Web Lecture #8

The Black Revolutionary Arts Movement

Lesson Overview

This online lecture will discuss the Black Revolutionary Art Movement and the Civil Rights and Black Revolutionary protests that preceded it. Leroi Jones, also known as Imamu Amiri Baraka, was one of the major proponents of a revolutionary approach to theater that began in urban Northern cities between 1963 and 1967. The Black Revolutionary Arts Movement emphasized separatism, black consciousness, community involvement, and new aesthetics for Black art. The plays that we will be reading for class, Dutchman and The Slave, are examples of this approach to playwriting.

Key Concepts

• The murder of Emmett Till in Money, Mississippi (1955).
• The Little Rock school desegregation (1957)
• The Montgomery Alabama bus boycott (1955-56)
• Voter Registration Drives
• The March on Washington (1963)

Snipers and mobs frequently attacked Civil Rights activists. State and local police agencies assisted politicians in repressing the movement. Both Blacks and Whites participated in the public protests.

Martin Luther King advocated for a strategy of non-violent protest in which demonstrators would occupy a public place and refuse to leave. An example would be occupation of a segregated lunch counter. Protesters would arrive at the restaurant and ask to be served. When refused they would remain at the counter until police were mobilized. The strategy of non-violent protest depended upon media coverage to publicize the activities. Television was fairly new technology during this time period. For many Americans it was the first time that they were able to witness the violence that ensued as a result of peaceful protest for humanitarian rights.

The culmination of the Civil Rights movement was the Civil Rights Act of 1964 that outlawed discrimination in public facilities, employment, and schools.

The Black Panther Party for Self-Defense was one of the leading organizations advocating Black Power. (Source: J.C. Albert and S.E. Albert, eds., The Sixties Papers [Praeger, 1984], 105)

At the same time many urban youth in the North believed that non-violent protest was ineffectual. These activists were responsible for the emergence of the Black Power movement. Advocates of Black Power movement were separatists who believed that equality could only be achieved if African Americans formed their own cultural institutions. These institutions celebrated African and African American political and cultural practices. For example, Karamu House in Cleveland provided social and economic support for urban families, supported African dance companies as a well as a theater center, and taught young people the communal values of East African life. Many Black Studies programs at colleges and universities are a direct result of the activism of Black Power advocates.

One of the most influential spokesperson for the Black Power movement was Malcolm X. Working out of the Harlem community; he

Malcom X

encouraged economic separatism and independence. He practiced Islam and encouraged his followers to educate themselves about world politics. He thought that discipline (religious, moral and educational) was the key to positive action on behalf of the African American community. His all-Black organization was a threat to White politicians and authority figures.

Some revolutionaries advocated for armed resistance against the system of racial oppression. The most influential of these organizations was the Black Panther Party. The Party, founded by Huey Newton and Bobby Seale in 1966 promoted the idea of self-defense. They established community patrols and affirmed the rights of Blacks to use violence to defend themselves. Many of their headquarter sites were raided during the late nineteen sixties.

A new arts movement emerged out of the protests and political activism of the late nineteen fifties and nineteen sixties called the Black Revolutionary Arts Movement. Leroi Jones (Amiri Baraka) and Ed Bullins are perhaps the most well known playwrights to work within this aesthetic.

The Black Revolutionary Arts Movement emphasized:

1) Separatism and Revolutionary Action

2) Black Consciousness

3) Community Involvement.

4) New Aesthetics and Innovations in Form and Structure

Separatism and Revolutionary Action

Plays written by Black Revolutionary playwrights encouraged African Americans to work outside of White institutions and White cultural formats and to write from their own experiences. Theater was to encourage revolutionary thought and to incite strong political action. Audiences were expected to leave the theater with new understandings about the politics of race in America.

Black Consciousness

Black identity was celebrated in the Black Revolutionary plays. Thematically the plays portrayed the experiences of slavery, the cultures of Africa and the struggle against White oppression.

Community Involvement

African American community members were encouraged to participate in the play productions as amateurs, activists and audience members. The theater events were dialogues that included audience response and involved audiences in the experience of the theater. Some plays used call and response exchanges, environmental smells and sounds, and spontaneous speeches to encourage participation.

