The Black Scholar

Journal of Black Studies and Research

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The Social Background of the Black Arts Movement

Larry Neal

To cite this article: Larry Neal (1987) The Social Background of the Black Arts Movement, The
Black Scholar, 18:1, 11-22, DOI: 10.1080/00064246.1987.11412735

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00064246.1987.11412735

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 THE SOCIAL BACKGROUND
OF THE
BLACK ARTS MOVEMENT
I came to New York City just before the
Harlem riot. While I was in New York
City, the Philadelphia riot occurred; so I was
between riots. This was, as you know, a
highly political time; this was a time when
there were stirrings and political activitv
going on both in America and in the third
world.
In 1961, I was in the Lincoln University
library when a student came running into
the library, saying, "Cuba's been invaded.
Cuba's been invaded." And he started talk-
ing about the Bay of Pigs. I didn't even know
what the Bay of Pigs was. I didn't know much
about Cuba.
What was important for me at the time
was a large Afro-American collection at
Lincoln University. I often dug into that
collection as a student. They didn't teach
Afro-American literature at Lincoln Univer-
sity. They taught the standard courses of
American literature and English literature.
I had a side interest in folklore and an
interest in politics, too. But it really was more
literary. I was reading T.S. Eliot, James
Joyce and people like that. I was trying to
understand what existentialism was all
about.
LARRY NEAL was a poet and a drama and
literary critic. With Amiri Baraka, he edited Black
Fire: An Anthology of Afro-American Writing (1968).
His other works included Black Boogaloo (Notes on
Black Liberation) and Hoodoo Hollerin' Rrbop Ghosts.
He died in 1981.
THE BLACK SCHOLAR JANUARY/FEBRUARY 1987
by larry Neal
POLITICS AND LITERATURE
et, here was this guy coming up to me
Y talking about the Bay of Pigs. So gradu-
ally I began to start thinking about politics
more, trying to put politics into some kind
of context. At the time, the Civil Rights
Movement was going on. People were begin-
ning to take sides and trying to discuss issues
about various things. One of the issues that
arose was, what was the role of literature?
What was the role of the writer? How did
we fit into all of this? Those were some of
the things that were going on in Philadel-
phia.
Then some people in the Philadelphia
region moved towards a leftist orientation.
I worked at a communist bookstore when I
was in graduate school. I read Marxist
literature. It was all around.
One day in the store, a quarterly arrived
that I had never seen before. It was called
Revolution: Africa, Asia and Latin America. It
was really polished. It was brightly illus-
trated. It dealt not only with what was going
on in Africa and the third world, but also
with Afro-Americans in this context. This
was really a revelation.
There were articles on music by A.B.
Spellman and LeRoi Jones. I didn't even
know who LeRoi Jones was at that time. This
was probably 1962-63. This magazine came
out of Paris, but it had offices in New York.
It was quite impressive.
PAGE 11

IDEOLOGICAL DISCUSSIONS
uddenly I was moving from reading
S Arthurian romance, or something like
that, to this material. You could look at this
material in Revolution; here suddenly was
this very exciting magazine with articles on
both politics and art, seemingly in interesting
relationship to each other.
Right away bells started going off because
there were people thinking the same things.
We were having these ideological discussions
in Philadelphia in an organization that I
belonged to with Charles Fuller, the play-
wright, and Jamie Stuart, who was in Black
Fire.
We were having these discussions about
Muntu, or nco-African culture, which some
of us had run into in 1963. Well, let me just
run the thing down. M-u-n-t-u. It's a Grove
Press book. And for some reason, I don't
know if it was nco-African culture that
attracted us, or the word Muntu, or the red
cover. But when you Ripped through Afuntu,
you saw an interesting collage of things
juxtaposed against one another. Things like
Kuntu, and something about the dynamics
of motion and rhythm. Then juxtaposed
against that another title, something like
Blues Something or another, and then
Nomo, all of these interesting African terms
juxtaposed against something about the
blues.
MUNTU
hat we saw in Muntu essentially was an
W exploration of African culture, of Af-
rican philosophical values. It tried to get at
the inside of the African culture using Bantu
philosophy as the construct for discussing
African culture, discussing concepts of
rhythm, concepts of the use of the word. We
had been talking about these things in the
context of political struggle, that is the role
of the artist in political struggle, but also
about poetry itself and literature itself and
how it could become more dynamic.
We were coming out, as you might recall,
in American literature, of the so-called beat
generation. I think that might have been a
PAGE 12 THE BLACK SCHOLAR JANUARY/FEBRUARY 1987
reaction to the kind of closely written poetry
of people like Allen Tate. We felt a certain
distance between us and that strictly literary
approach to working. That is to say, an
enclosed literary context. We were looking
at the world as young black people and
saying, "Where does that fit with reference
to where we are, because we see ourselves at
a certain point involved in struggle."
