The Black Arts Movement:
Art as Revolution

Malcolm X was shot and killed at the Audubon Ballroom in Harlem on February 21, 1965. He was 39 years old. The assassination — carried out by members of the Nation of Islam, with disputed involvement by federal agencies — removed from the political landscape the most uncompromising advocate of Black self-determination in American public life. The Civil Rights Act had passed in 1964. The Voting Rights Act would pass in 1965. The legal apparatus of Jim Crow was being dismantled. And yet Black communities in the urban North were poorer, more segregated, more policed than before the movement began. Legal equality was not producing material equality. Something else was needed.

Amiri Baraka — the poet and playwright then known as LeRoi Jones — had been a central figure in Greenwich Village's Beat and avant-garde literary scene. He had been married to a white woman. He had been published by mainstream white literary journals. He had been, in some important sense, operating inside the institutions of white cultural life. Three days after Malcolm X's death, he left all of it and moved to Harlem. The move was a declaration: that integration into white cultural life was not the goal; that Black art required Black institutions; that the assassination had made the terms clear.

The Black Arts Repertory Theatre/School brought free performances to Harlem's streets — poetry readings, theater, jazz concerts — directly to the community the movement was for. It lasted one year before losing its federal funding under pressure. Baraka moved to Newark in 1966, founded Spirit House, and continued. The movement's organizational forms were fragile. The art it produced was not.

Sonia Sanchez was a poet, playwright, and professor who had been involved in the Civil Rights Movement before joining the Black Arts Movement. Her poetry was designed to be spoken aloud — dense with phonetic spelling, call-and-response patterns, musical rhythms drawn from jazz and blues. Her 1969 collection We a BaddDDD People was a formal manifesto: poetry that used Black vernacular speech as a deliberate aesthetic choice, not a concession to illiteracy but an assertion that the vernacular was the literature.

Nikki Giovanni's 1968 debut collection Black Feeling, Black Talk and her 1970 Black Judgement made her one of the most read poets in America — not just among Black audiences but in mainstream bookstores. Her poem "Nikki-Rosa" — "Black love is Black wealth" — was a direct challenge to the sociological literature that treated Black poverty as cultural pathology. Gwendolyn Brooks had won the Pulitzer Prize in 1950 — the first Black author to do so — but had been operating within the formal traditions of white American poetry. After attending the 1967 Fisk University Writers' Conference, she embraced the Black Arts Movement, changed publishers, and spent the rest of her career insisting that her work was for Black readers first.

The movement's poets were also performers — they read at community centers, colleges, prisons, street corners. The performance tradition they built drew directly on the oral traditions of the Black church, the dozens, the toasts, and the blues hollers. They were not creating something new. They were bringing something very old back into the room where it had been denied.

In 1968, a group of Black visual artists in Chicago formed OBAC — the Organization of Black American Culture — and then the visual arts collective AfriCOBRA (African Commune of Bad Relevant Artists). Its founding members included Jeff Donaldson, Wadsworth Jarrell, Barbara Jones-Hogu, and Carolyn Lawrence. Their manifesto, written by Donaldson, called for "cool-ade colors" — hot, saturated primary colors drawn from African textile traditions — and images that documented and celebrated Black life with the same formal seriousness that European art gave to European subjects.

Their most famous collective work, The Wall of Respect, was a 1967 mural painted on the side of a building at 43rd and Langley in Chicago — depicting Malcolm X, Muhammad Ali, Gwendolyn Brooks, Nina Simone, John Coltrane, and other figures of Black cultural and political life. It was not commissioned. It was not paid for by a museum or a gallery. It was painted on a building in a Black neighborhood, for the people who lived there. It became the model for the community mural movement that spread across Black and Latino neighborhoods in American cities for the next three decades.

Dudley Randall founded Broadside Press in Detroit in 1965 — a Black-owned press specifically to publish the poets of the Black Arts Movement outside the mainstream publishing industry. It published Sonia Sanchez, Nikki Giovanni, Haki Madhubuti, Etheridge Knight, and dozens of other poets who might otherwise have had no outlet. The movement understood that cultural independence required institutional independence — you could not make art for Black audiences if the only publishers were white-owned.

The Black Arts Movement had a musical wing — and it was called free jazz. John Coltrane's A Love Supreme (1964) was the movement's sacred text before the movement had a name: a 33-minute suite structured as a prayer, dedicated to God and to the spiritual wholeness that Coltrane believed music could create. His later work — Ascension (1965), Interstellar Space (1967) — pushed further: long, dense, sometimes overwhelming works that prioritized spiritual intensity over commercial accessibility. He died in 1967 at 40, the year the movement reached its height. He became its patron saint.

Sun Ra — born Herman Poole Blount in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1914 — built an entire cosmological mythology around Afrofuturism: the claim that Black Americans were not descended from slaves but from a cosmic civilization, that space was the place where Black liberation would be realized. His Arkestra performed in elaborate Egyptian-influenced costumes. His music was unlike anything else being made. Amiri Baraka called free jazz "the sound of Black liberation." He was not speaking metaphorically.

The free jazz musicians — Coleman, Coltrane, Sun Ra, Archie Shepp, Albert Ayler — were making music that the mainstream jazz industry found difficult to promote. Record labels were reluctant to release it. Radio would not play it. The musicians built their own institutions: loft concerts in New York, the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM) in Chicago, the Black Artists Group in St. Louis. The institutional infrastructure of the Black Arts Movement was, in every medium, built by the artists themselves because the existing infrastructure would not have them.

By the mid-1970s, the Black Arts Movement as an organized cultural formation had largely dissolved. Federal arts funding — which had briefly supported some of the movement's institutions — was withdrawn. The FBI had surveilled and infiltrated Black cultural organizations, as it had political ones. The commercial mainstream absorbed some of the movement's aesthetics while stripping them of their political content. Nikki Giovanni got a record deal and appeared on Soul Train. Amiri Baraka was arrested during the 1967 Newark riots. The institutions were fragile. The work was not.

The Black Arts Movement's legacy runs through every subsequent form of Black cultural production: hip-hop's spoken word tradition descends directly from Baraka and Sanchez; the spoken word poetry movement of the 1990s — slam poetry, the Nuyorican Poets Cafe — is a direct continuation; the community mural tradition from the Wall of Respect forward traces through graffiti art and street art; the independent Black publishing tradition from Broadside Press runs through Third World Press, which is still operating. Toni Morrison, who edited Baraka's work at Random House, said the movement taught her that Black literature needed Black editors who understood what it was doing and why.

The Last Poets and Gil Scott-Heron — who came out of the Black Arts Movement's spoken word tradition — recorded albums in 1970 and 1971 that are now recognized as the direct ancestors of hip-hop. Scott-Heron's "The Revolution Will Not Be Televised" is the Black Arts Movement's thesis condensed into a single track. The chain is unbroken: from the street-corner performances of Harlem in 1965 to the rhymes of the Bronx in 1973 to the stages and streaming services of the present. The revolution was not televised. But it was recorded.