Books by Larry Neal

Black Fire  / Hoodoo Hollerin Bebop Ghosts

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The Black Arts Movement

By Larry Neal

The Black Arts Movement is radically opposed to any concept of the artist that alienates him from his community. Black Art is the aesthetic and spiritual sister of the Black Power concept. As such, it envisions an art that speaks directly to the needs and aspirations of Black America. In order to perform this task, the black Arts Movement proposes a radical reordering of the Western cultural aesthetic. It proposes a separate symbolism, mythology, critique, and iconology. The Black Arts and the Black Power concept both relate broadly to the Afro-American’s desire for self-determination and nationhood. Both concepts are nationalistic. One is politics; the other with the art of politics.

Recently, these two movements have begun to merge: the political values inherent in the Black Power concept are now finding concrete expression in the aesthetics of Afro-American dramatists, poets, choreographers, musicians, and novelists. A main tenet of  Black Power is the necessity for Black people to define the world in their own terms. The Black artist has made the same point in the context of aesthetics. The two movements postulate that there are in fact and in spirit two Americas—one black, one white.

The Black artist takes this to mean that his primary duty is to speak to the spiritual and cultural needs of Black people. Therefore, the main thrust of this new breed of contemporary writers is to confront the contradictions arising out of the Black man’s experience in the racist West. Currently, these writers are re-evaluating Western aesthetic, the traditional role of the writer, and the social function of art. Implicit in this re-evaluation is the need to develop a “black aesthetic.”

It is the opinion of many Black writers, I among them, that the Western aesthetic has run its course: it is impossible to construct anything meaningful within its decaying structure. We advocate a cultural revolution in art and ideas. The cultural values inherent in Western history must either be radicalized or destroyed, and we will probably find that even radicalization is impossible. In fact, what is needed is a whole new system of ideas. Poet Don L. Lee expresses it:

The Black Arts Movement eschews “protest” literature. It speaks directly to Black people. Implicit in the concept of ‘protest” literature, as brother Knight has made clear, is an appeal to white morality:

Brother Knight also has some interesting statements about the development of a “Black aesthetic”:

When we speak of a “Black aesthetic” several things are meant. First, we assume that there is already in existence the basis for such an aesthetic. Essentially, it consists of an African-American cultural tradition. But this aesthetic is finally, by implication, broader than that tradition. It encompasses most of the useable elements of the Third World culture. The motive behind the Black aesthetic is the destruction of the white thing, the destruction of white ideas, and white ways of looking at the world.

The new aesthetic is mostly predicated on an Ethics which asks the question: whose vision of the world is finally more meaningful, ours or the white oppressors’? These are basic questions. Black intellectuals of previous decades failed to ask them. Further, national and international affairs demand that we appraise the world in terms of our own interests. It is clear that the question of human survival is at the core of contemporary experience. The Black artist must address himself to this reality in the strongest terms possible. In a context of world upheaval, ethics and aesthetics must interact positively and be consistent with the demands for a more spiritual world.

Consequently, the Black Arts Movement is an ethical movement. Ethical, that is, from the viewpoint of the oppressed. And much of the oppression confronting the Third World and Black America is directly traceable to the Euro-American cultural sensibility. This sensibility, antihuman in nature, has, until recently, dominated the psyches of most Black artists and intellectuals; it must be destroyed before the Black creative artists can have a meaningful role in the transformation of society.

It is this natural reaction to an alien sensibility that informs the cultural attitudes of the Black Arts and the Black Power movement. It is a profound ethical sense that makes a Black artist question a society in which art is one thing and the actions of men another. The Black Arts Movement believes that your ethics and your aesthetics are one. That the contradictions between ethics and aesthetics in Western society is symptomatic of a dying culture.

The term “Black Arts” is of ancient origin, but it was first used in a positive sense by LeRoi Jones;

There is also a section of the poem “Black Dada Nihilimus” that carries the same motif. But a fuller amplification of the nature of the new aesthetic appears in the poem “Black Art ”:

Poetry is a concrete function, an action. No more abstractions. Poems are physical entities: fists, daggers, airplane poems, and poems that shoot guns. Poems are transformed from physical objects into personal forces.

Then the poem affirms the integral relationship between Black Art and Black people:

It ends with the following lines, a central assertion in both the Black Arts Movement and the philosophy of Black Power:

The poem comes to stand for the collective conscious and unconscious of Black America—the real impulse in back of the Black Power movement, which is the will toward self-determination and nationhood, a radical reordering of nature and function of both art and the artist.