So Muntu and the other books opened up
areas of inquiry that we were very interested
in. For example, Muntu opened up the
question of how poetry readings and drama
can be dynamic, and dynamic in Afro-
American terms, terms that we felt comfort-
able with working, terms that we felt would
be our scale, so to speak, our methodologv.
That led to all kinds of experiments with the
orality in poetry. We began to do things
around Philadelphia.
LEROIJONES
lues People, by LeRoi Jones, also came
B out in 1963. Everybody was really ex-
cited. Who was LeRoi Jones? Who was this
guy, anyway? Blues People was the first
comprehensive book by an Afro-American
writer about the blues. Before Ellison's works
and Richard Wright's blues kind of got at
that. Sterling Brown had earlier written this
essay called "The Blues as Folk Poetry." But
he"re was what seemed to be a definitive
statement, something that reached for the
grand statement about Afro-American cul-
ture.
So I wrote LeRoi Jones a letter. I sent it
to William Morrow and Sons where the book
was published. I don't know if he ever re-
ceived that letter, but I never got an answer.
Subsequent to that, after grad school,
in 1964, I met LeRoi in New York as I
was going to work at a publishing house to
write. The nationalists used to speak at
125th Street and 7th Avenue. And a large
part of their discussion was the role of the
black man and his destiny in the [Vietnam]
war. So you could go to I 25th Street and 7th
Avenue and hear all various nationalist
tendencies.
One of the major speakers in this context
was Ed "Porkchop" Davis, who was legendary.
That's a great doctoral dissertation-the
Harlem street corner speakers. They edu-
cated a lot of people politically. This was the
first time in my life, coming from North
Philadelphia to New York, that I had seen
this much involvement and activity around
these ideas. We had the same ideas in
Philadelphia but they were not as intense.
CHANGE IN LANGUAGE
W hat was becoming clear was that the
language was changing through this.
I'm speaking about the speakers. I'm looking
at this phenomenon from a literary point of
view right now. What I'm trying to do is get
at the feel of languages out there, what
symbols you can go after. So suddenly the
whole vocabulary was changing. Here were
words in our vocabulary like Muntu, Yoruba,
and other names we didn't know before. All
of a sudden it became exciting just to hear
these names-Ghana, West Africa, Cuba,
Marxism, dialectical this, dialectical that,
superstructure, relevancy. We were moving
to a place where the language was changing,
and we were affected by the whole linguistic
environment.
Literature takes place in both the public
and private field of language, and here we
were in an era where the public voice seemed
to be on the ascendancy. So that meant that
we had to begin to put into focus the private
voice that we brought to it. There was a dash
getting ready to happen.
One way of looking at it is when LeRoi
Jones moved from the private voice to the
public voice by making an announcement.
When he left the village downtown, he didn't
just leave. He did the right thing as a person
who is engaged; he announced his leaving.
He could have just left and clone his number
uptown, but he didn't do that. He left with
great fanfare.
PUBLIC ARTIST
e left cussing out people-giving up a
H wife and whole range of things, giving
up old friends, I mean it's not just a leave,
it's like I'm leaving you, m.f.'s. So it's a real
THE BLACK SCHOLAR JANUARY/FEBRUARY 1987
announcement. It takes on a public charac-
ter. The point is that the artist became more
public in the context; the dynamics of the
time was forcing us to be more public. The
street speakers were very attractive, and they
set a certain kind of tone, so that we read
about Ronald Snelling and Ishmael Reed
and a few others doing their poetry on the
street corners of Harlem.
That was the kind of place Harlem was. I
don't know of many communities like that,
but it has a tradition of oratory that goes
back for years. After all, Garvey did go
through there, and DuBois was there. Given
Harlem's particular kind of history, the
writers have seen them. They've heard the
politicians come and go, and they help to
create the rhetoric.
So, within this public aura, this context,
we were beginning to look at the question
of the writer as activist and then at the
question of the role of polemic. .Just what do
you do with polemic? How does it work?
Some of us just embraced the polemic stance
or the polemic mode that becomes an ele-
ment. I think that when you are looking at
the literature of that period, you will see that
there is a sense in which there is in that
literature polemic mode. And the reason is
because that's the kind of time it was. And
there was a lot of competition, a lot of people
who could handle language very well.
SOUTHERN AND STREET-
CORNER ORATORY
ou find yourselves in the linguistic era
Y of, on one level, Martin Luther King,
with his Southern background, creating a
certain kind of poetry of the South and of
the sermon tradition. Then you have the
other level, your street-corner speakers-
your Ed Davis and your Malcolm X. Malcolm
X is in the tradition of Ed Davis, that is to
say, the urban street-corner speaker.
The poet began to listen to both of these
types and to make decisions as to which one
was speaking to him or her, which mode of
address was the most useful. Those of us
who were urbanized Northern folks went
PAGE 13
for the Malcolm X style because it was
related to things that you saw on the urban
landscape such as jazz. Being hip, the whole
kind of thing for us was the urban impulse.
