First, a little background on the Black Arts Movement based on what is described in wikipedia. It was a troubled time in American history. The Vietnam War was raging. The Civil Rights movement was moving from the fight against desegregation and for voting rights in the South to the poverty found in many African American communities in the Northern cities. The Watts riots ravaged Los Angeles and the Detroit riots left 43 people dead. Two of the great leaders of the African American community were killed. Medgar Evans. Malcolm X.

Malcolm X's assassination had a profound effect on LeRoi Jones, the poet who later became Amiri Baraka. LeRoi Jones was a well regarded poet, essayist, jazz critic, and an Obie award winning playwright. Along with James Baldwin, Jones was most respected and most widely published Black writer of his generation. When Malcolm X died on February 21, 1965, LeRoi Jones moved from the Manhattan's Lower East Side uptown to Harlem. He started the Black Arts Repertory Theatre/School and created the 1965 poem "Black Art," which was seen as the manifesto of the Black Arts literary movement. In 1967 LeRoi Jones changed his name to Amiri Baraka.

Amiri Baraka felt that African American artists had to break away from the dominant white culture and to create artwork that derived from their own unique culture. In the book The LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka Reader, Amiri Baraka wrote an essay entitled The Legacy of Malcolm X and the Coming of the Black Nation that described what Baraka thought an artist should be about. He wrote in that essay:

"The mores, customs, of a place are the result of experience, and a common reference for defining it- common images. The three white men in the film Gunga Din who kill off hundreds of Indians, Greek hero style, are part of an image of white men. The various black porters, gigglers, ghostchumps, and punkish Indians, etc., that inhabit the public image the white man has fashioned to characterize Black Men are references by Black Men to the identity of Black Men in the West, since that's what is run on them each day by white magic, i.e., television, movies, radio, etc.- the Mass Media (the Daily News does it with flicks and adjectives)...

The Black artist, in this context, is desperately needed to change the images his people identify with, by asserting Black feeling, Black mind, Black judgement. The Black intellectual, in this same context, is needed to change the interpretation of facts toward the Black Man's best interests, instead of merely tagging along reciting white judgements of the world.

Art, Religion, and Politics are impressive vectors of a culture. Art describes a culture. Black artists must have an image of what the Black sensibility is in this land."

It is in this context that the young writers of the Fisk Black Writers' Conference of 1966 clashed with Robert Hayden. Robert Hayden studied under W.H. Auden in the University of Michigan during the 1940s. According to Poetry.org , Hayden's poetry was deeply influenced by Auden, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Elinor Wiley, Carl Sandburg, and Hart Crane, as well as the poets of the Harlem Renaissance, Langston Hughes, Countee Cullen, and Jean Toomer. In the 1960s, Hayden's poetry started finding an audience. In 1966, Hayden received the Grand Prix de la Poesie at the First World Festival of Negro Arts in Senegal for his book Ballad of Remembrance. That same year he was appointed as Senegal's Poet Laureate. That year his Selected Poems brought him acclaim.

Though Hayden frequently touched upon concerns of race and explored African American history in his poetry, Hayden did not agree with the emerging Black Arts Movement philosophy of the role of African American artists. In the bookBy Herself: Women Reclaim Poetry edited by Molly McQuade, Elizabeth Alexander wrote an essay entitled Meditations on Mecca: Gwendolyn Brooks and the Responsibilities of the Black Poet in which she quotes Hayden:

"To put it succinctly, I feel that Afro-American poets ought to be looked at as poets first, if that's what they truly are. And as one of them I dare to hope that if my work means anything, if it's any good at all, it's going to have a human impact, not a narrow racial or ethnic or political and overspecialized impact."

I sympathize with both Amiri Baraka's and Robert Hayden's viewpoints. When one looks at the stereotypical depictions of African Americans in movies like Gone With The Wind, one can understand the need that the Black Arts Movement was trying to fill of a different and more true image of African Americans and their culture. I also understand Hayden's desire not to have his poetry be too narrowly tied down to only African American concerns. If I understand both viewpoints correctly, I think Hayden wanted to write to a more universal audience, while Amiri Baraka and the Black Arts Movement poets wanted to write to a specifically African American audience.

Though I sympathize with both viewpoints, I tend to lean more towards Robert Hayden's philosophy. I think an individual artist should follow his or her own muse. Though I inject a lot of social concerns in my cartoons and art, I also enjoy the freedom to do art with no political or social motivations. I wouldn't want to force an Edward Hopper or an Andrew Wyeth to limit themselves to just political subject matter. I think Hayden just wanted the same artistic freedoms that white artists took for granted. Elizabeth Alexander had a great insight in her essay Meditations on Mecca: Gwendolyn Brooks and the Responsibilities of the Black Poet:

"Black writers well know the perils of white racism and racist judgments against us and our work. That presents an unavoidable, if unpleasant, navigational challenge for any African American. But we are also, as ever, faced with judgments and injunctions from within our communities that our work should perform a certain service as well as say and not say what is empowering or embarrassing to 'the race' at large. The pressure on creative work can be intense for artists who belong to groups still struggling for their fair shake in history. The challenges to be published and heard, let alone to write well, lead to the understandable conclusion that every word counts, and that those who wish well for the race would also wish their words could further the cause, however controversial that cause might be defined."

Which leads to Gwendolyn Brooks. While Gwendolyn Brooks was in high school, she was encouraged by poets James Weldon Johnson and Langston Hughes to be a poet, and she studied the poetry of T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound and E.E. Cummings. In the 1940s and 1950s Gwendolyn Brooks wrote The Bean Eaters, A Street in Bronzeville, and Annie Allen for which she received the Pulitzer Prize, becoming the first African American poet to win the prize.

In the spring of 1967, Brooks attended the Fisk University Black Writers' Conference, a year after Robert Hayden had clashed with the young poets who were influenced by the Black Arts Movement. While Hayden held on to his philosophy, Brooks was influenced by the new ideas to focus her poetry more on her blackness. Her next book, In the Mecca in 1967 revolves around the decaying apartment called the Mecca. After that book, Brooks decided to stop having her books published at Harper and Row, and the rest of her books would be published exclusively with black publishing houses.

Though I naturally lean more towards Robert Hayden's philosophy, I am grateful for the Black Arts Movement for making the art and literature world more diverse. The Black Arts Movement paved the way for multiculturalism and an appreciation of the different cultures that make the mosaic of America. In The LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka Reader, William Harris wrote in the introduction:

"The Black Arts Era, both in terms of creative and theoretical writing, is the most important one in black literature since the Harlem Renaissance. No post-Black Arts artist thinks of a human being who happens to be black; blackness is central to his or her experience and art. Furthermore, Black Arts had its impact on other ethnic groups and primarily through the person of Baraka. The Native American author Maurice Kenny writes of Baraka in The Kaleidoscopic Torch: 'He opened tightly guarded doors for not only Blacks but poor whites as well and, of course, Native Americans, Latinos and Asian-Americans. We'd all still be waiting the invitation from the New Yorker without him. He taught us all how to claim it and take it.'"

I grew up in navy bases. It was a wonderful childhood, but I never really got exposed much to my Filipino heritage. I only saw my relatives once a year and really didn't get to know them until later in my life. When my dad retired and I got to know more Filipinos, I would often get criticized for not knowing tagalog (one of the languages of the Philippines) and for not knowing much of the culture. I was what they used to call a "banana": yellow on the outside but white on the inside.

