African-American History

Chapter 2: "BAM's Historical Background"

When discussing social movements, establishing start and stop dates is often an arbitrary exercise. BAM is particularly difficult to pin down to a specific start and stop date because of the nature of its beginning in far flung, grassroots activities which were often unrelated to each other. Nevertheless, if we claim that BAM was an important movement then we need to be able to locate this movement in history. In keeping with our L/N/L conceptual model, I mark the beginning point of BAM in the national phase and the end point of BAM in the disruption/decline of the second grassroots phase.

From this perspective, BAM begins in 1965, catalyzed into action by the assassination of Malcolm X in February 1965, which propelled a number of forces to make definitive moves and declarations. As we will see, LeRoi Jones joined forces with other Black activists/artists to found the Black Arts Repertory Theatre/School (BART/S) in March of 1965. Also, the staff of Black Dialogue decided to dedicate their 1965 debut issue to Malcolm. Additionally, with the passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Bill, the Civil Rights Movement was effectively ended and the stage was set for "Black Power" which "officially" begins as a social movement in 1966 but which, like BAM, had already been set in motion at the grassroots level prior to achieving national recognition.

I designate 1976 as a transition point for BAM mainly because by then Broadside Press had gone into hiatus, The Journal of Black Poetry had ceased publication, and in April of 1976 Black World was shut down by John Johnson, the publisher. In a later chapter, I will discuss the ramifications of these and other factors in the decline of BAM activity. Although I use 1976 as a formal end point for the purposes of this study, I do not mark 1976 as the death of BAM.

Well after 1976 the triad of BAM principles remained vital to a number of artists and institutions. However, after 1976 BAM was a much less dynamic force and often was in a defensive rather than offensive posture. In any case, I have chosen to focus on a 1965 (national birth) to 1976 (institutional disruption) as the decade of BAM's apogee.

Political Context

Both inherently and overtly political in content, BAM was the first American literary movement with a national reach to advance "social engagement" as a sine qua non of its mission. The "revolutionary" literature of the depression  era 30s such as the communist-led John Reed clubs which promoted the work of Richard Wright and other Black writers of that period, did not have the national reach that BAM had. The focal points for the production of most of that Marxist-oriented work was Chicago and the Northeast corridor (particularly the New York area.) BAM on the other hand was produced in the far west and in the deep south as well as in the Northern urban areas.

We cannot overstress the national reach of BAM. The Black Arts Movement was neither a one-city nor one-region phenomenon. Individuals and organizations nationwide were actively involved and accounted for both its vitality and its diversity.

BAM broke from the immediate past of protest and petition (Civil Rights) literature and dashed forward toward an alternative that initially seemed unthinkable and unobtainable: Black Power. As a political reference, the phrase "Black Power" was not new. The slogan had earlier been articulated by Richard Wright specifically in his 1954 book Black Power: A Record of Reactions in a Land of Pathos, which described the mid-fifties emergence of the independent African nation of Ghana. The more familiar, sixties use of the term originated in the Civil Rights movement in 1966 with SNCC (the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee) which was often described as the most militant of the major Civil Rights organizations.

During the famous 1966 Meredith march, SNCC field workers Stokley Carmichael and Willie Ricks used the chant of "Black Power" as a counter to the speeches of Martin Luther King and other Southern Christian Leadership Committee (SCLC) leaders. While King was calling for equal rights, Carmichael and other SNCC workers would set up a call ("what do we want") and lead their audiences in answering ("black power.") At that time black power was often translated to mean Black political and economic control of predominately Black towns, cities and counties in the deep south, especially in Alabama and Mississippi. Credible sources content that although Carmichael is often credited with popularizing the phrase "black power," in fact Willie Ricks was the first person in SNCC to use the phrase and that Ricks passed the phrase on to a receptive Carmichael who popularized the phrase.

So what did Carmichael mean? In a July 28, 1966 speech Carmichael comments:

"There is a psychological war going on in this country and it's whether or not Black people are going to be able to use the terms they want about their movement without white peoples' blessing. We have to tell them we are going to use the term 'Black Power' and we are going to define it because Black Power speaks to us. We can't let them project Black Power because they can only project it from white power and we know what white power has done to us. We have to organize ourselves to speak from a position of strength and stop begging people to look kindly upon us. We are going to build a movement in this country based on the color of our skins that is going to free us from our oppressors and we have to do that ourselves."

