Black Arts Cities

In 1968, Ron Karenga, founder of the US Organization, wrote that, “Black art must expose the enemy, praise the people and support the revolution.” ¹ For certain black writers, dramatists, visual artists, and musicians, these words crystallized the struggle they had waged through the 1960s. As the life force of the Black Arts Movement (BAM), they wanted to identify a uniquely black aesthetic that merged art and activism in support of the global fight for black liberation. As with many artistic movements, cities were the centers of BAM activity. From Amiri Baraka opening the Black Arts Repertory Theatre/School in Harlem in 1965 to the publication of Chicory magazine in Baltimore in 1966 to the painting of the Wall of Respect mural in Chicago in 1967, the BAM was an urban phenomenon, albeit one that few urban historians have studied as urban history. ²

Urban historians should care about BAM for three reasons. First, for those interested in the history of social movements in the 1960s and 1970s, to ignore the role of arts and culture is to apply a narrow definition of activism. BAM artists understood their art as activism. To ignore art is to ignore a major aspect of black social movements in this era, including those that attended to urban issues. Second, these artists’ work shaped the cities where they resided. As historian Julia Foulkes argues, “artists should be added alongside urban planners, theorists, and historians, to build a dense, layered view of how cities operate . . . they depend on, reveal, symbolize, and call to change how cities function.” ³ Finally, by working at the grassroots level, artists recorded the lived experience of urban residents and neighborhoods through an artistic practice predating the development of the urban tourist apparatus that transformed the arts into economic development and which resisted commodification.

Three recent books in literature and art history demonstrate the importance of the BAM in urban history. This burgeoning urban history of the BAM represents a new interdisciplinary scholarly field that I call Black Arts Movement Studies. ⁴ The development of BAM Studies since the late 1960s has been defined by two methodological approaches: the infrastructural and the critical cultural.

BAM Studies and the Critical Cultural Method

Theorizing about the BAM occurred simultaneously with its development in the late 1960s and early 1970s, often by the same people whose artwork defined it—artist-activists and public intellectuals, including Amiri Baraka, Larry Neal, Eugene Redmond, Addison Gayle, Stephen Henderson, and Harold Cruse, among many others. They explicitly theorized about the artwork they and others were producing and its relationship with revolutionary movements in the United States and around the globe. ⁵

After this first generation of scholarship, a new wave of scholars published important work on the BAM starting in the 1990s. These scholars tended to adopt one of two methodologies: the critical cultural or infrastructural. Those working with a critical cultural approach utilized literary or cultural theory to analyze what BAM artists made. ⁶ From Aldon Lynn Nielsen’s Black Chant: Languages of African-American Postmodernism (1997) to Evie Shockley’s Renegade Poetics: Black Aesthetics and Formal Innovation in African American Poetry (2011), these scholars analyzed the radical formal qualities of African American poetry of the BAM era. In Black Post-Blackness, Margo Crawford compared the post-blackness ideology of twenty-first-century artists with the embracing of black identity by BAM visual artists and writers, which she sees as a move from a collective ethos in the 1960s and 1970s to an individualist one today. Taken together, critical cultural scholars take BAM art seriously as art, rather than as, in Henry Louis Gates’s terms, “a matter less of aesthetics than of protest.” ⁷

The Infrastructural Approach: Behold the City

With the publication of The Black Arts Movement: Literary Nationalism in the 1960s and 1970s (2005), James Smethurst introduced a different methodological approach to BAM Studies, which I call the infrastructural. ⁸ In this masterful book, Smethurst “undertakes to map the origins and development of the different strains of the 1960s and 1970s Black Arts Movement,” and “trace the continuities as well as ruptures between the Old Left . . . and the new black political and cultural radicalisms” (pp. 7-8). Arguing that BAM was “bidirectional,” meaning that national publications inspired local artistic work which in turn fed into a national movement, he divides the country into four geographic regions centered around cities. Utilizing archival collections and interviews with prominent BAM figures, he reveals how “surviving networks associated with” the Communist Party USA, the Socialist Workers Party, “and other Left groups within the black community provided spaces where emerging activists, intellectuals, and artists could develop ideologically, meet like-minded people, find outlets for their work, and make connections” (p. 52). While he is not an urban historian, the fact that BAM was an urban movement means that he uncovers city-based political and social networks. While the critical cultural approach can leave us feeling that BAM was the same everywhere, the infrastructural approach’s grounding in the local reveals how the historical and political context of specific cities, with their attendant networks of organizations, institutions, funding, and people, shaped the movement and vice versa. ⁹

