Brian Cope on the black arts movement

From: bjcope@sas.upenn.edu (Brian J Cope)
Message-Id: <200103261217.f2QCHIX10521@mail1.sas.upenn.edu>
Subject: Re: Black Arts Movement
To: afilreis@dept.english.upenn.edu (Al Filreis)
Date: Mon, 26 Mar 2001 07:17:18 -0500 (EST)

This is bit long and I hope you don't find it too tedious. 

In handing out this special report to me, Al referred to the Black Arts 
Movement (BAM) as artistic sister of the Black Power Movement.  Then he 
clarified by saying it's not that simple.  Over the course of studying 
BAM and its roots, I found that BAM's connection to the Black Power is 
indeed not so simple.  The reason, though, is because the two are so 
interwoven that it is often difficult to distinguish them.  BAM was the 
attempt of black people in the mid sixties to establish their own art - 
an art not defined or judged by a white centered society that could both 
clearly express their cries of oppression and demands of freedom to their 
black audiences. 

Like any movement, it is also not so easy to establish the beginning and 
end of the BAM.  BAM begin as grassroots movement in various areas that 
would swell to national collective of black artists conversing and 
working together.  However, the best choice for BAM's birth is 1965.  
After 1965, what was once a scattered grassroots campaign became a 
nationally organized cohesive force.  Malcolm X was assassinated in 
February and his death would serve as catalyst for both the Black Power 
and BAM movements.  Angered young black men and women were moved to 
revolutionary action by the murder of their spiritual leader.  One these 
efforts, which would prove critical to the success of BAM, was the 
establishment of Black Arts Repertory Theatre/School (BARTS) by Leroi 
Jones (Amiri Baraka), Larry Neal, and Askia Toure among others.  Also 
with the passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Bills, many of the objectives 
of the Civil Rights Movement had been accomplished and the national stage 
would be handed over to the black nationalists who demanded much more of 
their white counterparts than the right to vote in his elections, drink 
coffee in his dinners, and ride on his buses.  They wanted and demanded 
those dinners and those buses, not just the right to use them.  

It is important here to note the two prominent camps of the Black Rights 
Movement.  The easiest way to identify these camps is through their 
leaders - Dr. Martin Luther King of the Civil Rights camp and Malcolm X 
of the Black Power camp. King was a pacifist who wanted equal rights.  
Malcolm was a militant who sought to establish black nationalism.  He 
wanted black citizens in predominantly black cities not only to have 
equal rights, but also to gain political and economic control - to 
establish black power.

BAM was cultural wing of this movement and began to establish a black 
artistic culture which feed from its own non-white cultural traditions.  
BAM challenged the literary traditions of white America. They not only 
wanted to state their blackness, but to state their blackness in black 
terms. 

In terms of poetry, the poets of the time attempted to create a new 
poetics: a poetics grounded in African American culture, its language, 
and the lives of its people and a poetics in which they could re-consider 
and re-write their blackness.  

"We must launch a cultural revolution to unbrainwash our people.  
Afro-Americans will be free to create only when they depend on the 
Afro-American community for support and Afro-American artists must 
realize that they depend on the Afro-American for inspiration." (Malcolm X)

But they not only wanted to state their blackness, they wanted to create 
art that would incite their black communities to revolution - "An art 
that would educate and unify black people in our attack on an anti-black 
racist America." Thus Black Power politics were at the heart of BAM.  
"Black Power was both the content and the style of BAM expressions".

The politics of Black Power movement came before its art (especially so 
when the art did not have political ambitions).  Many of the artists who 
would form literary magazines, theatre troupes, and institutions to 
celebrations Black Art - the essence of BAM -- meet at political 
rallies.  Baraka recalls meeting Larry Neal and Askia Toure, the artists 
he founded BARTS alongside - "I found out Larry was an artist, a poet, 
writer after mutually expressed commitment to destroy white supremacy.  
It was the same Askia Toure.  We met fighting police whole protesting 
Lumumba's murder.  We found we both wrote poetry, afterward!" And like 
Baraka suggests political came first and art was an afterthought, which 
became first and foremost a method of rallying his people together.  

