|
Books by Amiri Baraka
Tales of the Out &
the Gone
/
The Essence of Reparations /
Somebody Blew Up
America & Other Poems
/
Blues People
Autobiography
of LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka /
Selected Poetry of
Amiri Baraka/LeRoi Jones
/
Black Music
* *
* * *
Bio-Sketch
Amiri Baraka, born in 1934, in Newark, New Jersey,
USA, is the author of over 40 books of essays, poems, drama, and music
history and criticism, a poet icon and revolutionary
political activist who has recited poetry and lectured on
cultural and political issues extensively in the USA, the
Caribbean, Africa, and Europe. Amiri
Baraka Bio /
Amiri Baraka's Website
* * *
* *
We always knew the crazy tales our people
told about the vicious madness of White Supremacy, enforced by
Uncle Sam Gestapo Good Old Boy Cracker Nazis, Spawn of the
“Soul Thieves” (Fred said) who bought our bodies to work for
them free, forever, so they could be rich and rule the world.
Sunday School and one people and friends and brains had
told us clearly to recognize:
Heathens, jealous Crackers the old folks called them.
Racists. Lynchers.
The spiritual KKK in America’s soul.
We are its Blood, ourselves. Sucked out of our homes by our African selves as captors,
then sold to vampire-like European and American slaves traders.
They are the meaning of Halloween.
The Skull and Crossbones is their only flag.
From Parks to
Marxism
* * *
* *
The Amiri
Baraka Discography Project—This site is dedicated to
the jazz-related work of Amiri Baraka, writer,
essayist and activist par excellence who brings
words and jazz together like no other person. In the
liner notes to his India Navigation LP, Baraka
called the style "poetrymusic."
http://www.amirimusic.com/
* * *
* *
I
was Everett LeRoi Jones. My grandfather’s name was
Everett. He was a politician in that town. My family
came to Newark in the '20s. We've been there a long,
long time. My father’s name was LeRoi, the French-ified
aspect of it, because his first name was Coyette,
you see. They come from South Carolina. I changed my
name when we became aware of the African revolution
and the whole question of our African roots. I was
named by the man who buried Malcolm X, Hesham Jabbar,
who died last week. He named me Amir Barakat. But
that’s Arabic. I brought it down into Swahililand,
into Tanzania, which is an accent.
So
it’s Amiri, instead of Amir, and, you know, Baraka,
rather than Barakat, you know, which is interesting.
If it was Amir Barakat, I would probably have more
difficulty flying these days.DemocracyNow
* * *
* *
Amiri Baraka: Biography
and Historical Context—In 1934 Amiri Baraka (LeRoi
Jones) was born in the industrial city of Newark,
New Jersey. After attending Howard University in
Washington, D. C., he served in the United States
Air Force. In the late fifties he settled in New
York’s Greenwich Village where he was a central
figure of that bohemian scene. He became nationally
prominent in 1964, with the New York production of
his Obie Award-winning play, Dutchman. After the
death of Malcolm X he became a Black Nationalist,
moving first to Harlem and then back home to Newark.
In the mid-1970s, abandoning Cultural Nationalist,
he became a Third World Marxist-Leninist. In 1999,
after teaching for twenty years in the Department of
Africana Studies at SUNY-Stony Brook, he retired.
