Black Arts and Beyond: African American Novels, 1960s– 1970s

Abstract

James Baldwin, who had once critiqued Richard Wright for sacrificing humanity to protest, dedicated his 1964 play Blues for Mr. Charlie to the memory of Medgar Evers, his widow, and his children. One reviewer characterized Blues as having “fires of fury in its belly, tears of anguish in its eyes and a roar of protest in its throat.” Baldwin's shift in tone was one instance of the increasing radicalization that would emerge in much black expression of the 1960s–1970s. Similar sentiment could be found in the journals Liberator , Soulbook , and Umbra , as well as television shows such as Soul! and Like It Is . Nonfiction works such as Eldridge Cleaver's Soul on Ice (1968), Malcolm X's Malcom X Speaks (1965), Bobby Seale's Seize the Time (1968), and Kwame Toure's (Stokely Carmichael) and Charles Hamilton's Black Power: The Politics of Liberation (1967) were circulated through independent book stores, word of mouth, and cemented a philosophy that called for an immediate end to second-class black citizenship. Even the middle-of-the-road Ebony magazine in August 1969 produced a special issue “The Black Revolution.” Accompanying the cover, a black and white Van Gogh style portrait of a serious-faced, dark black man, was the following caption: “The Black Revolution, which is currently redefining deeply rooted values in a society built largely on the assumptions of black inferiority, and which is the subject of this special issue, is typified by the Afro-wearing young man on the cover. Fiercely proud of all that is entailed in being black, he and his peers – both male and female – have found their black identity and with it an inner strength which rules out forever a return to that traditional brand of race relations that characterized lives of their elders” (4). One cannot help but hear overtones of the New Negro movement in Ebony's description of the time and thinking, as did Henry Louis Gates that this constituted another black renaissance: The third renaissance was the Black Arts Movement, which extended from the mid-’60s to the early ‘70s. Defining itself against the Harlem Renaissance and deeply rooted in black cultural nationalism, the Black Arts writers imagined themselves as the artistic wing of the Black Power movement.