Black Power and the Arts, Yesterday and Today

This summer I took an African Amerian Lit course, and I was particularly fascinated by the Black Arts Movement.  The movement, as the Norton puts it, aimed "to create works that would be--in the words of Maulana Karenga--'functional, collective, and committing.'  Hence, the Black Arts of the 1960s proposed to create politically engaged expression as a corollary to the new black spirit of the decade."

Amiri Baraka is one of the most recognized Black Arts writers, and his poem "Black Art" gets at the heart of the period, I think.  Here are a few excerpts:

Poems are bullshit unless they are
teeth or trees or lemons piled
on a step.  Or black ladies dying
of men leaving nickel hearts
beating them down.
...
Assassin poems, Poems that shoot
guns.  Poems that wrestle cops into alleys
and take their weapons leaving them dead
with tongues pulled out and sent to Ireland.
...
Let there be no love poems written
until love can exist freely and
cleanly.  Let Black People understand
that they are the lovers and the sons
of lovers and warriors and sons
of warriors Are poems & poets &
all the loveliness here in the world


We want a black poem.  And a 
Black World.
Let the world be a Black Poem
And Let All Black People Speak This Poem
Silently
or LOUD

Baraka's poem resonates with the same violent anger that propelled Black Power during the sixties and seventies.  Today marks the official release of Göran Olsson's documentary The Black Power Mixtape: 1967-1975; you can read the NPR review here.  It looks pretty interesting--it's a take on the movement from Sweden, which apparently was pretty anti-US at the time.  Check out the trailer below: