For African American writers and artists, the 1960s was an era of empowerment and polarization, optimism and disillusion. They met this epochal moment in history with a renewed commitment to art, when “Black” was not only beautiful but also a political identity, one in which racial justice became inseparable from aesthetic practice. Even as the “New America” inaugurated by President John F. Kennedy and continued by President Lyndon B. Johnson’s “Great Society” promised a new frontier, one in which the United States would be the first to land a man on the moon while it also achieved some of the most ambitious civil rights legislation in the twentieth century, equal opportunity in a “post-racial” America seemed unlikely.

The decade also witnessed incredible moments of violence such as brutal police responses to peaceful protests by students and citizens, violence at the Democratic National Convention, attacks against churches and children, uprisings in cities, and the assassinations of President Kennedy, Robert F. Kennedy, Medgar Evers, Malcolm X, and the recent Nobel Laureate Martin Luther King, Jr. Many lost hope in a new America. These political disappointments and social paradoxes also signaled a necessary transformation in culture.

African American Literature in Transition, 1960–1970: Black Art, Politics, and Aesthetics takes seriously this notion of transition, particularly as it informs literature and culture as important indications of the era’s zeitgeist, and it offers an exciting account of the period for a new generation of readers. For instance, Gwendolyn Brooks (who, in 1950, was the first African American to win a Pulitzer Prize), published her last book with a mainstream, white press in 1968. This book of poems, In the Mecca, signaled a significant shift in Brooks’ work as well as in the history of African American literature. Toni Cade Bambara’s assessment of her career in The New York Times characterizes this turn: “something happened to Brooks, something most certainly in evidence in In the Mecca and subsequent works – a new movement and energy, intensity, richness, power of statement and a new stripped lean, compressed style. A change of style prompted by a change of mind.”¹

This shift – this “change of mind” – was her now explicit conscious commitment to her racial, social, and political identity as the subject and the inspiration for her writing. In this transition, Brooks had become a Black poet as she shed the highly celebrated yet problematic integrationist distinction of being a “real poet,” one whose writing was no more “Negro poetry” than, as Robert Frost wrote, “white poetry.”

Brooks’ attendance at the Second Black Writers’ Conference (1967), held at Fisk University, had formally prompted this transition. In her autobiography, she writes that the conference was transformational: “I had never been, before, in the general presence of such insouciance, such live firmness, such confident vigor, such determination to mold or carve something DEFINITE.”² While there, she met a host of younger poets – among them Dudley Randall, whose aesthetics were a politics of Blackness, an attentiveness to the specific social, historical, and political conditions of African Americans that he and other younger poets understood were inseparable from the project of poetry. Their passion moved Brooks. Randall and fellow poet and arts activist Margaret Burroughs had announced their intention to publish a poetry anthology to honor Malcolm X, whose 1965 assassination was another definitive turning point in 1960s Black culture. Brooks’ poem, “Malcolm X,” which opened their anthology, proclaims:

The For Malcolm anthology appeared in 1969, soon after Randall had launched Broadside Press in Detroit. Brooks’ poem celebrates Malcolm’s Black pride – a maleness, a manhood – that stood for many as defiance to an emasculating racism that had been pervasive within a 1960s culture of televised anti-Black violence that seemed to persist with seeming impunity. The “man” Brooks celebrated in her poem claimed for himself and for Black people a humanity that America’s long history of apartheid had sought to deny.

Like the range of poets in the anthology – among them Mari Evans, Ted Joans, Robert Hayden, Clarence Major, Margaret Walker, LeRoi Jones, Etheridge Knight, and Sonia Sanchez – Malcolm X was an inspired symbol for a new, Black consciousness. For instance, in his 1965 eulogy for Malcolm, Ossie Davis proclaims: “Malcolm was our manhood, our living black manhood. This was his meaning to his people. And, in honoring him, we honor the best in ourselves.”⁴

Of course, Malcolm had also experienced his own transitions. In The Autobiography of Malcolm X, which he authored with Alex Haley and which was published the same year as his murder, Malcolm explains his turn away from a criminal to a religious life, guided by Elijah Muhammad and the Nation of Islam. Malcolm’s break with Muhammad and with the Nation coincided with his hajj in 1964. During his Muslim pilgrimage to Mecca, Malcolm describes his own personal discovery of a freedom unbound by race or nationality:

