Gayle, Addison-The Black Aesthetic.-Doubleday (1971)

The
Black Aesthetic
The
Black Aesthetic
edited by
ADDISON GAYLE, JR.
D O U BLED AY & COMPANY, INC.

G A RD EN CITY, NEW YORK 19 71
Library of Congiess Catalog Card Number 71-123692
Copyright 1971 by Addison Gayle, Jr,
All Rights Reserved
Printed in the United States of America
First Edition
IN M EM O R IAM ; FOR M Y FATH ER
Le# the martial songs be written, let the dirges disappear.
Let a race of men now rise and take control^
Margaret Walker
Thanks are due to the following for permission to include copy
righted selections:
for his Blacloiess Can: A Quest for Aesthetics/

JA M E S A. EM ANUEL
Copyright 19 71 by James A. Emanuel.
SARAH WEBSTER FABio for her Tripping with Black Writing, Copy
right 19 71 by Sarah Webster Fabio.
HOYT w . FULLER for his Towords a Black Aesthetic, from The
Critic, Copyright 1968 by Thomas More Association, and
The New Black Literature: Protest or Affirmation, Copyright
1970 by Hoyt W. Fuller.
Negro Digest for The Black Writer and His Role by Carolyn F.
Gerald. Copyright 1969 by Negro Digest.
HAROLD OBER ASSOCIATES for The Negro Artist and the Racial Moun
tain by Langston Hughes. Copyright 1926 by Langston
Hughes.
LEROi JONES and the Sterling Lord Agency for his The Changing
Same (R&B and New Black Music) from Black Music by LeRoi
Jones. Copyright 1968 by LeRoi Jones.
RON KARENGA and Block World for his Black Cultural Nationalism,
Copyright January 1968 by Negro Digest.
W ILLIA^ KEORAPETSE KGOSiTSiLE and NegTO Digest for his Paths to
the Future, Copyright September 1968 by Negro Digest.
INTERNATIONAL FAMOUS AGENCY, INC., for The Black Writer Vis--
Vis His Country by John Oliver Killens, Copyright 1965 by
John Oliver KiUens.
for his Toward a Definition: Black Poetry of the Sixties
DON L . L E E
(After LeRoi Jones). Copyright 1971 by Don L. Lee.
JU LIAN M AYFIELD for his "You Touch My Black Aesthetic and Ill
Touch Yours, Copyright 1971 by Julian Mayfield.
ADAM DAVID MILLER for his Some Observations on a Black Aesthetic,
Copyright 1970 by Adam David Miller.
RONALD MILNER and NcgfO Digest for his Black TheaterGo Homel
Copyright April 1968 by Negro Digest.
LOFTEN MITCHELL for his I Work Here to Please You. Copyright

1971 by Loften Mitchell.
The Drama Review and larry neal for his The Black Arts Move
ment from TDR, volume 12, Number 4 (T40), Summer, 1968,
Copyright 1968 by TDR, and to Larry Neal for Some Re
flections on the Black Aesthetic, Copyright 1970 by Larry
Neal.
JOHN o'neal for his Black Arts: Notebook, Copyright 1971 by
John O'Neal.
DUDLEY RANDALL for his The Black Aesthetic in the Thirties, For
ties, and Fifties, Copyright 19 71 by Dudley Randall.
foi his Can A Metronome Know The Thunder Or
isiiM A EL REED
Summon A God? Copyright 1970 by Ishmael Reed from
iQ Necromancers from Now (Doubleday, 1970).
CLAYTON RILEY for his On Black Theater. Copyright 19 71 by

Clayton Riley.
Negro Digest for Reflections on the Evolution of Post-War Jazz by
Leslie B. Rout, Jr., Copyright 1969 by Negro Digest.
JIM M Y STEWARTfor his Introduction to Black Aesthetics in Music,"
Copyright 1970 by Jimmy Stewart.
DARWIN T. TURNER for his Afro-American Literary Critics; an In
troduction, Copyright 1971 by Darwin T. Turner.
ORTIZ M. WALTON for his A Comparative Analysis of the African and
tlie Western Aesthetics, Copyright 1971 by Ortiz M. Walton.
RON WELLRURN foi his The Black Aesthetic Imperative, Copyright
1970 by Ron Wellbum.
PAUL R. REYNOLDS, INC.,for Blueprint for Negro Writing by Rich
ard Wright, Copyright 1937 by New Challenge.
CONTENTS
Introduction XV
I THEORY
Introduction: Towards a Black Aesthetic 3

Hoyt W. Fuller
Some Reflections on the Black Aesthetic 13

Larry Neal
Negro Youth Speaks 17

Alain Locke
You Touch M y Black Aesthetic and 111 Touch Yours 24

Julian Mayfield
Black Cultural Nationalism 32

Hon Karenga
Cultural Strangulation: Black Literature and

the White Aesthetic 39
Addison Gayle, Jr.
XU Contents
Black Arts: Notebook 47
John O'Neal
Afro-American Literary Critics: An Introduction 59

Darwin T. Turner
n M USIC
Introduction to Black Aesthetics in Music 81

Jimmy Stewart
Of the Sorrow Songs 97
W. . B. DuBois
Jazz at Home 110

/. A. Rogers
The Changing Same (R&B and New Black Music) 118

LeRoi Jones
The Black Aesthetic Imperative 132

Ron Wellburn
Reflections on the Evolution of Post-War Jazz 150

Leslie B, Rout, Jr,
A Comparative Analysis of the African

and the Western Aesthetics 16 1
Ortiz M. Walton
POETRY
Introduction: Tlie Negro Artist and the Racial Moimtain 175

Langston Hughes
Tripping \ritli Black Writing 182

Sarah Webster Fabio
Contents
Blackness Can: A Quest for Aesthetics 192
James A. Emanuel
The Black Aesthetic in the Thirties,

Forties, and Fifties 224
D udley Randall
Toward a Definition: Black Poetry of the Sixties

(After LeRoi Jones) 235
Don L. Lee
Paths to the Future 248

W, Keorapetse Kgositsile
IV DRAM A
Introduction: The Negro and

the American Theatre (1927) 263
Alain Locke
The Black Arts Movement 272

Larry Neal
I Work Here to Please You 291

Loften Mitchell
Black TheaterGo Home 306

Ronald Milner
On Black Theater 3 13
Clayton Riley
V FICTION
Introduction: Blueprint for Negro Writing 333

Richard Wright
The New Black Literature: Protest or AfiBrmation 346
Hoyt W. Fuller
nv Contents
The Black Writer and His Role 370
Carolyn F. Gerald
The Black Writer Vis-4-Vis His Country 379
John Oliver Kittens
Some Observations on a Black Aesthetic 397
Adam David M iller
Can A Metronome Know The Thunder Or
Summon A God? 405
Ishmael Reed
The Function of Black Literature at
the Presait Time 407
Addison Gayle, Jr.
Biographies 420
Index 425
INTRODUCTION
A new note, discernible even to the most biased observer, was

sounded in the art of black people during the nineteen fifties
and sixties. *1 will go on judging and elucidating novels and
plays and poetry by Negroes according to what general powers
I possess, writes Richard Gilman, but the kind of Negro writing
I have been talking about, the act of creation of the self m
the face of the seifs historic denial by our society, seems to me
to be at this point beyond my right to intrude.
Some critics, less amenable to conversion than Gilman, would
have us believe that only two elements separate the present-day
black artist from his forerunner. One such element is angerl
. . . Negro writers are demonstrating the responsibility of the
artist to the disciplines and traditions of art and literature . . .
writes Herbert Hill; simple protest and anger are not enough
and rhetoric will not be useful in masking the inadequacies of
literary craftsmanship. The other is black nationalism, which,
according to Robert Bone, for all its militancy is politically
Utopian.
The element of black anger is neither new nor, as Herbert Hill
would have us believe, pass. The black artist in the American
society who creates without interjecting a note of anger is crt-
XVI Introduction
ing not as a black man, but as an American. For anger in
black art is as old as the first utterances by black men on
American soil:
*lf I had-a my way,

rd tear this building down
Great God, then, if I had-a my way
If I had-a my way, little children
If I had-a my way,
rd tear this building down. . .
As old as Frances Ellen Watkins, who made one demand of

her undertaker:
ask no monument, proud and high

To arrest the gaze of the passer-by.
All that my yearning spirit craves
Is bury me not in a land of slaves.**
Nowhere does anger reach more intensive expression than in

DuBois, who strikes a note that has found accord in the breast
of contemporary black artists:
hate them, ohi

I hate them well,
I hate them, Christ!
As I hate hell!
If I were God,
rd sound their knell
This day.'*
Neither is black nationalism a new element in black life or

black art. In 1836, . , some of the delegates [at the National
Negro Convention], writes Philip S. Foner, "were convinced
that Canadian colonization was still the most mgent business at
hand. Odicrs felt that it was necessary to concentrate upon
building a better social order in tlie United States. . . . One
Introduction xvu
group doubted the eiBcacy of associating with any set of white
abolitionists, and advocated restricting the convention to Negro
membership. Another, convinced of the inability to achieve
equahty for Negroes in existing institutions, favored continuing
the establishment of separate schools and churches for the
Negro people." This sentiment reaches dramatic form in the
fiction of Martin Delaney, Blake, or the Huts of America (1859);
Sutton Griggs, Imperium in Imperio (1899); and DuBois, Dark
Princess (1928).
Again, animosity against the inept, sterile critiques of Ameri
can academiciansso prevalent in black critical writings today
is not new. As early as 1900, Pauline Hopldns realized that art
was . . of great value to any people as a preserver of manners
and customsreligious, political, and social. It is a record of
growth and development from generation to generation. No one
will do this for us; we must ourselves develop the men and
women who will faithfully portray the inmost thoughts and
feelings of the Negro with all the fire and romance which lie
dormant in our history. . . ." Twenty-two years later, William
Pickens was more direct: Tt is not simply that the white story
teller will not do full justice to the humanity of the black race;
he cannot William Stanley Braithwaite, an American critic in
every essential, quotes from an article in the Independent.
Magazine (19 2 5): 'The white writer seems to stand baflSed be
fore the enigma, and so he expends all his energies on dialect
and in general on the Negro s minstrel characteristics. . . . We
shall have to look to the Negro himself to go all the way. It is
quite likely that no white man can do it. It is reasonable to
suppose that his white psychology will get in the w a y (Italics
mine)
Nevertheless, there is a discernible element in black art today
that is new, and Hoyt W. Fuller has come closest to pointing
it out: The Negro revolt is as palpable in letters as it is in the
streets." Change revolt to war, and the characteristics that
distinguish the old art from the new are readily apparent. The
serious black artist of today is at war with the American society
xvm Introduction
as few have been throughout American history. Too often, as
Richard Wright noted, the black (artists) . . entered the
court of American public opinion dressed in the knee pants of
servility, curtsying to show that the Negro was not inferior, that
he was human, and that he had a life comparable to other
people. They waged war not against the society but against the
societal laws and mores that barred them from equal member
ship. They were, in the main, anxious to become Americans, to
share in the fruits of the countrys economic system and to
surrender their history and culture to a universal melting pot.
They were men of another era who believed in the American
dream more fervently than their white contemporaries. They
saw the nation as a land of innocence, young enough to hold
out promises of maturing into a nation of freedom, justice, and
equality. The days of innocence have passed. The child has
become the adult, and instead of improving with age, she has
grown increasingly worse. Yesterday America was evil personi
fied in her youth; today she is evil personified in adulthood.
The dimensions of the black artists war against the society
are highly visible. At the core of black art in the past was a
vendetta against the South. The black novel, from William Wells
Brown to Richard Wright, was concerned primarily with south
ern tyranny and injustice. Often the North escaped with no more
than a rap on the knuckles. Northern white people, wrote
James Weldon Johnson in The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured
Man (19 12 ), love the Negro in a sort of abstract way, as a
race; through a sense of justice, charity, and philanthropy, they
will liberally assist in his elevation. . .
With the exception of writers such as Dunbar and Chesnutt,
who viewed the black mans exodus from South to North as an
exchange of one hell for another, black writers spoke of the
North as the new Canaan, of northern whites as a difierent
breed of man from their southern counterparts. Is it any wonder
that black people, falling sway to increasing southern tyranny,
began, in 1917, the exodus that swelled the urban areas of
America in the sixties and seventies?
Introduction XIX
T ve seen them come dark/wondering/wide-eyed/dreaming/

out of Pemi Station . . . writes Langston Hughes, but the
trains are late. The gates open/but there re bars/at each gate.'*
The bars were erected by northern, not southern, whites. Black
people had run away from white terrorism in Savannah in 1904
and Atlanta in 1906, only to experience white terrorism in Ohio in
1904, Illinois in 1908, and New York in 1935. The evenhanded
treatment of blacks North and South made little imprint upon
Negro leaders who, then as now, were more willing to combat
injustices down south than up north.
The task of pointing out northern duplicity was left to the
black artist, and no writer was more effective in this undertaking
than Richard Wright. When Wright placed Bigger Thomas and
Mr. Dalton in a northern setting and pointed up the fact that
Biggers condition resulted from Daltons hypocrisy, he opened
a Pandora's box of problems for white liberals and Negro leaders,
neither of whom could bring themselves to share his vision.
Dalton is a white liberal philanthropist who, although donating
money to Negro uplift organizations," owns the slums in which
Bigger Thomas is forced to live. His control of the young black
man is more despotic than that of the southern plantation owner
over blacks in the South; for him, the weapons of control are
economic, social, and political.
He is more sagacious and dishonest than his southern counter
part; he has discovered a way to Tceep the nigger in his place"
without such aids as signs and restrictive covenants. He has
constructed a cosmology that allows him to pose as a humani
tarian on the one hand, while he sets about defining the black
man's limitations on the other. His most cherished symbol of tlie
black man is Uncle Tom; and he remains enamored of Nigger
Jim, the black everyboy toward whom he feels paternalistic.
Like Theodore Gross, he is able to share with Joel Chandler
Harris . . . the fears, laughter, and anger of the Negro"; and
he is equally convinced with Gross that Harris . . . contributed
the most popular Negro characters to American fictionUncle
XX Introduction
Remus, Balaam, Ananias, and Mingo . . / characters whom
he, too, believes to be representative of the race.
Thomas Nelson Page, Thomas Dixon, and Hinton Helper
might create, for Southerners, the image of the black man as
" . . . a degenerate, inferior, irresponsible, and bestial creature
transformed by the exigency of war from a chattel to be bought
and sold into a possible beast to be feared and guarded/ Dalton,
however, will not accept this image. Such portraits of black men
disturb his humanitarian (read sexual) ideal of the black man.
"In an eflFort to make Hell endurable,* Robert Bone writes of
James Baldwin, "Baldwin attempts to spiritualize his sexual
rebellion. Subjectively, I have no doubt, he is convinced that he
has found God. Not the white God of his black father, but a
darker deity who dwells in the heart of carnal mystery. . . .
The stranger the sex partner, the better the orgasm, for it
violates a stronger taboo. Bones inability to come to grips with
the sexual aspects of Baldwins novels, reveals more about Bone
than it does about Baldwin.
At the least, it reveals a great deal about the Daltons of the
North. In order to protect the Marys of the earth (Daltons
daughter in Native Son), they have defined the black man
in the most negative terms possible. To the northern mind. Nig
ger Jim and Uncle Tom are opposite ends of the same pole;
the young boy and the old man are both eunuchs, paternalistic
wards who, one step removed from the jungle, are capable
of limited, prescribed salvation. The inability of the Daltons to
see the black man as other than an impotent sexual force
accounts for much of the negative criticism by white writers
about black literature; it also accounts for the sexually impotent
black men who people the novels of WiUiam Styron and Nor
man Mailer.
The liberal ideologyboth social and literaryof the northern
Daltons has become the primary target of the Afro-American
writer and critic. In the novels of John A. Williams, Sam Green
lee, Cecil Brown, and Islunael Reed, the criticism of Don L. Lee,
Ron Wellbuni, LeRoi Jones, and Hoyt Fuller, to name but a
Introduction XXI
few, the liberal shibboleths are called into question. The Daltons
are brought before the bar of black public opinion and revealed
for the modern-day plantation owners they are.
There is another, more important aspect to this war. The
black artist of the past worked with the white public in mind.
The guidelines by which he measured his production was its
acceptance or rejection by white people. To be damned by a
white critic and disavowed by a white public was reason enough
to damn the artist in the eyes of his own people. The invisible
censor, white power, hovered over him in the sanctuary of his
private roomwhether at the piano or the typewriterand, like
his black brothers, he debated about what he could say to the
world without bringing censure upon himself. The mannerisms
he had used to survive in the society outside, he now brought
to his art; and, to paraphrase Richard Wright, he was forced
to figure out how to sound each note and how to write down
each word.
The result was usually an artistic creation filled with half-
truths. His works were always seasoned with the proper amount
of angeran anger that dared not reach the explosive level of
calling for total demolition of the American societyand con
descension; condescension that meant he would assure his audi
ence, at some point in the production, that he believed in the
principles of Americanism. To return to Richard Wright, he was
not . . ever expected to speak honestly about the problem.
[He had to] wrap it up in myth, legend, morality, folklore,
niceties, and plain lies."
Speaking honestly is a fundamental principle of todays black
artist. He has given up the futile practice of speaking to whites,
and has begun to speak to his brothers. Ofttimes, as in essays
in this anthology, he points up the wide disparity between the
pronouncements of liberal intellectuals and their actions. Yet
his purpose is not to convert the liberals (one does not waste
energy on the likes of Selden Rodman, Irving Howe, Theodore
Gross, Louis Simpson, Herbert Hill, or Robert Bone), but in
stead to point out to black people the true extent of the control
xxu Introduction
exercised upon them by the American society, in the hope that
a process of de-Americanization will occur in every black com
munity in the nation.
The problem of the de-Americanization of black people lies
at the heart of the Black Aesthetic. After the Egyptian and
Indian, the Greek and Roman, the Teuton and Mongolian, wrote
DuBois in 1903, the Negro is a sort of seventh son, bom vrith
a veil, and gifted with second sight in this American world
a world which yields him no true self-consciousness, but only
lets him see himself through the revelation of the other world.
It is a peculiar sensation, this double consciousness, this sense
of always looking at one's self through the eyes of others, of
measuring ones soul by the tape of a world that looks on in
amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his twonessan
American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled
strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged
strength alone keeps it from being tom asunder.
In 1961 the old master resolved die psychic tension in his own
breast by leaving the country that had rewarded his endeavors
with scorn and oppression. His denunciations of America and
his exodus back to the land of his forefadiers provide an ap
propriate symbol of the black man who de-Americanized himself.
His act proclaimed to black men the world over that the
price for becoming an American was too high. It meant, at
the least, to desert ones heritage and culture; at the most, to
become part of all . . . that has been instrumental in wanton
destmction of life, degradation of dignity, and contempt for the
human spirit. To be an American is to be opposed to human
kind, against the dignity of the individual, and against the striv
ing in man for compassion and tenderness: to be an American
is to lose ones humanity.
What else is one to make of M y Lai, Vietnam? A black
soldier has been charged with joining his white compatriots in
the murder of innocent Vietnamese women and children. How
far has the Americanization of black men progressed when a
soutliern black man stands beside white men and shoots down.
Introduction XXlll
not the enemies of his people, but the niggers of American

