Black Arts Movement is the Black Nationalist African American arts movement focusing on music, literature, drama, and the visual arts. The Black Arts Movement was a loose network of Black Nationalist African American artists and intellectuals during the mid-1960s to the mid-1970s. In many respects, the Black Arts Movement was the cultural wing of the Black Power Movement. Like the Black Power Movement, its participants held a variety of political beliefs, ranging from revolutionary Marxism to versions of what was understood as the cultures and ideologies of traditional precolonial Africa. Despite this range of often conflicting beliefs, there was a generally shared concept of African American liberation and the right of African Americans to determine their own destiny. There was also usually some common notion of the development or recovery of an authentic national black culture that was linked to an existing African American folk or popular culture.

It is difficult to date the beginning of the Black Arts Movement exactly. One possibility is 1965, when Amiri Baraka and other black cultural activists founded the Black Arts Repertory Theatre/School (BARTS) in Harlem, New York. However, a number of important forerunners to BARTS helped make the larger movement possible. For example, Umbra, a seminationalist group of African American writers in the Lower Eastside of New York City in the early 1960s, provided a training ground for a number of influential Black Arts activists, including Ishmael Reed, Lorenzo Thomas, David Henderson, Calvin Hernton, and Askia Muhammad Touré. The influence of the Nation of Islam on many African American jazz musicians in the 1950s and early 1960s also helped prepare the way for a Black Nationalist arts movement. The journals The Liberator and Negro Digest (later Black World) offered important outlets and encouragement for emerging literary and artistic nationalists in the early 1960s. Baraka’s pre-BARTS drama, particularly Dutchman (1964) and The Slave (1964), were crucial in shaping the form and direction that African American nationalist drama would take in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

After 1965, however, the Black Arts Movement took on a more cohesive presence. Although there often existed sharp conflict about politics and aesthetics between participants in the movement, there was enough common ground to produce national conferences, journals (such as Black Dialogue, Journal of Black Poetry, and Black World), organizations, and widely read anthologies (such as Baraka and Larry Neal’s seminal Black Fire [1968]). Unlike earlier groupings of African American artistic production, the Black Arts Movement flourished in a wide range of locations. Virtually every sizable African American community, and many college campuses, saw the rise of new black theaters and organizations of nationalist-minded visual artists, writers, dancers, and musicians. Some of these organizations and institutions are the Association for the Advancement of Creative Music, the Organization of Black American Culture, and the African Commune of Bad Relevant Artists, all in Chicago, Illinois; Spirit House in Newark, New Jersey; the Black Arts Group in St. Louis, Missouri; the Watts Writer’s Workshop in Los Angeles, California; and Broadside Press in Detroit, Michigan.
Music (particularly avant-garde or “free” jazz), poetry, and drama were the artistic genres that dominated the Black Arts Movement. In part this was due to the movement’s close connection to the political movement of Black Power: music, poetry, and drama were easily performed at street rallies, demonstrations, political meetings, and other communal events. These genres also lent themselves to the multimedia productions—combining spoken, visual, and musical elements—that characterized the movement. Another important art form of the period was public wall murals, which engaged whole communities in their creation as well as in their viewing.

Baraka is considered the leading figure of the era. Baraka’s Black Arts poetry, drama, musical criticism, and social commentary were apocalyptic, antiwhite, and often misogynistic, anti-Semitic, and homophobic, projecting a powerful vision of a utopian unity of African Americans that proved tremendously important in defining the discussion of a black aesthetic. Other significant writers of the Black Arts Movement include poet and essayist Larry Neal, poet Sonia Sanchez, poet Don L. Lee (Haki Madhubuti), poet Nikki Giovanni, playwright Ed Bullins, and novelist Toni Morrison. Such critics, scholars, and editors as Addison Gayle, Jr., (editor of the anthology of criticism The Black Aesthetic [1971]), Harold Cruse (author of the study The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual [1967]), and Hoyt Fuller (editor of the journal Black World) played prominent roles in promoting and shaping the conversations and debates that took place among Black Arts artists and intellectuals.

Jazz musicians, such as Archie Shepp, Sun Ra, and Muhal Richard Abrams, were among the most powerful and most visible artists of the movement. Many African American popular musicians were heavily influenced by Black Power and Black Arts, producing best-selling songs such as Curtis Mayfield and the Impressions’s “Keep On Pushing” and “Say It Loud (I’m Black and I’m Proud)” by James Brown, which became anthems of the period.

Like its beginning, the ending of the Black Arts Movement is hard to pinpoint. In general, as the activities and the organizations of the Black Power Movement, such as the Black Panther Party and The Organization Us of Maulana Karenga dwindled or disappeared in the early and mid-1970s, the Black Arts Movement did also. Nonetheless, the impact of the movement lasted far beyond its perceived end. On some writers, such as Alice Walker and Sherley Anne Williams, the influence was largely negative, as they reacted against what they saw as the sexism and homophobia of the movement. Others, notably Baraka and Sanchez, who both moved away from nationalism toward a Third World Marxism, acknowledged a positive Black Arts legacy while critiquing its limitations. Still other artists, such as Morrison, continued to embrace what was essentially a Black Arts stance in their work after 1975. Similarly, present-day editors have assembled anthologies of African American writing, such as Keith Gilyard’s Spirit and Flame (1996), that look back to the key Black Arts anthologies, particularly Black Fire, for inspiration.

Another lasting influence of the Black Arts Movement is found in institutions, such as African American Studies departments (and the field of Black Studies itself) as well as African American-oriented art galleries, theaters, publishers, book imprints, and academic book series. All of these would not have existed without the explosion of African American nationalist-influenced artistic activity in the 1960s and 1970s. Finally, the movement made a considerable impression on artists and intellectuals too young to remember its events firsthand. For example, much rap music owes a large debt to the militancy, urgent tone, and multimedia aesthetics of the Black Arts Movement.