This epiphany shows Malcolm at the height of his spiritual and political consciousness, when he understood Black freedom struggles as crucially global and coalitional. He then formed the Organization of Afro-American Unity (OAAU), modeled on the Organization of African Unity (OAU), and designed to support Black human rights all over the world. Months before his death, Malcolm appeared in a television interview announcing his desire to work alongside any organization or person genuinely committed to justice for oppressed people, and it is this man who the poets in For Malcolm celebrated as “the best in ourselves.” Malcolm and Martin Luther King, Jr., had met only once, also in 1964. In February 1965, Malcolm went to Selma and met with Coretta Scott King while her husband was in jail. Malcolm and Martin were on a path to collaboration, but Malcolm was murdered later that month, on February 21.

In the same year as For Malcolm, Brooks published a short book of poems, Riot (1969), with Broadside Press. It chronicles the uprisings in Chicago after Martin Luther King’s murder; its title poem in three parts begins with a quote from King, “A riot is the language of the unheard.”⁶ Here, Brooks acknowledges the uprisings in Black communities across the nation as the result of the country’s disregard for racial justice. Formally, the collection makes a turn toward assemblage. Its first page is black, with a white-lettered epigram: “[I]t would be a terrible thing for Chicago if this black fountain of life should erupt,” it begins, announcing a Black eruption that is both political and creative.

The next page of Riot is white. This time, it features an image by Jeff Donaldson, founding artist of the collective AfriCOBRA,⁷ whose painting of young Black people shows one of them grasping an African-inspired sculpture pressed against the glass, as if the sculpture, and the person, will smash through it. Riot’s content framed by a graphic, mixed-media design visualizes Brooks’ transition from mainstream publishing to a new allegiance with smaller, Black presses like Broadside and Chicago’s Third World Press. In this moment, the well-established Brooks welcomed young Black creatives into her home, sponsored poetry competitions in schools, traveled to Africa, and began wearing an Afro. This turn toward independent African American publishing houses and their commitment to Black communities as the decisive audiences represents an important resurgence and survival of Black print culture despite the censorship and surveillance that sought to disable it. It is another example of the formal and institutional shifts taking place in the history of the 1960s that would inform transitions in African American literature and culture.

Similarly, Martin Luther King’s 1968 murder – inspiring, for example, the “high priestess of soul,” Nina Simone, to ask: “what will happen now that the King of Love is dead?” – can be read as the signal apocalypse James Baldwin forewarned of in The Fire Next Time (1963). The hope expressed in Baldwin’s essays about the transformational power of love, changes into disappointment and disillusionment by the end of the decade. Following King’s faith and commitment to nonviolence, Baldwin metaphorizes the country’s legal and cultural endorsements of racism as a moral failure, one with apocalyptic consequences. His solution in 1963 was love. Baldwin argues that love can overcome the fearful thinking and behaviors that cause so many to cling to an ethically untenable status quo. He writes that we must, “like lovers, insist on, or create, the consciousness of others … we may be able, handful that we are, to end the racial nightmare, and achieve our country, and change the history of the world.”⁸

Although Baldwin had spent much of the previous decade abroad, he returned to the United States because he felt compelled to be present for what he hoped would be a long overdue turn to racial justice and love. The same year as his The Fire Next Time, he joined his peers at the historic March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. ⁹ Here, King delivered his “I Have a Dream” speech to an interracial, intergenerational group of 250,000 people surrounding the Lincoln Memorial to support a message of love, community, and social justice. Its political platform included meaningful legislation, including laws to prohibit employment discrimination and a national minimum wage. Millions also watched and listened to King’s speech on television and radio, including via the Voice of America, which translated the speech into thirty-six languages and rebroadcast it globally.

The moment thus symbolized a beacon for equality and change not only in the United States but also abroad where so many people sought to end colonialism, apartheid, and economic injustice. Televised documentary evidence of white police and white citizens attacking peaceful protesters prompted public indignation and calls for legislative action, and it mobilized students of all races to organize in the service of African Americans’ civil rights, including the right to vote and to fair housing. In this moment, it seemed as if love and justice would prevail over hatred and fear.

