Black Arts Movement

The Black Arts Movement was an African American literary and artistic movement of the 1960s and 1970s, closely allied with the contemporary Black Power political movement, that called for a distinctly Black aesthetic rooted in African American vernacular speech, music and cultural experience, explicitly directed at and accountable to Black audiences rather than a presumed white literary establishment. Its founding figure, the poet and playwright Amiri Baraka, formerly LeRoi Jones, established the Black Arts Repertory Theatre and School in Harlem in 1965, and the movement's other central figures included the poets Sonia Sanchez, Nikki Giovanni and Haki Madhubuti and the critic Larry Neal, whose 1968 essay The Black Arts Movement provided its clearest theoretical statement, describing it as the aesthetic and spiritual sister of the Black Power concept. Distinct from the earlier Harlem Renaissance, which the Black Arts Movement's writers often criticized as insufficiently radical and too oriented toward white literary approval, the movement produced a substantial body of politically engaged poetry, drama and criticism and directly shaped the subsequent development of African American literary studies and spoken-word poetics.