The folk rhythms of King are the South-
ern folk rhythms, the church rhythms of the
gospel, whereas the urban rhythm is the
urban blues and the root of that language is
the toast and the dozens. These kinds of
things that happen in the exchange and
challenge and ritual of growing up-the
rites of passage.
Malcolm's oratory was extremely compel-
ling. There was an inner logic to it that was
irrefutable. E\en though everything he said
wasn't right, there was an inner logic that
won, I think, that bombarded our senses.
GROWTH OF BLACK PERIODICALS
nto this environment, other periodicals
I began to assume a great deal of impor-
tance. Freedomways, for example, was being
published, and it was really important. Al-
though it was seen to be an older crowd,
there was a lot of receptivity on the part of the
Freedomways people to the young writers. As
a matter of fact, my first poem published in
a legitimate magazine that you could go to
a newsstand or go into a bookstore and buy
was in Freedomways. It was a poem about
John Henry.
Then there was a Liberator magazine that
was being published, and it was oriented
toward Africa in many ways. And this was a
place that was also receptive to work of this
time.
The other tendency was another literary
magazine called Hombre. Hombre was down-
town, the lower east side. There was down
on the lower east side a definite Afro-Ameri-
can clique. Ironically enough, LeRoi Jones
is not in any copies of Hombre, and the reason
why is that at that time, he was associated
with the white Bohemian writers in the
Village rather than Ishmael Reed and other
black writers.
I think there was a certain kind of tension
and competition between Ishmael and
LeRoi. There were all kinds of negative
allusions to LeRoi's and Ishmael's works. It
PAGE 14
is very important to make it clear that there
was in Manhattan, vis-a-vis the black artist,
essentially these two communities-the
downtown community and the uptown com-
munity.
UPTOWNVS.
DOWNTOWN NEW YORK
ptown was looked upon by the
U nationalist impulse as the place to be.
That's where the people were. That was an
historical place. It was very important in
some way to claim Harlem. The downtown
group was essentially trying to move through
the main currents of American avant-gar-
dism. The Village had always been a place
that was relaxing for Afro-Americans, at least
in the 1950s. There was a ready home down
there, but there was a tension about whether
that was rele,ant.
So, for a long time, there would be this
tension within one person, say within myself,
between whether I was supposed to be in
the Village or whether I was supposed to be
uptown with the black people.
Let me briefly describe for you the scene
downtown and how my meeting with LeRoi
came about. I was in a group called the
Revolutionary Action Movement (RAM),
which was certainly not a nonviolent organi-
zation although we didn't commit any vio-
lence. We really didn't know how to commit
violence systematically. We were defending
ourselves, but we were writing a lot about
the struggle. and I was beginning to write
in Liberator magazine.
One day, Max Stanford said, "Do you
want to meet LeRoi Jones? I am going
downtown to meet LeRoiJones." I said, "Oh,
yeah, that sounds cool, that's pretty slick."
We went downtown. LeRoi was living at 27
Cooper Square in the Village.
MEETING AT JONES' HOME
T his was an interesting building he was
living in because Archie Shepp lived in
the same building. I think Archie lived in
THE BLACK SCHOLAR JANUARY/FEBRUARY 1987
the second floor apartment, and LeRoi lived
in the third floor apartment with Hettie and
the little one. LeRoi's place was a loft in many
ways; it was a downtown loft. And it was
packed with books and this great big upright
piano. His lovely wife, Hettie Cohen, was a
very friendly person, holding forth listening
to LeRoi and everybody. LeRoi Jones' be-
came a place to stop when you were down-
town. This was 1964. It was before the
production of "The Slave," which I'll say
something about in a moment.
The other person who used to come by
there was A.B. Spellman, and he and LeRoi
were like the leaders, sort of the black
leaders of the downtown literary thing.
Their friends were Allen Ginsberg, Ed Dorn
and that group of people. At this particular
point in history, LeRoi was still in friendly
conversation with Allen Ginsberg. They
were just literary pals. LeRoi was more
critically an anarchist, a Bohemian, than he
was a nationalist, or, as he is now, an
orthodox Marxist.
The meeting was interesting. The follow-
ing week I had to go back down there to
Archie Shepp's place, and Archie and LeRoi
were in constant conversation about the role
of music and the struggle. So, there was this
community of people circling around Archie
and LeRoi, really getting these various ideas
about the role of art in the struggle.
27 COOPER SQUARE
began to notice, though, that there was a
! tension even then in terms of the social
life. What LeRoi was really trying to get at
was, you know, what was going on with his
life? Why was he here? What was the point
of the whole Bohemian downtown thing? It
was more white than black, and it was
creating for him a certain amount of tension.