construction?
To understand this incident and what must be done to correct
it is to understand the Black Aesthetic. A critical methodology
has no relevance to the black community unless it aids men in
becoming better than they are. Such an element has been sorely
lacking in the critical canons handed down from the academies
by the Aristotelian Critics, the Practical Critics, the Formalistic
Critics, and the New Critics. Each has this in common: it
aims to evaluate the work of art in terms of its beauty and not
in terms of the transformation from ugliness to beauty that the
work of art demands from its audience.
The question for the black critic today is not how beautiful
is a melody, a play, a poem, or a novel, but how much more
beautiful has the poem, melody, play, or novel made the life
of a single black man? How far has the work gone in transform
ing an American Negro into an African-American or black man?
The Black Aesthetic, then, as conceived by this writer, is a
correctivea means of helping black people out of the polluted
mainstream of Americanism, and oflFering logical, reasoned argu
ments as to why he should not desire to join the ranks of a
Norman Mailer or a William Styron. To be an American writer
is to be an American, and, for black people, there should no
longer be honor attached to either position.
To paraphrase Saimders Redding, I have been enclothed with
no authority to speak for others. Therefore, it is not my intention,
in this introduction, to speak for the contributors to this anthol
ogy. Few of them may share my views; a great many may find
them reprehensible. These are independent artists who demand
the right to think for themselves and who, rightfully so, will
resist the attempt by anyoneblack or whiteto articulate posi
tions in their names.
Each has his own idea of the Black Aesthetic, of the function
of the black artist in the American society and of the necessity
for new and difFerent critical approaches to the artistic endeavors
of black artists. Few, I believe, would argue with my assertion
XXIV Introduction
that the black artist, due to his historical position in America
at the present time, is engaged in a war with this nation that
will determine the future of black art. Likewise, there are few
among themand here again this is only conjecturewho would
disagree with the idea that unique experiences produce unique
cultural artifacts, and that art is a product of such cultural
experiences. To push this thesis to its logical conclusion, unique
art derived from unique cultural experiences mandates unique
critical tools for evaluation. Further than this, agreement need
not gol
One final note: Less than a decade ago, anthologies on black
writing were edited almost exclusively by whites. Today, there
is a noticeable diflFerence: the white academician edits an an-
thology and calls upon a black man to write the introduction.
The editor then declares that his anthology Vepresents the best
of black literature" or that he has chosen those works which
rank with the best in American artistic production.
This editor makes no such farcical and nonsensical claims.
Represented in this anthology is not the best critical thought on
the subject of the Black Aesthetic, but critical thought that is
among the best. This anthology is not definitive and does not
claim to be. The first of its kind to treat of this subject, it is
meant as an incentive to young black critics to scan the pages of
The Black World [Negro Digest], Liberator Magazine, Soul-
book, Journal of Negro Poetry, Amistad, Umbra, and coimtless
other black magazines, and anthologize the thousands of essays
tiiat no single anthology could possibly cover.
Many writers whose claim to recognition is equal to that of
the other contributors and the editor have been left out of this
anthology. This could not be helped. Perhaps it can be recti
fied. Instead of being content to write introduction for white
editors, perhaps our serious black artists will edit anthologies
themselves. If this is done, the present renaissance in black
letters will escape the fate of its predecessor in the nineteen
twenties, and endure. Then and only tlien will the revolution
in black letters gain viability and continue right on!
I Theory
TOWARDS A BLAC K A ESTH ETIC
Hoyt W. Fuller
The black revolt is as palpable in letters as it is in the streets,

and if it has not yet made its impact upon the Literary Establish
ment, then the nature of the revolt itself is the reason. For the
break between the revolutionary black writers and the literary
mainstream is, perhaps of necessity, cleaner and more decisive
than the noisier and more dramatic break between the black
militants and traditional political and institutional structures.
Just as black intellectuals have rejected the NAACP, on the one
hand, and the two major political parties, on the other, and
gone off in search of new and more effective means and
methods of seizing power, so revolutionary black writers have
turned their backs on the old certainties and struck out in
new, if imcharted, directions. They have begun the journey
toward a black aesthetic.
The road to that placeif it exists at aUcannot, by definition,
lead through the literary mainstreams. Which is to say that few
critics will look upon the new movement with sympathy, even
if a number of publishers might be daring enough to publish the
works which its adherents produce. The movement will be re
viled as racism-in-reverse, and its writers labeled racists,
opprobrious terms which are flung lightly at black people now
4 The Black Aesthetic
that the piper is being paid for all the long years of rejection
and abuse which black people have experienced at the hands
of white peoplewith few voices raised in objection.
Is this too harsh and sweeping a generalization? White people
might think so; black people will not; which is a way of stating
the problem and the prospect before us. Black people are being
called "violent these days, as if violence is a new invention out
of the ghetto. But violence against the black minority is in-built
in the established American society. There is no need for the
white majority to take to the streets to clobber the blacks, al
though there certainly is enough of that; brutalization is in
herent in all the customs and practices which bestow privileges
on the whites and relegate the blacks to the status of pariahs.
These are old and well-worn truths which hardly need repeat
ing. What is new is the reaction to them. Rapidly now, black
people are turning onto that uncertain road, and they are doing
so with the approval of all kinds of fellow-travellers who
ordinarily are considered safe for the other side. In the fall
1967 issue of the Journal of the National Medical Association
(all-black), for example. Dr. Charles A. De Leon of Cleveland,
Ohio, explained why the new turn is necessary: If young
Negroes are to avoid the unnecessary burden of self-hatred
(via identification with the aggressor) they will have to develop
a keen faculty for identifying, fractionating out, and rejecting
the absurdities of the conscious as well as the unconscious white
racism in American society from what is worthwhile in it.
Coascious and unconscious white racism is everywhere, in
fecting all the vital areas of national life. But the revolutionary
black writer, like the new breed of mihtant activist, has decided
that white racism will no longer exercise its insidious control over
his work. If the tag of racist is one the white critic will hang
on liim in dismissing him, then he is more tlian willing to bear
that. He is not going to separate literature from hfe.
But just how widespread is white racismconscious and im-
consciousin tlie realm of letters? In a review of Gwendolyn
Brooks s Selected Poems in the old New York Herald Tribune
Towards a Black Aesthetic 5
Book Week back in October 1963, poet Louis Simpson began by
writing that the Chicago poets book of poems contains some
lively pictures of Negro hfe, an ambiguous enough opener
which did not necessarily suggest a literary putdown. But Mr.
Simpson s next sentence dispelled all ambiguity. I am not sure
it is possible for a Negro to write well without making us aware
he is a Negro,' he wrote. On the other hand, if being a Negro is
the only subject, the writing is not important."
All the history of American race relations is contained in that
appraisal, despite its disingenuousness. It is civilized, urbane,
gentle and elegant; and it is arrogant, condescending, presump
tuous and racist. To most white readers, no doubt, Mr. Simpson's
words, if not his assessment, seemed eminently sensible; but it is
all but impossible to imagine a black reader not reacting to the
words with unalloyed fury.
Both black and white readers are hkely to go to the core of
Mr. Simpson's statement, which is: if being a Negro is the only
subject, the writing is not important. The white reader will, in
all probability, find that clear and acceptable enough; indeed, he
is used to hearing it. Certainly, the argument might proceed,
to be important, writing must have universal values, universal
implications; it cannot deal exclusively with Negro problems.
The plain but unstated assumption being, of course, that there
are no universal values and no universal implications in Negro
life.
Mr. Simpson is a greatly respected American poet, a winner
of the Puhtzer Prize for poetry, as is Miss Brooks, and it wdU be
considered the depth of irresponsibility to accuse him of the
viciousness of racism. He is probably the gendest and most com
passionate of men. Miss Brooks, who met Mr. Simpson at the
University of California not many months after the review was
published, reported that the gendeman was most kind and cour
teous to her. There is no reason to doubt it. The essential point
here is not the presence of overt hostility; it is the absence of
clarity of vision. The glass through which black life is viewed
by white Americans is, inescapably (it is a matter of extent),
befogged by the hot breath of history. True objectivity where
race is concerned is as rare as a necklace of Hope diamonds.
In October 1967, a yoimg man named Jonathan Kozol pub
lished a book called Death at an Early Age, which is an account
of his experiences as a teacher in a predominantly Negro ele
mentary school in Boston. Mr. Kozol broke with convention
in his approach to teacliing and incurred the displeasure of a
great many people, including the vigilant policeman father of
one of his few white pupils. The issue around which the young
teachers opponents seemed to rally was his use of a Langston
Hughes poem in his classroom. Now the late Langston Hughes
was a favorite target of some of the more aggressive right-wing
pressure groups during his lifetime, but it remained for an
oflBcial of the Boston School Committee to come to the heart of
the argument against the poet. Explaining the opposition to the
poem used by Mr. Kozol, the school oflBcial said that no poem
by any Negro author can be considered permissible if it involves
suflFering.
There is a direct connecting line between the school oflBcials
rejection of Negro poetry which deals with suflFering and Mr.
Simpson s facile dismissal of writing about Negroes only. Negro
life, which is characterized by suflFering imposed by the mainte
nance of white privilege in America, must be denied validity
and banished beyond the pale. The facts of Negro life accuse
wliite people. In order to look at Negro life unflinchingly, the
white viewer either must relegate it to the realm of the sub
human, thereby justifying an attitude of indiflFerence, or else the
white viewer must confront the imputation of guilt against him.
And no man who considers himself humane wishes to admit
complicity in crimes against the human spirit.
There is a myth abroad in American literary criticism that

Negro writing has been favored by a double standiird wliich
judges it less stringendy. The opposite is true. No one will
serioiLsly dispute diat, on occasions, critics have been generous
to Negro writers, for a variety of reasons; but diere is no
evidence that generosity has been the rule. Indeed, why should
it be assumed that literary critics are more sympathetic to blacks
than are other white people? During any year, hundreds of
mediocre volumes of prose and poetry by white writers are
published, little noted, and forgotten. At the same time, the few
creative works by black writers are seized and dissected and,
if not deemed of the liighest literary quality, condemned as still
more examples of the failure of black writers to scale the rare
heights of hterature. And the condemnation is especially strong
for those black works which have not screened their themes of
suffering, redemption and triumph behind frail faades of ob
scurity and conscious universahty,
Central to the problem of the irreconcilable conflict between
the black writer and the white critic is the failure of recognition
of a fundamental and obvious truth of American lifethat the
two races are residents of two separate and naturally antag
onistic worlds. No manner of well-meaning rhetoric about "one
country and "one people, and even about the two races long
joint-occupancy of this troubled land, can obliterate the high,
thick dividing walls which hate and history have erectedand
maintainbetween them. The breaking down of those barriers
might be a goal, worthy or unworthy (depending on view
point), but the reality remains. The world of the black outsider,
however much it approximates and parallels and imitates the
world of the white insider, by its very nature is inheritor and
generator of values and viewpoints which threaten the insiders.
The outsiders world, feeding on its own sources, fecimdates
and vibrates, stamping its progeny with its very special ethos, its
insuperably logical bias.
The black writer, like the black artist generally, has wasted
much time and talent denying a propensity every rule of hu
man dignity demands that he possess, seeking an identity that
can only do violence to his sense of self. Black Americans are,
for all practical purposes, colonized in their native land, and it
can be argued that those who would submit to subjection without
struggle deserve to be enslaved. It is one thing to accept the
guiding principles on which the American republic ostensibly
was founded; it is quite another thing to accept the prevailing
practices which violate those principles.
The rebellion in the streets is the black ghetto^s response to
the vast distance between the nations principles and its prac
tices. But that rebellion has roots which are deeper than most
white people know; it is many-veined, and its blood has been
sent pulsating to the very heart of black hfe. Across this country,
young black men and women have been infected with a fever
of affirmation. They are saying, We are black and beautiful,
and the ghetto is reacting witli a liberating shock of realization
which transcends mere chauvinism. They are rediscovering their
heritage and their history, seeing it with newly fociLsed eyes,
struck with the wonder of that strength which has enabled
them to endure and, in spirit, to defeat the power of prolonged
and calculated oppression. After centuries of being told, in a
million different ways, that they were not beautiful, and that
whiteness of skin, straightness of hair, and aquilineness of fea
tures constituted the only measures of beauty, black people
have revolted. The trend has not yet reached the point of
avalanche, but the future can be clearly seen in the growing
niunber of black people who are snapping off tlie shackles of
imitation and are wearing their skin, their hair, and their features
naturar and with pride. In a poem called Nittygritty, which
is dedicated to poet LeRoi Jones, Joseph Bevans Bush put the
new credo this way:
* . . W e all gonna com e from behind