However, in retirement he is as active and
productive as an artist and intellectual as he has
ever been in his career. Currently he lives with his
wife, the poet Amina Baraka, in Newark. . . . The
Beat Period (1957-1962) . . . The Black Nationalist
Period (1965-1974) . . . The Third World Marxist
Period (1974- )— William J. Harris—English
Illinois
* * *
* *
Lunch Poems—Amiri Baraka
Amiri Baraka Reading Poems Online /
Ode to Obama: Amiri Baraka
Resistance and The Arts /
Obama's Mojo Ain't Working Like It Used To
Amiri Baraka: The African American Literature Book
Club (AALBC.com)
Amiri Baraka: Evolution of a Revolutionary Poet
* * *
* *
|
Table
Essays & Poems
Amiri
Baraka Bio
A BAM Roll
Call
(essay)
Baraka: Act Like We Know
Battle Is On
Black Art (poem)
Black Dada Nihilimus
(poem)
Black
Studies Forty Years Later (conference call)
Digging
Max (poem)
Forward Is Where
We Have to Go
From Parks to Marxism A
Political Evolution
(essay)
Manning Marable's Malcolm X Book
New Work by Baraka (Black World,
1973)
The Parade of Anti Obama Rascals
A Plea for Ras Baraka
The
Revolutionary Theatre
(essay)
Slo Dance Introduction
Somebody Blew Up America
(poem)
Audio
Something
in the Way of Things (In Town) (poem)
Streets of
Despair, Street of Protest (essays)
Why You Need to Send Some
Money
Will Not Apologize, Will Not Resign
(letter)
Books:
Autobiography of
LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka
(Review,
Lewis)
Black Fire: An Anthology of Afro-American
Writing (Review)
Black Music
Blues People
The
Essence of Reparations (Review)
Selected
Poetry of Amiri Baraka/LeRoi Jones
Somebody Blew Up America & Other Poems (Review)
Tales
of the Out & the Gone
(Review)
About & For Baraka
Baraka's Daughter Killed
Black Man as Victim
(Review of Dutchman and Toilet)
Climbing
Malcolm's Ladder
For
Baraka
(Jamie
Walker)
Home
Going Celebration
LeRoi Jones: Pursued by Furies
(Review of Home on the Range)
Let Loose on the World
Praise
& Support of Baraka (Jamie
Walker)
Remembering Shani
Baraka
Review of Essence of Reparations
* * *
* *
The Holloway Series in Poetry
- Amiri Baraka (video) /
Penn Sound—Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones)
* * *
* *
|
The
Masquerade is Over
Hitler is alive
& Well
Now he lives
In Israel.
The Master Race
Has changed
Its place
The new Nazism
Is called
Zionism!
The old
oppressed Jews
Are dead
Call them
Palestinians
Instead!
Amiri
Baraka 12/08 |
* * *
* *
We had already lost a great innovator, Lorraine Hansberry, who
flexed the breath we did not even know we had. And she, for all
the ink about Raisin, is still no t fully know n for the power
that followed. “The Drinking Gourd.” Whites in Harlem
do Genet’s “The Blacks” but no one seems willing to do
Lorraine’s power answer “Les Blancs.” How many years
before all of her is known?
And Jimmy Baldwin too, the other explosive
paradigm, who helped set the tone, the direction of The Black
Arts Cultural Revolution with all of his searching works
evaluating sorry America. Blues for Mr Charlie presented the
choice, the gun or the bible he said, one of them gonna work!
And so he was removed from the pantheon of the Colored, OK to
read. No Name In the Street, “Evidence” makes it all
abundantly clear of our protracted struggle as well as the
wooden Negroes barb wiring our path!
A BAM Roll Call
* * *
* *
We know directions. They are wide and bright for
the faintly visionary. They are roads, clearly marked,
if you looking. Like shouted ideologies. Fast and loose,
if you say eat, we have at least, some movement you
know? But then the general directions becomes itself a
randomness, if steps are not firmly placed and some
focus is not brought to bear upon some singular
particular place.
To do is too general. To go is also. To be is
saying nothing. We want to know we must know just what
you are going to do when you get to that exact place you
must get to for that action to have meaning. We need
facts figures precision and skill. It is work and study
that will change the world. The rest is clearly
bullshit.
New Work by Imamu Amiri Baraka
* * *
* *
Clay, in Dutchman, Ray, in The Toilet, Walker in The
Slave are all victims. In the Western sense they could be
heroes. But the Revolutionary Theatre, even if it is Western,
must be anti-Western. It must show horrible coming attractions
of The Crumbling of The West. Even as Artaud designed The
Conquest of Mexico, so we must design The Conquest of White Eye,
and show the missionaries and wiggly Liberals dying under blasts
of concrete. For sound effects, wild screams of joy, from all
the peoples of the world.
The Revolutionary Theatre must take dreams and give them a
reality. It must isolate the ritual and historical cycles of
reality. But it must be food for all these who need food, and
daring propaganda for the beauty of the Human Mind. But it is a
political theatre, a weapon to help in the slaughter of these
dimwitted fat-bellied white guys who somehow believe that the
rest of the world is here for them to slobber on.