But the other thing about 27 Cooper
Square was that there were concerts in one
of the lofts in the building. I think the guy's
name was Mosette. Now, we had been
hearing about this music. Everyone kept
saying this new thing-all the musicians
kept walking around talking about the new
thing.
THE BLACK SCHOLAR JANUARY/FEBRUARY 1987
I had been listening to John Coltrane in
Philadelphia, but it was John Coltrane out
of the mouths of the Miles Davis unit. It was
pretty cool. It was structured, it was nice.
But there was another thing going on in
the music that I had been reading about in
Revolution magazine from A.B. Spellman
and LeRoi. I hadn't heard it yet. They were
calling it "loft jazz" in Downbeat magazine.
Now it's back on the scene. It's taken over
part of New York. Powerful music. Well,
getting to the power of it.
They had this party, and Albert Ayler was
playing. LeRoi was deeply into Albert Ayler.
I mean, he was in love with Albert Ayler's
music. It's pretty hard to describe this music.
I would advise you, if you want to get a sense
of the solarity of the time, if you want to get
a sense of the Gestalt, the ambience, you
have to listen to this music. You have to find
the Albert Ayler things and the Sun-Ra
things of 1964.
LOFT JAZZ
his music had a very definite, piercing,
T passionate sound, and for some weird
reason we connected with the sound because,
I guess, it was sound and abstract. We
connected with it. We laid on this sound a
certain kind of attitude and meaning. We
said it was out of the African mode and it
was revolutionary. It was formalistically rev-
olutionary. It broke with all of the previous
ways of improvisation.
It is interesting that in America, Afro-
American culture very often is announced
and identified through various shifts be-
tween the music. Like Ralph Ellison's hey-
day, obviously Charlie Parker and those
guys. You see what I'm getting at-our
sound was the Albert Ayler and the late John
Coltrane. The intensity of the sound, it was
a total new intensity.
Everybody came to these parties, and at
the parties you met all of the writers who
were trying to get the thing together-the
painters, the musicians coming in to hear
this new music. You could run into anybody
in this context. And 27 Cooper Square was
one of the places along the way where a lot
PAGE 15
of ideas took shape, a lot of discussion, a lot conduit for certain kinds of ideas.
of listening, a lot of comraderie. I think from the point of view of literary
It wasn't like they were formal discussions. history, we should go and examine Grove's
They were informal. You're partying and titles in reference to American literature. It's
you're talking. You know, listening to music. very central in putting certain kinds of
There was something happening here. radical literary and political ideas out. LeRoi,
Something that was really consummg 111 of course, had been published by Grove
terms of your personality. Press and all of a sudden I'm putting things
together. M untu was from Grove Press. And
here was the Fanon thing. And that was, I
JONES AS A REVOLUTIONARY think, the Fanon thing, that tilt pushed us
right on over to our whole thing. That was
t was out of that kind of interaction that just it.
I LeRoi began to think about what kind of First, this particular group of writers
form he was going to take. He had always could never go for Martin Luther King.
been interested in independence as an artist. There was no way any of our particular
Even when he was with the white Bohemian group could ever have gone for that. We
thing, he published his own magazine and were urban. We had grown up in tough
had his own press. And he was published in neighborhoods. There was no way we had
a lot of independents, so the concept of the kind of fortitude that it would take to
being independent and having your own go anywhere and turn any other cheek.
kind of thing, he already had that, had the
habit of that.
LeRoi began to feel that it was necessary TENSION BETWEEN FACTIONS
to set up this magazine called lnlfinmation.
This was a handbill that went on, but it was e had seen a lot of violence. We were
one of those manifestos. We do not have W in many ways violent although we kept
many copies floating around. But in that it cool. We were ready for violence. We were
again were announcements and pronounce- conditioned as young black urban people in
ments about the role of the artist and what the North to deal with violence. And every-
the artist was supposed to be about. The body knew that violence was wrong.
period after, right after the plays that LeRoi But in Fanon we found the intellectual
did called "The Slave" and "The Toilet," justification for violence that we didn't have
which I reviewed in Liberator magazine- before. There was no basis for the violence.
that period begins LeRoi's public announce- I mean, we were basically Christian in our
ment of his revolutionary stance. And he way. We knew that we could not liberate
began to act like the character in the play in these people. We felt, anyway, non-violently.
many ways-Walker Vessels. We just disagreed with that tendency.
I already explained the tensions going on
earlier between the various factions. You
GROVE PRESS
have to remember, they were not talking to
e were all influenced by Fanon's The themselves. When Martin Luther King got
W Wretched of the Earth. The Fan on thing up to speak and Malcolm got up to speak,
was like, "Bam! Hit in the head with a sledge they were not talking to themselves. They
hammer." We didn't know anything. None were talking to Afro-Americana and
of us knew Fanon, any of that. Here was America. They were strategists. They were
another book Fanon wrote. Grove Press, saying, "My strategy is better than that one."
ironically again. I began to put things to- When King said, "Turn the other cheek,"
gether finally that all of this stuff was coming he was saying, "My strategy is better than
out of Grove Press. I hadn't even focused the guy who says 'fight.'" You have to re-
on Grove Press, but at the time it obviously member that there was a contention over
assumed a certain kind of character as a which way to go.