"Everybody in this country is for "Freedom Now" but not everybody is for Black Power because we have got to get rid of some of the people who have white power. We have got to get us some Black Power. We don't control anything but what white people say we can control. We have to be able to smash any political machine in the country that's oppressing us and bring it to its knees. We have to be aware that if we keep growing and multiplying the way we do, in ten years all the major cities are going to be ours. We have to know that in Newark, New Jersey, where we are 60% of the population, we went along with their stories about integrating and we got absorbed. All we have to show for it is three councilmen who are speaking for them and not for us. We have to organize ourselves to speak for each other. That's Black Power. We have to move to control the economics and politics of our community." [Carmichael / pages 474-475, and 476]

BAM can not be understood apart from its beginnings in the black power movement. In the article "The Black Cultural Revolution" (Kitabu Cha Jua, formerly the Journal of Black Poetry, Summer 1975) A. Muhammad Ahmed (Max Sanford, a founder and leader of RAM, the Revolutionary Action Movement) gives a detailed historical interpretation of Black Power's beginnings. Ahmed maintains "The mass protest-year of our struggle started on February 1, 1960, when four Black students staged a sit-in at Greensboro, N.C. Within weeks, Black students throughout the south were demonstrating against public aspects of segregation." [Ahmed / page 3] The sit-in is usually seen as part and parcel of the Civil Rights movement, but as Ahmed details in his article, there was a vigorous ideological struggle going on within the broad Civil Rights movement. The two camps may be simplistically identified as the assimilationist Civil Rights camp and the separatist Black Power camp. Although the assimilationist position as articulated by Martin Luther King/SCLC is the most well known and most celebrated, the Civil Rights movement was far from monolithic.

Ahmed goes on to mention the involvement of CORE in the 1961 Freedom Rides. Ahmed then pinpoints the 1962 founding of RAM (Revolutionary Action Movement) as a leading ideological force in the development and spread of the Black Power ideology, an ideology which became the driving force of BAM:

"Some of these students began intensive study of Black history; some of their ideological leaders were Marcus Garvey, Robert Williams, Harold Cruse, the Honorable Elijah Muhammad, Malcolm X and Dr. Dubois... As these Black student revolutionaries began to formulate ideas for their party, some decided to leave school and go into northern Black communities and organize like SNCC did in southern communities. After some debate a name was chosen for their Black student party; it was called the RAM party, later to become known as the Revolutionary Action Movement. RAM won the student elections at Central State, its whole slate gaining control of student government. That was in May of 1962." [page 4]

"As a result of the mass activism in the north and south, a conference was held in August, 1963, called the "Black Vanguard" conference. The students discussed the forthcoming March on Washington and how it would be compromised, and began formulating ideas of involving brothers form the street in the forefront of the movement. They decided to continue nationalist activism in the north, slowly building a nationalist consciousness. In the fall of 1963 the Grassroots Conference was called in Detroit, calling together grassroots leaders of the then civil rights movement. The Grassroots conference took a Black nationalist stand, supporting the Freedom Now Party, an all-Black party organized during the March on Washington." [pages 6 - 7]

"In 1964 a group of Black students at Fisk University formed a Black nationalist student movement called ASM, the Afro-American Student Movement. ASM called the 1st National Afro-American Student Conference on Black Nationalism on May 1st to 3rd... The convening of the 1st National Afro-American Student Conference on Black Nationalism was the ideological catalyst that eventually shifted the civil rights movement into the Black Power movement. During the summer months, RAM organizers with the agreement of John Lewis, the then Chairman of SNCC, went into Mississippi to work with SNCC. RAM organizers soon came into conflict with white SNCC workers, who opposed an all-Black force and the practice of self-defense; soon, RAM began a movement to force whites out of SNCC." [page 8]

A key participant in RAM's infiltration of SNCC was poet, journalist and activist Rolland Snellings (Askia Muhammad Toure) who was also one of the main authors of SNCC's Black Power position paper. This history is important because unless we understand the Black Power origins, we cannot appreciate the Black Aesthetic fruit.

In the first grassroots period, the key ideological figures of BAM were writer Larry Neal (who was also a member of RAM) and activist/scholar Maulana Karenga, who, in the early sixties, was head of the Los Angeles chapter of Attorney Donald Warden's Afro-American Association. Of course, the spiritual father of Black Power was Malcolm X, who inspired both Neal and Karenga.