New Aesthetics and Innovations in Form and Structure

The Black Revolutionary playwrights sought to explode familiar forms of theatrical narrative. Building upon strategies introduced by Antonin Artaud and his Theater of Cruelty they wanted to confront audiences with images drawn from the Black experience. Sometimes they appropriated formats based upon the African American church or communal ceremonies characteristic of African circle dances. Images and scenarios depicted violence and symbolic overthrow of antagonists. Cultural performance modes such as jazz music and word poetry determined the structure of some of the plays The goal was to encourage audiences and performers to create a theatrical dialogue that differed from Euro-American models. Most of the theater was expressionistic rather than realistic.

Leroi Jones wrote an Essay about the Black Revolutionary Theatre that states:

The Revolutionary Theatre should force changeÉThe Revolutionary Theatre must EXPOSE!ÉWhite men will cower before this theater because it hates themÉ The Revolutionary Theatre must teach them their deaths. The Revolutionary Theatre must Accuse and Attack anything that can be accused and attacked. It must Accuse and Attack because it is a theatre of VictimsÉ.It must isolate the ritual and historical cycles of realityÉwhen the final curtain goes down brains are splattered over the seats and the floor, and bleeding nuns must wire SOSÕs to Belgians with gold teethÉAmericans will hate the Revolutionary Theatre because it will be out to destroy them and whatever they believe is real. American cops will try to close the theatres where such nakedness of the human spirit is paraded. American producers will say the revolutionary plays are filth. ..We want actual explosions and actual brutalityÉThe Revolutionary Theatre will soon begin to be peopled with new kinds of heroesÑnot the weak Hamlets debating whether or not they are ready to die for whatÕs on their minds, but men and women (and minds) digging out from under a thousand years of "high art" and weak-faced dalliance.(excerpted from Leroi Jones "The Revolutionary Theatre," Liberator 5, no.7 (1965) 5.)

Leroi Jones Biography

Leroi Jones was raised in a middle class family in Newark New Jersey. Born in 1934, he graduated from Howard University in Washington D.C. and moved to the Greenwich Village section of New York in the late nineteen fifties. While there, he became immersed in the avante garde arts scene that included figures like musician John Cage, choreographer Merce Cunningham, and poets like Alan Ginsberg and Robert Duncan. These white artists were experimenting with art forms and structures and staging conceptual events like "happenings" and outdoor performance spectacles.

Between 1958 and 1963, Jones married a White woman named Hettie Cohen and edited a literary magazine with her called The Moderns. Their work was strongly influenced by beat poetry, conceptual jazz artistry socialist political thought.

Dutchman, one of the plays that we will be reading for class, was presented at the Cherry Lane Theater in Greenwich Village in 1964.

In 1965, after the assassination of Malcolm X, Jones divorced his wife, moved to Harlem, severed ties with his White associates, and immersed himself in the Black Revolutionary Arts Movement. He remarried, this time to a Black woman named Sylvia Robinson, and in 1967 changed his name to Amiri (Prince) Baraka (the Blessed One). He worked with political organizations and supported Black playwrights like Ed Bullins, Larry Neal, and Ron Milner.The play The Slave was written in 1965, just before his move to Harlem.

Baraka/Jones later moved to Newark NJ and supported the mayoral campaign of Ken Gibson. He founded several theater companies, taught as a Visiting Professor at Yale and George Washington University, and later, as a full Professor at SUNY, Stony Brook.

Dutchman and The Slave

Dutchman is "A ritualized reenactment of a script written by history and an innately corrupt White societyÑa script in which both blacks and whites are captive cactros riding a doomed ship." (Sanders, Leslie Catherine. The Development of Black Theater in America. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 120)

Jones uses ritual and symbolic imagery to communicate his message about the mendacity of American society. Questions to consider for our in-class discussion are:

1) What does the title of the play refer to?

2) How do the characters in the two plays move from a state of innocence to a state of political awareness?

3) How is language used by Jones to illustrate the social consciousness of the characters?

4) What allegories and symbolic imagery does Jones use highlight the social relationships?

Be prepared to talk about these concepts at our next class meeting.