PAGE 16 THE BLACK SCHOLARJANUARYIFEBRUARY 1987

 So, here though, in Fanon, was an intellec-
tual justification for violence from a black
person that was articulate as opposed to say,
Lenin or Mao Tse-tung or any number of
people that would be so-called revolution-
aries in the world. You are looking at a
picture of someone who looks like you, who
has a similar experience-at least we
matched our experience with Fanon's. We
began to talk then about the colonial experi-
ence.
QUESTION OF DEFINITION
A gain, there was another shift of vocabu-
lary. At each point along the way these
issues were forcing a shift in vocabulary;
terms were being changed gradually. The
only existence we have is really through
language anyway. So that you can't move
through existence in a social realm without
affecting language. And the question of
definition is always paramount, particularly
if you are a literary person. You are going
to be dealing with words and what they
mean. A "Black" for example, what is that?
What meaning do we ascribe to it? A question
of adding a positive meaning on what ordi-
narily in the West was a negative term.
So, Fanon was a justification, the intellec-
tual justification. Also, we could identify
with Fanon because we could identify with
that kind of "intellectual," or we could aspire
to. And, I finally entered into poetry, for
example; the poetry essentially picked up
the Fanon image. The literature picked it
up and moved and wove right through.
There were aspects of the Fan on image in
Walker Vessels. I am not quite sure at which
point LeRoi read it in the construction of
the play, but you can see in Walker Vessels
the black intellectual who has been Western-
ized grappling with the question of violence.
The question of what is good and the
colonial context.
LANDMARKS
uddenly, the landscape opened up and
S things began to fall back into a certain
kind of order. I understood what my friend,
whom I had run into in the library that day,
THE BLACK SCHOLAR JANUARY/FEBRUARY 1987
was saying about the Cuban invasion. Now
we had come to a point where there was
something called a third world, and we could
look at it with a certain kind of almost
wholistic vision. It was as if suddenly we had
a place for all of that which seemed once
despairing. But Fanon pulled it together for
us. Whether it was right or wrong is not the
point.
I am trying to point out certain landmarks
that you can go back and examine against
the talk. You can go back and look at these
landmarks and see whether or not in fact
that was the case. If you were supposed to
be anything, black and intellectual, if you
hadn't read the Fanon, you were out of it.
You were just out because you had not read
an essential text. Then the following Fanon
books became very important.
OK. Malcolm. The break with the Nation
of Islam. I was glad because I was not into
Islam. I was raised Catholic, went to Catholic
grade school and Catholic High School, and
I could not go with any religious ideology
by that point in my life. I called art "religion
ideology." I wasn't inside the Muslims. I was
very respectful of it, but I didn't dig it. To
me they were reactionary; I saw them as
basically neo-capitalists.
MALCOLM'S BREAK WITH
THE NATION OF ISLAM
had my Marxist vocabulary together.
I was very righteous, you know. So, wh .1
Malcolm broke with the Nation of Islam, I
was very happy. Everyone else was sad. They
were saying, "Oh, he broke his heart." No,
I was glad. I wanted him to get away from
that stuff because I wanted to see an opening
up and I wanted to see the broadening. I
wanted to see a more secular movement built
around a nationalistic, charismatic leader.
So, those of us in RAM and LeRoi and
Max Stanford, I think we were glad. We
didn't annunciate being glad because you
didn't say certain things at that time. But I
think we were glad. Because here was a
strong, secular nationalist who had a broad
following, who could maybe become the
spearhead of another aspect of the urban
struggle.
PAGE 17
 We didn't feel that the NAACP and the
Urban League were addressing themselves
to what we considered to be the central issue.
Out of the Fanon situation, we saw the
central issue as liberation, not civil rights.
We saw it moving towards the human rights
position of Malcolm X. But as everybody
knows, and if you see in my piece in Rolling
Stone on the 60s, you know that I was there
at Malcolm's assassination. And so I won't
talk about the assassination in detail.
MALCOLM'S ASSASSINATION
or the young black, urban nationalist
F revolutionary writer, musician or artist,
Malcolm's assassination was one of the heavy
moments. That was the point at which it was
decided by those of us who would stay
around that we would open up full throttle.
It was war and that we should respond to a
society that would kill Malcolm X in kind.
Again, fortunately, I can say that I'm glad
I'm able to stand here and say that. There
is no blood on my hands. I'm very happy to
say that. But there was many a time when I
would have been proud to have had blood
on my hands.
