Transition 114: Transition: the Magazine of Africa and the Diaspora

York.

Amiri Baraka and the Music of Life

Blues People fifty years later

Komozi Woodard

UNFORTUNATELY, THE NEW York Times neglected most of the materials that I provided their reporter for the Amiri Baraka obituary. Fortunately, they included Maya Angelou’s assessment that Amiri Baraka was the world’s greatest living poet. However, it is difficult to account for the newspaper of record that neglected to mention that, by 1995, Amiri Baraka was officially inducted into this country’s most prestigious cultural assembly, the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Was that a case of criminal neglect or a case of tragic blindness?

He advised that students imaginatively learn the art of maneuver in the Black Revolt; then he referred students to Sun Tzu’s The Art of War.

A few years ago, Baraka invited me to his sunny breakfast nook; that is the room that housed his portrait standing amidst an overwhelmingly white crowd of the 250 men and women honored in the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1995. He pointed to the few dark dots in the group portrait, indicating where he and Toni Morrison were standing as a token gesture to racial diversity in the constellation of American genius represented in that esteemed academy.

Characteristically, Baraka wasn’t bitter about it, but rather amused; and he smiled at the honor with touches of irony and sadness for all of the African American geniuses (including Duke Ellington) routinely excluded from the American cultural establishment. Meanwhile, I looked at the stack of new books that Amiri Baraka had piled up, as usual, on a shelf in that sunny room. There were several books on language, including new scholarship on Wittgenstein; and there was also a recent biography of Ho Chi Minh that I, too, was reading.

In fact, the first speech I heard by Amiri Baraka, given in 1968, discussed the flexibility of tactics employed by the elderly Vietnamese leader Ho Chi Minh, who had led the 1954 defeat of the French Empire at Dien Bien Phu; he advised that students imaginatively learn the art of maneuver in the Black Revolt; then he referred students to Sun Tzu’s The Art of War. On the same subject, he liked to quote the military genius of General Ulysses S. Grant in workshops on black leadership. Over the forty-seven years I knew Baraka, he never ceased to amaze me with the wide range of literature he consumed, digested, and presented in his conversations, lectures, and writings.

I first heard the name LeRoi Jones (later Amiri Baraka) when I was a student at Weequahic High School, of some fame thanks to Philip Roth’s novels. Up to that point, I knew of a few white writers from Newark. But Baraka was the first I heard of a black writer from New Jersey. He was born in the segregated Kenney Memorial Hospital in Newark, New Jersey on October 7, 1934, during the Great Depression. Dr. John A. Kenney was a celebrated African American doctor who followed the lead of Booker T. Washington in building black institutions in Jim Crow America during the era of medical apartheid. In my Jewish high school, Baraka was controversial because of his experimentations with the American vernacular—including a number of colorful words that we don’t generally print—and a few choice words and plays that got him arrested for indecency even in the heyday of Greenwich Village. In 1966, Eric Mann, a Newark schoolteacher who was also in the Civil Rights Movement, was fired for inviting Baraka to speak to his class of African American students at Peshine Avenue School.

The basic facts of Amiri Baraka’s life have been confused on numerous occasions. A number of influential books and articles mistakenly stated that he graduated from Howard University with a B.A. and then earned an M.A. in comparative literature at Columbia University. In fact, Amiri Baraka dropped out of college and went on to teach at a number of Ivy League universities. In real life, Baraka graduated from Newark’s Barringer High School, where he was one of a few token black students. Barringer was the Italian American academic parallel to the highly regarded Jewish Weequahic High School that educated alumni like novelist Philip Roth and historian James Oliver Horton. And, in that competitive environment, Baraka skipped a few grades before arriving in college at the tender age of sixteen. He attended Rutgers University in Newark for a year and then transferred to Howard University, where he met future civil rights leaders, like Andrew Young, and future Nobel Prize-winning writer Toni Morrison. Being bright yet immature, and younger than his college peers, he experienced a number of embarrassing situations by trying to act older than he was. However, the major problems Baraka faced at Howard revolved around his lack of identity, purpose, and direction. Although in high school he ran track and at the Queen of Angels he played basketball, in college his love for music, art, and literature made him feel alienated in the midst of the careerist ethos of the Cold War University. He loved the course on Dante that he took with youthful Professor Nathan Scott, who developed into a renowned literary scholar at the University of Chicago. The issues raised in Scott’s class about the religious dimensions of Western literature remained preoccupations for the rest of Baraka’s life. Some of those issues are explored in his early novel, Dante’s System of Hell. Furthermore, he was fascinated by an off-campus introduction to blues historiography at the home of his literature professor, Sterling Brown. Brown was not only an important poet, but also a leading New Deal intellectual in the Blues School of Literature. Although Baraka was immersed in the music of Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie, outside of Brown and Scott, he found little intellectual support for that line of inquiry. In the grip of spiritual ennui and personal malaise, he dropped out of Howard in the last semester of his senior year and joined the Air Force, rather than return to his hometown in shame and disgrace.