For this vary reason, poetry, drama, and music were the artistic genres 
of choice for these young revolutionaries because they were easily 
integrated into rallies, protests, and political meetings. 

Someone in class mentioned a friend's comment (to paraphrase and to 
paraphrase badly) that it was shame that June Jordan was so political 
because her art (poetry, etc) could have been so much better otherwise. 
Baraka challenges that opinion: 
"It infuriates me when I hear young economic artists (as Lenin termed 
them), more interested in careerism and getoverism than Black Liberation, 
try to put down the artists of the 60's for lack of skill. What dismally 
brainwashed opportunistic feces.
	As if it took no skill to move the people, to have the black 
masses wailing our love songs to Self-Determination, Self-Respect and 
Self-Defense, as they struggled to change the world.  It took much more 
skill, it takes much more skill, to move the people than it does simply 
to stand in the bossman's payline to get a gig as occasionally mentioned 
whore in the national lie. Which is where a lot of folks have gone, in 
collaborative celebration of the steady deadly move to fascism and 
nuclear war set forth as examples of human dignity by the fascist minded 
Ronald Reagan and his white supremacy uber alles regime." 
	Well put, I must say. And with this, I cannot help but think that 
as we read Jordan we must keep this in mind - her aesthetic and the 
aesthetic of her audience.  
	
Ron Karenga in his essay entitled "On Black Art" goes further with this 
idea.  "Art for art's sake is an invalid concept, all art reflects the 
value system from which it come...We need a new language to break the 
linguistic straight jacket of our masters, who taught us his language so 
he understand us, although we hardly understand ourselves...Black art 
initiates, supports, and promotes change.  It refuses to accept values 
laid down by dead white men.  It sets its own values and re-enforces them 
with hard and/or soft words and sounds." 
	This also brings me back to my argument with Dari and I see 
myself beginning to lean to her side.  Do we not miss some of the art's 
purpose if we were not the audience the art was intended for? I think 
this is a question we must address in relation to us reading Jordan's 
work.  I would also be curious to find out how Lorene Cary's class 
address this as predominantly white upwardly mobile Penn students prepare 
to head into predominantly black West Philly system to teach Jordan.  
Would the teacher know less than the students? 
	
Sorry for the tangent (thought I will return to idea of the black 
aesthetic later), now back to BAM. 
	As I mentioned Malcolm X was considered the spiritual leader of 
both the Black Power and Black Arts movements.  Beyond politics though, 
Malcolm's own style and ability to move the people shaped BAM.  In an 
essay on the historical background of BAM, Kalamu ya Salaam cites three 
such examples: first, Malcolm's widely admired oratory skills affected 
the choices of young artists who attempt to emulate the leader; second, 
Malcolm's speeches were widely circulated on records and cassettes and 
reinforced the power of the spoken word; third, (and posthumously) the 
popularity of Malcolm's autobiography encouraged reading in general and 
in particularly an interest in black power literature. 

It seems I gone on for quite some time, but not nailed down exactly what 
BAM was.  The sentiments I have expressed above were at the core of the 
BAM movement.  What made the BAM movement special and significant beyond 
these sentiments was the national cohesion that black artists maintained 
during this time.  This communication was created through the 
establishment of Black artistic centers across the country, including 
schools like BART, national conferences held in Harlem and other black 
urban centers, literary journals (like Black Dialogue, Journal of Black 
Poetry, and Black World, among others) and highly circulated anthologies 
(including the very popular Black Fire edited by Neal and Baraka).  

Entrenched in Black Power politics, the artists of the period understood 
the need for such institutions to sustain and encourage a black artistic 
culture that white artistic institutions either ignored or attempted to 
suppress. 

