Baraka, Amiri

BARAKA, AMIRI (1934-2014). Named Everett LeRoi Jones at birth in Newark, New Jersey, Baraka was a famed poet, essayist, novelist, historian, writer, actor, producer, director, playwright, and political activist, and Poet Laureate of New Jersey in 2002-2003. He married twice: to Hettie Cohen (Hettie Jones) (1958-1965) and to Sylvia Robinson (Amina Baraka), who survives him.

Amiri Baraka first became known as public figure LeRoi Jones in Beat and other avant-garde literary circles in the late 1950s, after moving to New York City in 1957 and starting, with poet Diane Di Prima, the literary magazine Yugen. He became deeply and prominently involved with the emergent alternative communities seeking to renew the aesthetic life by mixing artistic concerns with a sociopolitical orientation influenced by Existentialism, anarchism, pacifism, and a growing interest in Asian culture and religion, in particular Zen Buddhism. This unique and challenging cultural politics cultivated a hostility to the standard academic discourse of the colleges and universities in the era of McCarthyism.

Baraka brought to all this a Black middle-class upbringing and a Howard University education. While he seems to have been untouched in his youth by the organized Left, his associations with the anarchist-minded Di Prima and the Popular Front literary milieu of Allen Ginsberg and Charles Olson put him in the midst of a nascent, independent Left revival. He quickly became a leader in bohemian and artistic circles of lower Manhattan, a racially integrated community recalling, in some ways, the racially integrated communities of the 1940s Left. His poems and other writing in Yugen and elsewhere, along with his first book, Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note (1961), skyrocketed him into prominence in this milieu and beyond. The Dead Lecturer (1964) and Black Magic Poetry (1969) would follow and consolidate his reputation.

Baraka’s early poetry, characterized by a focus on casual, everyday speech and situations, contained an orientation toward the syntactic compression of phrases and sentences. These showed the influence of Ezra Pound, but also the utilization of the breath as a measure of the poetic line, in ways recalling the urgings of Charles Olson. The earliest of this poetry rarely focused on social issues, at most abstract social criticisms rather than specific and concrete.

Roughly speaking, Baraka had become a literary socialist-progressive without portfolio. He emerged an early leader of the proto-New Left during the summer of 1961, elected chair of the New York branch of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee. He also became active in the campaign to defend Black nationalisrt Robert Williams.

In these years, his essays appeared in such periodicals as Kulchur, The Liberator, Midstream, The Nation, Saturday Review, The Sunday Herald Tribune Magazine and The Evergreen Review. In Evergreen, he published “Cuba Libre,” an account of his trip to Cuba with an American delegation that included such artists and intellectuals as the painter Ed Clark, the novelist John Oliver Killens, and the essayist Harold Cruse. For the most part, his early essays, later collected in Home (1965), reflect the sensibility of Northern black intellectuals at the start of the civil rights movement, mostly college graduates gravitating toward the new bohemian enclaves and embracing their values. These values might be described as a “Utopia of Racial Integration,” an anarcho-bohemian idea of a new society. If not exactly the version of racial integration trumpeted by “the movement,” it was closer to the ideal world in which Billie Holiday was the epitome of the artist-saint and Miles Davis the star. The combination of the Utopian world and the post-World War II bohemia inspired by bebop and the cultural movement around it had, by the early 1960s, come to define a unique milieu as the country’s culture of dissent, within which racial integration constituted a central feature. The last chapter of Blues People (1963), his classic study of the history of African American music, explores the disintegration of the high hopes of that world, a coming apart that gave way to trenchant analyses heavily laden with sarcasm and invective.

By 1964-1965, the earlier, insular bohemia had largely given way to a new type of mass bohemian culture. This mass bohemianism would pose a utopian politics of its own, profoundly disruptive and influential. To Baraka and others, it seemed that this bohemia, with its New Left politics and interests soon to be known as the “counterculture,” had difficulty admitting Blacks as equals, and could not be the social change agent that would materially improve the lives of most Black people. The Black Nationalist alternative proposed by Baraka and others, a utopia of cultural and racial separatism, became by the late 1960s a kind of counterculture of its own, mirroring but also diverging sharply from and yet influencing the larger counterculture.

Baraka moved to Harlem soon after the assassination of Malcolm X to found the Black Arts Repertory Theater, an act that coincided with his divorce from Cohen, itself a famous incident in the downtown bohemian milieu. Vitriol drove the narrative in his 1964 plays Dutchman and The Slave, dystopian dramas involving interracial marriages. These plays and their then-scandalous themes nevertheless enjoyed critical acclaim. Their Off Broadway runs prompted much discussion and controversy around the emotionally fraught, highly contradictory impulses that followed racial integration among the intelligentsia within downtown Manhattan and far beyond.