those
Wigs and start to stop using those
Standards of beauty which can never
Be a frame for our reference; wash
That excess grease out of our hair,
Come out of that bleach bag and get
Into something meaningful to us as
Nonwliite peoplcBLack people . . .
If the poem lacks the resonances of William Shakespeare, that
is intentional. The great bard of Avon" has only limited rele
vance to the revolutionary spirit raging in the ghetto. Which is
not to say that the black revolutionaries reject the universar
statements inherent in Shakespeare s works; what they do re
ject, however, is the literary assumption that the style and
language and the concerns of Shakespeare establish the ap
propriate limits and frame of reference"" for black poetry and
people. This is above and beyond the doctrine of revolution
to which so many of the brighter black intellectuals are com
mitted, that philosophy articulated by the late Frantz Fanon
which holds that, in the time of revolutionary struggle, the
traditional Western liberal ideals are not merely irrelevant but
they must be assiduously opposed. The young writers of the
black ghetto have set out in search of a black aesthetic, a system
of isolating and evaluating the artistic works of black people
which reflect the special character and imperatives of black
experience.
That was the meaning and intent of poet-playwright LeRoi
Jones" aborted Black Arts Theater in Harlem in 1965, and it is
the generative idea behind such later groups and institutions as
Spirit House in Newark, the Black House in San Francisco, the
New School of Afro-American Thought in Washington, D.C.,
the Institute for Black Studies in Los Angeles, Forum "66 in
Detroit, and the Organization of Black American Culture in
Chicago. It is a serious quest, and the black writers themselves
are well aware of the possibility that what they seek is, after
all, beyond codifying. They are fully aware of the dual nature
of their heritage, and of the subtleties and complexities; but they
are even more aware of the terrible reality of their outsideness,
of their political and economic powerlessness, and of the desper
ate racial need for unity. And they have been convinced, over
and over again, by the irrefutable facts of history and by the
cold intransigence of the privileged white majority that the
road to solidarity and strength leads inevitably through reclama
tion and indoctrination of black art and culture.
lO The Black Aesthetic
In Chicago, the Organization of Black American Culture has
moved boldly toward a definition of a black aesthetic. In the
writers* workshop sponsored by the group, the writers are de
liberately striving to invest their work vrith the distinctive styles
and rhythms and colors of the ghetto, with those peculiar
qualities which, for example, characterize the music of a John
Coltrane or a Charlie Parker or a Ray Charles. Aiming toward
the publication of an anthology which will manifest this aes
thetic, they have established criteria by which they measure
tlieir own work and eliminate from consideration those poems,
short stories, plays, essays and sketches which do not adequately
reflect the black experience. What the sponsors of the workshop
most hope for in this delicate and dangerous experiment is the
emergence of new black critics who will be able to articulate
and expound the new aesthetic and eventually set in motion
the long overdue assault against the restrictive assumptions of
the white critics.
It is not that the writers of OBAC have nothing to start with.
That there exists already a mystique of blackness even some
white critics will agree. In the November 1967 issue of Esquire
magazine, for instance, George Frazier, a white writer who is
not in the least sympathetic with the likes of LfCRoi Jones,
nevertheless did a commendable job of identifying elements of
the black mystique. Discussing the Negro's immense style, a
style so seductive that its little wonder that black men are, as
Shakespeare put it in The Two Gentlemen of Verona, pearls
in beauteous ladies* eyes,*** Mr. Frazier singled out the follow
ing examples;
The formal daytime attire (black sack coats and striped
trousers) the Modem Jazz Quartet wore when appearing in
concert; die lazy amble with which Jimmy Brown used to return
to the huddle; the delight the late Big Daddy** Lipscomb took
in making sideline tackles in full view of the crowd and the
way, after crushing a ball carrier to the ground, he would
chivalroiLsly assist liim to his feet; the constant cool of Satchel*
Paige; die cliic of Bobby Short; the incomparable grace of Jolin
Bubblesthings like that are style and they have nothing what
soever to do with ability (although the ability, God wot, is
there, too). It is not that there are no white men with style,
for there is Fred Astaire, for one, and Cary Grant, for another,
but that there are so very, very few of them. Even in the dock,
the black man has an air about himAdam Clayton Powell, so
blithe, so self-possessed, so casual, as contrasted with Tom
Dodd, sanctimonious, whining, an absolute disgrace. What it is
that made Miles Davis and Cassius Clay, Sugar Ray Robinson
and Archie Moore and Ralph Ellison and Sammy Davis, Jr.
seem so special was their style. . . .
And then, of course, there is our speech.
For what nuances, what plays of light and shade, what little
sharpnesses our speech has are almost all of them, out of the
black worldthe talk of Negro musicians and whores and
hoodlums and whatnot. CooP and all the other words in com
mon currency came out of the mouths of Negroes.
We love you madly,' said Duke Ellington, and now the
phrase is almost a clich. But it is a quality of the Negro s style
that he is forever creative, forever more styhsh. There was a
night when, as I stood with Duke EUington outside the Hickory
House, I looked up at the sky and said, 1 hope its a good day
tomorrow. I want to wake up early.'
Any day I wake up,' said Ellington, is a good day.'
And that was style."
Well, yes. . . .
Black critics have the responsibility of approaching the works
of black writers assuming these qualities to be present, and with
the knowledge that white readersand white criticscannot be
expected to recognize and to empathize with the subtleties and
significance of black style and technique. They have the re-
sponsibihty of rebutting the white critics and of putting things in
the proper perspective. Within the past few years, for example,
Chicago's white critics have given the backs of their hands to
worthy works by black playwrights, part of their criticism di
rectly attributable to their ignorance of the intricacies of black
style and black life. Oscar Brown, Jr. s rockingly soulful Kicks
and Company was panned for many of the wrong reasons; and
Douglas Turner Ward s two plays, Day of Absence and Happy
Endingy were tolerated as labored and a bit tasteless. Both
Brown and Ward had dealt satirically with race relations, and
there were not many black people in the audiences who found
themselves in agreement with the critics. It is the w ay things
arebut not the way things will continue to be if the OBAC
writers and those similarly concerned elsewhere in America have
anything to say about it.
SOME REFLECTIONS ON THE BLACK AESTHETIC by LARRY NEAL
This outline below is a rough overview of some categories and elements that
constituted a Black Aesthetic outlook. All of these categories need further
elaboration, so I am working on a larger essay that will tie them all together.
1. RACE MEMORY (Africa, Middle Passage)

Mythology formal manifestation Rhythm as an expression of race
Spirit worship, Samba, Calypso, memory; rhythm as a basic crea
Orishas, ancestors, Batucada, Cha-Cha, tive principle; rhythm as a
African Gods. juba, jgospel songs,. existence, creative force as
Syncretism/ jubilees, work song, vector of existence. Swinging
catholic voodoo, spirituals.
macumba, Holy Ghost, 2. MIDDLE PASSAGE (Diaspora)
Jesus as somebody Race memory: terror, landlessness,
you might know, like .claustrophobia: America is a pri
a personal diety. son . Malcolm X.
River spirits.
3. TRANSMUTATION AND SYNTHESIS

Neo-Mythology formal manifestation Funky Butt, Stomps, Jump Jim Crow,
Shamans: Preachers,. All aspects of Black Buck n Wing, Jigs, Snake, Grind,
poets, blues singers. dance styls in the slow drag, jitterbug, twist, Watusi,
musicians, mackdaddies. New World. Pelvic. fish, swim, boogaloo, etc. Dance to
and politicians. ^ Dress and walk. the after beat. Dance as race memory;
transmitted through the collective
folk consciousness.
NechMythology
Legba, Oshun,
Yemaya, Urzulie,
Soul Momma, Evil
women, Good loving
women, woman as primarily
need/man as doer. Blues
singer as poet and moral
judge; bad man Earth
centered, but directed
cosmologically. Folk poet,
philosopher, priest, priestess,
conjurer, preacher,
teacher, hustler, seer,
soothsayer. . .
BLUES GOD/TONE AS MEANING AND MEMORY
Sound as racial memory, primeval. Life
breath. Word is perceived as energy or
force. Call and response Blues perceived
as an emanation outside of man, but yet
a manifestation of his being/reality.
Same energy source as Gospel, field
holler, but delineated in narrative
song. The African voice transplated.
This God must be the meanest and the-
strongest. He survives and persists
Once perceived as an evil force:
.. and I (Dude Botley) got to think
ing about how many thousand of people
(Buddy) Bolden had made happy and all
of them women who used to idolize him
Where are they now? I say to myself.
Then I hear Boldens cornet I look
through the crack and there he is, re
laxed back in the chair, blowing that
silver cornet softly, just above a
whisper, and I see hes got his hat
over the bell of the horn. I put my
ear close to the keyhole. I thought I
heard Bolden play the blues before,
and play hymns at funerals, but what
he is playing now is real strange and
HISTORY AS UNITARY MYTH
Shango, Nat Turner, Denmark,
Vesey, Brer* Rabbit, High John
the Conqueror, Jack Johnson, Ray
Robinson, Signifying Monkey,
Malcolm X, Adam Clayton Powell,
Garvey, DuBois, Hon.
Elijah Muhammed, Martin L.
King, Rap Brown, Rev. Franklin,
Charlie Parker, Duke Ellington
BLUES GOD/TONE AS MEANING AND MEMORY (contd)
I listen carefully, because hes playing
something that, for a while sounds like
the blues, then like a hymn. I cannot
make out the tune, but after awhile I
catch on. He is mixing up the blues
with the hymns. He plays the blues real
sad and the hymn sadder than the blues
and then the blues sadder than the hymn.
That is the first time that I had ever
heard hymns and blues cooked up together,
A strange cold feeling comes over me; I
get sort of scared because I know the
Lord dont like that mixing the Devils
music with his music., , , It sounded like
a battle between the Good Lord and the
Devil. Something tells me to listen and
see who wins. If Bolden stops on the
hymn, the Good Lord wins; if he stops
on the blues, the Devil wins.
BLACK ARTS MOVEMENT/BLACK ART AESTHETIC

Feeling/contemporary and historical.
Energy intensifies. Non-matrixed art
forms: Coltrane, Ornette, Sun Ra.
More concerned with the vibrations of
the Word, than with the Word itself.
Like signifying.
HISTORY AS UNITARY MYTH (contd)
James Brown, Bessie Smith
Moms Mabley, King Pleasure,
Raefilt Johnson. Son House.
Louis Armstrong.. . .
Voodoo again/Ishmael Reeds
Hoodoo. Islamic suffis.
Third Worlds destiny.
The East as the Womb
and the Tomb. Fanons
Third World, Bandung
Humanism. Revolution Is the
operational mythology.
Symbol change. Expanded
metaphors as in the poetry
of Curtis Lyle and Stanley
Crouch; or L. Barretts Song
For M u M u . . . Nigger styles and
masks such as Rinehart in the
Invisible Man, Style as in
James P. Johnson description
of stride pianists in the twenties.
Bobby Blue Bland wearing a dashikt
and a process. All of this links
up with the transmutation of
African styles and the revitalization
of these styles on the West.
BLACK ARTS MOVEMENT/BLACK ART AESTHETIC (contd)
The Black Nation as Poem. Ethical stance
as aesthetic. The synthesis of the above
presented outline. The integral unity of
culture, politics, and art. Spiritual.
Despises alienation in the European sense.
Art consciously committed; art addressed
primarily to Black and Third World people.
Black attempts to realize the world as
art by making Man more compatible to it
and it more compatible to Man. Styles
itself from nigger rhythms to cosmic
sensibility. Black love, conscious and
aiilrmed. Change.
NEGRO YOUTH SPEAKS
Alain Locke
The Younger Generation conies, bringing its gifts. They are

the first fruits of the Negro Renaissance. Youth speaks, and
the voice of the New Negro is heard. What stirs inarticulately
in the masses is already vocal upon the lips of the talented
few, and the future listens, however the present may shut
its ears. Here we have Negro youth, with arresting visions and
vibrant prophecies; forecasting in the mirror of art what we must
see and recognize in the streets of reality tomorrow, foretelling
in new notes and accents the maturing speech of full racial
utterance.
Primarily, of course, it is youth that speaks in the voice of
Negro youth, but the overtones are distinctive; Negro youth
speaks out of an unique experience and with a particular repre
sentativeness. All classes of a people under social pressure are
permeated with a common experience; they are emotionally
welded as others cannot be. With them, even ordinary living
has epic depth and lyric intensity, and this, their material
handicap, is their spiritual advantage. So, in a day when art
has run to classes, cliques and coteries, and life lacks more and
more a vital common background, the Negro artist, out of the
i8 The Black Aesthetic
depths of his group and personal experience, has to his hand
almost the conditions of a classical art.
Negro genius to-day relies upon the race-gift as a vast
spiritual endowment from which our best developments have
come and must come. Racial expression as a conscious motive,
it is true, is fading out of our latest art, but just as surely the
age of truer, finer group expression is coming infor race
expression does not need to be deliberate to be vital. Indeed
at its best it never is. This was the case with our instinctive
and quite matchless folk-art, and begins to be the same again
as we approach cultural maturity in a phase of art that promises
now to be fully representative. The interval between has been
an awkward age, where from the anxious desire and attempt
to be representative much that was really unrepresentative has
come; we have lately had an art that was stiltedly self-con
scious, and racially rhetorical rather than racially expressive.
Our poets have now stopped speaking for the Negrothey
speak as Negroes. Where formerly they spoke to others and
tried to interpret, they now speak to their own and try to ex
press. They have stopped posing, being nearer the attainment
of poise.
The yoimgcr generation has thus achieved an objective atti
tude toward life. Race for them is but an idiom of experience,
a sort of added enriching adventure and discipline, giving
subtler overtones to life, making it more beautiful and interest
ing, even if more poignantly so. So experienced, it affords
a deepening rather than a narrowing of social vision. The
artistic problem of the Young Negro has not been so much
tliat of acquiring the outer mastery of form and technique
as that of achieving an inner mastery of mood and spirit.
That accomplished, there has come the happy release from
self-consciousness, rhetoric, bombast, and the hampering habit
of setting artistic values with primary regard for moral effect
all those pathetic over-compensations of a group inferiority
complex which our social dilemmas inflicted upon several un-
happy generations. Our poets no longer have tlie hard choice
Negro Youth Speaks ig
between an over-assertive and an appealing attitude. By the
same eflFort they have shaken themselves free from the min
strel tradition and the fowling-nets of dialect, and through
acquiring ease and simplicity in serious expression, have carried
the folk-gift to the altitudes of art. There they seek and find
art s intrinsic values and satisfactionsand if America were deaf,
they would still sing.
But America listensperhaps in curiosity at first; later, we
may be siu*e, in understanding. Buta moment of patience.
The generation now in the artistic vanguard inherits the fine
and dearly bought achievement of another generation of cre
ative workmen who have been pioneers and path-breakers in
the cultural development and recognition of the Negro in the
arts. Though still in their prime, as veterans of a hard strug
gle, they must have the praise and gratitude that is due them.
We have had, in fiction, Chesbiutt and Burghardt DuBois;
in drama DuBois again and Angelina Grimke; in poetry Dim-
bar, James Weldon Johnson, Fenton and Charles Bertram John
son, Everett Hawkins, Lucien Watkins, Cotter, Jameson; and
in another file of poets. Miss Crimke, Anne Spencer, and
Georgia Douglas Johnson; in criticism and belles lettres, Braith-
waite and Dr. DuBois; in painting. Tanner and Scott; in sculp
ture, Meta Warrick and May Jackson; in acting, Gilpin and
Robeson; in music, Burleigh. Nor must the fine collaboration of
white American artists be omitted; the work of Ridgely Tor
rence and Eugene ONeill in drama, of Stribling, and Shands
and Clement Wood in fiction, all of which has helped in the
bringing of the materials of Negro life out of the shambles of
conventional polemics, cheap romance and jomnalLsm into the
domain of pure and unbiassed art. Then, rich in this legacy, but
richer still, I think, in their own endowment of talent, comes
the youngest generation of our Afro-American culture: in music
Diton, Dett, Grant StiU, and Roland Hayes; in fiction, Jessie
Fauset, Walter White, Claude McKay (a forthcoming book);
in drama, Willis Richardson; in the field of the short story, Jean
Toomer, Eric Walrond, Rudolph Fisher; and finally a vivid gal
axy of young Negro poets, McKay, Jean Toomer, Langston
Hughes and Countee Cullen.
TTiese constitute a new generation not because of years only,
but because of a new aesthetic and a new philosophy of life.
They have all swung above the horizon in the last three years,
and we can say without disparagement of the past that in that
short space of time they have gained collectively from pub
lishers, editors, critics and the general public more recognition
than has ever before come to Negro creative artists in an entire
working lifetime. First novels of unquestioned distinction, first
acceptances by premier journals whose pages are the ambition
of veteran craftsmen, international acclaim, the conquest for
us of new provinces of art, the development for the first time
among us of literary coteries and channels for the contact
of creative minds, and most important of all, a spiritual quick
ening and racial leavening such as no generation has yet felt and
known. It has been their achievement also to bring the artistic
advance of the Negro sharply into stepping alignment with
contemporary artistic thought, mood and style. They are thor
oughly modem, some of them ultra-modem, and Negro thoughts
now wear the uniform of the age.
Through their work, these younger artists have declared for
a lusty vigorous realism; the same that is molding contemporary
American letters, but their achievement of it, as it has been
doubly diflBcult, is doubly significant. The elder generation
of Negro writers expressed itself in cautious moralism and
guarded idealizations; the trammels of Puritanism were on its
mind because the repressions of prejudice were heavy on its
heart. They felt art must fight social battles and compensate
social wrongs; Be representative : put the better foot foremost,
was the underlying mood. Just as with tlie Irish Renaissance,
there were the riots and controversies over Synges folk plays
and other frank realisms of the younger school, so we are
having and will have turbulent discussion and dissatisfaction
with the stories, plays and poems of the yoimger Negro group.
But writers like Rudolph Fisher, Zora Hiurston, Jean Toomer,
Eric Walrond, Willis Richardson, and Langston Hughes take
their material objectively with detached artistic vision; they
have no thought of their racy folk types as typical of anything
but themselves or of their being taken or mistaken as racixdly
representative. Contrast Ellen Glasgows Barren Ground with
Thomas Nelson Page, or Waldo Franks Holidaij with anything
of Mr. Cable s, and you will get the true clue for this contrast
between the younger and the elder generations of Negro htera-
ture; Realism in crossing the Potomac had also to cross the
color line. Indeed it was the other way round; the pioneer
writing of the fiction of the New South was the reahstic fiction
of Negro life. Fortunately just at the time the younger genera
tion was precipitating out, Batouala came to attention through
the award of the Prix Concourt to Ren Maran, its author, in
1923. Though Batouala is not of the American Negro either
in substance or authorship, the influence of its daring realism
and Latin frankness was educative and emancipating. And so
not merely for modernity of style, but for vital originality of
substance, the young Negro writers dig deep into the racy
peasant undersoil of the race life. Jean Toomer writes:
Georgia opened me. And it may well be said that I re

