Image: Wadsworth A. Jarrell: Revolutionary (Angela Davis), 1971. Acrylic and mixed media on canvas.
Getting started: browse The Poetry Foundation’s roundup of essays and poetry by members of the Black Arts Movement. Then, explore the books and articles below.
Books
GerShun Avilez: Radical Aesthetics and Modern Black Nationalism.
Amiri Baraka: The LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka Reader.
John H. Bracey, Sonia Sanchez, & James Smethurst (editors): SOS―Calling All Black People: A Black Arts Movement Reader.
Cheryl Clarke: After Mecca”: Women Poets and the Black Arts Movement.
Margo Natalie Crawford: Black Post-Blackness: The Black Arts Movement and Twenty-First-Century Aesthetics.
La Donna Forsgren: In Search of Our Warrior Mothers: Women Dramatists of the Black Arts Movement.
Mark Godfrey: Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power.
Mark Godfrey & Allie Biswas: The Soul of a Nation Reader: Writings by and about Black American Artists, 1960 – 1980.
Wadsworth A. Jarrell: AFRICOBRA: Experimental Art toward a School of Thought.
Jo-Ann Morgan: The Black Arts Movement and the Black Panther Party in American Visual Culture.
Fred Moten: In The Break: The Aesthetics Of The Black Radical Tradition.
Amy Abugo Ongiri: Spectacular Blackness: The Cultural Politics of the Black Power Movement and the Search for a Black Aesthetic.
Howard Rambsy: The Black Arts Enterprise and the Production of African American Poetry.
Evie Shockley: Renegade Poetics: Black Aesthetics and Formal Innovation in African American Poetry.
Michael Simanga: Amiri Baraka and the Congress of African People: History and Memory.
James Smethurst:
- Behold the Land: The Black Arts Movement in the South.
- Brick City Vanguard: Amiri Baraka, Black Music, Black Modernity.
- The Black Arts Movement: Literary Nationalism in the 1960s and 1970s.
Steven C. Tracy: Writers of the Black Chicago Renaissance.
Komozi Woodard: A Nation Within a Nation.
Rebecca Zorach: Art for People’s Sake: Artists and Community in Black Chicago, 1965-1975.
Articles
Black Past: The Black Arts Movement (1965-1975).
Jelani Cobb: The Path Cleared by Amiri Baraka.
Tracey Johnson: Art for the People’s Sake: Chicago’s Black Arts Movement.
Barbara Jones-Hogu: The History, Philosophy and Aesthetics of AFRICOBRA.
Daniel Matlin: The Black Arts Movement and Twenty-First-Century Aesthetics.
Nadja Sayej: AfriCOBRA: the collective that helped shape the black arts movement.
Wilton Schereka: Amiri Baraka, Black Music, and Black Modernity.
James Smethurst:
- The Black Arts Movement and “A Nation Within a Nation”.
- A Free South: The Black Arts Movement and the politics of emancipation.
Shantay Robinson: The Aesthetics of the Black Arts Movement.