In the following summer of 1964, more than 1,000 college students, mostly white, arrived in Mississippi to join the mostly Black Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee’s (SNCC) Freedom Summer project.¹⁰ Their threefold mission was to secure Black voters’ registration inside a state vehemently opposed to Black civil rights; to build “freedom schools” that would provide literacy and history education that the state had denied its Black citizens, even as it required them to “qualify” to vote; and to form a parallel Mississippi Freedom Democratic delegation that would challenge the all-white delegation that would represent the state of Mississippi at the Democratic National Convention that would take place later that year.

They understood that the right to vote was a critical remedy to the state’s systematic assault against African Americans, who in Mississippi consisted of more than a third of the population, yet less than 7 percent of its registered voters. That Freedom Summer coalition of students worked alongside Black Mississippians who had been denied voter registration by means of subjective literacy tests, economic reprisals, and physical violence.

One local activist, Fannie Lou Hamer, a sharecropper who summoned up the courage to speak about the numerous assaults and threats against her as she sought her constitutional right to vote, empowered her similarly threatened peers to claim their rights as citizens. Freedom Summer was the most violent in the already violent history of the state. The Ku Klux Klan along with police and other state and local authorities launched vicious attacks against the students and activists:

• ◦ 1,062 people were arrested under false pretenses

• ◦ 80 Freedom Summer workers were assaulted

• ◦ 37 churches were bombed or burned

• ◦ 30 homes and businesses belonging to African Americans were bombed or burned

• ◦ 7 or more people were murdered, including James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner¹¹

And while FBI investigators searched for Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner, they also found the bodies of eight African Americans – one boy and seven men – whose corpses were hidden in rivers and swamps throughout the state.

The violence continued and the transformational power of love seemed to wane. Students and citizens were continually attacked and murdered; inspirational leaders were assassinated. Major events such as these define the decade, marking personal and political tensions that also signal important examples of the transitions in African American literature and culture. Mid-decade – after the bombing that killed four girls at Sunday school and after Malcolm X’s murder – LeRoi Jones published his elegy for Malcolm, “A Poem for Black Hearts,” as well as “Black Art” (Reference Malcolm1965). Together, these poems signaled his move away from Greenwich Village and the downtown poetry scene associated with New York’s mostly white avant-garde.

Now uptown and in Harlem, Jones founded the Black Arts Repertory Theater/School (BART/S) and in 1968 changed his name to Amiri Baraka. His name change, his poems, and his move to Harlem, the iconic capital of African American culture, mark an inaugural moment for a new Black Aesthetic, and for the Black Arts Movement. The spirit of Black empowerment, now less interested in interracial collaboration, appeared in community centers and artist collectives across the United States.

For instance, the Watts Towers Arts Center opened in Los Angeles in 1963; in Detroit, artists and activists convened a Black Arts Convention (1966); in New York, Spiral, an artists’ collective was established; and in Los Angeles, Maulana Karenga created the first pan-African non-religious holiday, Kwanzaa (1966). Jazz musician Lester Bowie formed the Art Ensemble of Chicago (1967) and Arthur Mitchell created the Dance Theater of Harlem (1968). In these and other examples, such as in the AfriCOBRA collective, culture became a cause for avant-garde art, civil rights activism, and a defiance of white hegemony. In the 1960s, African American creatives had created a counterculture.

Indicative of the defiance of a generation of Black artists whose creativity announced a radical break with the status quo, Jones/Baraka’s poem “Black Art” signaled the emergence of a new, and confrontational, political aesthetic:

His pronouncement offers a poetic grounded in a wholly touchable, tangible form. The poem’s title claims a racial art – a “black imagination” – that recalls a long tradition of aesthetic manifestos and radical declarations of independence. Here, the speaker announces a logic that, without concrete manifestations, “poems are bullshit”:

The poem’s claims to a tangibility and a seemingly indiscriminate violence assert a departure from nonviolence; it is a “Black” poem, one that has agency as well as the power and the ability to kill.

Baraka was not alone in this aesthetic turn. As part of the Black Arts/Black Aesthetic movement of the later 1960s and 1970s, poems like “Black Art” called for confrontation, a radical break with the psychic and material conditions that undermine the full agency of Black people in the United States. Its aesthetic of resistance echoes Frantz Fanon’s embrace of a psychological freedom from colonial thinking, and it more immediately reflects a vision of empowerment that is more popularly associated with Malcolm X and with Black nationalism.