Smethurst continues his infrastructural approach in Behold the Land by zooming in on the BAM in the South. Defined somewhat loosely as the former slaveholding and border states, the South includes key urban BAM nodes: Atlanta, New Orleans, Nashville, and Washington, DC (though he excludes St. Louis, Missouri). Smethurst argues that the demographic presence of black people, networks created in the South by the Civil Rights Movement, and the number of HBCUs located there made it a fertile place for the artistic explorations of the BAM. As in his earlier work, he identifies the leftist roots that helped the BAM grow. He traces how the Southern Negro Youth Congress “promoted politicized African American arts and literature in the South” during the Popular Front era (p. 18). While Cold War repression caused its demise, the networks built among its members led to the creation of the journal Freedomways in 1961, one of the most important and long-lasting publications for radical black artists. ¹⁰ However, in this work, he argues that it was the reciprocal relationship between artist and community that defined the movement in this region, rather than specific political positions.

Cities, for Smethurst, are spaces of institutions, politics, and networking. Perhaps of most interest to urban historians will be his treatment of the role of educational institutions and municipal politics in the BAM. Looking at Washington, DC as a case study, Smethurst shows us how the Black Power mantra of self-determination took institutional form. Black artist-activists Gaston Neal, who worked in an anti-poverty program in DC, and Baba Lumumba, Howard University student and member of the Revolutionary Action Movement, created the New School for Afro-American Thought in 1965 on 14th Street in Washington, DC, an area so rife with Black Power and Black Arts institutions it was called “Liberation Street” (p. 116). The New School merged arts, culture, education, and politics with the goals of overturning the “psychology of self-hatred,” sowed in black people by white-run schools and promoting black institution-building and self-determination. Through arts events, the School served as a hub introducing “the middle-class Black intelligentsia, many with connections to Howard,” to “younger and older artists of a wide variety of radical Black ideological and aesthetic positions” (p. 119). It influenced the creation of Black Studies at Howard and spurred the creation of similar schools in other cities, including the SOUL School in Baltimore.

While urban historians have often examined the commodification of the arts for the purposes of tourism, gentrification, and economic development, Smethurst offers a compelling contrasting example through the well-known story of the rise of black big city mayors in the late 1960s and 1970s. While historians have traced the importance of the Black Power movement to these campaigns, less emphasis has been placed on links with the BAM. One “planned consequence of electoral success” Smethurst writes, was increased access to funding for public arts and artistic education programs (p. 91). Maynard Jackson, Atlanta’s first black mayor, wanted to be seen as the “culture mayor” (p. 156). Jackson was not alone among 1970s mayors in seeing the arts as important for improving the image of the city. William Donald Schaefer in Baltimore, for example, also poured money into the arts, though with a goal of spurring economic development through urban branding. ¹¹ Jackson’s ties with BAM artists ensured that “the Black community got a significant share of the resources made available through Jackson’s cultural focus instead of channeling those funds to more established ‘high’ art institutions” (p. 157). Smethurst points to the Neighborhood Arts Center (NAC), created by Black Arts activists, as “the most important locus of African American arts efforts in Atlanta . . . that . . . established Black Arts and a Black Arts sensibility as a model for public art in Atlanta” (p. 157). Ultimately, Reagan’s budget cuts led to the dissolution of NAC and other arts institutions.

If there is one critique of the infrastructural approach, it is that its focus on uncovering leftist roots and local networks means that the artworks themselves are not analyzed as deeply as the connections between past and present organizations. While Smethurst discusses the meaning of the Free Southern Theater’s staging of Waiting for Godot and Toni Cade Bambara’s novel The Salt Eaters’ feminist analysis of the BAM and Black Power, readers may feel like the art recedes to the background. Two recent books merge the infrastructural and critical cultural approaches offering urban historians and others a promising method for future work.