Three things helped me to appreciate my Filipino heritage. One of them was my first girlfriend, who was Filipina. She was very nice and her family welcomed me and they didn't make me feel bad for not knowing much about Filipino culture. In my freshman year in college I took a course in Asian American history. I liked my teacher and my classmates, and that class really opened up for me the contributions of Chinese Americans, Japanese Americans, Filipino Americans and other Asian Americans to our great country. That class introduced to me the bookAmerica Is In the Heart: A Personal History by Carlos Bulosan, the Filipino American poet and activist, and that book changed my life. In 1993, I spent one month in the Philippines, and had a great time getting to know my relatives.

I end this post with poems from Robert Hayden, Amiri Baraka, and Gwendolyn Brooks. All three poets admired Malcolm X and made poems about him, and each poem reveals something different about Malcolm X.

El-Hajj Malik El Shabazz (Malcolm X) by Robert Hayden O masks and metamorphoses of Ahab, Native Son I

The icy evil that struck his father down
and ravished his mother into madness
trapped him in violence of a punished self
struggling to break free.

As Home Boy, as Dee-troit Red,
he fled his name, became the quarry of
his own obsessed pursuit.

He conked his hair and Lindy-hopped,
zoot-suited jiver, swinging those chicks
in the hot rose and reefer glow.

His injured childhood bullied him.
He skirmished in the Upas trees
and cannibal flowers of the American Dream--

but could not hurt the enemy
powered against him there.

II

Sometimes the dark that gave his life
its cold satanic sheen would shift
a little, and he saw himself
floodlit and eloquent;

yet how could he, "Satan" in The Hole,
guess what the waking dream foretold?

Then false dawn of vision came;
he fell upon his face before
a racist Allah pledged to wrest him from
the hellward-thrusting hand of Calvin's Christ-

to free him and his kind
from Yakub's white-faced treachery.
He rose redeemed from all but prideful anger,
though adulterate attars could not cleanse
him of the odors of the pit.

III

He X'd his name, became his people's anger,
exhorted them to vengeance for their past;
rebuked, admonished them,

their scouger who
would shame them, drive them from
the lush ice gardens of their servitude.

Asalam alaikum!

Rejecting Ahab, he was Ahab's tribe.
"Strike through the mask!"

IV

Time, "The martyr's time," he said.
Time and the karate killer,
knifer, gunman. Time that brought
ironic trophies as his faith

twined sparking round the hole,
the fruit of neo-Islam.
"The martyr's time."

But first, the ebb time pilgrimage
toward revelation, hejira to
his final metamorphosis;

Labbayk! Labbayk!

He fell upon his face before
Allah the raceless in whose blazing Oneness all
were one. He rose renewed renamed, became
much more than there was time for him to be.

A Poem for Black Hearts
by Amiri Baraka

For Malcolm's eyes, when they broke
the face of some dumb white man, For
Malcom's hands raised to bless us
all black and strong in his image
of ourselves, For Malcolm's words
fire darts, the victor's tireless
thrusts, words hung above the world
change as it may, he said it, and
for this he was killed, for saying,
and feeling, and being/ changed, all
collected hot in his heart. For Malcolm's
heart, raising us above our filthy cities,
for his stride, and his beat, and his address
to the grey monsters of the world, For Malcolm's
pleas for your dignity, black men, for your life,
black man, for the filling of your minds
with righteousness, For all of him dead and
gone and vanished from us, and all of him which
clings to our speech black god of our time.
For all of him, and all of yourself, look up,
black man, quit stuttering and shuffling, look up,
black man, quit whining and stooping, for all of him,
For Great Malcolm a prince of the earth, let nothing in us rest
until we avenge ourselves for his death, stupid animals
that killed him, let us never breathe a pure breath if
we fail, and white men call us faggots till the end of
the earth.

Malcolm X
by Gwendolyn Brooks
For Dudley Randall

Original.
Ragged-round.
Rich-robust.

He had the hawk-man's eyes.
We gasped. We saw the maleness.
The maleness raking out and making guttural the air
and pushing us to walls.

And in a soft and fundamental hour
a sorcery devout and vertical
beguiled the world.

He opened us-
who was a key,

who was a man.