In Black Fire: An Anthology of Afro-American Writing (1968), which Jones/Baraka edited in collaboration with Larry Neal, they insist this aesthetic turn is more than symbolic, that it would “destroy the double consciousness – the tension that is in the souls of black folk.”¹³ Their Black Aesthetic manifesto defies the very condition W. E. B. Du Bois called “the problem of the twentieth century,” one in which segregation and the color line had been previously characterized as “the Negro Problem.”¹⁴ Jones/Baraka and Neal’s Black Fire understands Black freedom as unconcerned with the values – or the feelings – of the (white) status quo. Instead, it celebrated fearlessness in Black art and Black identity.

And while performance is crucial to poetry, the performance of confrontation is crucial to a Black Aesthetic resistance to an institutional and cultural anti-Blackness. It refuses the violence of racial subjection while it also claims Blackness as African American creative power. For instance, in the same period, Nikki Giovanni, another Black Aesthetic poet, invites polarization in the service of Black freedom, such as in her “The True Import of Black vs. Negro (For Peppe, Who will Ultimately Judge Our Efforts)” (1968):

This ritual demonstration of confrontational anger is an articulation of defiance and rebellion. The poem’s title reflects another transition, one that establishes an opposition between “Black” and “Negro,” Black and white, to suggest that any liberal notion of progress gained by nonviolence or negotiation is untenable and impossible. For Giovanni, like Baraka whose 1969 Black Magic book cover featured a white voodoo doll pierced with pins, oppressive ways of being and thinking must be eradicated. In her poem, the act of murder, to “kill,” is to destroy a racist, anti-Black social order.

Similarly, Baraka’s commitment to the “revolutionary” value of the performative should “function like an incendiary pencil.” He argues: “it should stagger through our universe correcting, insulting, preaching, spitting craziness.”¹⁶ More recently, Phillip Brian Harper has argued this kind of poetic performance depicts an example of fearlessness in the face of oppression. He writes that this type of confrontation achieves “maximum impact in a context in which [the poems] are understood as being heard directly by whites and overheard by blacks.”¹⁷

The notion is that these incendiary poems are a direct address to whites, who as “the Man” represent an oppressive status quo, and they suggest an important instance of chiasmus in which the Black person now looks at the white person with contempt. This reversal inverts the logic of double consciousness, so that the problem of the color line is now “The White Problem.”

Like Giovanni’s poem, Baraka’s “Black Art” announces an uncompromised pro-Blackness, and it invites listeners to choose a side. The speaker announces a collectivity, a “we,” who have precise tastes and clear perspectives distinct from the “cops,” “jews,” “niggers,” “Jocks,” “wops” (l. 24), and “girdlemamma mulatta bitches” (l. 16). One compelling feature of this racialized confrontation is that it occurs precisely at the moment when the potential for racial justice and love seems lost in the face of such virulent anti-Black violence.

Rather than embrace the promise of an aesthetic, social, and political integration, Baraka’s earlier works published under the name LeRoi Jones suggest the poet who publishes “Black Art” insists on a creativity in which Black difference is its most distinct feature. It conceptualizes the era’s political aesthetic of empowered outrage. And given Jones’ long-established position in New York’s avant-garde scene, “Black Art” is the signal emergence of a new poet, Amiri Baraka, and the disappearance of LeRoi Jones. Like Jones/Baraka’s only novel, the experimental The System of Dante’s Hell, also published in 1965, the poem depicts a creative logic in which art becomes the originary site of a decisively Black political consciousness.

Jones/Baraka makes a clear connection between the enraged semantic turn in his writing and the resistance to anti-Black violence so prevalent in the 1960s. For instance, in his 1963 essay on nonviolence, he writes: “[t]here is a war going on now in the United States … in that war, four Negro children were blown to bits while they were learning to pray.”¹⁸ His opening invites anger and the radicalization of a political consciousness that ultimately transforms LeRoi Jones into Amiri Baraka.

His characterization of the white supremacist slaughter of children engaged in Sunday school activities not only justifies his outrage against the violence perpetuated against African Americans with impunity, but also questions the value of nonviolence when, from his perspective, Black people are under attack. He continues “What Does Nonviolence Mean?” with a list of “terroristic tactics”: “The leader of the Jackson, Mississippi, NAACP … was assassinated in front of his home. Police dogs, fire hoses, blackjacks, have been used on Negroes, trying to reinforce a simple and brutal social repression.” In this, Jones/Baraka refers to the assassination of Medgar Evers, a nonviolent civil rights activist, who was killed in his driveway while his wife and children were inside their home. And as the decade continues, this list of terrorist acts against Black people grows exponentially – water hoses, fire bombs, and more deaths continued to demean African American life.