The Revolutionary Theatre
* * *
* *
Digging: The Afro-American Soul of American Classical
Music
 |
For
almost half a century,
Amiri Baraka
has ranked among the most important
commentators on African American music and
culture. In this brilliant assemblage of his
writings on music, the first such collection
in nearly twenty years, Baraka blends
autobiography, history, musical analysis,
and political commentary to recall the
sounds, people, times, and places he's
encountered. As in his earlier classics,
Blues People and
Black Music, Baraka offers essays on
the famous--Max Roach, Charlie Parker, Miles
Davis, John Coltrane--and on those whose
names are known mainly by jazz
aficionados--Alan Shorter, Jon Jang, and
Malachi Thompson. Baraka's literary style,
with its deep roots in poetry, makes
palpable his love and respect for his jazz
musician friends. His energy and enthusiasm
show us again how much Coltrane, Albert
Ayler, and the others he lovingly considers
mattered. He brings home to us how music
itself matters, and how musicians carry and
extend that knowledge from generation to
generation, providing us, their listeners,
with a sense of meaning and belonging. |
* * *
* *
Related Files:
African Renaissance
(Nkrumah)
African
Renaissance (Journal)
The
African World
Amistad 2
Anthologies:
New Negro Poets
U.S.A. Black
Fire
The Black Poets
Drumvoices
Black Nationalism in America
360° A Revolution of Black Poets
Ashanti Chronology
Ashanti Empire
Askia Muhammad Touré
Baraka's
Daughter Killed
Black Arts and Black Power Figures
Black Arts
Movement
(Kalamu)
Black Arts Movement
(Larry Neal)
Black Nationalism in America
Blackness and the Adventure of Western Culture
Black Poetry 1965-2000
Black World and
Fanon
Charlie
Rangel Begat Ed Towns
Claude McKay--Romare Bearden
Climbing
Malcolm's Ladder
Communism
as Russian Imperialism
Control,
Conflict, and Change
(James Forman)
The
Defection of Eldridge Cleaver (Huey P. Newton)
Demythologizing
Huey Newton
Dingane Joe Goncalves
“Don’t Say Goodbye to the Pork Pie Hat
Dramatic Vision of August
Wilson
DrumVoices
Revue
Ed Bullins Chronology
Election Day
Returns
Escaping
the Black-Bible Belt
The Fact
of Blackness (1952)
Fanon and the Concept of Colonial
Violence
Fifty Influential Figures
For Kwame Nkrumah
God Save His Majesty's Blacks
The
Ground on Which I Stand
Haki Madhubuti
Hard Truths (Haki)
Hip Hop Table
Home-Going Celebration
I
Am We (Huey P. Newton)
Interview with Ed Bullins
Interview with Yambo Ouologuem (Yambo)
Journal of
Black Poetry Festival
Kwame
Nkrumah, Kenyatta, and the Old Order
Larry Neal
Bio
Larry Neal Conference
Larry Neal
Chronology
Larry Neal
Interview in
Omowe
The Legend of the Saifs (Yambo)
Literature & Arts
Marvin X Table
Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance
New Negro Poets
U.S.A.
Night of the Giants (Yambo)
Nonwhite
Manhood in America
Notes on "An Open Letter to Oprah Winfrey"
The
Omni-Americans
a poem
for kwame nkrumah
Poems
of Remembrance
The Poetry of Don L. Lee
The
Political Thought of James Forman
Ras Baraka
#1
#4
Black
Girls Learn Love Hard
There Are Some
Black Men
Report:
BAM Conference (Marvin X)
Responsibility of a Pan-African Socialist
Sandra Shannon on August Wilson
Situating August Wilson
Slo Dance Table
Speak
the Truth to the People
Transitional Writings on Africa
Way Of Liberation
Manifesto (Huey P. Newton)
What Is Black Poetry
Yambo
Bio & Review (Yambo) |
* * * * *
Amiri Baraka & Kellie Jones
Curator Kellie Jones and her
father—renowned poet, playwright, and activist Amiri
Baraka—discuss their collaboration on Jones's book EyeMinded:
Living and Writing Contemporary Art, which investigates
various perspectives on art making throughout different
generations. Jones is associate professor in the Department of
Art History and Archaeology at Columbia University. Her writings
have appeared in NKA, Artforum, Flash Art,
Atlantica, Third Text, and numerous catalogues.