On the Streets of Chicago

When the Organization of Black American Culture (OBAC) completed the Wall of Respect in 1967, the murals existed on two geographic levels. The unveiling celebration, which featured luminaries like poet Gwendolyn Brooks, brought OBAC and Chicago to national attention. At the street level, the Wall existed in a specific place, Bronzeville, the center of Black Chicago. It was created by professionally trained black artists working closely with community members in that neighborhood, from children to the elderly, who offered opinions and picked up paintbrushes. Through this cross-class artistic collaboration, the Wall claimed literal and figurative space. It demonstrated a powerful vision of the arts as community building. While the story of the Wall of Respect has been told many times by scholars, Rebecca Zorach’s Art for People’s Sake offers new insights by connecting the Wall to the specific history of Black Chicago at the neighborhood level with a rich analysis of the artwork itself. As she notes, “Unlike many murals, it was not a unified representational field, nor was it a narrative composed of historical vignettes. . . . None of their contributions hewed to the social realist narrative painting style that characterized most of the murals any of them might have seen” (p. 61). Instead, these artists created a Chicago BAM aesthetic. Zorach’s skill pays attention to both sides of that phrase: Chicago and aesthetic.

Mining enviably extensive archival collections, art historian Zorach tells the story of the BAM in Chicago by combining the infrastructural and critical cultural approaches to geographically and historically situate the artists and their artwork. When she writes about riots that “the act of uprising, however dangerous, however destructive its consequences, and however doomed, should also be understood as a conscious attempt at visibly reshaping space and human relationships to it,” she is also articulating a view of art as a force that shapes urban space and community (p. 294).

For urban cultural historians, Zorach’s interpretation is critical because she refuses to consider community outside of the real and imagined space of “the street,” the lived-in places of workaday Black Chicagoans. Unlike Benedict Anderson who argued that print media like newspapers constructed “imagined communities,” Zorach asserts that,

to consider only the virtual and conceptual (“imagined”) community forged by reading matter would be, however, to understate the importance of shared geography. In the 1960s and 1970s Black artists and community members in Chicago also made highly visible claims on changing urban space, and it is worth stopping to gain a more concrete understanding of the histories and geographies of the particular neighborhoods at stake in this book. (p. 23)

To that end, Zorach engages in an infrastructural approach. She traces how restrictive covenants, redlining, and the “spatial strategy” of urban renewal confined African Americans to certain neighborhoods drawing on the work of urban historians of Chicago, including James Grossman, Beryl Satter, Arnold Hirsch, and Davarian Baldwin. These constraints on their freedom of movement created the context which made marking and controlling space central to the work of BAM artists as well as to the gangs she examines. Following Smethurst, she identifies the roots of Chicago’s Black arts community and its links with leftist radicalism through the towering figure of Margaret Burroughs, founder of the DuSable Museum of African American History, and institutions like the WPA-funded, interracial Illinois Craft Project (pp. 10-11). Out of this seedbed grew nationally recognized BAM organizations and projects, including the Wall of Respect, OBAC, and AFRICOBRA (African Commune of Bad Relevant Artists).

But what did the art mean? What aesthetic choices did these artists make and why? In answering these questions, Zorach connects the infrastructural and critical cultural approaches. Arguing that BAM and community art need to be added to the typical story of mid-twentieth-century art told by art historians, she identifies the differences between BAM artists and the white art world. First, their interest in collaborating with working-class communities, rather than simply bringing their art to them, distinguished their work. Formally, BAM artists, many of whom were trained at art schools, refused to be defined by the abstract style that dominated galleries and museums. Those kinds of artworks were art for art’s sake. As Don Lee (later Haki Madhubuti) wrote at the opening ceremony for the Wall of Respect, what was needed was “art for people’s sake,” or works that spoke directly to regular people (p. 7).

Chicago BAM artists grappled with what it meant formally, stylistically, and visually to create politicized people’s art. AFRICOBRA artists defined their aesthetic as “superreality.” They used bright “coolade colors,” frontality, and “mimesis at midpoint,” or, “the space between representation and abstraction—which AFRICOBRA members derived from African aesthetics” (p. 269). These artistic choices contrasted with the styles defined by the elite art world located in New York City. Rather than abstraction and negativity, AFRICOBRA depicted figures facing the viewer in fields of eye-popping color alongside textual commentary. For the group, the goal was political art comprehensible to an average Black Chicagoan.

