African-American Literature

Nearly a quarter of a century ago the social and cultural fabric of the United States of America was shaken to the core of its European foundations by what has been termed a Black Revolution or Black Power Movement. The year 1966 witnessed the official beginning of this movement, when Stokely Carmichael, the new chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), announced his organization's redirection from its traditional methods of demonstrating and protesting for the civil rights denied to African Americans citizens, by laws and custom, for more than a century.

Carmichael challenged all "thinking" black folk to join SNCC in its quest for Black Power. The voice of Larry Neal, poet, critic, editor, and declared Black Nationalist, was soon heard responding to this call. Neal become the leading spirit and voice of the Black Arts Movement, which he referred to as 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".

As African Americans in Watts, Harlem, Detroit, Philadelphia, Hartford, and other cities across the nation responded with "fire" to the weight of oppression and white racism that had made their existence on this continent unbearable, the black artist was encouraged by Neal "to purify by fire" the old symbols, songs, myths, legends, and history that was the lost birthright of African peoples. Ethics, he explained, should not be divorced from aesthetics, and art must not be separate from black people and their own spiritual groundings.

The Black Power and Black Arts movements made a lasting impression on several men, women, and children who would later become leading voices in the African American's social and political struggles of the 1980s and 1990s. The challenge was and still is to "move the agenda" and guide the African American community - further away from Eurocentricism and toward Afrocentricism, self-determination, and ultimately, liberation.