Baraka is the author of more than 40 books of essays, poems,
drama, and music history and criticism. The former Poet Laureate
of New Jersey, he has received numerous honors including
fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National
Endowment of the Arts, the PEN/Faulkner Award, and an Obie Award
for his play Dutchman (1963).
* * * * *
|
Eyeminded: Living and Writing Contemporary Art
By
Kellie Jones
A daughter of the poets
Hettie Jones and Amiri Baraka, Kellie Jones grew
up immersed in a world of artists, musicians, and
writers in Manhattan’s East Village and absorbed in
black nationalist ideas about art, politics, and
social justice across the river in Newark. The
activist vision of art and culture that she learned
in those two communities, and especially from her
family, has shaped her life and work as an art
critic and curator. Featuring selections of her
writings from the past twenty years,
EyeMinded reveals Jones’s role in bringing
attention to the work of African American, African,
Latin American, and women artists who have
challenged established art practices. Interviews
that she conducted with the painter
Howardena Pindell, the installation and
performance artist
David Hammons, and the
Cuban
sculptor Kcho appear along with pieces on the
photographers
Dawoud Bey,
Lorna Simpson, and
Pat Ward Williams; the sculptor
Martin Puryear; the assemblage artist
Betye Saar; and the painters
Jean-Michel Basquiat,
Norman Lewis, and
Al Loving. Reflecting Jones’s curatorial
sensibility, this collection is structured as a
dialogue between her writings and works by her
parents, her sister
Lisa Jones, and her husband
Guthrie P. Ramsey Jr.
EyeMinded offers a glimpse into the family
conversation that has shaped and sustained Jones,
insight into the development of her critical and
curatorial vision, and a survey of some of the most
important figures in contemporary art. |
 |
* * * * *
Ishmael Reed, Amiri Baraka and the Black Radical
Dilemma
Amiri Baraka
on Malcolm’s “united front” with civil rights
organizations (video)
* * * * *
 |
Everett LeRoi Jones was born on 7th October
1934 in Newark, New Jersey. His father, Coyt LeRoy
Jones, was a postman, and his mother Anna Lois Jones
was a social worker. He studied for two years at the
local Rutgers University then moved to Howard
University, where he took his BA in English in 1954.
He then did three years of obligatory army service
in the air force before moving to the Lower East Side
of Manhattan in 1957.
In
1958 he married his first wife, Hettie Cohen,
descended from a wealthy Jewish family, in a
Buddhist ceremony and published his first play A
Good Girl is Hard to Find. His collection of
poems ´Spring and Soforth´ followed. In 1960 he
visited Cuba for the first time and made no secret
of his sympathies for the revolutionaries
surrounding Fidel Castro—he
recorded his impressions of this trip in the book
Cuba Libre (1961). |
His
second collection of poems Preface to a Twenty-Volume
Suicide Note (1961) made him instantly famous. These
poems plainly belonged to the Beat movement. At this time he
also became co-publisher of the literary magazine The
Floating Bear (till 1963) with Diane di Prima. . . .
* * * * *
Things have come to that—Alexander
Knaak—In
1957 he joined the group of artists in the New York borough
Greenwich Village and together with his wife Hetti Cohen
published the avant-garde magazine YUGEN. They were also
founding members of the publishing company Totem Press,
publishing the first works by Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac
and other Beat authors.
His artistic breakthrough came in
1964 with the premiere of his provocative play ´Dutchman´,
which won the prestigious Obie Award. The murder of Malcom X
(1965) led to the first radical change in his life. He got
divorced from his white Jewish wife, converted to Islam,
dropped his ´slave name´ LeRoi Jones and called himself Imam
Amiri Baraka. . . .—CultureBase
* * * * *
* * * * *
Black Mass
is based on the Muslim myth of Yacub. According to this
myth, Yacub, a Black scientist, developed the means of
grafting different colors of the Original Black Nation
until a White Devil was created. In Black Mass,
Yacub’s experiments produce a raving White Beast who is
condemned to the coldest regions of the North. The other
magicians implore Yacub to cease his experiments. But he
insists on claiming the primacy of scientific knowledge
over spiritual knowledge. The sensibility of the White
Devil is alien, informed by lust and sensuality. The
Beast is the consumable embodiment of evil, the
beginning of the historical subjugation of the spiritual
world.