The Black Arts Theater came up to
Harlem the spring after Malcolm's assassina-
tion. It announced itself with great fanfare.
The fanfare was a parade through Harlem
led by Sun-Ra. So you see, what was happen-
ing now, was getting really strange. The
nationalists and the indigenous nationalist
groups in Harlem-the Ed Davis group and
especially a group called the African
Nationalist Pioneer Movement. Does any-
body remember them, the Brethway
brothers and the man that died, their leader,
whose name I forget right now? He was a
prominent Harlem nationalist. They called
it an invasion.
BLACK ARTS THEATER
wrote a little descriptive piece in Liberator
I magazine in 1965 called "Black Arts
Comes to Harlem," which describes the
parades. The Black Arts Theater opened
PAGE 18 THE BLACK SCHOLARJANUARYIFEBRUARY 1987
with a series of poetry readings. I think any
black poet of any significance read in those
readings. Ishmael Reed, David Henderson,
Calvin Hernton. It was the place to be.
Although," if you talk to Ishmael Reed today,
he might try to give you the impression that
he wasn't there. But, I know he was there.
Sometimes he wanted to be separate from
LeRoi, but he was there.
The poetry readings were all part of what
was happening along with the "loft jazz."
There were poetry readings in apartments
and public poetry readings. Downtown, in
Harlem, this was when you got a chance to
hear people like, I think, Sonia Sanchez,
David Henderson, just a rich variety of
poets. These were very exciting readings for
me. They were certainly in the Afro-Ameri-
can tradition. They did not sound like T.S.
Eliot reading his poetry. It was more in the
style of the Russians, big sound, big voice,
public.
The only quiet poet who could cut through
that was a South African poet who was
around with us at the time. Willy was the
South African brother. He could read; his
voice was intense. Everything else was big.
Ishmael seemed to be conducting a big
symphony orchestra when he read.
POETRY READINGS
he poetry readings became a standard
T part of the apparatus of these activities
and this backgrounding, the social life, in
terms of what things were being formed. It
was in the poetry readings a lot that LeRoi,
I and other people worked out the style that
came to be called the black poetry style in
terms of reading. That is to say, the style
that influenced Don L. Lee (Haki
Madhubuti), and that style, that school.
It was this perception of style. Some of us
did things intuitively, some of us did certain
things theoretically. I for some reason always
tended to be a little bit of a hodge-podge, a
little bit theoretical, a little bit intuitive. In
the readings that we were doing we were
always trying to make sure that the form we
were evolving was a form that could include
the people, the community.
 We began to listen to the music of the
rhythm and blues people, soul music. That
was the other musical tendency that influ-
enced the language. The big hero for the
poets was James Brown. We all thought that
James Brown was a magnificent poet, and
we all envied him and wished that we could
do what he did. If the poets could do that,
we would just take over America. Suppose
James Brown had consciousness. We used
to have big arguments like that. It was like
saying, "Suppose James Brown read Fanon."
RHYTHM AND BLUES
AND HISTORY
ut that power was one thing we liked in
B there. And this was the modality we
were after. The work began to reflect that.
In Black Forehead is a poem by David Hender-
son called "Keep on Pushing." You read that
poem, you see all that is in there, all of those
references to the things.
The quest for national liberation and
nationalism and identity made us focus on
Afro-American history on one level. You
went back to look at Garvey and you went
back to look at the 19th century nationalists,
but it also forced the nationalists to look at
where the people were. It was always,
"Where are the people, Brother?" So the
people were into James Brown. You knew
you had to get into James Brown. But the
point was that was the challenge of the oral
poets in the rhythm and blues.
It was a challenge there so there again was
the environment; the stylistic mode was
being affected by a lot of things then. We
had politics, on the other hand, that influ-
enced the language, this orientation. We had
the total quality of Coltrane, Albert Ayler
and Ornette Coleman; that was another
kind of gestalt.
And now you had the rhythm and blues
gestalt coming at you which was all up to the
rhythm and the boogaloo. That's why there
was a book called Black Boog A Loo because
that was a popular dance at the time. And
so we were looking at black national culture
for things that would be usable for national
liberation or for nationhood.
THE BLACK SCHOLAR JANUARY/FEBRUARY 1987
POLITICS AND CULTURE
sometimes regret that we did not evolve
I a very sophisticated nationhood party
but, such as it may be, there is the question
of what to do with these things. How to
handle that. How to address a people that
were into all these rhythmic modes led to
that question, led to the Black Aesthetic.
That question was, how to convey to black
people the strength and the values of Afro-
American culture and politics through cul-
ture? That was one of the reasons that we
got Black Studies.
If you noticed, I did not use the ideological
reference. I am talking about the stylistic
technique now. I am not talking about what
happened later on when you got people
talking about Black Studies. They were still
talking political.
I'm starting with the modality first. It was
the mode of operating as artists that led to
taking these things from the Afro-American
cultural context. Listening to it more.
