Amiri Baraka

Everett LeRoi Jones was born on the seventh of October 1934 at Newark, New Jersey, the eldest of two children of Coyt LeRoy Jones — an elevator operator and lift mechanic — and Anna Lois Russ Jones, a social worker. He completed Barringer High School at the top of his class in 1951 and entered Rutgers on a scholarship the same fall; he transferred to Howard in his second year and graduated from Howard in 1954. He served in the United States Air Force from 1954 to 1957, the latter portion of his service at Ramey Air Force Base in Puerto Rico as a B-36 weatherman. He was dishonourably discharged in 1957 after the discovery of his subscription to suspect periodicals.

He moved to Greenwich Village in 1957 and across the following eight years became one of the central figures of the Beat literary world — co-founding with his then-wife Hettie Cohen the avant-garde poetry magazine Yugen in 1958, the small press Totem Press the same year, and the Eighth Street Bookshop circle that included Allen Ginsberg, Frank O'Hara and Charles Olson. He published his first collection — Preface to a Twenty-Volume Suicide Note — in 1961 and his first play — Dutchman — in March 1964. The play won the Obie Award for Best American Play the same year.

The assassination of Malcolm X (placed in this archive) on the twenty-first of February 1965 produced the decisive break of his career. He left his Greenwich Village marriage and moved within weeks to Harlem, where he founded the Black Arts Repertory Theatre and School. The BARTS at 109 West 130th Street operated for four months in the summer of 1965 — and from it emerged the founding statement of the Black Arts Movement as an organised cultural-political project. Larry Neal, in the Black Arts Movement essay of 1968, would identify the BARTS season as the founding moment.

He moved back to Newark in 1966 and over the following decade founded Spirit House Publications, the Committee for a Unified Newark, the Congress of Afrikan Peoples, and Spirit House Theatre. He took the name Imamu Amear Baraka in 1968 under Sunni Muslim influence, modified it to Amiri Baraka in 1974, and shifted from Black cultural nationalism to a self-described Marxist position in 1974. He served as Poet Laureate of New Jersey from 2002 to 2003, taught at SUNY-Stony Brook from 1980 to 2000, and published over fifty volumes across his career.

He died at Newark on the ninth of January 2014, at seventy-nine.

He is honored here as the founder of the Black Arts Movement.