Black Mass
takes place in some pre-historical time. In fact, the
concept of time, we learn, is the creation of an alien
sensibility, that of the Beast. This is a deeply
weighted play, a colloquy on the nature of man, and the
relationship between legitimate spiritual and scientific
knowledge. It is LeRoi Jones’ most important play mainly
because it is informed by a mythology that is wholly the
creation of the Afro-American sensibility.
Further, Yacub’s
creation is not merely a scientific exercise. More
fundamentally, it is the aesthetic impulse gone astray.
The Beast is created merely for the sake of creation.
Some artists assert a similar claim about the nature of
art. They argue that art need not have a function. It is
against this decadent attitude toward art—that the play
militates. Yacub’s real crime, therefore, is the
introduction of a meaningless evil into a harmonious
universe.
The evil of the
Beast is pervasive, corrupting everything and everyone
it touches. What was beautiful is twisted into an ugly
screaming thing. The play ends with destruction of the
holy place of the Black Magicians. Now the Beast and his
descendants roam the earth. An offstage voice chants a
call for the Jihad to begin. It is then that myth merges
into legitimate history, and we, the audience, come to
understand that all history is merely someone’s version
of mythology.— The
Black Arts Movement (Larry Neal)
* * * * *
* * * * *
Amiri Baraka (center) is
pictured at the entrance to
Spirit House, Newark, with
musicians and actors of the
black arts movement, 1966. Yusef
Iman (second from left) had
played the role of the rogue
magician, Jacoub, in a
production of Baraka’s play A
Black Mass. Courtesy Prints and
Photographs Department,
Manuscript Division, Moorland-Spingarn
Research Center, Howard
University.
* * * * *
* * * * *
Amiri Baraka enters Essex County
courthouse, New Jersey, in
January 1968 to receive a
sentence of three years
imprisonment and a $1,000 fine
following his conviction for
unlawful possession of firearms
on the first night of the 1967
Newark riot. Accompanying him
are his wife, Amina Baraka, and
their seven-month-old son,
Obalaji. The conviction was
overturned in a successful
appeal later in 1968. Courtesy
Photographs and Prints Division,
Schomburg Center for Research in
Black Culture, The New York
Public Library, Astor, Lenox,
and Tilden Foundations.
* * * * *
A Conference Call
Black Studies Forty Years Later, 1969-2009
100 Day Assessment of the Barack Obama Presidency
From an African American Perspective
Friday, May
1, through Sunday May 3, 2009 at Temple University,
Philadelphia, PA.
Contact
Dr.
Muhammad Ahmad at 215-204-1995
or
mstanfrd@temple.edu, Amiri Baraka at
973-242-1346, Mack Jones at 404-699-0631,
Ron
Walters at 301-421-5919,
Dr. Nathaniel Norment, Jr.
at 215-204-5073 or
norme01@temple.edu, LaFrance Howard at 215-204-3159.
* * * * *
 |
Amiri Baraka/Le Roi Jones: The Quest for a
"Populist Modernism"
By Werner
Sollors
In Amiri Baraka/LeRoi
Jones: The Quest for a ‘Populist Modernism’
(1978), Sollors portrays Baraka as an
artistic and political hero of the Beat
generation who evolved into a unique array
of aesthetic and social identities.
* * * * *
Werner
Sollors—One of Baraka’s most typical
nationalist poems, "Black Art" . . . is an
expression of his Black Aesthetic, but is
striking for its venomous language and for
its rhetorical violence. The poem
characteristically casts the "negro-leader,"
the "Liberal," the "jew-lady," or the
Eliotic "owner-jews" as the enemies. The
"abstract" and arbitrary sounds "rrrrrrrrrrrr
. . . tuhtuhtuhtuhtuhtuh tuhtuhtuh" are now
the volley-shot sounds of "poems that kill"
these enemies. |
The poem
itself is to commit the violence that Baraka considers
the prerequisite for the establishment of a Black world.
