Rethinking Black Arts: Impact of Black Power Movement & Malcolm X Assassination - Essay Sample

Introduction

The black arts movement referred to the change comprising of politically motivated musicians, dramatists, black poets and the writers in the wake of the Black power Movement (Shockley and Evie 13). The movement was ignited upon the assassination of Malcom X and the espousal of the Black power by a civil right organisation such as the Congress of Racial Equality (Baker, Lindsey, and Robinson 78). These two events spurred the young black artists and writers to rethink about the purpose of the African American arts.

Is your time best spent reading someone else’s essay? Get a 100% original essay FROM A CERTIFIED WRITER!

Save 25%

Most importantly, according to the black art writers, literature was the only way of exhortation and that it was through poetry that they could articulate the new consciousness of the Blacks (Miller and Quentin 17). Having been linked both ideologically and chronologically, the movement recognised the idea of the black Americans and white Americans. The thematic concern of the action revolved around, pressing for the formation of a distinctive Black authentic where the black artists could attract white audiences.

The movement is believed to have been initiated by various young artists such as Imamu Amiri Barack, Larry Neal among other writers and poets. The Black arts movement occurred between the years 1965 and 1975. The opening of the Repertory Theatre in Herlam by Barack in 1965 formed the basis for the formal establishment of the Black Arts Movement (Ramey and Lauri 10). The Black arts Movement participated in nation building through sponsoring the creation of literary magazines, encouraging poetry readings and establishing small presses as a way of rejecting the notions of other artists that separated it from the African American community.

As a result of the building cultural politics of Black Nationalism, the Black art movement was seeking to create populist art that could, in turn, promote the idea of black separatism. The founders of the movement believed that political activism was the responsibility of black artists (Baker, Lindsey, and Robinson 78). They also thought that the liberation from the white artistic and power structures could only be achieved through the Black arts Movement (Cataliotti and Robert 15). Larry Neal, one of the founders of the Black arts movement noted that the action could only be compared to the Black power concept which had arisen as a result of the antagonistic ethos of the late 1950s (Crawford and Margo 30). Thus, the Black arts movement acted as an evolution of the African-American artistry where the African had to declare their independence from the Americans (Ramey and Lauri 15).

Although the movement had been initiated in New York, its impacts on poetry and theatres were felt as far as Chicago, California, Illinois and Michigan as well as other States within America. Furthermore, the movement was able to attract collaboration with cultural nationalist of the Black Arts Movements as well as the black musicians specifically the jazz musicians such as Thelonious Monk, John Coltrane among others. Concisely, the Black arts movements were seen as the key to revisiting the perceptions of black Americans about themselves. Therefore the move was aimed at social, political and economic empowerment of the Africans through poems and literature.

Although the movement had a significant impact in the arts industry, it faced a substantial drawback of racial segregation where the blacks and the whites became alienated from each other thus encouraging violence (Shockley and Evie 20). Besides, some of the famous and prominent art works were often sexist, racist and Semitic such that the work put forward black hyper-masculinity at the expense of the female voices within the society.

Works Cited

Baker, Lindsey, and T. J. Robinson. "Black Arts Movement." Black Power Encyclopedia: From" Black is Beautiful" to Urban Uprisings [2 volumes] (2018): 78.

Cataliotti, Robert H. The Music in African American Fiction. Routledge, 2018.

Crawford, Margo Natalie. Black Post-Blackness: The Black Arts Movement and Twenty-First-Century Aesthetics. University of Illinois Press, 2017.

Miller, D. Quentin. The Routledge Introduction to African American Literature. Routledge, 2016.

Ramey, Lauri. The Heritage Series of Black Poetry, 1962-1975: A Research Compendium. Routledge, 2016.

Shockley, Evie. "The Black Arts Movement and Black Aesthetics." The Cambridge Companion to Modern American Poetry (2015): 180-195.