The theme for this Black History Month is African Americans and the Arts.  For purposes of this blog, I’ll highlight the “Black Arts Era” (1960-1975).  The Black Arts Era began at the very beginning of what Samuel F. Yette, influential newsman and the first Black Washington correspondent for Newsweek, and the author of The Choice: The Issue of Black Survival in America, called the Decisive Decade, for obvious reasons if we look at that era and the political assassinations, of JFK and RFK, of MLK and Malcolm X, and so many others – a long list of stolen lives.

All those stolen lives, all those political assassinations, took from us the best and the brightest.  The decade was indeed decisive, in that the struggle for Civil Rights in America was becoming a struggle for human rights within the international context.  MLK seemed to be offering America the easy way out, and it wasn’t simply about integration.  It was about America making good on that promissory note, doing more than simply spouting the ideals of Democracy!  The world was watching America.  She could not talk about democracy abroad when it was denied at home.  She could not talk about freedom when America was becoming a prison state.  She could not send someone like Muhammad Ali overseas to fight a war against people of color, people who never called him the N word – those are fighting words!  If there was fighting to be done, it could be done on the homeland.

This political landscape would profoundly inform the Black Arts Movement.  Larry Neal, notable scholar, writer, poet, and critic, in “The Black Arts Movement,” wrote:

One can make the argument that most, if not all Art, is political, including the protest novel, which the aesthetics of the Black Arts Movement rejects, because it appeals to “white mortality.” As Neal stated in the above quoted piece, the Black Arts Movement separates itself from the western cultural aesthetic. It is tied to concepts of Black Power. It operated from the fact that there were two Americas, Black, and white, and white America had no claim to moral superiority given the racial terror it perpetrated against Black people throughout the Decisive Decade. If this was the road of white morality, then why follow it in any shape, form or fashion? Why not create something that spoke directly to and evolved from your lived experience as Black people in America. A case on point, Frederick Douglass deconstructed the Fourth of July, what it meant to the Negro? Black aesthetics will see things differently, because Black folk have experienced America differently from white folk.

The Black Arts Era is full of revolutionary works of music, story, and song, that came from the Black experience of America. In the Black Arts Era, Black artists found a voice that divorced itself from that duality that W.E.B. DuBois wrote about. It wagged that symbolic Black fist at the white world. Read any of the works of artists from that generation, beginning with LeRoi Jones.

I often wonder what kind of land America would be without that long list of political assassinations in the Decisive Decade, by far the most important decade in American history, one more important than the Reconstruction years (1865-1877). In a sense, those political assassinations forged the Black Arts Era in Black blood.