early fifties when the status quo was secure. The real question became, what next? After the desegregation of public accommodations, education, and, to a lesser extent, the desegregation of employment opportunities, the movement found itself at a crossroads as leader after leader attempted to provide a vision of the way ahead for the Black community.

            With the signing of the Civil Rights legislation in 1964 and the Voting Rights Act in 1965, the Civil Rights movement reached its zenith. After Civil Rights was enacted as the “law of the land,” politically active Black people realized we needed more than legal equality. We wanted freedom: freedom from White racism and freedom to determine our own destiny; enter the Black Power era, 1966 to 1976.

            Within the cultural sphere, BAM grew directly out of and voiced the widespread sentiment that independence rather than inclusion was the goal of the Black Power struggle. There were significant differences between the Civil Rights and the Black Power movements, differences which were directly reflected in BAM artistic expressions.

1. The Civil Rights Movement was Christian based and the Black Power movement was non-Christian oriented. This non-Christian orientation should not be construed to ignore the significant contributions of what was popularly called “liberation theology” by Christian people and organizations such as historian and theologian Vincent Harding, founding director of the Institute of The Black World and author of the insightful history There Is A River (1981). There is also the aforementioned Rev. Albert Cleage, founder of Black Christian Nationalism and The Shrine of the Black Madonna. A third significant force was theologist James Cone, author of Black Theology & Black Power (1969). Nevertheless, the important contributions of Christian leaders such as those cited above notwithstanding, once the Black movement moved north and west and became Black Power-oriented rather than Civil Rights-oriented, Christianity was no longer at the cultural center.

            Whereas gospel had been a major source for the “Freedom songs” of the Civil Rights movement, jazz and R&B were the main musical forces of BAM. Also, there was an ever increasing search for alternatives to Christianity which was widely perceived within BAM as being “the White man’s religion.” The two major influences in terms of non-Christian spirituality were traditional African religions (particularly Yoruba) and Islam.

            Baba Oserjiman Adefumi of the Harlem Yoruba Temple directly influenced a number of the early BAM spiritual developments. For a brief time Amiri Baraka adhered to the Yoruba faith. In Baraka’s autobiography he specifically points to the Yoruba influence which lasted with Baraka from 1965 to approximately 1967 when he went to California and became directly influenced by Maulana Karenga. 

            Some of us were very much influenced by the Yorubas. When we first arrived in Harlem, Oserjeman’s group was very political. They dressed as traditional West Africans from Nigeria, but upheld the right of black self-determination, declaring that Africans in Harlem must control it. We gave many rallies at which Oserjeman or some other speaker from the Yoruba Temple spoke. [Baraka / The Autobiography, page 215]

            Additionally, under the general influence of Malcolm X, as well as the specific broad influence of Elijah Muhammad’s leadership of the Nation of Islam, Islam made significant inroads into the general Black consciousness of the sixties. After Malcolm’s expulsion, a number of people turned to various denominations of orthodox Islam, chief among them the “Sunni” denomination.

2. There was a concurrent rejection of “non-violence,” which was inextricably linked to the Civil Rights Movement and Christianity. Within the Black Power movement, armed self-defense at home and active support for Third World liberation movements became guiding principles. Expressions of militant outrage rather than the dignity of stoic suffering guided BAM aesthetics. This was the moment when Islam really took off within the Black community. It is interesting to note that with its “jihad,” or “holy war” tradition, Islamic militancy in terms of fighting for one’s beliefs was emotionally closer to Black Power than was Black Christianity’s spirit of non-violence.
3. Black Power rejected interracial relationships. During the Civil Rights Movement, “Black and White together” represented a direct threat to the status quo. A number of interracial relationships were consummated on both organizational and personal levels. Beginning with the RAM-influenced expelling of Whites from SNCC in the mid-sixties, on through LeRoi Jones’ symbolic move to Harlem in 1965 and Jones’ subsequent divorce (both literally and figuratively) from his interracial past, what was called “Black separatism” became a major force in BAM. LeRoi Jones made his first national reputation as a beat writer in New York’s Greenwich Village where he was married to Hattie Cohen, a Jewish writer. In hindsight, it is clear that much of the emotionalism surrounding “putting down Whitey” had its roots in the fact that some of the initial BAM stalwarts had previously lived integrated lifestyles. But regardless of its cause, Black separatism became one of the chief characteristics of BAM.
4. The Civil Rights Movement had emphasized “socially correct behavior” to prove that Blacks were ready for and deserving of assimilation into the mainstream. This emphasis necessarily validated White modes of cultural expression. BAM vehemently rejected this approach and instead focused on Black American and, eventually, African and African-heritage modes and manners of cultural expressions. “Black English” was validated and used extensively, especially in oratory and literature. All of this shaped and was in turn expressed by BAM, especially in BAM poetry which became known as the “New Black Poetry.” The New Black Poetry was self-consciously anti-establishment in many of its techniques, themes and modes of delivery. The majority of BAM poetry actively “Messed with” standard English through the use of alternative spellings, non-conventional grammar, and inventive and/or ambiguous use of word meanings.
5. The Civil Rights movement had been primarily a domestic movement with a regional focus. Black Power saw itself as both a national and an international movement with Africa at the center of its consciousness. Such a centering of Africa in the consciousness and expression of Black people had not happened in America since the Garvey era in the early twenties. African dance became instantly popular and dance troupes were started everywhere. African languages and religions were investigated and, in some cases, adopted. Indeed, the intellectual current of eighties Afro-centrism is an outgrowth of BAM’s cultural centering of Africa. Many of the leading Afro-centrists were either students during BAM’s heyday or were, in fact, BAM participants.
6. Technological developments, particularly the expansion and maturing of the “newly integrated” (in the sense of Blacks on camera as well as behind the camera) communications technology of television, broadly disseminated the “news” that Black America was on the move. The sixties marked the first mass appearance of Blacks on television. Nationally broadcast programs such as “Black Journal” and “Soul” plus numerous regional and local programs helped to rapidly spread BAM’s example and message.

            These were the major differences between a civil rights orientation and a Black power orientation. All of these differences were directly reflected in BAM. Hoyt Fuller opens his important essay, “The New Black Literature: Protest or Affirmation” with a paragraph that perfectly sums up BAM literary endeavors.

There is a revolution in  black literature in America. It is nationalist in direction, and it is pro-black. That means, in effect, that it is deliberately moving outside the sphere of traditional Western forms, limitations, and presumptions. It is seeking new forms, new limits, new shapes, and much of it now admittedly is crude, reflecting the uncertainty, the searching quality of its movement. But, though troubled and seeking, it is very, very vital. [Fuller/”The New Black Literature” page 327]

—Kalamu ya Salaam