What it was that seemed to move me then was that learning was important.

I vowed, right then, I was going to learn something every day.

At one point while he was in the Air Force, he was standing in front of a Chicago bookstore, the Green Door on the South Side, when he spotted important books in the window, including a copy of James Joyce’s Ulysses. In his autobiography, he says he realized,

I didn’t know a hell of a lot about anything. What it was that seemed to move me then was that learning was important. I’d never thought that before . . . I vowed, right then, I was going to learn something every day. That’s what I would do. Not just as a pastime, something to do in the [Air Force], but a life commitment.

However, serious reading during the Cold War got him kicked out of the Air Force because some of the New York poetry and literary journals he subscribed to were deemed subversive. Leaving the Air Force, he headed for the art scene in Greenwich Village, where the Beat Generation was in formation. Ominously, military intelligence was never far behind, and their surveillance file grew as he studied jazz while selling records in a music store. At a jazz club in Greenwich Village, he had the formative experience of seeing Langston Hughes’ virtuoso performance of jazz poetry.

In an era when black writers were criminally neglected by American publishers, the young Baraka decided to edit the masters of Beat poetry, producing some important volumes of poetry and cultural criticism that went against the tide of academic poetry. Among his central contributions were the founding and editing of Totem Press, and the journals Yugen and Floating Bear. Allen Ginsberg was his teacher and mentor during that period, and, as far as Baraka was concerned, Ginsberg knew more about prosody than professors at Columbia and the other Ivy League schools. But he remained torn about his destiny. What would he be: a writer, a musician, or an artist?

The Confederacy: Alabama (1965). Robert Indiana (American, born 1928). Oil on canvas, 70 × 60 in. (177.8 × 152.4 cm). Miami University Art Museum, Oxford, Ohio, Gift of Walter and Dawn Clark Netsch. © 2013 Morgan Art Foundation / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

Searching for answers, Baraka immersed himself in the imaginative world of Greenwich Village poets and musicians, alongside playwrights, actors, dancers, and artists. These included Steve McQueen, Lou Gossett, Ishmael Reed, Ted Jones, Askia Muhammad Toure, Lorenzo Thomas, Sonia Sanchez, and Robert De Niro’s father, the painter Robert De Niro, Sr. Baraka worked at the trumpet, playing like his hero Miles Davis, but he had not yet discovered his distinct voice. However, he began to find his voice in a singular style of jazz writing that amounted to a performance of the written word. His creative writing embraced countless influences, including the jazz aesthetic of Langston Hughes and the conversational prose style of his mentor James Baldwin. Crafting his prose in Blues People was a creative breakthrough. He found his voice in the poetic insight, irony, and pathos of the blues. With an advance from his publisher, he began the lifelong study of African American history and music that helped him pioneer Africana studies.

For the young Baraka, equality did not necessarily mean sameness, assimilation, and Anglo-conformity, but rather creativity, distinctiveness, and self-realization.

It is a tragic commentary on American letters that, in 1963, Blues People was the first book on the blues by an African American. The book was written on the eve of the March on Washington and in the midst of the bloody civil rights confrontations that reached from the civility and etiquette of the Jim Crow South to the funky streets of the Jim Crow North. Thus, Blues People also reflects the thinking of a young intellectual about the meaning of American citizenship and the terms of racial equality. For the young Baraka, equality did not necessarily mean sameness, assimilation, and Anglo-conformity, but rather creativity, distinctiveness, and self-realization. Thus, in 1963, he was discovering his voice as a Citizen-Poet.