In 1966, police shot and killed Matthew Johnson in the impoverished Hunters Point neighborhood of San Francisco. Johnson was sixteen years old, unarmed, and Black. Johnson’s community erupted in protest, prompting the governor to impose martial law. Incidents like these took place across the United States and throughout the decade. In 1964, an off-duty police officer shot and killed a fifteen-year-old African American boy, prompting uprisings in Harlem, Brooklyn’s Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood, Rochester, NY, and in three cities in New Jersey.

Aggressive police actions against unarmed African Americans and their allies signaled the era’s mood of unrest and polarization. In Tuscaloosa, Alabama, African Americans who attempted to walk from the First African Baptist Church to the County Courthouse to protest segregated drinking fountains and bathrooms, were beaten, tear-gassed, and arrested by an angry mob of whites and white police. This incident, known as “Bloody Tuesday” (June 9, 1964), resembles another event, “Bloody Sunday” (March 7, 1965), when nonviolent activists sought to challenge American apartheid and claim their constitutional right to vote by marching from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama. State troopers and county posse men (some of whom were known members of the KKK) attacked the peaceful protesters with billy clubs and tear gas.

Weeks later, 25,000 people arrived safely in Montgomery to support voting rights for Black Americans – they, along with Martin Luther King, were protected by federally commanded National Guard troops, FBI agents, and federal marshals.¹⁹ The violence that commonly met peaceful protests prompted another approach to Black social justice. Two years after the Freedom Summer, Black students in the SNCC made their own turn when the committee’s newly elected chair, Stokely Carmichael, began to voice his loss of faith in nonviolent political action. Carmichael helped transform the SNCC into a more radical organization, and during a voters’ rights speech in Mississippi, he declared: “[w]e been saying ‘freedom’ for six years … what we are going to start saying now is ‘Black Power.’”²⁰

The slogan “Black Power” became a rallying call for a younger generation of activists, including among them anti-imperialists in Africa and anticolonialists in the Caribbean, who were dissatisfied with the slow progress of social justice. The influence of this phrase is particularly noteworthy because of the separate, simultaneous rise of the Black Panther Party for Self Defense in Oakland, California, led by Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale.

More readily known as the Black Panther Party (BPP), the organization’s genesis stemmed from the police killing of Matthew Johnson, the teenager shot by police in San Francisco. The BPP’s early activities were primarily concerned with monitoring police activities in Black communities. They claimed a constitutional right to bear arms as a means of self-defense against unnecessary and unjust police violence. And on May 2, 1967, thirty-two fully armed Black women and men met Ronald Reagan, the new governor of California, at the state capital, where Bobby Seale announced, to “The American people in general and black people in particular,” that the “racist power structure” had continued to disempower Black people despite the fact that African Americans had “begged, prayed, petition, and demonstrated” in their calls for justice. In his rejection of nonviolent protest, he declared: “[t]he time has come for black people to arm themselves against this terror before it’s too late.”²¹ He and his peers then entered the state capital. In response to this moment of empowered Black defiance, the California legislature drafted and passed the Mulford Act, making it illegal to carry loaded weapons in public.²²

The Black Panther Party was deeply committed to a larger Black freedom movement; in a platform they called the Ten-Point Program, they emphasized Black pride, community control, equal employment and housing opportunities, and freedom from government harassment and police brutality. They launched several community service programs including free breakfasts for school children and free health clinics.

By 1968, the Black Panther Party was run mostly by women and it had thousands of members and hundreds of branches across the United States.²³ Its organization and its resistance to institutionalized racism inspired racial justice activism and alliances among, for example, the American Indian Movement, Asian Americans’ “Yellow Power” movement, and El Movimiento, a Mexican American social justice movement.²⁴ As their popularity grew, their justice efforts made them targets of a secret federal counterintelligence program, COINTELPRO, in which the FBI sought to undermine community programs, exploit rivalries, and enlist informants who could provide information that would help neutralize the Black Panther Party.²⁵

In one egregious instance, the FBI assisted an early morning police raid on the Chicago apartment of BPP chair Fred Hampton, who along with his pregnant girlfriend and associates were asleep inside. The police fired almost one hundred bullets into the apartment, killing Hampton, Mark Clark, and critically injuring four others. Hampton was twenty-one years old.²⁶