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In the spring of 1964, LeRoi Jones, Charles Patterson, William Patterson, Clarence Reed, Johnny Moore, and a number of other Black artists opened the Black Arts Repertoire Theatre School. They produced a number of plays including Jones’ Experimental Death Unit # One, Black Mass, Jello, and Dutchman. They also initiated a series of poetry readings and concerts. These activities represented the most advanced tendencies in the movement and were of excellent artistic quality.

The Black Arts School came under immediate attack by the New York power structure. The Establishment, fearing Black creativity, did exactly what it was expected to do—it attacked the theatre and all of its values. In the meantime, the school was granted funds by OEO through HARYOU-ACT. Lacking a cultural program itself, HARYOU turned to the only organization which addressed itself to the needs of the community.

In keeping with its "revolutionary” cultural ideas, the Black Arts theatre took its programs into the streets of Harlem. For three months the theatre presented plays, concerts, and poetry readings to the people of the community. Plays that shattered the illusions of the American body politic, and awakened Black people to the meaning of their lives.

Then the hawks from the OEO moved in and chopped off the funds. Again, this should have been expected. The Black Arts Theatre stood in radical opposition to the feeble attitudes about culture of the “War On Poverty” bureaucrats. And later, because of internal problems, the theatre was forced to close. But the Black Arts group proved that the community could be served by a valid and dynamic art. It also proved that there was a definite need for a cultural revolution in the Black community.

With the closing of the Black Arts theatre, the implications of what Brother Jones and his colleagues were trying to do took on even more significance. Black Art groups sprang up on the west Coast and the idea spread to Detroit, Philadelphia, jersey City, new Orleans, and Washington, D.C. Black Art movements began on the campuses of San Francisco State college, Fish University, Lincoln University, Hunter college in the Bronx, Columbia University, and Oberlin College. In watts, after the rebellion, maulana Karenga welded the black Arts Movement into a cohesive cultural ideology which owed much to the work of Leroi Jones. . . .

In drama LeRoi Jones represents the most advanced aspects of the movement. He is its prime mover and chief designer. In a poetic essay entitled “The Revolutionary Theatre ,” he outlines the iconology of the movement:

The theatre that Jones proposes is inextricably linked to the Afro-American political dynamic. And such a link is perfectly consistent with Black America’s contemporary demands. For theatre is potentially the most social of all of the arts. It is an integral part of the socializing process. It exists in direct relationship to the audience it claims to serve. The decadence and inanity of the contemporary American theatre is an accurate reflection of the state of American society. . . . The theatre of white America is escapist, refusing to confront concrete reality. Into this cultural emptiness come the musicals, an up-tempo version of the stale lives.

And the use of Negroes in such plays as Hello Dolly and Hallelujah Baby does not alert their nature; it compounds the problem. These plays are simply hipper versions of the minstrel show. They present negroes acting out the hang-ups of middle-class white America. Consequently, the American theatre is a palliative prescribed to bourgeois patients who refuse to see the world as it is. Or, more crucially, as the world sees them. It is no accident, therefore, that the most “important” plays come from Europe—Brecht, Weiss, and Ghelderode. And even these have begun to run dry.

The Black Arts theatre, the theatre of LeRoi Jones, is a radical alternative to the sterility of the American theatre. It is primarily a theatre of the Spirit, confronting the Black man in his interaction with his brothers and with the white thing

The victims in the world of Jones’ early plays are Clay, murdered by the white bitch-goddess in Dutchman, and Walter vessels, the revolutionary in The Slave. Both of these plays present Black men in transition. . . .

This confrontation between the black radical and the white liberal is symbolic of larger confrontations occurring between the Third World and Western society. It is a confrontation between the colonizer and the colonized, the slavemaster and the slave. . . .

There is a minor element in The Slave which assumes great importance in the later pl entitle Jello. Here I refer to the emblem of walker’s army: a red-mouthed grinning field slave. The revolutionary army has taken one of the most hated symbols of the Afro-American past and radically altered its meaning. This is the supreme act of freedom, available only to those who have liberated themselves psychically. Jones amplifies this inversion of emblem and symbol in Jello by making Rochester (Ratfester) of the old Jack Benny (Penny) program into a revolutionary nationalist.

Ratfester, ordinarily the supreme embodiment of the Uncle Tom Clown, surprises Jack Penny by turning on the other side of the nature of the Black man. He skillfully, and with an evasive black humor, robs Penny of all of his money. But Ratfester is getting his back pay; payment of a long over-due debt to the Black man. Ratfester’s sensibilities are different from Walker’s. He is blues people smiling and shuffling while trying to figure out how to destroy the white thing. And like the blues man, he is the master of the understatement. Or in the Afro-American folk tradition, he is the Signifying Monkey, Shine, and Stagolee all rolled into one.