When I interviewed leaders in the Black Power Generation, each of them said that Blues People was their introduction to the new writer. They read the book and looked for him to engage his ideas about the music. Bobby Seale talked about Blues People as formative in his thinking about black culture; Baraka met Seale on that book tour. Leaving Philadelphia, poet Larry Neal sought him out in Greenwich Village. Eventually, Malcolm X sought out the young writer in Manhattan. By 1964, Baraka had written Dutchman and won the Obie Award. Numerous honors and fellowships followed, including a Guggenheim and a Rockefeller.

Baraka’s meetings with Fidel Castro and Malcolm X marked his turning point toward radical politics. He was part of the delegation of African American writers invited to witness the celebration of the first anniversary of the Cuban Revolution, and he reached a new stage in his prose by publishing his poignant and award-winning essay Cuba Libre. The playful side of Baraka comes out in a story from Harold Cruse about that trip: as usual, if there was a party, then the bash was in Baraka’s suite. When the waiter brought the bill for a night of food, drinking, dancing, and conversation, the young Baraka told him, Charge it to the Revolution!

The meeting with Malcolm X was more decisive. Baraka had an all-night meeting in a hotel suite with Malcolm X and Abdul Rahman Babu, the leader of the 1964 Zanzibar Revolution. It was January 1965, and when Malcolm X was assassinated on February 21, 1965, Baraka made a fateful choice. He left his life in Greenwich Village and threw himself into the new thing, the Black Arts Movement.

Using his royalties, Baraka took a Harlem brownstone on West 131st Street and transformed it into the Black Arts Repertory Theatre-School (BARTS). The jazz legend Sun Ra led a procession of musicians, artists, writers, actors, and dancers in a jazz step announcing the new movement that would bring African American culture and black studies to the streets. They introduced the Jazz Mobile and street drama; and they ran a black studies program for teenagers in the summer of 1965. Sun Ra taught music and philosophy, Lou Gossett taught acting, and Sonia Sanchez taught writing. The curriculum suggests that the Black Arts Renaissance’s approach to Africana studies was aimed at education for liberation, combining the humanities, the arts, and the social sciences.

Jean-Paul Sarte called the governor of New Jersey demanding an accounting, and that international scrutiny probably saved Baraka’s life from a violent end.

By 1967, the Black Arts Renaissance was spreading the new poetry, art, drama, and literature from coast to coast. Amiri Baraka, his new wife actress-dancer-choreographer-poet Amina Baraka, and his fellow-poet Sonia Sanchez transplanted themselves to the budding Black Arts West in San Francisco. That is where Baraka began to feel confident that he might combine the Black Arts Movement and Black Power politics when he returned to Newark, New Jersey. He witnessed the early successes of Black Power on the West Coast, including not only the rise of the Oakland Black Panther Party, but also the Los Angeles Organization Us and the birth of the Kwanzaa holiday. In addition, Sonia Sanchez and Amiri Baraka joined with Ed Bullins and Marvin X in the campaign Black Theatre for Black Panthers to raise legal defense funds.

Soon after his return home, the city exploded with the July 1967 Newark Rebellion, in which Baraka was nearly beaten to death by a group of white Newark police officers, then arrested for using poetry as a weapon. After he was arrested and chained to a wheelchair, covered in his own blood, the prison officials claimed that he was missing in the jail system. His wife, Amina Baraka, feared that the threats against him had been made good: Was he dead? Mrs. Baraka called Allen Ginsberg, who in turn reached out to Jean-Paul Sartre in Paris. The renowned philosopher called the governor of New Jersey demanding an accounting, and that international scrutiny probably saved the poet’s life from a violent end.

It Takes Two to Integrate (Cha Cha Cha) (1961). Edward Kienholz (American, 1927–1994). Painted dolls, dried fish, glass in wooden box, 31 ¼ × 22 ½ × 7 ½ in. (79.4 × 57.2 × 19.1 cm). Collection of David R. Packard and M. Bernadette Castor, Portola Valley, California. © Kienholz. Photo: Courtesy of L.A. Louver, Venice, California.

Baraka rose from the ashes of the Newark Rebellion like the Phoenix, transforming himself into not only the Malcolm X of literature, but also the leader of a series of Black Power organizations that changed the complexion of national African American politics for nearly a decade. Locally, he launched the Committee for a Unified Newark. Nationally, he launched the Congress of African People, with coast-to-coast branches in twenty-five cities. Politically, he called for not only the 1969 Black and Puerto Rican Political Convention in Newark, but also the 1972 National Black Political Convention in Gary, Indiana. Internationally, he helped organize the African Liberation Support Committee for the independence of the Portuguese colonies of Angola, Mozambique, and Guinea-Bissau. Additionally, he called for the end of colonialism and apartheid in southern Africa. By most measures, those 1970s campaigns were an astonishing and an unprecedented success, transforming common sense about the hopelessness of black politics.