By becoming an "assassin" the poem becomes political;
and art merges with life by leaving its artfulness
behind. Only this process makes an art that is as
organic as a "tree." Admittedly, the poem
must abandon poetry in
order to perform this function. "Black Art" implies that
poetry must die so that the poem can kill.
But why does Baraka’s poem
kill Jews—who had once been his metaphor for Blacks?
Precisely for this reason. In Baraka’s nationalist world
view, Jews remain images of assimilated Negroes (who are
not spared Baraka’s poetic violence, either). Baraka now
regrets and renounces his own anti-Semitic phase and
sees it as a "reactionary thing," an aberration
suggested by bourgeois Black nationalism. (The Nation of
Islam, e.g., distributed revised versions of Czarist
anti-Semitic propaganda.) As a reaction to the success
of the Black-Jewish alliance in the civil movement,
anti-Semitism became, perhaps, even a matter of radical
chic among Black nationalists of the late 1960s.
Furthermore, if we follow
the paradigms of Bohemianism and avant-gardism for an
understanding of Baraka’s development, we may see the
period of anti-Semitism as a reactionary swing on the
antibourgeois pendulum. . . . .But more than the result
of abstract Black nationalist influence, or a version of
the reactionary side of Bohemianism, Baraka’s
anti-Semitism was also an intensely personal exorcism of
his own past; and his anti-Semitic references included
his former wife and literary milieu in New York.—From
Amiri Baraka / LeRoi Jones: The Quest for a "Populist
Modernism." (1978, Columbia University Press)—English.Illinois
* * * * *
"American Poem" Ras
Baraka (Def Poetry) /
Lauryn Hill and Ras
Baraka—Hot Beverage In Winter
It Aint
My Fault by Mos Def & Lenny Kravitz
Mockingbirds at Jerusalem
(poetry manuscript)
* * *
* *
* * * * *
|
So Rich, So Poor: Why It's So Hard to End Poverty in America
By Peter Edelman
If the nation’s gross national income—over $14 trillion—were divided evenly across the entire U.S. population, every household could call itself middle class. Yet the income-level disparity in this country is now wider than at any point since the Great Depression. In 2010 the average salary for CEOs on the S&P 500 was over $1 million—climbing to over $11 million when all forms of compensation are accounted for—while the current median household income for African Americans is just over $32,000. How can some be so rich, while others are so poor? In this provocative book, Peter Edelman, a former top aide to Senator Robert F. Kennedy and a lifelong antipoverty advocate, offers an informed analysis of how this country can be so wealthy yet have a steadily growing number of unemployed and working poor. According to Edelman, we have taken important positive steps without which 25 to 30 million more people would be poor, but poverty fluctuates with the business cycle. |
 |
The structure of today’s economy has stultified wage
growth for half of America’s workers—with even worse
results at the bottom and for people of color—while bestowing billions on those at the top. So Rich, So Poor delves into what is happening to the people behind the statistics and takes a particular look at the continuing crisis of young people of color, whose possibility of a productive life too often is lost on their way to adulthood.—DemocracyNow
* * * * *
 |
Super Rich: A Guide to Having it All
By Russell Simmons
Russell Simmons knows firsthand that
wealth is rooted in much more than the
stock
market. True wealth has more to do with
what's in your heart than what's in your
wallet. Using this knowledge, Simmons
became one of America's shrewdest
entrepreneurs, achieving a level of
success that most investors only dream
about. No matter how much material gain
he accumulated, he never stopped lending
a hand to those less fortunate. In
Super Rich, Simmons uses his rare
blend of spiritual savvy and
street-smart wisdom to offer a new
definition of wealth-and share timeless
principles for developing an unshakable
sense of self that can weather any
financial storm. As Simmons says, "Happy
can make you money, but money can't make
you happy." |
* * * * *
|
The New Jim Crow
Mass Incarceration in the Age of
Colorblindness
By Michele Alexander
Contrary to the
rosy picture of race embodied in Barack
Obama's political success and Oprah
Winfrey's financial success, legal
scholar Alexander argues vigorously and