It is within this context of real and highly publicized anti-Black violence that artists and writers developed their craft to offer jarring, countercultural depictions of the “brutal social repression” they understood as the primary goal of the violence against Black American persons. Baraka, for instance, interprets this anti-Black violence as a failure of imagination – and this failure is the failure to conceive Black humanity. In another direct address to liberal whites, he also offers a sobering aside: “(During slavery a liberal, or a moderate, was a man who didn’t want the slaves beaten. But he was not asking that they be freed.)”²⁷ This jolting indictment of the ethical failures of liberalism is yet another invitation for a radical transformation of thought into action.

For this cohort of Black Arts/Black Aesthetic artists and writers, any commitment that art can change the world must be provocative and political. When Baraka writes: “Art is method. And art, ‘like any ashtray or senator,’ remains in the world. Wittgenstein said ethics and aesthetics are one. I believe this,” he challenges the longstanding theory of tension between art and politics.²⁸ His provocation returns to the opening lines of “Black Art”: “Poems are bullshit unless they are/teeth or trees or lemons piled/on a step,” and it characterizes the concrete manifestation of ethics as art.

For Baraka, poetics is politics, and Black literature is an act of resistance. In this aesthetic vision, both poetry and protest create tangible results. This political investment conceives of the imagination, of creativity, as the architect of revolution, so that “imagination … is all possibility … Possibility is what moves us.”²⁹

This interest in the possibility imagination affords suggests two significant implications for literature and politics in the American milieu of 1960s African American literature and culture. First, it signals a self-consciousness about the function of African American creative projects. Rather than support the idea that, with integration, African American literature and culture is no longer necessary nor legitimate, it posits African American creative endeavors as crucial to racial justice issues that remain insidious even after so many civil rights victories. Second, the framing of imagination as particularly “Black” describes a shift away from identity as race to identity as affect. In other words, the Black revolutionary community Baraka and his peers imagine is primarily organized by feeling, not skin color. The implication in this turn is agency.

Here, Blackness is a deliberate choice, one that mobilizes outrage to realize the complete rights of Black personhood. It also celebrates Blackness – skin, hair, and culture – as beautiful. The phrase “Black is beautiful” became popular in the 1960s; recently, philosopher Paul C. Taylor theorized “Black is beautiful” as a heterogeneous position deeply linked to an ocular regime that fails to see Blackness, or one that recognizes it as “ugly,” unworthy of aesthetic consideration.³⁰

In this decade, “Negro” became an outmoded term to describe people of African descent; 1960s literature, culture, and politics created the transition from “Negro” to “Black,” now a signifier for an identity informed by a political and ideological position of defiance and self-love. Gwendolyn Brooks’ Afro hairstyle, dashikis and black leather fashions, and James Brown’s song “Say it Loud – I’m Black and I’m Proud” (1968) are examples of this shift toward an empowered Blackness celebrated in popular culture. African American Literature in Transition, 1960–1970, embraces the very notion of African American literature and culture as both the subject and the agent of change. And change is coalitional.

Noliwe M. Rooks points out that in 1968 when San Francisco State College established the nation’s first Black studies department, “white students joined with Asian students, Latino students, American Indian students and black students to found the field. The battle they waged was multiracial, seeing black studies as the first step in the wider-ranging agenda for educational, economic, and social economy.”³¹ Within twelve months of the founding of the department at San Francisco State, at least 200 new Black studies programs were set to begin. By 1971, the Ford Foundation had become one of the largest supporters of this new field.

The coalitional investment in Black studies facilitated an important shift in higher education, one that redefined the concept of opportunity, access, and equity in institutions that educate the nation. Besides formalizing the need for investments in welcoming Black students, Black faculty, and their creative and intellectual work, these coalitional activisms also facilitated the rise of women’s studies, as well as Latinx, Asian American, Native American, and queer studies.

This moment of coalitional justice activities not only informs the literary and cultural collectives that emerged in the 1960s, but it also reflects the political and social movements that shaped them. For instance, Martin Luther King’s increasing concern about U.S. military involvement in Vietnam, intersects with his longstanding interest in economic justice for African Americans, while also signaling his emerging commitments to anticolonialism.