By the 1980s, Amiri Baraka was teaching black studies at a number of universities, and he was also on tour reading jazz poetry, often with his jazz ensemble, Blue Ark. In 2009, at the celebration of his seventy-fifth birthday, I looked at the throng of more than one-thousand musicians, dancers, artists, actors like Danny Glover, and poets like Felipe Luciano and the Last Poets, and I realized that all of them had been his students. They had flowered into his colleagues in art and politics.

In fact, I was one of the many of his students that flowered into teachers and professors. From that vantage point, I could see at least two hidden transcripts in the life of Amiri Baraka that seem appropriate to address at this moment. One hidden transcript of resistance is the long years he devoted to educating and nourishing white students, apprentices, protégés, and colleagues, from the Nuyorican Café to Harvard University. After years in the Black Arts Renaissance, by 1976, Amiri Baraka and I worked to develop a number of interracial and multicultural programs, including the important Anti-Imperialist Cultural Union (AICU) and its journal, Main Trend, under the banner of Artists United to Serve the People.

If the AICU was part of that first hidden transcript, then the Blue Ark jazz ensemble was at the core of the second hidden transcript of resistance to cultural imperialism, in which he aimed to continue the work of Malcolm X to get black America and its allies to take three steps: to Wake Up, Clean Up and Stand Up for self-emancipation in resistance to racial oppression. Given the decades that Amiri Baraka devoted to fashioning a new vision of American identity and culture, the lack of attention to his anti-racism and his creativity in multiculturalism is one measure of scandalous negligence by powerful parts of the American establishment.

As Amiri Baraka aged, he modeled himself in the tradition of long-distance runners like Frederick Douglass, Margaret Walker, Elizabeth Catlett, Harry Haywood, Paul Robeson, and W.E.B. Du Bois. In essence, Amiri Baraka is to Black Theatre what Yeats is to the legacy of Irish Theatre; he is to poetry and insight in America what Goethe was to German poetry and philosophy. He taught his students what he had learned the hard way: that they could pursue a life of learning propelled by the imaginative power of the arts.

In his political life, he encouraged grassroots mass movements—organized around calls for self-determination and proportional representation—to elect, and hold accountable, the first black mayors in the Jim Crow North. He also worked to elect, and hold accountable, the first black president, from the 1980s campaigns of Jesse Jackson to the twenty-first century campaigns of Barak Obama. Typically, the campaigns where he lost were preparation for the coming victories, dress rehearsals for primetime.

The lack of attention to his anti-racism and his creativity in multiculturalism is one measure of scandalous negligence by powerful parts of the American establishment.

In his politics, alongside his writing and drama, Amiri Baraka’s personal yearning for individuality and meaning captured the imagination of a generation of African Americans because, to varying degrees, that group was experiencing similar tensions—between moods ranging from spiritual ennui, personal malaise, and identity crisis on the one hand, to ethnic kinship, black consciousness, and cultural regeneration on the other hand. Thus, one of Baraka’s most important creative achievements was his compelling artistic reordering of the black quest for identity, purpose, and direction. After studying Aimé Césaire’s Return to My Native Land (Cahier d’un retours au pays natal), Baraka transformed himself into the singular lyrical poet of his age, propelled by his special gift for poignant music, the blues ethos, and jazz aesthetic, enriched by his imaginative mining of the incantatory beauty of the neglected American vernacular.

Despite controversy, his cultural and intellectual contributions not only enriched black America specifically, but also America generally, as recognized by his induction into the American Academy of Arts and Letters, his fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts, as well as the Langston Hughes Award, a Rockefeller Award for Drama, and a PEN/Faulkner Award. One can only wonder why the New York Times would replace those juries with the artistic judgment of political bosses in New Jersey.

One of Baraka’s favorite themes was the celebration of, and appreciation for, the contours of the genius of black America that is so central to American genius writ large. That theme is masterfully articulated in his books, from his 1963 classic Blues People: Negro Music in White America, to his recent, award-winning Digging: The African American Soul of American Classical Music. In other words, like the geniuses Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, John Coltrane, and Thelonius Monk before him, Amiri Baraka