From New York to Saigon

“Whether in 1963 or 1970, 1968 or 1976, New York, Newark, Birmingham or Vietnam,” literary scholar David Grundy writes, “poetry served as a key tool to work through paradoxes which might of necessity have to be simplified and put aside in the nitty-gritty of political action” (p. 226). In A Black Arts Poetry Machine, Grundy juggles two geographic scales—American cities and a global Third World connected by revolutionary politics. He argues that the BAM can be dated to the founding of the Umbra Poetry Workshop, a collective founded in New York City in 1962 by avant-garde poet-activists. While Umbra only lasted until 1964, its journal, Umbra, and members were deeply influential. Grundy follows Amiri Baraka, David Henderson, Calvin C. Hernton, Tom Dent, and Lorenzo Thomas as they move out of New York to other places, some urban, some not. However, he argues that the Umbra poets “were intensely engaged with their urban environment both in their organizational work and in their poetry,” which he shows through his literary analysis of specific poems (p. 23).

Grundy is best when he merges the infrastructural and critical cultural approaches through poetry. He builds on Lorenzo Thomas’s insight that Baraka’s famous poem “Black Art,” which is seen as a BAM manifesto, references specific places in his hometown, Newark, NJ. To understand the poem fully, we need to contextualize Baraka’s demands for “immediate improvement of the actual human environment—not merely through antipoverty agencies, but through the agency of an increasingly affective poetics, by which Baraka means consciousness” (p. 88). The urban is the space where it all comes together. It is the site of actions, from protests to riots; networking among artists; and is the subject of poetry that illuminates the psychology of inner-city life, records black language, and draws connections with other places, like the rural South and Third-World cities as parallel sites of revolution.

Grundy’s analysis of David Henderson’s poetry suggests the problems and possibilities of the merged method. Henderson focused his 1960s’ poems on New York City. He becomes a documentarian of black street culture in Harlem, recording, for example, the names of street gangs. While Grundy does not directly draw on the urban studies concept of relationality, or the ways in which cities or areas within cities are given meaning through their comparison with each other, he utilizes this idea in examining how Henderson conceptualized Harlem vis-à-vis the Lower East Side. Harlem “still held a strong pull” for black artist-activists, “not only due to its literary past but as a still-thriving centre of black culture and politics” (p. 102). However, the Lower East Side was a multicultural mecca where Henderson and the other Umbra poets could connect with different kinds of artists (p. 102). Understanding the meaning of Harlem for these poets necessitates understanding it in relation to other urban spaces.

Grundy ambitiously moves beyond the U.S. context. As he notes, “Umbra was simultaneously local and internationalist” (p. 34). He suggests that BAM Studies scholars have not paid sufficient attention to the latter. However, holding the local and global geographic scales in view simultaneously is difficult, especially without research into the historiographies of places outside the United States. While the specifics of the history, politics, and geography of New York or Newark snap into focus in several places, the diaspora is represented by broader geographies: Cuba, Cameroon, and Vietnam. In Henderson’s “Yin Years,” he links disparate places in an associative chain:

too many rushing natives howling

strange rage

Vietnam Los Angeles Santo Domingo Harlem. . .

Clearly, the “rushing natives” are anticolonial fighters from Vietnam to Los Angeles, a sweeping declaration about the broad nature of colonialism often made by Black Power activists in the era. Grundy notes, too, that “Yin Years” explores growing interest in Eastern religions and philosophies in the 1970s without acknowledging how often such explorations were grounded in stereotype. While a poem is not the same as a ten-point platform, the lack of specificity here is indicative. While Grundy astutely connects Umbra poets’ work with U.S. urban contexts, the reach toward the global, while laudable, remains at a surface level perhaps because the poets themselves can only see such places as, in Cynthia Young’s words, “a set of projections and imaginaries.” ¹²

Representative of a growing, rich body of scholarship in BAM Studies, these books should compel urban historians to, in David Henderson’s words, “keep on pushing.” Cities are built and imagined environments; spaces of material struggle that include the cultural and artistic. The authors considered here outline methodological approaches to urban BAM Studies. While the infrastructural may be closest to the work that many urban historians already do, the depth of analysis gained by merging it with the critical cultural offers a promising methodological approach for future work.