ceived my initial impulse to an individual art from my experience
there. For no otlier section of the country has so stirred me.
There one finds soil, soil in the sense the Russians know it,
the soil every art and literature that is to live must be im
bedded in.
The newer motive, then, in being racial is to be so purely for

the sake of art. Nowhere is this more apparent, or more
justified than in the increasing tendency to evolve from the
racial substance something technically distinctive, something that
as an idiom of style may become a contribution to the gen
eral resources of art. In flavor of language, flow of phrase,
accent of rhythm in prose, verse and music, color and tone
of imagery, idiom and timbre of emotion and symbolism, it is
the ambition and promise of Negro artists to make a distinctive
contribution. Much of this is already discernible. The inter
esting experiment of Weldon Johnson in Creation: A Negro
Sermon^ to transpose the dialect motive and carry it through
in the idioms of imagery rather than the broken phonetics of
speech, is a case in point In music such transfusions of racial
idioms witli the modernistic styles of expression has already
taken place; in the other arts it is just as possible and likely.
Thus under the sophistications of modem style may be de
tected in almost all our artists a fresh distinctive note that the
majority of them admit as the instinctive gift of the folk-spirit
Toomer gives a musical folk-lilt and a glamorous sensuous ecstasy
to the style of the American prose modernists. McKay adds
Aesop and peasant irony to the social novel and folk clarity
and navet to lyric thought. Fisher adds the terseness and
emotional raciness of Uncle Remus to the art of Maupassant
and O. Henry. Walrond has a tropical color and almost volcanic
gush that are unique even after more than a generation of
exotic word painting by master artists. Langston Hughes has
a distinctive fervency of color and rhytlim, and a Biblical
simplicity of speech that is colloquial in derivation, but full
of artistry. Roland Hayes carries the rhapsodic gush and depth
of folk-song to the old masters. Countee Cullen blends the
simple witli the sophisticated so originally as almost to put the
vineyards themselves into his crystal goblets.
There is in all the marriage of a fresh emotional endowment
with the finest niceties of art. Here for the enrichment of
American and modem art, among our contemporaries, in a peo
ple who still have the ancient key, are some of the tilings
we thought culture had forever lost. Art cannot disdain the
gift of a natural irony, of a transfiguring imagination, of rhap
sodic Biblical speech, of dynamic musical swing, of cosmic
emotion such as only the gifted pagans knew, of a rehmi to
nature, not by way of the foreed and worn formula of Roman
ticism, but through the closeness of an imagination that has
never broken kinship with nature. Art must accept such gifts,
and revaluate the giver.
Not all the new art is in the field of pure art values. There
is poetry of sturdy social protest, and fiction of cahn, dispas
sionate social analysis. But reason and realism have cured us
of sentimentality: instead of the wail and appeal, there is chal
lenge and indictment. Satire is just beneath the surface of oiu:
latest prose, and tonic irony has come into our poetic wells.
These are good medicines for the common mind, for us they
are necessary antidotes against social poison. Their influence
means that at least for us the worst symptoms of the social
distemper are passing. And so the social promise of our recent
art is as great as the artistic. It has brought with it, first of all,
that wholesome, welcome virtue of finding beauty in oneself;
the yoimger generation can no longer be twitted as cultural
nondescripts or accused of being out of love with their own
nativity. They have instinctive love and pride of race, and,
spiritually compensating for the present lacks of America, ardent
respect and love for Africa, the motherland. Gradually too, under
some spiritualizing reaction, the brands and wounds of social
persecution are becoming the proud stigmata of spiritual im
munity and moral victory. Already enough progress has been
made in this direction so that it is no longer true that the
Negro mind is too engulfed in its own social dilemmas for
control of the necessary perspective of art, or too depressed
to attain the full horizons of self and social criticism. Indeed,
by the evidence and promise of the cultured few, we are at
last spiritually free, and ofiFer through art an emancipating vision
to America.
YOU TOUCH MY B L A C K A EST H ET IC
AND I X L TOUCH YOURS
Julian Mayfield
In her poem Saul, Barbara Simmons says: ^Tell me about soul/

Do I have it? Have you got it? Do you have it? Can you touch
mine?/IU touch yours. The sister is uncertain, and well she
might be, for soul means so many things to so many people
who are all so certain that they know what they are talking
about that they may all be right, although their definitions
contradict each other.
I feel much the same way about the term Black Aesthetic.
At the risk of sounding superstitious, I know deep down in my
guts what it means, but so does every other writer who is
grappling with this question, and some of them soimd as silly
to me as I must sound to them. This is not a cop-out, for like
many another of our new terms. Black Aesthetic is easier to
define in the negative. I know quite definitely what Black
Estlietic is not.
It is not, as many people seem to think, a way of talking,
a secret language invented by black people to confoimd tlie
wliites, or, as more-serious advocates of tliis theory would put
it, a special language dredged up out of the black experience.
I say it is not this, because anyone with projx?r application can
learn it, but most blacks living tlie black experience do not
You Touch My Black Aesthetic and Til Touch Yours 25
speak it and can not understand it. The hippest guy I know
is a young French Jew who insists that he is black. I met him
in a barroom on the island of Ibiza, off the coast of Barcelona,
a few years ago. He heard the proprieter call my name, and
he turned a beaming smile on me, slapped my hand real hip
fashion, and said: Hey, Dad, I know who you are. Every
other word out of his mouth was motherfucker, cat, "man,
brother, sister, the whole bag. Raoul, as I shall call him, is
a brilliant young man, gifted in several languages, and, I think,
a sincere revolutionist. He seems to have read everything
about black people that was ever written in French, English,
Arabic, and Spanish, and, moreover, has a profounder grasp of
what he has read than most blacks I know. Black musicians
passing through Spain always greeted him hke a brother, but
as soon as I opened my mouth they put me down as a stone
square. Once, when he was flying high after a lot of hashish
and I thought I might catch him off guard, I asked him why
he insisted on being black when anyone could see he was
white. (It had nothing to do with the color of his skin or the
texture of his tightly curled but definitely white hairAdam
Powell looks whiter but, damn it, for all his problems, he is
black. There was just that indefinable something that Raoul
didnt have.) He wove me a long, intricate tale of his back
grounda French or Arabic father and a black mother, or
something like thatand so brilliantly was the tale conceived
and executed that finally I gave up and admitted him to the race.
For all I know, his story might have been true. If he wanted to
be black that bad, then to hell with it.
I no longer beheve that the gift of music has much to do

with the Black Aesthetic either. I mean, it has something to do
with it, but it is not a certain indicator. Yes, I know we blacks
created the only original music the nation has, and yes, I know
that Mahalia and Aretha and Dionne Warwick are the greatest,
and so were Redding and Coltrane and, further back, the
EHike and the Count, BiUie Hohday, Ivie Anderson, and Bessie
Smith. The trouble with trying to make music a special preserve
is that it ofiFends my common sense. It is like grasping at
extremely fragile straws. It belongs to whoever can dig it. Re
cord it, and it s gone. Moreover, I confess that I am a musical
glutton. I crave not only Yardbird, Bessie Smith, and Coltrane,
but Segovia when he works with Bach, Khachaturian when his
himdred instruments sweep over an entirely unknown world to
me, and Carlos Gardel, the greatest popular singer who ever
lived, whom I will not yield merely because he was an
Ai'gentinean.
Also, we might as well face it: there are some highly
talented whites (singers, dancers, writers, etc.) who can put
down any second-rate black who is shucking just because he
happens to have the right complexion. In this period, Im into
the sounds of O. C. Smith. The other night while shaving I
was sure I heard my man on television, and rushed out of the
bathroom only to find that O. C. Smith was a white, blue-eyed
boy named Tom Jones, who went on to do Otis Redding and
James Brown. All you had to do was close your eyes and
Tom Jones was black. Working musicians, who dont call them
selves intellectuals, know this, and they will tell you, somewhat
ruefully, that that is a bad white stud pushing drums behind
Brubeck, and that Janis Joplin ^sounds black. M y point here is
not to deny our rich heritage in the artsour music especially
was wrenched up out of our experience in the hell of Western
culture. But soul gut music alone does not a black man make,
and it is a poor and shallow aesthetic indeed that is based on
something that can so easily be borrowed by others.
Intelligence alone ought to reject the notion that the Black

Aesthetic has anything to do with our supposed supersexTiahty.
But here I am on dangerous ground, for this is a mytli in
which both blacks and whites believe with an unshakable faith
as solid as the Rock of Ages. One supposes that the m\^th
can do no hann as long as it helps us to groove in the night and
acliiove or produce tlie maximiun munber of orgasms, which
is our national obsession. And let us not rob the poor, for in
this land of faggotry the poorest black man has always been
able to wake up in the morning with one pitiable certainty,
and that was that his thing was larger than any white mans,
and that he could manipulate it more skillfully and produce bet
ter results. White lynch mobs have always beheved it, too, and
they used to make a special point of slashing oflE a black man s
penis and balls before they barbecued him. Even now, in a
public toilet a white man will peep over into your stall to see if
it is really true that yours is bigger than his.
Those of us who dare to attempt the act of creation must

not be put oflF by the diflBculty in finding an exact definition
for the Black Aesthetic. We must not be distracted by that be
wildering combination of forces the poet Margaret Walker de
scribed more than thirty years ago in her poem For My
People:
. . . Distressed and disturbed and deceived and

devoured by money-hungry, glory-craving leeches,
preyed on by facile force of state and fad and
novelty, by false prophet and holy believer. . . .
For those who must create, there is a Black Aesthetic which

cannot be stolen from us, and it rests on something much more
substantial than hip talk, African dress, natural hair, and endless,
fruitless discussions of "soul. It is in our racial memory, and
the imshakable knowledge of who we are, where we have been,
and, springing from this, where we are going. Where have we
been? Up a hell of a long, hard road. It is what DuBois saw
in 1903, in The Souls of Black Folk: "And there in the Kings
highway sat and sits a figure veiled and bowed, by which
the travellers footsteps hasten as they go. On the tainted air
breeds fear. Three centuries thought has been the raising and
unveiling of that bowed human heart, and now behold a century
new for the duty and the deed. The problem of the Twentieth
Century is the problem of the color-line.
But each of us has his own images, for which we must not
seek neat little definitions. For me the Black Aesthetic is in a
photogiaph in the book Harlem on My Mind of two old black
women, clinging to one another as they walk along the cold
streets of New York City. Their faces, especially their eyes, are
tired and worn, and their backs are bent, for they and their
mothers before them have been working for centuries for noth
ing. It is in the remembered face of one of my grandmothers
as she lay in her coflBn in Rock Creek Baptist Church in the
little South Carolina town where I was bom. She washed clothes
for one white family for fifty years! It is tired old men and
women working, working, working, and then dying and leaving
nothing because they hadnt earned anything. There is nothing
beautiful about that. It is the bright hope on the faces of
children sketched by the artist Tom Feelings, and the murdered
hope one sees on the faces of these same children, now barely
out of adolescence, as they are routinely shuffled oflF to prison
careers, because everything elseschool, parents, protest move
menthas failed them. It s the drowsy, blinking addicts on the
subway and the young winos sitting on the doorsteps waiting
for the juice joints to open. But succeeding from all that,
beautiful, relevant, and immediate, is a new breed of clean
young black men who know they have been programmed by
the white world and who reject the program.
The Black Aesthetic, if it is anything, is the search for a new
program, because aU the old programs spawned out of the
Judaeo-Christian spirit have failed us. It is the search for a new
spiritual quality, or the recapture of an old one, lost and biuicd
deep in our African past. I rejected the Christian God a long
time ago when I decided that whoever \vas responsible for
the condition of tliis world could hardly be a friend of mine.
I never found another god to worship, but this new breed does
seinch for a deity, a new pattern of spiritual values, perhaps
beciiuse tliey suspect tliat tlieir passage tlirough tliis life Nvill
be all too swift and they want it to have meaning. They wake
up each morning knowing that no day is a good day to die,
but that one day is as good as any other as long as they do not
die alone. I cannotwill notdefine my Black Aesthetic, nor will
I allow it to be defined for me, but I know that somehow it
revolves around this new breed of man and woman who have
leaped out of the loins of all those slaves and semi-slaves, who
survived so that we might survive. My Black Aesthetic is Bobby
Seale, bound and gagged and straining at his leash in a Chicago
courtroom. The hberal white world sees and records and reacts,
and calls it "a travesty of American justice." But because we
blacks remember and feel in our bones the wasted lives of
those generations of old people dead and gone and dying
still, we see more, and there is nothing mystical about it. We see
that it is no travesty of American justice, that it is American
justice imveiled, that Bobby Seale, black man, bound and
gagged, is what American justice has been from the very begin
ning. My Black Aesthetic is the image of the beautiful Malcolm
the last time I saw him in Africa, driven by his own recalled
images, determined to return to what he knew was a certain
early death because he must try to make a revolution in this
white American hell-pit. He must try to wipe it clean, as it never
was, for it was filthy from the very beginning.
( Considering the hundreds of thousands of people who have
jumped on the Malcolm X bandwagon since he was killed,
I suppose it is safe to say he had soul. It should be noted that
neither in speech nor life-style did he aflFect any of the pos
tures commonly associated with soul" or the Black Aesthetic."
In that prison period when he was Big Red, the super-hip cat
on the block, he acquired a great expertise in the handling
of women, but as Malcolm X he never found his former sexual
prowess anything of which to boast. As for language: The first
man I met in prison who made any positive impression upon
me whatever was a fellow inmate, Bimbi.' , . . Bimbi put the
aesthetic philosophy in a framework, so to speak. That ended my
vicious cursing attacks. My approach sounded so weak along
side his, and he never used a foul word. For the rest of his
life, Malcolm made a fantastically eflFective effort to master the
English language, not to become a precious little intellectual
and impress people with his learninghe was far bigger tlian
thatbut to shape words into bullets that would strike home
at the center of his targets; American racism and the historic
weaknesses of black men which permit such racism to persist
without serious challenge. Grappling with problems of the Black
Aesthetic, I am struck by how often many of his most vociferous
post-assassination advocates seem to think the word mother
fucker shouted at the top of the voice is a substitute for action
and clarity of thought.)
This is a great nation. It can absorb almost anything.
Suddenly, in the late fifties, when the nation is getting ac
customed to Martin Luther King, Malcolm X and the Black
Muslims seem to burst forth with the shocking news that black
Americans do not, for some mysterious reason, like white
Americans. Liberal whites and Negroes are scared to death.
Malcolm says, Tm telling it like it is, and he does. But within
a few months, the white boys on Madison Avenue done took
Malcolm s phrase and gone, making it a household slogan with
which to sell soap (Cold Power ), brassieres (Lift Power ),
and gasoline (Go Power ). The President of the United States
says, We shall overcome, and a young black man raises the
cry of Black Power, and hustlers shudder and say, Not
Black Power but Green Power and Black Capitalism, and
Dick Nixon, who would rather be President than right, responds,
You Negroexcuse mebiocfc hustling cats know where its at.
Go Tiead. Preach that bad rhetoric, and I ll throw some crumbs
your way.
My point is that superficial appurtenances such as music,
language, dress, and slogans, and other Black Is Beautiful
fads can so easily be chewed up, digested, and spat out by
tliis vigorous, if sick, society, that no aesthetic is safe within
its grinding teeth. White girls don Afro wigs and wdiite boys sport
dashikis, and last night I saw Sammy Davis Idss not one but
You Touch Mtj Black Aesthetic and Vll Touch Yours 31
two white women on television. But the business of revolution
has nothing to do with Afros or dashilds or singing songs,
beating drums, doing the bugaloo, or whatever the latest dance
craze is. It has nothing to do with confronting liberal college
professors who do not know one end of a pistol from another.
It does have something to do with meeting armed, white
construction workers and their cop supporters at city halls in
Chicago and Philadelphia and getting it on and finding out
just how tough we really are.
For those of us who read and write books and plays and
poetry, the Black Aesthetic has to do with both love and lolling,
and learning to live, and survive, in a nation of killers, so that
our children may breathe a purer and freer air.
The Black Aesthetic, for those trying to create today, is neces
sarily the business of making revolution, for we have tried every
thing else. Now, this the Tom Joneses and Janis Joplins can
not steal, and will not imitate. For deep in their guts they cannot
feel what we have felt. Their eyes cannot see what our eyes
have seen, and what the eyes of all those generations of dead
and dying old black men and women saw, from slave ships to
cotton fields to ghetto obsolescence; the crushing of manhood
spirit in childhood, the destruction of what was and
beautiful and godlike in ourselves before we could see it. When
Margaret Walker again
"we discovered we were black and poor

