Amiri Baraka

Born Leroi Jones (born 1934), poet and playwright Amiri Baraka has been an important, yet often controversial, voice in African American literary and political circles. Baraka's experience as a student at Howard University and his subsequent service in the Air Force radicalized him. Moving to Greenwich Village in 1957, he began a short-lived association with various beat writers. Their ideas about alienation in American society appealed to Baraka, but ultimately his embrace of black nationalism in the 1960s shifted his focus almost exclusively to African American subjects and political concerns. Beaten and arrested in the 1967 Newark race riot, Baraka came to "see art as a weapon of revolution." He helped to initiate the Black Arts movement, and played a lead role in founding theatrical companies in Newark and Harlem. His more recent writings have been devoted to revealing what he calls "the bankruptcy of Western cultures."