Abstract
Just as the modern Civil Rights Movement differed from previous ones in style and substance, the poetry of the 1960s, and especially the late 60s, offered a new way of talking, an especially noticeable sea change in mood, that was, I argue, a consequence of two sets of significant events: one, the 1966 "Black power" speech of Stokely Carmichael ( Kwame Toure) in Greenwood, Mississippi, and, in tandem, the deaths of Medgar Evers (1963), Malcolm X (1965), and the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. (1968).
Highlights
Just as the modern Civil Rights Movement differed from previous ones in style and substance, the poetry of the 1960s, and especially the late 60s, offered a new way of talking, an especially noticeable sea change in mood, that was, I argue, a consequence of two sets of significant events: one, the 1966 "Black power" speech of Stokely Carmichael ( Kwame Toure) in Greenwood, Mississippi, and, in tandem, the deaths of Medgar Evers (1963), Malcolm X (1965), and the Rev
A Song Flung Up To Heaven, Maya Angelou describes what she saw unfolding in Watts, California, the summer of 1965 following her return to America from Ghana: There had been no cameras to catch the ignition of the fire. a number of buildings were burning wildly before anyone could film them
The work that poets like Nikki Giovanni, Haki Madhubuti, Sonia Sanchez, Imiri Baraka, and many others did was not capillaries of the modern Civil Rights Movement, but penned out of the poets direct participation in that battle, and reflective of the truest meaning of resistance literature. These poets broke with long established European forms; they broke with a tradition of polite protest; they abandoned forms and structures complicit with notions of double-consciousness
Summary
A Song Flung Up To Heaven, Maya Angelou describes what she saw unfolding in Watts, California, the summer of 1965 following her return to America from Ghana: There had been no cameras to catch the ignition of the fire. a number of buildings were burning wildly before anyone could film them. As will be shown later in this essay, specific events such as the assassination of Black leaders would inspire specific works, but because so many of the poets were political activists, identities of inspiration or influence are not clearly demarcated It is clear, though, that the black hands making political and poetic history were clasped in a soulfully different way in the turbulent 1960s and a few years beyond than in any other period in American history. The work that poets like Nikki Giovanni, Haki Madhubuti, Sonia Sanchez, Imiri Baraka, and many others did was not capillaries of the modern Civil Rights Movement, but penned out of the poets direct participation in that battle, and reflective of the truest meaning of resistance literature These poets broke with long established European forms; they broke with a tradition of polite protest; they abandoned forms and structures complicit with notions of double-consciousness. This was no mere protest against atrocities; this was a call to action that was as far from Alain Locke’s 1927 figuration of the New Negro, as Harlem was from Hollywood.
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