The Black Arts Movement, with its call to valorize and sanctify African American culture and its African origins as sources of beauty and high self-regard, served as a worthy and necessary alternative community for many black artists and intellectuals. “Black is beautiful” became a cornerstone of a new aesthetics, based on rejecting the pro-integrationist values previously held by many Black artists seeking mainstream acceptance on the mainstream’s terms. Here can be found the source of much, if not all, of Baraka’s subsequent life and politics.

From this point forward, Baraka came to privilege the provocative epithet as a rhetorical feature of his poetry and other work. Baraka’s wide and prolific use of socially derogatory epithets may be seen as a stylistic and aesthetic orientation, quite as much as politics, personal taste or prejudice. Accusers insisted that some of Baraka’s poems contained anti-Semitic language and pointed to poems like “Black Dada Nihilismus” (1964) and “Black Art” (1969), expressing sentiments that he would repeat over the years. Like the obvious homophobia found in Baraka’s writing, starting at this time, his use of apparently antisemitic tropes was deeply performative and personal. This language could not be explained away easily and stood as in sharp contrast to his friendship with Allen Ginsberg, for example, who bailed Baraka from jail in 1967 after he was assaulted by Newark police, and who remained a close friend for life.

But Baraka could not be confined to any narrow categories. By the early 1970s, he had become a significant player in the Black Power movement. He also played a pivotal role in the election of Richard Gibson as the mayor of Newark, New Jersey. This was part of a wave of pioneering African American mayoral election victories in several major cities including Gary, Indiana, and, later, Chicago.

Baraka’s turn to Marxism after 1975 coincided with an important rapprochement, engaging his old friends among the Beats and other post 1950 avant-garde writers. He began down the road of class struggle theory as a Maoist. But he developed these associations at a moment when the Maoist movement had begun disintegrating under the weight of sectarianism, bombasity and isolation. His own avowal of Marxist ideas might be described as a cultural-political phenomena akin to the Popular Front politics of Paul Robeson, later Harry Belafonte, Ossie Davis, Ruby Dee and others or to the earlier conversion of famed authors like Theodore Dreiser to Communist causes. But his avowal remained sui generis, even as he offered public testimony to the ills of capitalism and the need for Marxist-Leninist understanding.

After the Berlin Wall fell, Baraka’s embrace of the class struggle Marxism seemed to many anachronistic, lending to critics the impression that he had never deeply ingested the ideas behind that language. Nevertheless, Baraka became newly active around a number of Left groups evolving out of the New Communist Movement. He never renounced these views. His second wife, Amina Baraka, grew close to the Communist Party, active from the 1990s onward in a wide array of cultural activities including artistic performance and journalism.
In August 2002, former New Jersey Governor James McGreevey appointed Baraka as the Poet Laureate of the State of New Jersey. The appointment was short-lived. McGreevey revoked the title a month later, due to a public controversy over “Somebody Blew Up America,” the poet’s response to the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks. This poem contained the host of derogatory epithets that had remained a standard part of Baraka’s repertoire. It also referenced, rhetorically, one of the more notorious anti-Semitic rumors that swept the country in the aftermath of the attacks.

Despite this controversy, Baraka remained one of the few genuinely popular poets in a country where the words “popular,” and “poet,” when used in the same sentence, have remained almost oxymoronic. He was, whatever the controversies around hm, a beloved and influential figure within the community of poets and an esteemed member of the literary community at large, a status confirmed by his membership in the elite American Academy of Arts and Letters. He continued to publish, teach, and give well-attended readings and lectures until just weeks before his death. His children have pursued accomplished careers of their own, the most distinguished of these include curator Kellie Jones, and Newark, New Jersey mayor Ras J. Baraka, who was first elected to that post in 2013.

Cornell, Andrew. “A New Anarchism Emerges, 1940-1954.” Journal for the Study of Radicalism 5.1, (2011): 105-131.

Di Prima, Diane. Recollections of My Life as a Woman: The New York Years. New York: Viking, 2001.

Harris, William J. (Editor.) The LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka Reader. 1991. New York: Basic Books, 2009.

Jacques, Geoffrey. “Forward.” In Sidney Finkelstein, Jazz: A People’s Music. 1948. New York: International Publishers, 2018.

Watts, Jerry Gafio. Amiri Baraka: The Politics and Art of a Black Intellectual. New York: New York University Press, 2001.