and small and different and nobody wondered
and nobody understood.
Wiping it clean from the very beginning as though it never

happened: that is enough to occupy the rest of our lives.
Let another generation deal with the niceties of beauty and
art. This generation of black men and women has its work cut
out for it.
BL A C K C U LTU R A L NATIONALISM
Ron Karenga
Black art, like everything eke in the black community, must

respond positively to the reality of revolution.
It must become and remain a part of the revolutionary ma
chinery that moves us to change quickly and creatively. We
have always said, and continue to say, that the battle we are
waging now is the battle for the minds of Black people, and
that if we lose this battle, we cannot win the violent one. It
becomes very important then, that art plays the role it
should play in Black survival and not bog itself down in the
meaningless madness of the Western world wasted. Li order
to avoid this madness, black artists and those who wish to be
artists must accept the fact that what is needed is an aesthetic,
a black aesthetic, that is a criteria for judging the validity
and/or the beauty of a work of art.
Pursuing this further, we discover tliat all art can be judged
on two levelson tlie social level and on the artistic level. In
terms of the artistic level, we will be brief in talking about
this, because the artistic level involves a consideration of form
and feeling, two tilings which obviously involve more technical
consideration and tenninology than we have space, time or will
to develop adequately here. Let it be enough to say that the

artistic consideration, although a necessary part, is not suflBcient
What completes the picture is that social criteria for judging
art. And it is this criteria that is the most important criteria.
For all art must reflect and support the Black Revolution, and
any art that does not discuss and contribute to the revolution
is invalid, no matter how many lines and spaces are produced
in proportion and symmetry and no matter how many sounds
are boxed in or blown out and called music.
All we do and create, then, is based on tradition and reason,
that is to say, on foundation and movement. For we begin
to build on traditional foimdation, but it is out of movement,
that is experience, that we complete our creation. Tradition
teaches us, Leopold Senghor tells us, that all African art has at
least three characteristics: that is, it is functional, collective and
committing or committed. Since this is traditionally valid, it
stands to reason that we should attempt to use it as the foimda
tion for a rational construction to meet oiu: present day needs.
And by no mere coincidence we find that the criteria is not
only valid, but inspiring. That is why we say that all Black art,
irregardless of any technical requirements, must have three basic
characteristics which make it revolutionary. In brief, it must
be functional, collective and committing. It must be functional,
that is useful, as we cannot accept the false doctrine of "art
for arts sake. For, in fact, there is no such thing as "art
for arts sake. All art reflects the value system from which
it comes. For if the artist created only for himself and not
for others, he would lock himself up somewhere and paint
or write or play just for himself. But he does not do that.
On the contrary, he invites us over, even insists that we come
to hear him or to see his work; in a word, he expresses a need
for our evaluation and/or appreciation and our evaluation cannot
be a favorable one if the work of art is not Gist functional, that
is, useful.
So what, then, is the use of artour art, Black art? Black
art must expose the enemy, praise the people and support the
revolution. It must be like LeRoi Jones poems that are assassins
poems, poems that kill and shoot guns and 'wrassle cops into
alleys taking their weapons, leaving them dead with tongues
pulled out and sent to Ireland. It must be functional like the
poem of another revolutionary poet from US, Clyde Halisi,
who described the Masters words as Sun Genies, dancing
through the crowd snatching crosses and St. Christophers from
around niggers necks and passing the white gapped legs in
their minds to Simbas^ to be disposed of.
Or, in terms of painting, we do not need pictures of oranges
in a bowl or trees standing innocently in tlie midst of a waste
land. If we must paint oranges and trees, let our guerrillas
be eating those oranges for strength and using those trees for
cover. We need new images, and oranges in a bowl or fat
white women smiling lewdly cannot be those images. All ma
terial is mute until the artist gives it a message, and that message
must be a message of revolution. Then we have destroyed art
for arts sake, which is of no use anyhow, and have developed
art for all our sake, art for Mose the miner, Sammy the shoeshine
boy, T.C. the truck driver and K.P. the unwilling soldier.
In conclusion, the real fmicUon of art is to make revolution,
using its own medium.
The second characteristic of Black art is that it must be
collective. In a word, it must be from the people and must
be returned to the people in a form more beautiful and colorful
than it was in real life. For that is what art is: everyday life
given more form and color. And in relationship to that, the
Black artist can find no better subject than Black People
themselves, and the Black artist who does not choose or develop
this subject will find himself unproductive. For no one is any
more than the context to which he owes his existence, and if
an artist owes liis existence to tlie Afroamerican context, tlien he
also owes his art to that context and therefore must be held
accoimtable to the people of tliat context. To say that art must
1 Swahili for Young Lions, tlie Youth Movement in US Organization.
be collective, however, raises foiir questions. Number one, the

question of popularization versus elevation; two, personality
versus individuality; three, diversity in unity; and four, freedom
to versus freedom from.
The question of popularization versus elevation is an old one;

what it really seeks to do is to ask and to answer the question
whether or not art should be lo\vered to the level of the people
or the people raised to the level of art. Our contention is that
if art is from the people, and for the people, there is no question
of raising people to art or lowering art to the people, for they
are one and the same thing. As we said previouslyart is every
day life given more form and color. And what one seeks to
do then is to use art as a means of educating the people, and
being educated by them, so that it is a mutual exchange rather
than a one-way communication. Art and people must develop
at the same time and for the same reason. It must move with
the masses and be moved by the masses.
For we should not demand that our people go to school to
leam to appreciate art, but that an artist go to school formally
or informally to learn new and better techniques of expressing
his appreciation for the people and all they represent and his
disdain for anything and everything that threatens or hinders
their existence. Then and only then can both the artist and
the people move forward with a positive pace rooted to the
reality of revolution.
The second question raised is the question of personality ver
sus individuality. Now this question is one of how much the em
phasis on collective art destroys the individuality of the artist.
We say that individualism is a luxury that we cannot afford,
moreover, individualism is, in effect, non-existent. For since no
one is any more than the context to which he owes his existence,
he has no individuality, only personality. Individuality by defini
tion is "me in spite of everyone, and personality is "me in
relation to everyone. The one, a useless isolation and the other
an important involvement. We have heard it even said that the
The Black Aesthetic
individual is like an atom, that which can no longer be reduced,
or the essence of humanity. However, aside from this being a
rather strained analogy, it does not prove that a man who wants
to be an individual can stand alone. For the atom itself is a part
of a molecule and cannot exist without interdependence, and
even then, it is at best a simple theoretical construction for
the convenience of conversation. We say that there is no virtue
in a false independence, but there is value in a real interdepend
ence.
The third question raised with regard to collective art is an
extension of the second one, and that is, does unity preclude
diversity? Our answer to that is an emphatic, "NO," for there
can be and is unity in diversity, even as there can be diversity
in unity. What one seeks, however, is not a standardization of
every move or creation, but a framework in which one can
create and avoid the European gift of trial and error. One can
seek the reality of the concept of diversity in unity or unity
in diversity in listening to a Trippin ensemble.^ In a Trippin
ensemble the leader sets the pace and others come in, or go
out, as it pleases them, but in the end they all come to a very
dynamic and overwhelmingly harmonious conclusion. So it is
with our dancetwo partners dance together the same dance
and yet they provide us with a demonstration of that which
is unique in each of them. But that is not individualitythat
is personality. For it is an expression of uniqueness, not isolation
from, but in relation to, each other and the collective experience
tliat they both have shared.
The last question is one of freedom to versus freedom from.
This is really a political question, or social one, and is one that
raises contradiction for the artist who rejects the social interpre
tation of art. However, when he demands freedom to do some-
2 Trippin is our word for whnt white boys and others call jazz. In line
with our obsession with self-detennination which demands new definitions
and nomencLiture, we reject the word jazz, for jazz is taken from the white
word, jazzy, i.e. sexy, because tliat is wliat he thought our music was. We
call it Trippin because that is what we do when we play it or Listen to i t
thing or freedom from the restriction that prohibits his doing

something, he is asking for a socio-political right, and that,
as we said, makes art social first and aesthetic second. Art does
not exist in the abstract just like freedom does not exist in
the abstract It is not an independent living thing; it lives
through us and through the meaning and message we give it.
And an artist may have any freedom to do what he wishes
as long as it does not take the freedom from the people to be
protected from those images, words and sounds that are nega
tive to their life and development. The people give us the
freedom from isolation and alienation and random searching
for subject matter and artists, in view of this, must not ask for
freedom to deny this, but on the contrary must praise the
people for this. In conclusion, the concept of collective art can
best be expressed in the African proverb showing the inter
dependence of aU by saying, One hand washes the other."
The final thing that is characteristic of Black art is that it
must be committing. It must commit us to revolution and change.
It must commit us to a future that is ours. In a word, it must
commit us to all that is US-yesterday, today and the sunrise of
tomorrow. It must tell us like Hahsi's poem, Maulana and
Word Magic," that we must give up the past or be found out
and exposed, as the notes of a new day come tripping through
searching each ones heart for any traces of Peyton Place."
It must commit us to the fact that the earth is ours and
the fullness thereof. As LeRoi Jones says, You cant steal
nothing from the white man. Hes already stole it, he owes
you anything you want, even his life." So, Black People take
the shit you want, take their lives if need, but get what you
want, what you need. Dance up and down the street, turn all
the music up. This is commitment to the struggle, a commit
ment that includes the artist and the observer. We cannot
let each other rest; there is so much to do, and we all know
we have done so little. Art will revive us, inspire us, give us
enough courage to face another disappointing day. It must not
teach us resignation. For all our art must contribute to revolu
tionary change and if it does not, it is invalid.
Therefore, we say the blues are invalid; for they teach resigna
tion, in a word acceptance of realityand we have come to
change reality. We will not submit to the resignation of our
fathers who lost their money, their women, and their lives and
sat around wondering 'w hat did they do to be so black and
blue.' We will say again with Brother LeRoi, We are lovers
and the sons of lovers, and warriors and the sons of warriors.
Therefore, we will loveand unwillingly though necessarily,
make war, revolutionary war. We will not cry for those things
that are gone, but find meaning in those things that remain
with us. Perhaps people will object violently to the idea that
the blues are invalid, but one should understand that they are
not invalid historically. They will always represent a very
beautiful, musical and psychological achievement of our peo
ple; but today they are not functional because they do not
commit us to the struggle of today and tomorrow, but keep us
in the past. And whatever we do, we cannot remain in the
past, for we have too much at stake in the present. And we
find our future much too much rewarding to be rejected.
Let our art remind us of our distaste for the enemy, our love
for each other, and our commitment to the revolutionary strug
gle that will be fought vdth the rhythmic reality of a permanent
revolution.
CU LTU RA L STRANGULATION:
B LA C K LIT E R A T U R E AND TH E W H ITE A EST H ET IC
Addison Gayle, Jr.
**This assumption that of all the hues of God, whiteness is

inherently and obviously better than brownness or tan leads to
curious acts. . .
W. E. B. DuBois
The expected opposition to the concept of a "Black Aesthetic

was not long in coming. In separate reviews of Black Fire, an
anthology edited by LeRoi Jones and Larry Neal, critics from
the Saturday Review and the New York Review of Books
presented the expected rebuttal. Agreeing with Ralph Ellison
that sociology and art are incompatible mates, these critics,
nevertheless, invoked the cliches of the social ideology of the
"we shall overcome years in their attempt to steer Blacks
from "the path of literary fantasy and folly.
Their major thesis is simple: There is no Black aesthetic be
cause there is no white aesthetic. The Kemer Commission
Report to the contrary, America is not two societies but one.
Therefore, Americans of all races, colors and creeds share a
common cultural heredity. This is to say that there is one
predominant culturethe American culturewith tributary na
tional and ethnic streams flowing into the larger river. Literature,
the most important by-product of this cultural monolith, knows
no parochial boundaries. To speak of a Black literature, a
Black aestlietic, or a Black state, is to engage in racial chauvin
ism, separatist bias, and Black fantasy.
The question of a white aesthetic, however, is academic.
One has neither to talk about it nor define it. Most Americans,
black and white, accept the existence of a White Aesthetic"
as naturally as they accept April 15th as the deadline for
paying their income taxwith far less animosity towards the
former than the latter. The white aesthetic, despite the academic
critics, has always been with us: for long before Diotima
pointed out the way to heavenly beauty to Socrates, the poets
of biblical times were discussing beauty in terms of light and
darkthe essential characteristics of a white and black aesthetic
and establishing the dichotomy of superior vs. inferior which
would assume body and form in the 18th century. Therefore,
more serious than a definition, is the problem of tracing the
white aesthetic from its early origins and afterwards, outlining
the various changes in the basic formula from culture to culture
and from nation to nation. Such an undertaking would be more
germane to a book than an essay; nevertheless, one may take
a certain starting point and, using selective nations and cultures,
make the critical point, while calling attention to the necessity
of a more comprehensive study encompassing all of the nations
and cultures of the world.
Let us propose Greece as the logical starting point, bearing in
mind Will Durant s observation that all of Western Civilization
is but a footnote to Plato," and take Plato as the first writer
to attempt a systematic aesthetic. Two documents by Plato,
The Symposium and The Republic, reveal the twin components
of Plato's aesthetic system.
In The Symposium, Plato divides the universe into spheres.
In one sphere, the lower, one finds the forms of beauty; in
the other, the higher, beauty, as Diotima tells Socrates, is
absolute and supreme. In The Republic, Plato defines the poet
as an imitator (a third-rate imitatora point which modem
critics have long since forgotten) who reflects the heavenly
beauty in the earthly mirror. In other words, the poet recreates
beauty as it exists in heaven; thus the poet, as Neo-Platonists
from Aquinas to Coleridge have told us, is the custodiau of
beauty on earth.
Black Literature and the White Aesthetic 41
However, Plato defines beauty only in ambiguous, mystical
terms; leaving the problem of a more circumscribed, secular
definition to philosophers, poets, and critics. During most of the
history of the Western world, these aestheticians have been
wliite; therefore, it is not surprising that, symbolically and
literally, they have defined beauty in terms of whiteness. (An
early contradiction to this tendency is the Marquis DeSade
who inverted the symbols, making black beautiful, but de
monic, and white pure, but sterilethe Marquis is considered
by modem criticism to have been mentally deranged.)
The distinction between whiteness as beautiful (good) and
blackness as ugly (evil) appears early in the literature of the
middle agesin the Morality Plays of England. Heavily in
fluenced by both Platonism and Christianity, these plays set
forth the distinctions which exist today. To be white was to be
pure, good, universal, and beautiful; to be black was to be
impure, evil, parochial, and ugly.
The characters and the plots of these plays followed this basic
format. The villain is always evil, in most cases the devil; the
protagonist, or hero, is always good, in most cases, angels or
disciples. The plot then is simple; good (light) triumphs over
the forces of evil (dark). As English literature became more
sophisticated, the symbols were made to cover wider areas
of the human and literary experience. To love was divine; to
hate, evil. The fancied mistress of Petrarch was the purest of the
pure; Grendels mother, a creature from the "lower regions and
marshes,** is, like her son, a monster; the bad characters in
Chaucer s Canterbury Tales tell dark stories; and the Satan of
Paradise Lost must be vanquished by Gabriel, the angel of
purity.
These ancients, as Swift might have called them, established
their dichotomies as a result of the influences of Neo-Platonism
and Christianity. Later, the symbols became internationalized.
Robert Burton, in The Anatomy of Melancholy, writes of dark
despair* in the seventeenth century, and James Boswell de
scribes melancholia, that state of mind common to intellectuals
of the 17th and 18th centuries, as a dark, dreaded affliction
which robbed men of their creative energies. This condition-
dark despair or melancholiawas later popularized in what is
referred to in English literature as its "'dark period the period
of the Grave Yard School of poets and the Gothic novels.
The symbols thus far were largely applied to conditions,
although characters who symbolized evil influences were also
dark. In the early stages of English literature, these characters
were mythological and fictitious and not representative of people
of specific racial or ethnic groups. In the 18th century English
novel, however, the symbolism becomes ethnic and raciaL
There were forerunners. As early as 16 21, Shakespeare has