We began to listen carefully to Smokey
Robinson and the Miracles, to Martha and
the Vandellas. A very important song was
"Dancing in the Street." There was a ques-
tion about these songs being in code. The
songs were saying, "Hey, let's get out and do
the dancing in the streets." Some people
read that as a revolutionary code that meant
black people should go into the streets and
take over. And the air was that kind of air.
"Keep on Pushing" was another one. It
was also the name of a poem in Black Fire by
David Henderson. That's where that was
coming from.
POETIC STYLE
ou see, the poets all of a sudden began
Y to pull into their language references.
which if you were reading in Harlem, some-
body, some ordinary working person could
say, "Hey, yeah, right on, brother," because
there would be that music reference under-
neath it. Also, it was a way to try and trap
their energy. try and get at their energy. Out
of that kind of stylistic element the questions
of the black poetic style came up.
PAGE 19
 Then, in this particular era of style and
stylistic dynamics, entered a poet by the
name of Yuseff Rockman, who is not writing
anymore but who is in Black Fire. Yuseff was
like one of those strange geniuses who comes
on the scene and then just fades off, like a
comet that hits a peak and boom, you don't
see him anymore. I think he may be in
Cleveland; I really don't know where he is.
Yuseff did something that was to influence
a lot of the poets. He evolved an oral delivery
that was fantastically unique and compelling.
He evolved a way of reading that was very
close to the instrumental way of making
music like the jazz musicians did. His poetry
will not work on the page like Amos Moore's
does. Amos Moore is the other genius in the
oral mode. He is in Chicago.
INFLUENCE OF
YUSEFF ROCKMAN
Y useff began to read what he mem-
orized-long, huge sections of his work.
He would create an entire atmosphere for
his poetry readings. He would turn the lights
down; he would light some incense and he
might get music back there and he would
take the energy of the reading as far as he
could go.
He imposed on the poets another chal-
lenge. The challenge was, how can you get
at the emotional thing with the poetry, the
image and word and get it all, as in music,
in one compressed unit? Coming out of the
Afro-American church experience and com-
ing out of the tradition of street oratory. but
now linking it with the tradition of Charlie
Parker and the tradition of John Coltrane
was a highly musical performance.
Of course we knew that the concept of
music and poetry is not new, but in this
context it had taken on a definite new
character. So, everybody was influenced by
Yuseff Rockman. He greatly influenced
LeRoi's concept of the oral work and the
chorusing.
BLACK AESTHETIC
ow, I think of the Black Aesthetic as a
N formal concept instead of an intuitive
PAGE 20 THE BLACK SCHOLAR JANUARY/FEBRUARY 1987
concept such as I just described. I think we
have to attribute the question of the formal
concept to Hoyt Fuller. Not because Hoyt
sat down and wrote any theory of Black
Aesthetics but because it was Hoyt who
asked the question. I think he said, "Is there
a Black Aesthetic? Does there need to be
one?" And he sent out this query to all of
the various writers around. It was called,
"Black Writers Speak on Various Issues."
Well, anyway, I got this form letter, right,
and I had been thinking about these things
and calling it all kinds of stuff. We were
talking about "Muntu-Kunto," talking about
energy. It was all a discussion about energy.
We would say, "Yeah, he's got a lot of
energy, you know." Talking about Coltrane,
talking about Yuseff.
It was all a question of energy. We were
very concerned with energy, with having
power. There was a constant discussion
about that. But Hoyt Fuller asked this
question and we gradually, Hoyt, Negro
Digest and other people had to deal with
these young writers and gradually began to
see Black Arts writing in Negro Digest. So, he
asked me, and for some reason I wrote one
of the longest responses in the book.
DEBATE
A nd people began to hassle me about this
Black Aesthetic. So it was just because,
I guess, it sounded lucid at the time. And
so, I am the one they put this on but I am
not the one. I have responded to it, of
course. I began because it was very clear that
we had been dealing with that and didn't
know it.
We never would have said, "Black Aesthet-
ic." I mean, I could never have thought that
way about it. It was a nice concept coming
from a person well traveled and erudite as
Hoyt. He had been to Paris and to Africa.
There were interesting responses. Saun-
ders Redding, as I recall, said there is no
such thing as a Black Aesthetic and it was
sort of a silly concept. He didn't say it that
way, but he just pooh-poohed the idea.
Gwendolyn Brooks said "yes" in answer to
the question, "Should there be a Black
Aesthetic?" because it is necessary and be-
cause it is a structure, something like a
structure. It means a structure. Her response
was not longer than that.
I said something about the Afro-American
folklore experience and how we already had
a tradition in that aesthetic, that it was not
necessary to create a Black Aesthetic. We
had one already, and we had been operating
out of a Black Aesthetic all of our lives in
various ways as Afro-Americans. The aes-
thetic was rooted in the folk culture. If we
went to the folk culture for the concept of
the aesthetic, we would find it. And that was
coming out of my background, having said
folklore and what not and things like that.