In 1967, a year before his assassination, King collaborated with an interfaith group of clergy to promote peace and to denounce a “deadly Western arrogance” that he understood as the result of U.S. colonial practices. In his “Beyond Vietnam” speech, King argued that the United States had rendered “peaceful revolution impossible by refusing to give up the privileges and pleasures that come from immense profits of overseas investments.”³² Before his death, Malcolm X also denounced the war. In 1967, 64 percent of all eligible African Americans were drafted to fight in Vietnam, while only 31 percent of eligible whites were compelled to serve. The casualty rates of Black soldiers was also disproportionally high – Black soldiers were killed in Vietnam two times more than white soldiers. As a consequence, civil rights, antiwar, and anticolonial movements were intersectional. The postwar baby boom had resulted in an unprecedented population increase in the United States, so that during the 1960s young people represented a major population demographic.

Their shared commitment to justice and to “counterculture” deeply influenced the era. And when the FDA approved the birth control pill in 1960, heterosexually active women achieved autonomy over their bodies and their life choices. This new freedom enabled more women to attend college, develop their careers, and importantly, advocate for equality.³³ Their activisms launched Second-wave feminism.

Each chapter in African American Literature in Transition, 1960–1970, which is organized in three sections, situates its subjects in history, in relation to the larger aesthetic and political contexts, and in conversation with recent developments in contemporary criticism. This approach affords the reader a critical frame for the power and the influence of African American literature and culture: it extends beyond the boundaries of African American concerns to reveal the undeniable intersections between feminism and art, anticolonialism and popular culture, civil rights and aesthetic experiments, the community and the artist, literature and film, politics and music, love and revolution, as well as between philosophy and social justice.

This book invites an alternative view of periodization by organizing chapters on literature and culture that engage with the period diachronically and within multiple modes and genres, adding texture to the familiar critical and historical timeline. Among its many interventions, it considers innovations, transitions, and traditions within both familiar and unfamiliar texts and moments in 1960s African American literature and culture, to interrogate declarations of race, authenticity, personal and collective empowerment, political action, and aesthetics.

At the same time, however, experimentation, now a challenge to convention and a call for new ways of being and thinking, became an often overlooked, yet common artistic practice in which many forms of the avant-garde – free jazz, poetry, film, art collectives, and the novel – exposed the potentials and the contradictions that offer new kinds of evaluations and investigations of the 1960s and its influences on the decades that follow.

In “The Society of Umbra and the Coming of the Black Aesthetic,” Keith D. Leonard explores the layers of influence that inform 1960s Black poetics, particularly how the writers of the Umbra Writers Workshop engaged with the better-known white poets identified with New York City’s Lower East Side and adapted from another art form – Abstract Expressionism in one case, bebop and free jazz in the other. He details how Umbra’s improvisational composition strategies demonstrate a vision that idiosyncratically unites the aesthetic and cultural implications of the full New York art scene, in order to orient discussions of the militant politics of the Black Arts Movement. His essay invites readers to recognize a fuller sense of how bohemian artistry served Black nationalist politics with integrity.

Similarly, Eric Porter’s “Reconsidering ‘the Revolution in Music’” engages jazz and the avant-garde as important indicators of the era’s cultural transitions. His essay revisits Frank Kofsky’s influential work on the relationship between “free jazz” and 1960s political struggle by offering closer readings of archival interviews of jazz musicians, such as John Coltrane, Elvin Jones, and McCoy Tyner, who were featured in the published work. Porter argues that the archive reveals a more sophisticated, collective analysis of jazz aesthetics and the complicated social and political context than what Kofsky apparently explains.

Poetry maintained a central position in 1960s Black literary and cultural transitions. Derik Smith in his chapter, “Robert Hayden, the Black Arts Movement, and the Politics of Aesthetic Distance,” challenges the ways in which critical conceptions of African American poetry of the period often pit Hayden against radical poets of the Black Arts Movement (BAM) in conveniently antagonistic terms – as combatants locked in battle over the meaning of “the Black Aesthetic” during those years that we have come to call the “Black Arts era.” He contends that partisan arguments about Hayden’s ideological and aesthetic disputes with 1960s peers tend to obscure the fact that Hayden and his apparent rivals confronted a similar set of mid-century problematics. He posits that the terrain of recent Black poetry has been prominently shaped by the differing ways in which Hayden and his BAM contemporaries responded to the same questions of class and aesthetics.