lago refer to Othello as that "old Black ewe, attaching the
mystical sexual characteristic to blackness which would become
the motive for centuries of oppressive acts by white Americans.
In The Tempest, Shakespeares last play, Caliban, though not
ostensibly black, is nevertheless a distant cousin of the colonial
Friday in Daniel Defoes Robinson Crusoe.
Robinson Crusoe was published at a historically significant
time. In the year 1719, the English had all but completed their
colonization of Africa. The slave trade in America was on its
way to becoming a booming industry; in Africa, Black people
were enslaved mentally as well as physically by such strange
bedfellows as criminals, businessmen, and Christians. In the
social and political spheres, a rationale was needed, and help
came from the artistin this case, the novelistin the form of
Robinson Crusoe. In the novel, Defoe brings together both Chris
tian and Platonic symbolism, sharpening the dichotomy between
light and dark on the one hand, while on the other establishing
a criterion for the inferiority of Black people as opposed to the
superiority of white.
One need only compare Cnisoe with Friday to validate both
of these statements. Crusoe is majestic, wise, white and a
colonialist; Friday is savage, ignorant, black and a colonial.
Therefore, Crusoe, the colonialist, has a double task. On the
Black Literature and the White Aesthetic 43
one hand he must transform the island (Africaunproductive,

barren, dead) into a little England (prosperous, life-giving,
fertile), and he must recreate Friday in his own image, thus
bringing him as close to being an Englishman as possible. At
the end of the novel, Crusoe has accomplished both undertak
ings; the island is a replica of mother England ; and Friday has
been transformed into a white man, now capable of immigrating
to the land of the gods.
From such mystical artifacts has the literatiue and criticism
of the Western world sprung; and based upon such narrow
prejudices as those of Defoe, the art of Black people through
out the world has been described as parochial and inferior.
Friday was parochial and inferior until, having denounced his
own culture, he assimilated another. Once this was done, sym
bolically, Friday underwent a change. To deal vrith him after
the conversion was to deal with him in terms of a character
who had been civilized and therefore had moved beyond racial
parochialism.
However, Defoe was merely a hack novelist, not a thinker.
It was left to shrewder minds than his to apply the rules of
the white aesthetic to the practical areas of the Black literary
and social worlds, and no shrewder minds were at work on
this problem than those of writers and critics in America. In
America, the rationale for both slavery and the inferiority of
Black art and culture was supplied boldly, without the trappings
of i8th century symbolism.
In 1867, in a book entitled Najoque: A Question for a
Continent, Hinton Helper provided the vehicle for the cultural
and social symbols of inferiority under which Blacks have
labored in this country. Helper intended, as he states frankly
in his preface, to write the negro out of America. In the
headings of the two major chapters of the book, the whole
symbolic apparatus of the white aesthetic handed down from
Plato to America is graphically revealed: the heading of one
chapter reads: Black: A Thing of Ugliness, Disease; another
heading reads: White; A Thing of Life, Health, and Beauty.
44
The Black Aesthetic
Under the first heading, Helper argues that the color black
lias always been associated with sinister things such as mourn
ing, the devil, the darkness of night." Under the second, White
has always been associated with the light of day, divine trans
figuration, the beneficent moon and stars . . . the fair complexion
of romantic ladies, the costumes of Romans and angels, and
the white of the American flag so beautifully combined with
blue and red without ever a touch of the black that has been for
the flag of pirates."
Such is the American critical ethic based upon centuries of
distortion of the Platonic ideal. By not adequately defining
beauty, and implying at least that this was the job of the
poet, Plato laid the foundation for the white aesthetic as
defined by Daniel Defoe and Hinton Helper. However, the uses
of that aesthetic to stifle and strangle the cultures of other
nations is not to be attributed to Plato but, instead, to his
hereditary brothers far from the Aegean. For Plato knew his
poets. They were not, he surmised, a very trusting lot and,
therefore, by adopting an ambiguous position on symbols, he
limited their power in the realm of aesthetics. For Plato,
there were two lands of symbols: natural and proscriptive.
Natural symbols corresponded to absolute beauty as created by
God; proscriptive symbols, on the other hand, were symbols of
beauty as proscribed by man, which is to say that certain
symbols are said to mean such and such by man himself.
The irony of the trap in which the Black artist has found
himself thoughout history is apparent. Those symbols which
govern his life and art are proscriptive ones, set down by
minds as diseased as Hinton Helpers. In other words, beauty
has been in the eyes of an earthly beholder who has stipulated
that beauty conforms to such and such a definition. To return
to Friday, Defoe stipulated that civilized man was what Friday
had to become, proscribed certain characteristics to the term
civilized," and presto, Friday, in order not to be regarded as
a savage under Western eyes, was forced to conform to this
Bleck Literature and tlw White Aesthetic 45
ideal. How well have the same stipulative definitions worked in

the artistic spherel Masterpieces are made at will by each new
critic who argues that the subject of his doctoral dissertation
is immortal. At one period of history, John Donne, according
to the critic Samuel Johnson, is a second rate poet; at another
period, according to the critic T. S. Eliot, he is one of the
finc'st poets in the language. Dickens, argues Professor Ada Nis-
bet, is one of Englands most representative novelists, while for
F. R. Leavis, Dickens work does not warrant him a place in
The Great Tradition.
When Black literature is the subject, the verbiage reaches the
height of the ridiculous. The good Negro Novel, we are told
by Robert Bone and Herbert Hill, is that novel in which the
subject matter moves beyond the limitations of narrow paro
chialism. Form is the most important criterion of the work of
art when Black literature is evaluated, whereas form, almost
non-existent in Dostoyevskys Crime and Punishment, and totally
chaotic in Kafkas The Trial, must take second place to the
supremacy of thought and message.
Richard Wright, says Theodore Gross, is not a major American
novelist; while Ralph Ellison, on the strength of one novel, is.
LeRoi Jones is not a major poet, Ed Bullins not a major
playwright, Baldwin incapable of handling the novel form
al! because white critics have said so.
Behind the symbol is the object or vehicle, and behind the
vehicle is the definition. It is the definition with which we are
concerned, for the extent of the cultural strangulation of Black
literature by white critics has been the extent to which they
have been allowed to define the terms in which the Black
artist will deal with his own experience. The career of Paul
Laurence Dunbar is the most striking example. Having inter
nalized the definitions handed him by tlie American society,
Dunbar would rather not have written about the Black ex
perience at all, and three of his novels and most of his poetry
support this argument. However, when forced to do so by his
white liberal mentors, among them was the powerful critic,
William Dean Howells, Dunbar deals with Blacks in terms of
buffoonery, idiocy and comedy.
Like so many Black writers, past and present, Dunbar was
trapped by the definitions of other men, never capable of
reahring until near the end of his life, that those definitions
were not god-given, but man-given; and so circumscribed by
tradition and culture that they were irrelevant to an evaluation
of either his life or his art.
In a literary conflict involving Christianity, Zarathustra, Fried
rich Nietzsches iconoclast, calls for a new table of the laws.
In similar iconoclastic fashion, the proponents of a Black Aes
thetic, the idol smashers of America, call for a set of rules by
which Black literature and art is to be judged and evaluated.
For the historic practice of bowing to other mens gods and
definitions has produced a crisis of the highest magnitude,
and brought us, culturally, to the limits of racial armageddon.
The trend must be reversed.
The acceptance of the phrase Black is Beautifur is the first
step in the destruction of the old table of the laws and the
constniction of new ones, for the phrase flies in the face of
the whole ethos of the white aesthetic. This step must be fol
lowed by serious scholarship and hard work; and Black critics
must dig beneath the phrase and unearth the treasure of beauty
lying deep in the untoured regions of the Black experience-
regions where others, due to historical conditioning and cultural
deprivation, cannot go.
B LA C K ARTS: NOTEBOOK
John a N e a l
I. **Afro-American^ etc,. Is a Contradiction
It is extremely diflBcult to achieve clarity v^^hen the very condi

tion of your being is tied to a basic contradiction. Because we
have been in this place, America, and because unknown millions
of us have been bom, have lived, and have died here over the
course of the past three and a half centuries, we have made
an identity between ourselves and America. Yet it remains the
same nation that sponsored the rape of Africa; that is now and
always has been hostile to our presence here; the same that
has exploited our labor, and our minds and culturea nation
that only in brief faltering moments has relented in a base attack
on our very survival. Yet we still yield to such terms and
names as Negro Americans, American Negroes, Afro-Americans,
Black Americans, etc.
The concept of home and roots in America is the problem.
People can only bring a nation out of mutual commitment
to their common good. Here, we have simply been victims.
Our concept must be a world concept, and we must see our
roots as African. We are an African People.
2, The Decadence of Western Culture
We are simply not an American People. America exists as a

contradiction to our People-hood. America is the historic mentor
of the oppression of our People. America serves as the bulwark
of colonial, neocolonial, and imperialistic forces that support
and maintain the oppression of our People and other non-Euro
pean Peoples in the world today.
In spite of all this, because of its affluence and because a
certain fluidity is permitted within the American body politic,
the siren s song the nation sings makes it intensely desirable for
many to flirt with the certain death that waits in her rocky surf.
Some argue with considerable justification, and with even
greater passion, that we live among a nation of devils who were
bom of devils. But the point, I think, is a simpler one: Western
culture is simply decadent. It has lived past the point of the
creativity of its values and continues only because of the ac
cumulated momentum of its past, going blindly now on a course
over which persons no longer have control. The machinery de
mands the perpetuation of itself quite apart from the intention
or desire of the persons who operate and who are operated on
by it.
For us, as a People, to try to find our Peopleness within the
context of the American nation or the values of the West on
which the nation is founded, would be like a chicken trying
to find his chickenness in an oven. Why enjoin a struggle to
become enmeshed in the very decadence that brings oppression
on our People and to the majority of the Peoples of the world?
3. Seven Decades: the Coon Trap and How It Looks Now.
After the Egyptian and Indian, the Greek and Roman, Teuton and
Mongolian, the Negro is a sort of seventh son bom \rith a veil, and
gifted with second sight in this American worlda world wliich
yields liim no true self-consciousness, but only lets him see himself
through the revelation of the outer world. It is a peculiar sensa

tion, this double consciousness, the sense of always looking at one's
self through the eyes of others, of measuring ones soul by the
tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One
ever feels his twonessan American, a Negro, two souls, two
thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one
dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being tom
asunder.
W. E. B. DuBois Soul s of Black Folk
The coon trap:
I, Too
I, too, sing America
I am the darker brother.
They send me to eat in the kitchen
when company comes.
But I laugh
And eat well
And grow strong
Tomorrow,
ril be at the table
When company comes
Nobody'll dare
say to me
Eat in the Kitchen,'*
Then.
Besides
They'll see how beautiful I am
and be ashamed
I, too, am America.
Langston Hughes (tch-tch-tch)I, Too (published in numerous

collections).
Poem for a Knee-grow
{1 dont care to meet)
he was bom here
his forefathers died here
fought here
worked here
their graves are here
in a marri ca
he's an a marri can
blit are you really, brother,
chickens are bom
in an oven sometimes but that don't make urn
biscuits, nigger
Asoob Akibas, NkomhOy fall 1969.

DuBois cites the contradiction at the turn of the century,
Hughes accepts the terms of the contradiction in the 40s, and
Asoob (Renaldo Fernandez), a young poet from F.S.T.s Blkart-
south in New Orleans, oflFers an avenue for thinking to its solu
tion in 1969. We live in America, we have a presence here,
but we are not an American people. Indeed, there is a consider
able question about just who is American People, but whatever
it is, it ain't us. We are an African People. We are not an
American People.
America is our oven, but there are ways to survive in ovens,
too. The oven's heat makes proper metal stronger.
4. Three Waters in Time and the Poet as Prophet.
I see three major lines of cultural development among con

temporary humankind; European, Asian, and African. Each of
these categories of peoples shows its own internal dynamic and
has participated in various ways in relationships to Peoples in
other cultural groups.
Think of a river going somewhere for the first time. The
river's well established, but where it's going isn'tjust that it's
going. The river is humankind. Human consciousness is defined
by ever-changing, ever-expanding limits of the river. The artists
are the ones who move at the edge of that conscioiLsness, moving
out in front of the mainstream, showing the way for the river to
go. If the artist's judgment is true, and the way he show^ clear,
tlien tlie mainstream of humankind will follow. When the main
stream of the people follow him, the artist is either thrust out
again to forge ahead into unknown areas of human potential,
or he is swallowed up and lost in the mainstreamno longer to
create, but to go along.
If the artist s judgment is not true and is unclear, then hes
left to dry up on the barren place he went to, while the main
stream of humankind rushes oflF in other directionsthose ways
illumined by clearer prophets. Sometimes the false way seems
clearest and best to the mainstream, and it follows that way
only to find an impenetrable passage, and the stream doubles
back or turns around to find that the way the true prophet
spoke of his work comes to life again when the river comes back
the way once lost.
Think of three waters. The waters come from separate places
but play close together, then farther on they mingle with the
others; then, pulling apart again, each goes off to meet the
other, then back and forth till they finally run together toward
a place where they cannot go apart, yet cannot mix to make one
stream without one or both backing up to come another way.
All waters find ultimate issue in a common source. The ulti
mate reunion in that source is the inevitable end of all striving.
Nation is not divine; being is. The waters of being, not streams of
nation.
The artist's job is to move at the edge of that stream not to
hold a mirror up, but to see the way and show the basic how
by going there and doing as much as he can without dying.
If dying is a must for the vision to be, then dying must also
be done, for the loss of the vision would make a worse death
for the seer.
It is the job of the priest to find the wisdom in the artist's
sight and to hold the people in common struggle toward that
dream. It is for the scientist to find the means to take us there.
And there are other tasks for others, but it is for the artist to
see and show the way by being what he sees.
Dry and strange and lonely places keep the artist in constant
danger, for the only protection is the Truth of his vision and his
kbor toward it. The only guarantee is that of death, if the vision
or his labor is either false or incomplete.
Of tlie streams of humankind, we are from the family of
Africa.
We live today on the threshold of a new era. Western culture
has passed the point of it s own creativity and crashes on with
malevolent splendor like a mighty river rolling into a bound
less desert with vigor now, but toward certain extinction in the
limitless arid wasteland, able only to consume the moisture
rolling in.
Western culture, because of the concept of its own superiority,
is doomed and damned. Damned because it is doomed and not
doomed because it is damned, because each People begin with
the defense of their own reality. Doomed because the tech
nology that their concept of superiority stands on cannot de
fend them from the reaction of exploited Peoples unless they
are willing to serve the cause of their own destruction also.
Which is not altogether unlikely.
5. Abstractivity
Black people in America have a tendency toward abstractivity

--the tendency to engage in abstract activity; the eflFort to do
everything at once while accomplishing little that has to do with
the projected goal; having only an abstract idea of the intended
results of the activity to begin the activity with.
I know a cat who decided to open a print shop. He had,
sometimes, fewer skills and less money, and not enough of
either. Now, forty years later, hes still trying to open a print
shop. lie s got a few pieces of antiquated printing equipment;
he has written an opera; he sells candy, notions, good-luck
charms, dream books, birthday cards, and cigarettes, and some
how spends more money each month than he makes. In between
times, hes a preacher. All the time, hes frustrated because of liis
abstractivity.
6 . About Black
Black as a physical fact has little significance. Color, as a
cultural, social, and political fact, is the most significant fact
of our era. Black is important because it gives us ground from
which to fighta way to feel and think about ourselves and our
own realitya way to define.
7. On Power
Power is the ability to make decisions and implement them.

