SOS — Calling All Black People: Introduction to the Black Arts Movement

Reading by John H. Bracey Jr., Sonia Sanchez, And James Smethurst

The “Wall of Respect,” located on Chicago’s South side, was conceived and executed by the Organization of Black American Culture in 1967. Source: Georg Stahl Mural Collection, University of Chicago Library.

The writer and political activist Larry Neal is credited with coining the term "Black Arts Movement" (BAM) to describe the explosion of politically engaged African American art from the mid-1960s to the late 1970s. It has been argued that BAM was “the most influential U.S. arts movement ever” because of the size of its US audience and the many cultural and community political institutions that it generated. Unlike the Harlem Renaissance, a legacy of BAM includes the idea that cultural expressions can and should serve overtly political movements, including the struggles to decolonize Africa, Asia, and Central America, and to decolonize the African American mind. 

BAM fostered a redefinition and reclaiming of Black political liberation, Black Power, Black aesthetics, and the ownership of Black culture by both Black men and Black women. BAM intended to be accessible to all Black people, particularly in community based venues, as it argued for a Black-defined (rather than white, European, elite) culture of visual, literary, performing, multimedia, and public arts. BAM is the source of the hip hop cultural movement, as well as a catalyst for cultural movements among Asian American, Chicana/a, Puerto Rican, and Native American communities. It is important to teach the Black Arts Movement both to fill a gap in historical knowledge and to offer a frame for creating contemporary cultural expressions that serve contemporary liberation movements.

The Black Arts Movement and Its Predecessors

Black Arts Movement (BAM) activists sought a usable past not simply in the idea of a general Black artistic tradition but more specifically in antecedent African American cultural movements. By far the most important was the Harlem, or New Negro, Renaissance of the 1920s. Like BAM, the Renaissance was a multidisciplinary and multi-genre arts movement that gave Black artists a national and even international status. Yet, in many respects, BAM artists treated the Harlem Renaissance as a cautionary tale as much as a beloved parent. They judged the artists of the Renaissance to be insufficiently political, not actively enough engaged with the concerns of working-class African Americans, too dependent on the support of jaded white patrons, and (with the exception of a relative few such as Langston Hughes, Sterling Brown, and Zora Neale Hurston) distant from the culture of the Black masses. Nevertheless, despite the charges they leveled against the Renaissance, the rise of Harlem Renaissance studies can be traced to the work of Larry Neal and BAM critics and early Black studies scholars of the 1960s and 1970s.

Also important to BAM activists as both antecedents to their movement and examples of what Harold Cruse would make famous as "the crisis of the Negro intellectual" were the radical political and cultural circles of the 1930s, 1940s, and early 1950s, especially those associated with the Communist Party. These circles provided audiences and venues for African American artists, some of whom, like Sterling Brown, Margaret Burroughs, Langston Hughes, John O. Killens, Jacob Lawrence, and Margaret Walker, provided critical support and mentoring for the nascent BAM. Quite a few of the young BAM activists themselves had participated in study groups, lecture series, educational organizations, and the like connected to the Old Left. At the same time, many of the young artists and activists criticized the Old Left (at least its members of the Communist Party) for an undue attachment to the Soviet Union, a romantic fetishizing of white workers and their revolutionary potential, a lack of understanding of the importance and appeal of Black nationalism, an underestimation of the Third World as the leading force for social liberation, and a lack of appreciation of the spiritual dimension of life.

BAM activists and Black Power militants as well were keenly aware of the political and cultural developments in the Third World, especially the debates between the adherents of Leopold Senghor’s Negritude and revolutionary nationalist Africanism of such independence leaders as Guinea's Sekou Toure and Ghana's Kwame Nkrumah. In general, BAM writers and artists sided with the revolutionary activism of Toure and Nkrumah against what they saw as the depoliticized culturalism of Senghor and Negritude. They were also inspired by the non-aligned movements of newly independent African and Asian nations and from the often-violent independence struggles against colonialism and neocolonialism. Of particular importance was the Cuban Revolution, which actively sought the support of Black artists and intellectuals, sponsoring tours for Black radicals, and having Fidel Castro stay at the Hotel Theresa in Harlem when he came to speak at the United Nations in 1960. Early Black Power and Black Arts activists advanced the idea of a world in which Black radicals were part of a worldwide revolutionary movement encompassing the vast majority of the world's people, rather than seeing themselves as a minority within a minority in the United States.

An immediate antecedent to BAM was the bohemian counterculture of the 1950s and early 1960s. Although such literary groups as the Beats, the New York School, and the Black Mountain School are often still characterized as "white,” they were actually among the most interracial intellectual circles in the United States, especially in New York, Chicago, Detroit, Washington, D.C., and the San Francisco Bay Area. Such African American writers as Amiri Baraka, Bob Kaufman, Ed Bullins, Ted Joan, A. B. Spellman, and the seminal Umbra Poets Workshop were intimately tied to the literary counterculture. In fact, Baraka as writer, editor, and publisher was a key figure in creating the idea of a "New American Poetry" in the 1950s and 1960s.

Not to be overlooked is the continuing presence of older Black artists, writers, and intellectuals, such as Samuel Allen, Romare Bearden, Gwendolyn Brooks, Sterling Brown, Margaret Burroughs, Elizabeth Catlett, Alice Childress, Charles Davis, Owen Dodson, Margaret Danner, Robert Hayden, Langston Hughes, John O. Killens, Jacob Lawrence, Melvin Tolson, Darwin Turner, Margaret Walker, and Theodore Ward. While only a few of these artists can be said to have truly been a part of BAM — most notably Gwendolyn Brooks — many were mentors and critical supporters of younger BAM members, encouraging their work and reminding them of earlier moments of Black political and cultural radicalism.

The Black Arts Movement and Black Nationalism

Part of the "Wall of Truth" conceived and executed by William Walker and Eugene "Edaw" Wade in 1969 on Chicago's South side. Source: Georg Stahl Mural Collection, University of Chicago Library.

BAM cannot be comprehended outside the context of the rise of Black nationalism in the 1960s. Of course, Black nationalism has a long history in the United States reaching back to the eighteenth century. However, with the mass circulation of the ideas of Malcolm X, first within and then outside the Nation of Islam, and the explosion of the uprisings of the 1960s, especially after the Watts Rebellion of 1965, nationalism exerted a new influence on Black artists and on the African American community in general to an extent unseen since the heyday of Marcus Garvey's Universal Negro Improvement Association in the 1920s. And even Marcus Garvey never directly affected most Black artists during the Harlem Renaissance in the way Malcolm X moved those whose who would start BAM. However, Malcolm X's analysis of white supremacy in the United States and its relationship to imperialism around the world and his call for Black cultural and political independence were taken in different directions after his assassination in 1965 left many key questions unanswered. Artists were extremely important in framing the discussion of what it would mean to be liberated, of what it did mean to be Black, of what the content of Blackness was.

Debates among nationalists turned not only on how liberation might be achieved but also on what a liberated nation would look like and how it should function: A socialist society run on Marxist- Leninist principles? Communal societies rooted in a vision of African traditional culture? Black entrepreneurship or Black capitalism? A large, unified state to ensure Black independence and national development? A linked federation of city-states?