Unlike earlier movements, BAM was not restricted to local interests and 
flourished across the college in most cities and college campuses with 
large African American segments. 

The widespread nature of BAM is crucial, because for the first time on 
national scale, back artists were defining their own art and the 
aesthetic by which their art was too be viewed/judged. 

The establishment of a black aesthetic (separate from white culture 
artistic aesthetic) was the monumental accomplishment of the Black Arts 
Movement and its lasting legacy.  

I found the voice for the creation of such an aesthetic most poignantly 
voiced in essay entitled "Black Writing is Socio-Creative Art". (Charles 
Fuller, 1967). 

The essence of Fuller's essay is stated rather eloquently within: "Our 
lives and our art are one in the same struggle, and to continue to accept 
or debate the white standards of evaluation, nurtured by racial 
oppression, is to commit a kind of literary suicide."

In later essay, Fuller would argue while the white artist of period was 
celebrating his right of freedom - freedom to write or create whatever 
he/she would choose, the black men and women did not have this same 
freedom because they had a responsibility to the black community first 
and to himself/herself second.  

As I read this essay and the argument put forth, I could not help but see 
Jordan's own family struggle divided along its lines.  Her father 
training her to be a great writer who would gain individual fame 
according to white standards and her mother asserting allegiance to the 
black community and its needs.  

I found these essays critical in my approach to Jordan's work and I 
encourage you all to read them as well the "On Black Art" essay mentioned 
previously - you can find all these essays as well as others at the 
following web address -- http://www.umich.edu/~eng499/documents.html .

The end of BAM is much more difficult to pinpoint that its beginning.  
Most sources point out that as many of Black Power organizations such as 
the Black Panther party dissolved, BAM began to disintegrate and the lose 
of the cohesion that had made the movement so powerful also marked its 
demise. By 1976, many of the literary journals and presses, which had gained 
prominence during BAM, were no longer at work.  

Finally, allow me to digress a bit.  

This weekend in addition to my foray into Black Arts, I also sat down to 
read Letters to a Young Poet by Rainer Maria Rilke.  I found it 
interesting and actually somewhat startlingly that the sentiments Rilke 
expressed to the young poet (over sixty years prior) often mirrored the 
sentiments of black artists during BAM.  Both encouraged artists to 
ignore the standards of art at the time and to explore their own art, to 
find their own art, and not seek acceptance for their creativity in the 
greater culture. Both suggest that pedagogues simply dampen, compromise, 
and stifle the progress of artists.

Rilke advises the young poet as such, " I do only want to advise you to 
keep growing quietly and seriously throughout your whole development; you 
cannot disturb it more rudely that by looking outward and expecting from 
outside replies to questions that only your inmost feeling in your most 
hushed hour can perhaps answer." 

But it would seem Rilke and BAM diverge rather seriously when we consider 
that BAM believed young artists were somewhat chained to the needs of the 
black communities.  
How does one rectify this? I spent a greater part of today thinking about 
this very question.  How could a young artist be asked to defy one 
pedagogue only to bow to another? 

I came up with this resolution.  BAM sought to seek a voice not for 
individuals, but for a community as a whole and as such the individuals 
within were not set free (according to the black power ideology).  Thus 
the emergence of BAM resembles not the birth and growth of many voices, 
but of a single voice, as if Rilke's guide to a young poet applied not to 
individuals of BAM, but to the movement as whole?  

If I were to have a conversation with June Jordan, I might discuss this 
conflict with her and for one, ask her if she even felt it as a conflict 
as a young writer. Or did she always feel allegiance to her community 
first and her art second?   

Finally, for those of you who actually made it this far, I want to 
apologize for the length of this report and my indirect and maybe 
unorthodox approach to the subject matter.  I guess I could have given a 
much more straightforward historical type report, but that didn't really 
interest me as much as the writings of the time and their tension did.  
Also, sorry for the multitude of quotes, but I felt much of what I read 
was so well written that it would have been wrong to try to paraphrase 
their sentiments.