Political power is ultimately dependent on the will (of the
masses) of the people.
5 . On Liberation Struggles and Revolution

A People s struggle for liberation must necessarily reach revo
lutionary proportions.
A People, that is, a group of people with similar cultures and
common ancestry and history, may struggle for liberation from
oppressive domination at the hands of a government imposed
by an alien People who subject the oppressed People to the ends
and terms of the alien People. Characteristic of colonialistic and
imperialistic situations.
It s hard to think of revolution without thinking of it in Marxist
terms. In the Marxist dictionary, people is used in a different
fashion. Marxists speak of the masses of the people, as opposed
to the ruling classes.
There is always a ruling group. Before liberation, after libera
tionbefore revolution, after revolution.
Revolution is the process by which the masses of the people
through their own action replace one ruling group and their
system of government, with another ruling group and another
system of government.
There may be revolution without liberation, but a People s
54
The Black Aesthetic
struggle for liberation must necessarily reach revolutionary pro
portions. A liberation struggle is therefore a revolutionary strug
gle.
Life magazine recently asked the question if revolution was
possible in America. They said no. But the correct answer is
yes; it is inevitable. Our struggle, however, the struggle of
Black People, is properly a liberation struggle. America describes
the context of, but does not and cannot define, the terms of
that struggle. The world, with Africa as a base, defines our
struggle. For we are an African People.
The first stage in any revolutionary struggle is the struggle
for the minds of the (masses of the) People. The People seldom
embrace stniggle willingly, but accept it once the compelling
necessity is clear. The recognition of the failure of reform within
a system, the inability of a system to accommodate to the needs
of the people, is the best way for Peoples' minds to be prepared
for the revolutionary commitment. The failure of reform is the
only way the masses of people in a more or less democratic
society will come to the acceptance of the revolutionary impera
tive. If reform can produce the necessary changes, then revolu
tion is not imperative.
It is necessary that the revolutionary alternatives expand at
a rate equivalent to the rate of defections from the establish
ment. Increase in reformist activity therefore requires a pro
portionate increase in revolutionary activity. Increases in re
formist and revolutionary activity will generate an increase in
fascist reaction, and thereby increase the number of people
with revolutionary inclinations, therefore increasing again the
need for revolutionary activity.
The pressure on the establishment increases until it can no
longer be tolerated, and concessions to reformists no longer make
eflFective propaganda. The dialectic between reformist and revo
lutionist aLso requires the reformist to make greater demands,
with which tlie establishment will eventually find no base for
compromise. The only option left to the establishment at tliis
point, then, is to embrace overt fascist repressionor capitulate

to the revolutionary forces, which is of course impossible.
We grow close to the period of overt fascist repression by the
United States.
Our work as Black artists is to help our People to recognize
themselves and the inevitable demands of the struggle that lies
ahead.
g. The Abstract, the Concrete, and the Shadow of the Past
Abstractions seem irrelevant in the face of concrete problems.

Yet it s true that concretes are simply confounding if not placed
in an orderly context; that is, within the context of an abstract
idea that permits the arrangement of concretes into useful de
signs.
The Black AestheticI Forget the contradiction in language
I dont know another. Perhaps oui/my struggle will show us/me
that w e/I must stop thinking in this language and learn to think
in another one. But, right now, this is iti
Aesthetic: a philosophical termthe principles of art.

Black Aesthetic: the principles of Black Art.
But principles and systems must be discovered. They come

after the fact as a result of reflection and observation. When we
thmk, we think about something. What I think about Black Art
can be stated very simply! With the exception of music, she
lies a virgin bride. And the music has been raped! While we
have stood by watching! We have to reclaim the music and
give it all a place to grow and mean. We have just begun
to recognize ourselves. Recognize Usus-ness, the oumess of
OURS, the peoplehood of Black. In this country and in the
world since the beginning of the period of Western domination,
we have failed to recognize and accept us as people. What Mr.
Muhammad calls Tcnowledge of self and kind, we have been
deprived of, for we have protested against our own existence
as a People.
Principles and laws and rules, to be useful and eflFective, must
be descriptive, not legislative. Dig iti Not what people must
do, but what they do do. Tell me I must do, and by choice I may
revolt. Tell me I do do, and I may simply recognize or deny the
Truth.
The artists vrill create the art and the people will create the
Artists; therefore, the People will create the art. Through the
struggle of African Peoples, we will find a w ay for US to be.
As the People and the life diflFer from the People and life of
Western Peoples, then so will the Art Aesthetic differ.
Tlie canons of Western art have only incidental significance
for Us. The incidence of our circumstance in relation to the west.
We cannot find our essence in the West, for we are not of the
west. We come from different bloodfrom our roots will come
our sustaining flow. From those roots only, can we relate
positively to the West. We are an African People.
lo. The Ignorant Tree and the Shadow of the Past
Val Ferdinand, a beautiful poet and a beautiful brother, re

cently reviewed Gordon Parks's The Learning Tree for The
Plain Truth, a newspaper published by one of the Free Southern
Theater workshops in New Orleans:
T he Ignorant Tree
At fiist I thought T he Ignorant Tree was a worse movie than
Slaves, which was a waste of time and money, but I thought
about it some more and now feel that T he Ignorant Tree is
perhaps one of the most truthful movies to hit the screen in
a long tne. The photography and direction have got to be some
of tlie best work you are going to see in a long time. A lot
of Parks s shots were so good that you just have to say, 'Damn,
tliat's a pretty sun.*' The direction and acting were so together
that you forgot people were acting. As a producer, Parks did
an even better job, because he somehow managed to find tlie
people who could play the parts he wanted them to play. There
can be little doubt but that the actor who played Newt right
eously did his part, as did all of the supporting actors.
But damn, the script! My wife and I took a friend of ours
out for her birthday and we sat there groaning and moaning.
"That can't be a nigger! "Who wrote this script? etc. etc.
A little church scene near the beginning of the movie told the
whole story in a nutshell. As the actors were leaving, we spied
that it was an AME church. My wife said that they were kind
of quiet for a black church. . . .
I could go on at length about this picture, but I would prefer
that you go see it so that you can see for yourself how the
black upper class thinks and moves around in the society. Yeah,
Newt, you gon* make it! Be sure to check out how easily Newt
does things for money. Like the scene when he bargains up to
six bits with the white cop for the honor of diving to get the
body of a brother that the same cop has just shot in the back.
I mean, if you had just seen a pig blow away a brother in the
back (and the brother was only guilty of piirticipating in an
integrated crap game . . .), if you had just seen this, do you
think that you would stand there and bargain with the same
cop about how much money you want to dive to find the
brother? Ah, man, I hope not. I hope we re past tliat. I hope
that none of us are just in it for the money. Things like fighting
our brothers in a circus ring for a few dollars. It makes you
sick. Yeah, brothers, go and see how a NEGRO views the world.
I agree with the substance of Ferdinands critique, but it

seems to me that he missed the two most important points. It is
assumed that the purpose of the picture was to tell the story
of the coming of age of a Negro youth. No, I don't think that was
the point. It was first and foremost a demonstration film. Proof
of what Gordon Parks can do . . . in spite of . . . (being
Black). Dig it! Write a novel, write a screenplay, produce it,
direct it, write music, take pictures, and think, too. And do it
all good! See what-all a nigger (therefore niggers) can do! If
given a chance, even if you don't give them a chance they
take it, e.g., G.P., and get rich and be moral too, Manl And,
man, like thats impossible, but the nigger did it.
The second thing is that this is unfortimately the wrong
point. This is probably the biggest problem Negro artists have
faced in the past, and this shadow hides the present work
from so manythe white audience and consciousness. Sad, man,
sad sad sad sad. So in the end youre right. Why is it that
Niggers think they got to spend so much time trying to prove
(to whom?) that they re human. Because we don't know y e t
When Black Art happens, it is different.
Affirmation of the Black reality, not contradiction and denial.
AflBrmation of Black potential, not trying to take black dreams
and paint them white till even we don't know the difference
any more. Black life is the model. Black life is a struggle for
unity and liberation of all African Peoples.
AFRO -AM ERICAN LIT ER A R Y C RITIC S:
AN INTRODUCTION
Darwin T. Turner
Each year, increasing numbers of American readers are becom

ing familiar with and often enthusiastic about black creative
writers. White scholars, critics, and students fret anxiously
about the probable date of EUisons next novel. They debate
the value of Gwendolyn Brooks s latest style. They choose sides
to support or attack Eldridge Cleavers repudiation of James
Baldwin. Without hesitation, reasonably knowledgeable readers
could rattle off names of black writers who have earned national
attention and acclaim in various literary genres and fields.
If, however, one wanted to silence the chatter, he would need
merely to ask for the names of black literary critics; for, even in
this decade of discovery of black culture, Afro-American critics
remain blackly invisible. Few are known among the general
reading public; and perhaps only oneNathan Scott, Jr.is
judged to be both eminent and influential.
Even when their subject has been literature by Afro-American
vmters, black critics have failed to make America see them,
to say nothing of reading or hearing their words. The best-
known critics of Afro-American literature are white. White
Vernon Loggins, author of The Negro Author (19 3 1) ; Robert
Bone, author of The Negro Novel in America (1952, 1965);
and Herbert Hill, editor of Soon, One Morning (1963) and
Anger and Beyond (1966), are better known than black Hugh
Gloster or Saunders Redding. The fact is ironic and regret
table, since black American critics can ofiFer insights into the
language, styles, and meanings intended by black writers, in
sights frequently denied to those who have not shared the
experience of hving as black people in the United States of
America.
The irony cannot be overemphasized. Many Americans today
read black writers with the hope of learning who black people
are, what they think, and what they propose to be. These
readers, however, seem not to comprehend that they will never
imderstand blacks as long as they seek such understanding
solely in Judgments, evaluations, and interpretations made by
others who are equally distant from the black experience. The
individual who wishes to imderstand the literature of black
people must know the ablest interpreters of that literature.
Many superficial explanations for the apparent dearth of emi
nent black critics have been whispered at one time or an
other: Afro-Americans do not write well; or they cannot write
objectively about the work of other blacks; or they cannot
think abstractly and formulate critical theories. Since these
explanations are illogical and easily disproved, let us consider
some of the actual reasons before turning to a history of the
Afro-American critics themselves.
An established critic in a field is not necessarily the individual
who has written the best work on a particular subject; instead,
he is the individual who is most widely known for writing on
that subject. This one fact, more than any other, has segregated
black critics into the basement of tlie club of literary criticism:
the masses of literate Americans do not read the pubhcations of
black critics and, consequently, do not know them.
Wliere does one look for a literary critic? He reads respected
newsstand periodicals; The Saturday Review, The N ew York
Review of Books, the New York Times; or, in years past.
Dial, The Atlantic, or The Nation. He looks in the nationally
Afro-American Literary Critics: An Introduction 6i
known Titde magazines, such as Poetry or The Kenyon Review,
He studies the anthologies of literary criticism, and he notes
the names of editors of anthologies of literature. He scrutinizes
the journals of the professional associationsPMLA, American
Literature, Shakespeare Quarterly, for example. He attends lec
tures at the large universities and at the annual meetings of
academic societies. In such arenas as these, one would expect to
discover more literary critics than he could read or listen to in a
lifetime.
But, except for rare individuals, the critics in these sources
are white. Few anthologies include criticism by blacks: The
"New Negro (Alain Locke, 1925), The Negro Caravan (Sterling
Brown et ah, 19 4 1), Soon, One Morning (Herbert Hill, 1963),
Anger and Beyond (HiU, 1966), Images of the Negro in America
(Darwin T. Turner and Jean Bright, 1965), Black Voices (Abra
ham Chapman, 1968), Images of the Negro in American Litera
ture (Seymour Gross and John Hardy, 1966), Black Fire (LeRoi
Jones and Larry Neal, 1968), Black Expression (Addison
Gayle, Jr., 1969), Black American Literature: Essays (Turner,
1969). Most of these anthologies have been published within the
past five years; and, significantly, of the eight anthologies during
that half decade, four have been edited by white men. Few
blacks have been hired into the white world of professional
journalism as critics or columnists (the William Stanley Braith-
waites and Carl Rowans are rare), and few white readers
have searched the back pages of black newspapers for critical
reviews. In general, the blacks who are invited to review for
nationally known periodicals are those who have distinguished
themselves as creative writers rather than as critics. They are
such men as Langston Hughes, Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin,
and Ama Bontemps. Until recently, few black scholars were
hired on the staffs of large universities even as visiting lecturers
the Hugh Clusters, Sterling Browns, and Alain Lockes of
previous decades were conspicuous. From 1949 to 1965, no more
than two or three black scholars read papers at the annual
meeting of the Modem Language Association, and only a few
more appeared on programs of the National Council of Teachers
of English. In fact, as recently as 1939, black scholars felt that
they had so little opportunity to present papers at the regional
or national Modem Language Association meetings that they
formed an organization for black teachers of language and
literaturethe College Language Association. In short, black
critics have been denied opportunity to present their works in
the most respected mediaor at least they have not been en
couraged to contribute.
These facts, however, do not entirely absolve blacks of the
responsibility for failing to produce more critics. Afro-American
professional journalism has failed to develop and promote a
literary market. Negro Digest^ now called The Black World,
(1942-51, 1961 to date) has been the most enduring among
the commercial magazines that devote significant space to htera-
ture, but tlie Johnson Pubhshing Company has not given the
Digest support equal to that for Ebony and Jet. Black commer
cial publishers have alleged that they would waste money if they
attempted to promote literary culture among the disinterested
black masses. (One wonders how these publishers explain the
fact that, with httle advertising and limited distribution. Broad
side Press has managed, in two years, to sell fifty-six thousand
copies of the poetry of Don Lee.
Many white commercial publishers have similar reservations
about the cultural interests of Americans, even though their
potential market is eight times as large. Among whites, however,
a substantial amount of hterary criticism is pubhshed within
the academic world. Here, too, black Americans have failed
to promote literary scholarship as effectively as might be ex
pected. Most major universities sponsor publishing companies,
which promote the university's reputation within the academic
community and simultaneously provide platfonns for the uni
versitys scholars. In contrast, although many predominantly
Negro colleges have offered coinses and even majors in printing
and in joiuiialLsm, very few have attempted to publish an)tliing
more scholarly than a catalogue and a schedule of classes.
Even though any one of these colleges may complain that high
costs and a limited market militate against establishing an in
dividual publishing company, it seems feasible for several black
colleges to pool their resources to form a combined press.
Equally significant is the failure of black institutions to pro
mote journals. Relatively small white universities have sponsored
journals that have gained respect; but, at black colleges, such
journalswhen attemptedhave rarely endured for more than
an issue or two: the Journal of Negro Education at Howard
University, Phtjlon at Atlanta University, and the Journal of
Human Relations at Central State College in Ohio are perhaps
the most successful. And the College Language Association is
the only professional association for blacks to give attention pri
marily to literature. Furthermore, no enduring journal has con
centrated on the study and promotion of Afro-American con
tributions in the arts. Phtjlon probably has achieved more
toward this end than any other journal, but Phylon has reflected
the social-science orientation that might be expected from a
periodical established by W. E. B. DuBois.
Finally, black scholars know how the fifteen-hour teaching
schedule has buried research imder mounds of freshman com
position and how the small pay checks have driven potential
critics into administrative positions merely to gain reasonable
compensation for their drudgery.
After this pessimistic review of the problems of Afro-American
literary critics, it may seem amazing that any have existed.
And in limited space, I can do little more than name a few
of the more prolific and to consider their practices briefly. I wish
to give special attention to the Afro-American critics who have
written about literature by blacks, and I shall include both
literary historians and critics under the rubric of critic.'" For
convenience of discussion, I shall oversimplify by categorizing
the historians and critics in six groups: ( 1 ) Afro-Americans
who have become identified primarily with the mainstream"" of
American criticism because of their research in the work of
white authors; (2) black historians who have described literary
achievements merely as a part of their broader study of Afro-
American culture; (3) those individuals who have attracted
attention because of their pronouncements about one particular
black writer or one group of writers; (4) the creative writers,
whose fame rests upon their own work rather than upon their
criticism; (5) the academic critics, and (6) the new black
critics, who argue for a Black Aesthetic. This survey is not defini
tive but suggestive: it is an introduction to a study that needs
to be made.
i.
Some Afro-Americans have earned recognition primarily by
writing about hterature by whites. Probably the first such suc
cessful critic was William Stanley Braithwaite, a Bostonian black
man of West Indian ancestry. A professional journalist, Braith
waite from 19 13 to 1929 edited an annual anthology of maga
zine verse. In introductions to these volumes, Braithwaite di
rected attention to young white poets who had not yet been
recognized by American critics. One should not look to Braith
waite for objective criticism, however. Generally, he assumed
the role of a sociable master of ceremonies, introducing his
protgs, rejoicing in their virtues, and abstaining from caustic
condemnation. Although he published only one volume of criti
cism, The Poetic Year, a collection of essays about the poetry
of 1936, he wrote a biography of the Bronte sisters, and he
edited anthologies of Elizabethan, Georgian, and Restoration
verse.
A second critic who published before World War I was
Benjamin Brawley. Although his principal reputation today is
based on his studies of black cultural history, Brawley, a pro
fessor at Morehouse College, Shaw University, and Howard
University, also wrote A Short History of English Literature,
designed for use in college classes. In taste, Brawley was a
Victorian, in the conservative and genteel sense in which that
tenn is understood. He preferred Nvriters who wTOte of beauty
rather than squalor; and in his own biographical work he ignored
those activities of his subjects that he could not commend. Al
though he must be mentioned at this point, Brawley will be
considered more fully in a later section of this paper.
Some more-recent scholars have earned wider recognition
for their publications about white authors than for their studies
of blacks. For example, although Philip Butcher, a professor at
Morgan State College, has written articles about young black
novelists, he is better known for his two biographies of George
Washington Cable, a nineteenth-century white novelist. Similarly,
Esther Merle Jackson, recently a Fulbright professor at the Uni
versity of Berlin and currently a professor at the University of
Wisconsin, is better known as the author of a brilliant book-
length study of Tennessee Williams than as a critic of black
literature.
The contemporary black critic who is most firmly anchored in
the mainstream is Nathan A. Scott, professor of theology at the
University of Chicago, whose race is unknown to many of his
ardent admirers. Scott occasionally has written about Afro-Amer
ican literature, a field in which he is very knowledgeable. His
best piece in black literary criticism is The Dark and Haunted
Tower of Richard Wright (1964), one of the few articles com
mending Richard Wright as an existentialist. Nathan Scott s rep
utation, however, is based on such books as Rehearsals of
Discomposure (1952) and Modern Literature and the Religious
Frontier (1958), excellent works in which he examined philo
sophical and psychological dilemmas as they are revealed in the
fiction of such writers as Kafka, Silone, Lawrence, and Eliot.
As was stated earlier, however, most of the attention in this
paper will be focused on those black literary historians and
critics who have been especially concerned with studies of
black literature.
u.
Criticism of black writers as a group is a relatively new