HENRY DUMAS
T he other landmark for the literary
people-at least for a lot of us-was
the work of Henry Dumas. I met Henry
Dumas in Mr. Michaud's Bookstore on 125th
Street. Dumas was very quiet. Like a lot of
us, he had been around Sun-Ra in the
Village. Sun-Ra was a very important force.
He was like a spiritual father to a lot of
people. You could just go see Sun-Ra and
get a bit of the occult and space science thing
in that music.
Henry, Hank, had done a lot of short
stories and fiction, but nobody knew who
Hank was. We had started working on Black
Fire- I did separately, I think about 1966,
and LeRoi came into Black Fire sometime
later. I must say, I got the title Black Fire
because I was reading a book of the same
title.
Well, anyway, we were working on the
book; there was a lot of stuff in the interven-
ing period that would sidetrack us. I got shot
and all of that kind of stuff. Dumas had sent
some stories to Liberator magazine for a short
story contest, and the contest never took
place. Dumas knew that I wrote for Liberator
and he wanted to find out what was happen-
ing. I said I didn't think they were going to
have the short story contest.
So he had all of this work. He was working
on the strange world of Afro-American
folklore mythology, and you began to see it
THE BLACK SCHOLARJANUARYIFEBRUARY 1987
in his work. We took two of his pieces for
the anthology. But there was a piece he
published in Negro Digest/Black World called
"Will the Circle Be Unbroken?"
WILL THE CIRCLE
BE UNBROKEN?
T o describe the story very quickly for
those of you who do not know it, it's
about a musician named Probe. He is sup-
posed to be this mysterious musical force
and is supposed to have gotten this horn in
some unknown way from some mountain
somewhere, from Himalaya or an Aztec
priest, I think it is. There is all of this
discussion among the musicians about this
particular musician's power. So, a white
musicologist hears this discussion and de-
cides that he is going to go and listen to the
music and find out what's happening.
This particular guy is also a musician and
had done a dissertation about a very impor-
tant jazz musician. He felt like he was
comfortable with the musicians and around
black people. He said, "Well, I want to go
hear the music." So he took his white
girlfriend and they go to a club somewhere
in a black community somewhere, the city,
I don't think is specified. It's sort of hanging
in space, this city. It could be any city. It
could be Chicago or New York.
They go there and the brothers say, "You
can't come in. You can't come in here
because it would be very dangerous for you
if you come into this particular place." The
musician and his girlfriend said, "Why?"
And the brothers said, "Because of the
extensions." And the guy said, "Well, I don't
believe any of that stuff they are saying
about the music. I want to go in and I want
to hear it."
MUSIC AS JUDGMENT
T hey complained and complained so
much that they called the white cop
over. The cop came over and he saw the
white couple trying to get into this black club
to hear the music. The cop said, "What do
PAGE 21
you want? You got to get off this street." BLACK SELF-DEFINITION
Finally, the brothers let them in to hear the
e didn't want the white critics in there.
musiC.
The music begins to play and Dumas
W I think the object was for black people
to find out who they were without someone
describes a trip within the soul of the horn.
overlooking their shoulder. Black people
He describes a whole tapestry of information
had a feeling of always being on stage for
about the horn, about the music, and back
white folks. It was time, some of us thought,
to the two people who have come in, who
to be in certain contexts socially, un-
go to sleep. And the music ends and they
ashamedly on our own, and to define our-
get ready to leave; everybody is cleaning up
selves on our own terms without someone
and ready to pack and they look over in the
else intervening in the definition. D
corner and both of the people are dead. The
musicians walk over and say, "Oh, it's true-
the idea of music as a judgment, as a judging All correspondence to the Black
force." Scholar must be sent to:
What is going on now is finally all of these
ideas were beginning to extend into one The Black Scholar
kind of ball. What you see was a raveling, P.O. Box 2869
and unraveling, a collecting. So now we had Oakland, CA 94609
music as a force of judgment. We also had
a place, ritually, symbolically, a place where Mail sent to the street address will
whites don't go-a psychic zone that should be returned by the post office.
not be intruded upon. That explained it to
a certain extent.

The 6th International Book Fair of Radical Black and

Third World Books will take place at the Camden Centre,
Bidborough Street, Kings Cross, London WC1,
from Thursday March 26th to Saturday March 28th 1987.
The accompanying International Book Fair Festival will be held in
London from Tuesday March 24th to Sunday March 29th, 1987.
John 'la Rose, Director
76 Stroud Green Road Finsbury Park London N4 3EN England
Telephone numbers 01-272 4889 01-737 2268 01-579 4920

PAGE 22 THE BLACK SCHOLARJANUARYIFEBRUARY 1987