In her reading of another BAM poet in “Breathing: Sonia Sanchez’s Call to Coalition Building,” Patricia Herrera contends that the practice of diaspora in Sanchez’s poetry and plays – such as The Bronx Is Next (1968) – illuminate the ways her work as a feminist figure in the Black Arts Movement creates fusions between Latinx and African American cultures and produces a literary and cultural zone that indicates early notions of Afro-Latinidad. Herrera argues that Sanchez’s writing in multiple modalities signals a Third World feminist perspective that also creates a transnational discourse between African American and Latinx communities to demonstrate a global African American literary expression.

In the next section, engaging the intersection between literature, culture, and politics, Dagmawi Woubshet’s “The Rights of Black Love” reads James Baldwin’s changing perspective on the power and potential of love from his The Fire Next Time (1963) to No Name in the Street (1972). Woubshet traces Baldwin’s shifting views through a historical contextualization of 1960s hope and devastation which he reads as not only pivotal to Baldwin’s life and writing, but also crucial to shifts in American life and letters.

Paul C. Taylor’s “Albert Murray Beyond Plight and Blight” offers a critical rebuke to Murray’s landmark collection of integrationist essays, The Omni-Americans (1970), to invite new considerations of the debates that shaped 1960s tensions between nationalists and integrationists, offering an incisive critique of Murray’s encounters with the theory and practice of Black aesthetics.

In “Espionage and Paths of Black Radicalism,” GerShun Avilez reads Sam Greenlee’s novel The Spook Who Sat by the Door as a rich opportunity to engage with how art represents and interrogates Black radicalism. He explains how espionage in the novel becomes a metaphor for Black freedom practices and their cultivation of Black radical personhood. The novel’s Black CIA agent/spy is also an outlaw, working undercover as a double agent in the service of a Black revolution in the United States. This chapter not only rejects the binary logic that positions integrationist against Black Power strategies, but it also points to understanding the era’s increasingly versatile thinking about Black revolution.

In “The Necessary Violence of Frantz Fanon and Malcolm X in Global Black Revolution,” Kelly M. Nims argues that global Black freedoms must confront the violent histories in the making of the United States and its colonial allies. Her detailed assessment explains how Malcolm’s and Fanon’s turns toward violence are grounded in the shared legacies of the American Revolution and global imperialism. She argues that this violence is cathartic; it offers pleasure and empowerment for Black persons ultimately unbound by national borders.

In the final section, Phillip Brian Harper’s “Meanwhile, Back on the Homefront” illuminates an alternative 1960s African American cultural domain within which relatively private modes of communal self-care at once counterbalanced, complemented, and underwrote the public engagement that might otherwise seem to constitute the totality of Black cultural activity during the period. Harper’s chapter offers a fresh reading of Vincent O. Carter’s posthumously published 1960s novel, Such Sweet Thunder (2003), that, in its time, did not seem to “protest enough.” He posits the novel as indicative of a shadow realm, whose very obscurity perpetuates and questions the predominance of protest as the definitive impression of the era.

Cheryl Higashida’s “Radio Free Dixie, Black Arts Radio, and African American Women’s Activism” makes visible the often overlooked politics and activisms of women of color. Her chapter describes how exiled African American revolutionaries Robert and Mabel Williams’ weekly English language radio program, broadcast from Havana, Cuba between 1962 and 1966, became a key vehicle of political revolution and youth culture across the globe. She argues that Radio Free Dixie contributes signally to transnational and hemispheric histories of civil rights and Black Power as a vehicle for forging connections with Fidel Castro, Kwame Nkrumah, and Mao Zedong, and for inspiring the Deacons for Defense and Justice, the Revolutionary Action Movement, and the Black Panther Party. The central claim of her chapter is that the medium as well as content of Radio Free Dixie shaped as well as transmitted key elements of Black culture in transition in the 1960s: a shift from Cold War liberalism to race radicalism, and from a focus on domestic rights to human rights and internationalism.

Indeed, 1960s Black literature and culture inspire personal investment in public and political change. These diverse communities of Black people and their allies across race and nation felt outrage toward systems that create hierarchies of personhood; and, together, they imagined solutions that could change not only the social and political landscapes of the United States, but also the world. In this way, the kinds of collaborations, coalitions, and cultural transitions emerging in this decade would become important models for the social justice movements that defined the activisms of the 1970s and beyond.