Amiri Baraka papers

Amiri Baraka (1934-2014), known early in his career as LeRoi Jones, was a widely published African American writer who produced poetry, drama, fiction, essays, and music criticism. Much of Baraka’s work addressed the subjects of Black liberation and white racism.

Baraka’s early writing and publishing involved collaborations with his then-wife Hettie (Cohen) Jones, Diane di Prima, and contributions from Beat notables such as Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg. Baraka’s first collection of poems, Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note, was published in 1961. His award-winning 1964 play, Dutchman, presents a philosophical exploration of Black and white relations in New York City through a white woman’s attack on a Black male passenger during a ride on the subway.

Music permeates both Baraka's creative and critical writing. Throughout his career, Baraka’s creative writing experimented with the idioms and aesthetics of African chants, jazz, rhythm and blues, and reggae. In 1963, he published an acclaimed study of jazz and blues, Blues People: Negro Music in White America. The Book of Monk, Baraka’s collection of essays and poetry on jazz pianist and composer Thelonious Monk, was published in 2005.

With poet Diane di Prima in 1961, Baraka founded the underground magazine Floating Bear which published work by poets from several important schools of the era including the New York School, the Beats, and the Black Mountain School. Through the early 1960s, however, Baraka began to drift away from the Beat movement he had largely been associated with up to that time. Inspired by artists and intellectuals he met on a trip to Fidel Castro’s Cuba as well as Malcom X’s preaching, Baraka became increasingly socially and politically active, and by 1964 he came to reject the cultural and political values of the Beats entirely.

With the assassination of Malcolm X in 1965, Baraka took up the cause of Black nationalism. He moved to Harlem and founded the Black Arts Repertory Theatre School, a short-lived but significant project that influenced similar Black Arts programs throughout the United States. In 1967, he moved to his birthplace, Newark, New Jersey, and changed his birth name LeRoi Jones to Imamu (later dropped) Ameer (later Amiri) Baraka. With his wife Amina Baraka (born Sylvia Robinson), he opened up a spiritual and cultural center in Newark called The Spirithouse. In the 1970s, Baraka became a prominent Black nationalist political leader and was instrumental in the organization of the 1970 Congress of African Peoples and the 1972 National Black Political Assembly. However, by 1974, he had drifted from the movement, redefining himself as “Marxist-Leninist-Maoist.”

Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, Baraka taught in several universities. A native of Newark, New Jersey, Baraka was awarded the post of Poet Laureate for the state in 2002. Criticism of his poem on the September 11th terrorist attacks, “Somebody Blew Up America?,” as antisemetic ultimately prompted the Governor and State Legislature to abolish the position as a way of removing him. Baraka stood as a polarizing figure throughout his career, with some critics representing his work as violent, antisemitic, misogynistic, and homophobic, and others championing his art and theories as instrumental in shifting the focus of Black literature away from the integrationist visions of his contemporaries to a literature firmly rooted in the Black experience.

Amiri Baraka died on January 9, 2014.

Amiri Baraka. Contemporary Black Biography, vol. 38, Gale, 2003. Gale In Context: Biography, link.gale.com/apps/doc/K1606002377/BIC. Accessed 30 Nov. 2021.The Floating Bear | Penny's poetry pages. Accessed December 1, 2021. https://pennyspoetry.fandom.com/wiki/The_Floating_BearAnalysis of Amiri Baraka’s Plays | Literary Theory and Criticism. Accessed December 1, 2021. https://literariness.org/2019/05/12/analysis-of-amiri-barakas-plays/Home - Amiri Baraka. Accessed December 3, 2021. http://www.amiribaraka.com/Amiri Baraka (1934-2014) exhibition: February 10 - April 30, 2014 | University of Delaware Library. Accessed December 1, 2021 https://wayback.archive-it.org/10305/20180411134932/http://www.lib.udel.edu/ud/spec/exhibits/baraka/index.html