There are no stereotypes any more. History has killed Uncle Tom. Because even Uncle Tom has a breaking point beyond which he will not be pushed. Cut deeply enough into the most docile Negro, and you will find a conscious murderer. Behind the lyrics of the blues and the shuffling porter loom visions of white throats being cut and cities burning.

Jones’ particular power as a playwright does not rest solely on his revolutionary vision, but is instead derived from his deep lyricism and spiritual outlook. In many ways, he is fundamentally more a poet than a playwright. And it is lyricism that gives body to his plays. Two important plays in this regard are Black Mass and Slave Ship.

Black Mass is based on the Muslim myth of Yacub. According to this myth, Yacub, a Black scientist, developed the means of grafting different colors of the Original Black Nation until a White Devil was created. In Black Mass, Yacub’s experiments produce a raving White Beast who is condemned to the coldest regions of the North. The other magicians implore Yacub to cease his experiments. But he insists on claiming the primacy of scientific knowledge over spiritual knowledge. The sensibility of the White Devil is alien, informed by lust and sensuality. The Beast is the consumable embodiment of evil, the beginning of the historical subjugation of the spiritual world. 

Black Mass takes place in some pre-historical time. In fact, the concept of time, we learn, is the creation of an alien sensibility, that of the Beast. This is a deeply weighted play, a colloquy on the nature of man, and the relationship between legitimate spiritual and scientific knowledge. It is LeRoi Jones’ most important play mainly because it is informed by a mythology that is wholly the creation of the Afro-American sensibility.

Further, Yacub’s creation is not merely a scientific exercise. More fundamentally, it is the aesthetic impulse gone astray. The Beast is created merely for the sake of creation. Some artists assert a similar claim about the nature of art. They argue that art need not have a function. It is against this decadent attitude toward art—that the play militates. Yacub’s real crime, therefore, is the introduction of a meaningless evil into a harmonious universe.

The evil of the Beast is pervasive, corrupting everything and everyone it touches. What was beautiful is twisted into an ugly screaming thing. The play ends with destruction of the holy place of the Black Magicians. Now the Beast and his descendants roam the earth. An offstage voice chants a call for the Jihad to begin. It is then that myth merges into legitimate history, and we, the audience, come to understand that all history is merely someone’s version of mythology.

Slave Ship presents a more immediate confrontation with history. In a series of expressionistic tableaux it depicts the horrors and the madness of the Middle Passage. It then moves through the period of slavery, early attempts at revolt, tendencies toward Uncle Tom reconciliation and betrayal, and the final act of liberation. . . .

This work has special affinities with the New Music of Sun Ra, John Coltrane, Albert Ayler, and Ornette Coleman. Events are blurred, rising and falling in a stream of sound. Almost cinematically, the images flicker and fade against a heavy backdrop of rhythm. The language is spare, stripped to the essential. It is a play which almost totally eliminates the need for a text. It functions on the basis of movement and energy—the dramatic equivalent of the New Music.

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LeRoi Jones is the best known and the most advanced playwright of the movement, but he is not alone. There are other excellent playwrights who express the general mood of the black Arts ideology. Among them are Ron Milner, Ed Bullins, Ben Caldwell, Jimmy Stewart, Joe White, Charles Patterson, Charles Fuller, Aisha Hughes, Carol Freeman, and Jimmy Garrett.

Ron Milner’s Who’s Got His Own is of particular importance. It strips bare the clashing attitudes of a contemporary Afro-American family. Milner’s concern is with legitimate manhood and morality. The family in Who’s Got His Own is in search of its conscience, or more precisely, its own definition of life. On the day of his father’s death, Tim and his family are forced to examine the inner fabric of their lives: the lies, self-deceits, and sense of powerlessness in a white world.

The basic conflict, however, is internal. It is rooted in the historic search for black manhood. Tim mother’s is representative of a generation of Christian Black women who have implicitly understood the brooding violence lurking in their men. And with this understanding, they have interposed themselves between their men and the object of that violence—the white man. Thus unable to direct this violence against the oppressor, the Black man becomes more frustrated and the sense of powerlessness deepens. Lacking the strength to be a man in the white world, he turns against his family. So the oppressed, as Fanon explains, constantly dreams violence against his oppressor, while killing his brother on fast weekends.

Tim’s sister represents the Negro woman’s attempt to acquire what Eldridge Cleaver calls “ultra-femininity.” That is, the attributes of her white upper-class counterpart. Involved here is a rejection of the body-oriented life of the working class Black man, symbolized by the mother’s traditional religion. The sister has an affair with a white upper-class liberal, ending in an abortion. There are hints of lesbianism, i.e. a further rejection of the body. Much of the stripping away of falsehood initiated by Tim is directed at her life, which they have carefully kept hidden from the mother.