persuasively that [w]e have not ended
racial caste in America; we have merely
redesigned it. Jim Crow and legal racial
segregation has been replaced by mass
incarceration as a system of social
control (More African Americans are
under correctional control today... than
were enslaved in 1850). Alexander
reviews American racial history from the
colonies to the Clinton administration,
delineating its transformation into the
war on drugs. She offers an acute
analysis of the effect of this mass
incarceration upon former inmates who
will be discriminated against, legally,
for the rest of their lives, denied
employment, housing, education, and
public benefits. |
 |
Most provocatively, she reveals how both the move
toward colorblindness and affirmative action
may blur our vision of injustice: most
Americans know and don't know the truth
about mass incarceration—but her
carefully researched, deeply engaging,
and thoroughly readable book should
change that.—Publishers
Weekly
* *
* * *
 |
A Nation within a Nation
Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones) and Black
Power Politics
By Komozi Woodard
Woodard examines the role of poet Amiri
Baraka's "cultural politics" on Black
Power and black nationalism in the 1960s
and 1970s. After a brief overview of the
evolution of black nationalism since
slavery, he focuses on activities in
Northeastern urban centers (Baraka's
milieus were Newark, N.J., and, to a
lesser extent, New York City). Taking
issue with scholars who see cultural
nationalism as self-destructive, Woodard
finds it "fundamental to the endurance
of the Black Revolt from the 1960s into
the 1970s." The 1965 assassination of
Malcolm X catalyzed LeRoi Jones's
metamorphosis into Amiri Baraka and his
later "ideological enchantment" with
Castro's revolution. After attracting
national attention following the 1966
Detroit Black Arts Convention, Baraka
shifted his emphasis to electoral
politics. He galvanized black support
for Kenneth Gibson, who was elected
mayor of Newark in 1970. Woodard pays
scant attention, however, to the fact
that "Baraka's models for political
organization had nothing revolutionary
to contribute in terms of women's
leadership" or the roots of "Baraka's
insistence on psychological separation"
from whites. |
Woodard's conclusion descends into rhetoric as
he urges support for a school system to "develop
oppressed groups into self-conscious agents of
their own liberation," while offering no
specific, practical suggestions. Woodard's need
to be both scholar and prophet are in conflict,
and the prophet's voice undermines the
scholar's.—Publishers
Weekly
* *
* * *
|
A Taste of Power: A Black Woman's Story
By Elaine Brown
Brown here relates
the dramatic story of her youth, her
political awakening and her role in the
Black Panther Party when she succeeded
her lover Huey Newton to become the
group's first female leader. Though
smoothly written, the book contains much
reconstructed dialogue that may daunt
readers. Brown's memoir takes her from a
Philadelphia ghetto to California, from
college to cocktail waitressing, from
wanting to be white to joining the black
power movement. She meets Eldridge
Cleaver, George Jackson and Bobby Seale,
goes to jail, visits North Korea and
North Vietnam, debates Marxism and gets
involved in Oakland, Calif., politics.
When other Black Panthers seemed to lose
sight of the revolution and seek power
for its own sake, Brown, with a growing
feminist consciousness, left the group.
|
 |
She now lives
in France and expresses ambivalent feelings about
the party she once loved. Having made her
acquaintance, the reader wonders about her present
life.—Publishers
Weekly
* *
* * *
The White Masters of the
World
From
The World and Africa, 1965
By W. E. B. Du Bois
W. E. B. Du Bois’
Arraignment and Indictment of White Civilization
(Fletcher)
* *
* * *
Ancient African Nations
* * * * *
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* * * * *
Negro Digest /
Black World
Browse all issues
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Enjoy!
* * * * *
The Death of Emmett Till by Bob Dylan
/
The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll
/
Only a Pawn in Their Game
Rev. Jesse Lee Peterson Thanks America for
Slavery
* *
* * *
The Journal of Negro History issues at Project Gutenberg
The
Haitian Declaration of Independence 1804
/
January 1, 1804 -- The Founding of
Haiti
* * * * *
update
23 February 2012
|