Neal became the major cultural savant/writer. Karenga, through the direct and indirect influence of his Kawaida's philosophical formulation, became one of the main philosophers of Black Power. Larry Neal, published widely in publications as diverse as the New York-based, activist-oriented Liberator magazine to the Chicago-based, status quo-oriented Ebony magazine. From academic journals to the major anthology of the period, Black Fire co-edited by Neal and LeRoi Jones, Larry Neal's influential writings would be widely quoted by BAM participants. Karenga's direct influence was felt mainly through one 1968 essay, "Black Art: Mute Matter Given Force and Function," published in Negro Digest. However, indirectly, through the spread of Kawaida, and especially the formulation of the "Nguzo Saba" (seven principles) and the "Kwanzaa" holiday, Karenga had a major influence. Additionally, when LeRoi Jones became an advocate of Kawaida, Karenga's indirect influence became preeminent in BAM because of Jones' popularity and propaganda prowess in producing articles and pamphlets such as "A Black Value System" (in the debut November 1969 issue of The Black Scholar) and Kawaida Studies: The New Nationalism (Third World Press: 1972), both of which were widely distributed and cited within Black nationalist circles.

Of course there were others who were significant forces in helping to shape BAM ideology. Significant among them are Ed Spriggs and Askia Muhammad Toure. In addition to being a founding editor of Black Dialogue, poet Ed Spriggs was also a visual artist who taught printmaking at BART/S in the spring and summer of 1965. Moreover, Ed Spriggs was among the first wave of BAM independent Black filmmakers. In 1965 he was part of a small film collective which produced a half hour documentary on the Ephesian Church of God in Christ in Berkeley, California. The film included the early work of Edwin Hawkins who was the church choir director at the time.

Between 1969 to approximately 1972, Ed Spriggs along with Larry Neal, Jim Hinton, Rufus Hinton (no relation), and Doug Harris formed a film collective which actively documented BAM and Black Power-oriented activities and events in and around New York City as well as along the east coast down to Washington DC. Examples of some of their work included Moving On Up (a documentary for the A. Phillip Randolph Institute's Joint Apprenticeship Program in New York). In Newark they documented the Ken Gibson mayoral campaign which was a showpiece of Baraka's initial forays into electoral politics and also they documented the Black Power conferences which featured speakers such as Maulana Karenga and Richard Hatcher. In Washington DC they documented the SCLC's "Poor People's Campaign." From 1969-1975 Spriggs was head of the Studio Museum in Harlem which was the site for the famous Africobra exhibit (which we will discuss later). Also of note, Hoyt Fuller's family selected Ed Spriggs to be the literary executor of Hoyt Fuller's estate in 1981-1984. Along with the significant help of Richard Long of Atlanta University, Spriggs secured a permanent repository for Fuller's collection in the Atlanta University Center's Robert W. Woodruff Library.

Although little known outside of intimate BAM circles, Askia Muhammad Toure was another significant catalyst who constantly sought to reach out to diverse peoples and involve them in BAM related activities. Toure was a member of the New York-based literary group Umbra, a key member of RAM, a writer for Liberator magazine, a founding member of BART/S (Black Arts Repertory Theatre/School), an organizer with SNCC, and a writer for Black Dialogue, Soulbook and The Journal of Black Poetry.

Amiri Baraka argues for the importance of Askia Toure and Larry Neal. Writing about the formation of BART/S, Baraka proclaims, "Both Larry and Askia were among the chief catalysts for that blazing and progressive, though short-lived, institution. Larry Neal and Askia Toure were my models in the middle 60s for Black Art." [Baraka / "The Wailer," page x, page xii]

Of course there were numerous others, including organizers and theorists such as Imari Obadele, head of the Republic of New Afrika, a nationalist formation whose avowed goal was the securing of reparations and the establishment of an independent Black nation in the deep south. Particularly important because of his international contacts and reputation was Robert Williams, the former Monroe, North Carolina NAACP leader who was forced out of the country after advocating and organizing armed resistance (self-defense) to Klan attacks in the late fifties. In exile, Robert Williams continued to be a beacon of resistance first while in Cuba and later while in China.  Williams operated Radio Free Dixie, a radio broadcast from Cuba into the United States, and also printed and distributed a newsletter, The Crusader.

On the religious front, the leader who had the greatest Black Power impact on Christianity was Jeramogi Albert Cleage, who founded Black Christian Nationalism and organized the Black-oriented Christian church, The Shrine of the Black Madonna. The task these and other leaders undertook was cogently articulated by Malcolm X:

"We must recapture our heritage and identity if we are ever to liberate ourselves from the bonds of white supremacy. We must launch a cultural revolution to unbrainwash an entire people. Our cultural revolution must be the means of bringing us closer to our African brothers and sisters. It must begin in the community and be based on community participation. Afro-Americans will be free to create only when they can depend on the Afro-American community for support and Afro-American artists must realize that they depend on the Afro-American for inspiration." [Malcolm X / page 427]

Historical Background of the Black Arts Movement (BAM) - Part II