Tim is the product of the new Afro-American sensibility, informed by the psychological revolution now operative within Black America. He is a combination ghetto soul brother and militant intellectual, very hip and slightly flawed. He would change the world, but without comprehending the particular history that produced his “tyrannical” father. . . . In short Tim must confront the history of his family. And that is exactly what happens. Each character tells his story, exposing his falsehood to the other until a balance is reached.

Who’s Got His Own is not the work of an alienated mind. Milner’s main thrust is directed toward unifying the family around basic moral principles, toward bridging the “generation gap.” Other Black playwrights, Jimmy Garrett, for example, see the gap as unbridgeable. 

Garrett’s We Own the Night takes place during an armed insurrection. As the play opens we see the central characters defending a section of the city against attacks by white police. Johnny, the protagonist, is wounded. Some of his brothers intermittently fire at attacking forces, while others look for medical help.

A doctor arrives, forced at gun point. The wounded boy’s mother also comes. She is a female Uncle Tom who berates the Brothers and their cause. She tries to get Johnny to leave. She is hysterical. The whole idea of Black people fighting white people is totally outside of her orientation. Johnny begins a vicious attack on his mother, accusing her of emasculating his father—a recurring theme in the sociology of the Black community.

In Afro-American literature of previous decades the strong Black mother was the object of awe and respect. But in the new literature her status is ambivalent and laced with tension. Historically, Afro-American women have had to be the economical mainstays of the family. The oppressor allowed them to have jobs while at the same time limiting the economic mobility of the Black man. Very often, the woman’s aspirations and values are closely tied to those of the white power structure and not to those of her man. Since he cannot provide for his family the way white men do, she despises his weakness, tearing into him at every opportunity until, very often, there is nothing left but a shell.

The only way out of this dilemma is through revolution. It either must be an actual blood revolution, or one that psychically redirects the energy of the oppressed. Milner is fundamentally concerned with the latter and Garrett with the former. Communication between Johnny and his mother breaks down. The revolutionary imperative demands that men step outside the legal framework. It is a question of erecting another morality. The old constructs do not hold up, because adhering to them means consigning oneself to the oppressive reality.

Johnny’s mother is involved in the old constructs. Manliness is equated with white morality. And even though she claims to love her family 9her men), the overall design of her ideas are against black manhood. In Garrett’s play the mother’s morality manifests itself in a deep-seated hatred of Black men; while in Milner’s work the mother understands, but holds her men back.

The mothers that Garrett and Milner see represent the Old Spirituality—the Faith of the fathers of which DuBois spoke. Johnny and Tim represent the new spirituality. They appear to be a type produced by the upheavals of the colonial world of which Black America is a part. . . . The new spirituality is specific. It begins by seeing the world from the concise point of view colonialized. Where the Old spirituality would live with oppression while ascribing to the oppressors an innate goodness, the New spirituality demands a radical shift in point-of-view. The colonialized native, the oppressed must, of necessity, subscribed to a separate morality. One that will liberate him and his people.

The assault against the old spirituality can sometimes be humorous. In Ben Caldwell’s play The Militant Preacher, a burglar is seen slipping into the home of a wealthy minister. . . . ducks behinds a large chair. . . . then the burglar begins to speak. The preacher is startled, taking the burglar’s voice for the voice of God.  The burglar begins to play on the preacher’s old time religion. . . . insulting and goading the preacher on until the preacher’s attitudes about protective violence change. . . . Just as Jones inverted the symbols in Jello, Caldwell twists the rhythms of the Uncle Tom preacher into the language of the new militancy.

These plays are directed at problems within Black America. They begin with the premise that there is a well-defined Afro-American audience. An audience that must see itself and the world in terms of its own interests. . . . The Black Arts Movement represents the flowering of a cultural nationalism that has been suppressed since the 1920s. I mean the “Harlem renaissance””—which was essentially a failure. It did not address itself to the mythology and the life-styles of the Black community. It failed to take roots, to link itself concretely to the struggles of that community, to become its voice and spirit.

Implicit in the Black Arts Movement is the idea that Black People, however dispersed, constitute a nation within the belly of white America. This is not a new idea. Garvey said it and the Honorable Elijah Muhammad says it now. And it is on this idea that the concept of Black Power is predicated.

Afro-American  life and history is full of creative possibilities, and the movement is just beginning to perceive them. Just beginning to understand that the most meaningful statements about the nature of Western society must come from the Third World of which Black America is a part. The thematic material is broad, ranging from folk heroes like Shine and Stagolee to historical figures like Marcus Garvey and Malcolm X. And then there is the struggle for Black survival, the coming confrontation between white America and Black America. If art is the harbinger of future possibilities, what does the future of Black America portend?

Source: Drama Review, 12 (Summer 1968), 29-39

published 3 November 2006

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updated 3 October 2007