venture. It was necessary, first, for black writers to produce a
considerable body of literature and, second, for black and white
critics to develop awareness that that work could be examined as
literature rather than merely as sociology. As early as 1863,
William Wells Brown included Phillis Wheatley among the black
heroes whose lives he recorded in The Black Man: His Ante-
cedents. His Genius, and His Achievements, Almost one half
century later, Benjamin Brawley produced a pioneer work,
The Negro in Literature and Art (19 10 ). Like Brown, Brawley
oflFered more biography than critical evaluation. Perceiving
Americas ignorance about black vmters, Brawley chiefly as
sumed the responsibility of familiarizing readers with them;
hence, he remained more historian than critic.
By the middle of the 1920s, the two requisite forcesan
ample volume of work by black vmters, and readers' respect for
that work as hteraturehad coalesced. Therefore, most signifi
cant criticism of Afro-American literature dates from that time.
Prominent among the black scholars since 1925 who have
earned reputations for knowledge of black literature, have been
several whose major interests lay in other disciplines. The first
of these was W. E. B. DuBois, who earned his doctorate from
Harvard in history. Although he did not publish any books of
criticism, DuBois, as the first editor of The Crisis, regularly
commented on the work of black writers. Unfortunately, during
the 1920s, one of the most exciting periods in the annals of
Afro-American literature, DuBois proved incapable of shedding
the ideals of an earlier generation. Like most black intellectuals
of the last decade of the nineteenth century, DuBois sought
to earn equality for black Americans by educating white Ameri
cans to awareness of their virtues and their sensitivity to op
pression. A talented writer who judged creative literature to be
a major vehicle for such education, DuBois was appalled by
some black writers of the twenties who seemed to sully the
black man's image by revealing the squalid aspects of Afro-
American life and character.
Few men, if any, have had greater success than Alain Locke
in familiarizing America vrith the culture of black people. Al-
tliough he earned a doctorate from Harvard in pliilosophy,
served for many years as chairman of the Philosophy Depart
ment at Howard University, and published studies in philosophy,
Locke used his compendious knowledge and his aesthetic sensi
tivity to art, music, and literature as a basis for many articles and
books about black culture. In 1925, he edited The New Negro,
an anthology that is still respected as the best introduction to
the temper and art of the early years of the Negro Awakening.
He was the first to edit an anthology of Afro-American drama.
Plays of Negro Life (1927). He edited one of the earhest
critical anthologies of poetry. Four Negro Poets (1927). For
more than twenty years, he annually reviewed literature of
black Americansfirst in Opportunity, then in Phylon. Like
Braithwaite, he applauded more than he appraised; for his
purpose was to record literary achievement and to encourage
additional activity.
More recent historians of Afro-American literature are John
Hope Franklin, Margaret Just Butcher, and Ernest Kaiser. In
From Slavery to Freedom (1948, 1956), Franklin, professor of
history at the University of Chicago, commented on Afro-Ameri
can writers as part of the cultural history of black America.
Margaret Butcher, a professor at Federal City College, included
appraisals of hterary works in The Negro in American Culture
(1956), which she developed from notes and materials that
Alain Locke had compiled. Ernest Kaiser, hbrarian at the
Schomburg Collection in New York City, is best known as the
author of briUiant essays on black scholarship in history. In
addition, Kaiser, who is incredibly knowledgeable about litera
ture by and about Afro-Americans, has written perceptively
about current black writers. His work is frequently published
in Negro Digest and in Freedomways, for which he regularly
reviews recent books by and about blacks.
All these cultural historians have played important roles by
familiarizing Americans with the names and works of black
writers; but, because of their training and their purpose, they
had no desire to provide for individual works or individual
authors the kind of in-depth examination that is essential to
literary criticism.
.
A few essayists have become known as critics chiefly because
of their evaluation of one writer or one group. It may be unfair
to place Harold Cruse in this category, for The Crisis of the
Negro Intellectual (1967) is now judged on its own merits.
Nevertheless, when the book was first published, the criticism
Cruse had written for magazines was not known widely; con
sequently, his name was less familiar than were the names of
black writers he attacked and black scholars whose critical
theories he denounced. It is probable, therefore, that much of
the early reaction to the book was stimulated by general interest
in Cruses assault on such writers as Lorraine Hansberry and
John KiUens. Similarly, the first international recognition of
James Baldwin as a critic came in response to "Everybody's
Protest Novel," which seemed to question the artistic competence
of Richard Wright, who was then the most famed and respected
among Afro-American novelists. As the wheel turns and attacker
becomes the attacked, it is fashionable today to quote Eldridge
Cleaver's denunciation of Baldwin in Soul on Ice (1968).
What is startling about these few instances is the apparent
eagerness of the reading public to accept instantly the scathing
pronouncements of an individual who had no previous reputa
tion as a critic or who at least lacked a literary reputation
comparable to that of the writer he rejected. The reason for
this phenomenon, I believe, is that, despite fifty years of criticism
of Afro-American literature, criteria for that criticism have not
been established. Consequently, some readers judge hteratine
by Afro-Americans according to its moral value, a few for its
aesthetic value, most by its social value, and too many according
to their responses to the personalities of the black autliors.
As long as this confusion continues, many readers, lacking con
fidence in their own ability to distinguish the worth-while black
literature from the inept, echo tlie most recent voice they hear.
io.
When a white publisher has wanted a black man to write

about Afro-American literature, the publisher generally has
turned to a famous creative writer. The reason is obvious. White
publishers and readers have not been, and are not, familiar with
the names and work of black scholarsthe academic critics.
Therefore, publishers have called upon the only blacks they have
knownthe famous writers.
Since all the best-known black writers and many of the less
well-known have been asked or permitted to serve as historian,
critic, or polemicist, only a minimal summary of their work
is possible in a paper as brief as this.
In 1922, novelist and poet James Weldon Johnson edited
an anthology, TJie Book of American Negro Poetry (revised
in 19 3 1), for which he wrote an excellent critical introduction
to black poets. From 1926 to 1928, Countee Cullen, best-known
Afro-American poet of his day, wrote randomly about literary
topics in "The Black Tower, published monthly in Opportunity.
In 1927, he, too, prepared an anthology of poetry. Caroling Dusk,
for which he provided an introduction and headnotes. Both
Johnson and Cullen, however, are suspect as critics. Like many
other authors, they sometimes devised theory to defend their
personal practices. Nevertheless, both gave more attention to
aesthetic theory than was common among Afro-American critics.
During the twenties, novelist Wallace Thurman received fre
quent invitations to write articles about fiction. From the thirties
until his death in the sixties, Langston Hughes probably re
ceived more requests to write about Afro-American authors
than any other black writer prior to James Baldwin. Most often,
Hughes described personalities rather than works, or he recited
the problems of black writers. It is diflBcult to determine whether
Hughes chose to restrict his writing in this manner, or, more
probably, whether these were the subjects of prime interest
to the soliciting editors. In the forties, Richard Wright was the
one whom editors called for articles; and, when he chose, he

produced as efiFectively in literary history as in fiction. One of the
most perceptive analyses by an Afro-American writer is Wright s
long essay on black poets, The Literature of the Negro in
the United States, published first in a French journal and later
included in W rights White Marti Listen (1957). In the essay,
Wright describes the poets since Phillis Wheatley, and scrutinizes
their relationships to American society.
The two best-known writer-critics are James Baldwin and
Ralph Ellison, who come closer than any others to being the
professional critics among black writers. A professional critic,
as I use the term, is a man who earns his living primarily by
writing about literature; for example. Brooks Atkinson, for years
drama critic for the New York Times, or Edmund Wilson or
George Jean Nathan. To survive, a professional critic normally
must be associated with a newspaper or magazine; a free-lance
critic risks starvation. (And, as I have said earlier, few blacks
have been hired on the staffs of periodicals or dailies.) Never
theless, Baldwin, in his early years in Paris, gambled at being
a free-lance writer on literary subjects even before he became
famous as a novelist. He included many of his better essays in
Notes of a Native Son (1955) Nobody Knows My Name
(19 6 1). Ralph Ellison also distinguished himself as a free-lance
writer on literary and musical topics. Some of his more significant
essays are included in his collection Shadow and Act (1964).
A writer-critic in great demand at the moment is Ama
Bontemps, one of the last of the talented writers of the Harlem
Renaissance. By preference and by invitation, Bontemps most
frequently writes nostalgically and illuminatingly about the
twenties and thirties. Although he has published many novels
and anthologies, Bontemps has published no books of literary
history, an oversight one hopes he will correct.
0.
The most significant group of black literary critics should be
the academic critics, for these are the individuals trained to
study and evaluate literature. They have the breadth of in
formation to facilitate comparison of American writers with for
eign ones and comparison of current writers with those of
previous centuries. Unfortunately, because they have published
most often for small printing houses or in professional journals
(often those read by few whites), the academic critics are
the least well-known of black critics.
The first major academic critic was Benjamin Brawley, whose
early efiorts were designed to promote appreciation rather than
evaluation. For example, in his critical biography of Paul Lau
rence Dunbar (1936), Brawley deliberately ignored personal
failings of the man, and minimized many of Dunbars weak
nesses as a writer. When the writers of the twenties appeared,
Brawley, like DuBois, revealed himself unable to adapt to the
tastes of a new generation: He continued to echo the precepts
of Matthew Arnold. Complaining about what he believed to be
the young writers' unnecessary interest in the ugliness of hfe,
he argued that they lacked the high moral purpose essential
to great literature. Perhaps the most accurate measure of Braw-
ley's literary taste is the fact that he selected as Dunbars best
story a highly sentimental one in which a husband decides
to remain with his wife because he is thrilled by the tenderness
with which their newly bom child clutches his hand.
Despite his deficiencies in criticism, Brawley was the first
significant academic critic-historian of Afro-American hterature.
The next was Sterling Brown, younger than Brawley but his
contemporary as a teacher at Howard University. Brown is the
dean of black academic critics. No other black critic has in
spired as much admiration and respect from his students and
his successors in the field. In every stream of creative black
literature. Sterling Brown is the source to which critics return.
His first published critical books were The Negro in American
Fiction (1937), a detailed examination of the Afro-American as
a character, and The Negro in Poetry and Drama (1937). An
almost unknown classic is his impublished study of Afro-Ameri
can drama, which he undertook as part of the Myrdal-Camegie
research project. Brown was the senior editor of The Negro

Caravan (19 4 1), the most comprehensive anthology of Afro-
American letters that has been published. Unlike Brawley,
Brown understood the need to evaluate the image of the black
man as character and the achievement of the black man as
writer. Brown has published no books since 1941, although he
continued until recently to publish infrequent articles on folk
tales, folklore, and folk speech. As a critic, Brown benefited
from catholic taste and sensitivity, which enabled him to ap
preciate and applaud the realistic as well as the genteel, the
folk as well as the sophisticated.
The best single volume of criticism by a black, I believe, is
Saunders Reddings To Make a Poet Black (1939)* A brilliant
writer, the author of history, an autobiography, a novel, and a
collection of essays. Redding, now a professor at Georgetown
University, studied writers from Jupiter Hammon through those
of the twenties. His insights are striking, and his style is ad
mirable. This is a book to read; it is regrettable that Redding
has not revised the book to bring it up to the present.
In the 1930s and 1940s, two other academic criticsNick
Ford and Hugh Glosterpublished book-length studies of Afro-
American literatiure. Ford examined twentieth-century fiction
in The Contemporary Negro N ovel (1936). Glos ter s Negro
Voices in American Fiction (1948)the more detailed of the
twofocuses on the Afro-American writers' depiction of the re
lationship of their black characters to the American scene.
Gloster, however, was concerned more with sociological import
than with aesthetic quality.
The forties and fifties spawned nmnerous Afro-American
critics who published in Phtjlon, the College Language Associa
tion Journal, and other professional periodicals. Among the most
productive of these were Jolm Lash, Blyden Jackson, and Nick
Ford. All three, at various times, prepared the amiual review
of Negro literatiue for Phxjlon, but also published frequendy
in other journals. AH three concentrated on fiction. Criticism of
poetry is surprisingly sparse during the period, and criticism of

drama is almost non-existent.
A characteristic common to all these criticsand one that
Harold Cruse denouncesis the tendency to evaluate hterature
by black writers according to the criteria established and ap
proved for white American writers. In one sense, this standard
is justifiable, for most of the black writers, in their eflFort to
earn respect, initiated the styles supposedly approved. But this
insistence encouraged excessively enthusiastic praise of writers
working within tradition, and suspicion of the few who broke
away from tradition.
oi.
For a decade, there was a hiatus in criticism by the academi

cians. Many of the black scholars drifted into administrative
positions to secure financial rewards commensurate with their
ability. Others abandoned Afro-American literature because
they believed that black writers had finally become part of the
mainstream of American literature. During this periodroughly,
1954 lo 1965significant social changes occurred. The Supreme
Court desegregation decision of 1954 at first seemed to assure
Afro-Americans the equality they had desired. Consequently,
many black educators considered it deplorable and un-Ameri
can to study Negro identity apart from American identity.
However, by i960, only six years later, it was evident that
school integration had not produced the anticipated amalgama
tion. Meanwhile, intensifying insistence from black Americans
persuaded blacks and whites to want to learn more about Afro-
American culture and history.
This impulse has produced two developments. The first is the
emergence of a new generation of academic critics and a return
of many who had discontinued their studies about Afro-American
literature: James Emanuel, W. Edward Farrison, Addison Gayle,
Stephen Henderson, and George Kent are among the currently
productive writers. Richard Long, Helen Johnson, and Richard
Barksdale are perfecting studies intended for publication. Of

these, only Emanuel and Farrison have written books of criticism
Emanuel, a biography of Langston Hughes (1967), and Far
rison, a biography of William Wells Brown (1969). Gayle, how
ever, has published two anthologies of criticism by Afro-Ameri
cansBZocfc Expression (1969) and this volume on the Black
Aesthetic and a collection of essays The Black Situation (1970).
The second development is perhaps more significant A new
group of black critics has developed. These reject the standards
previously applied to works by Afro-Americans, and are de
manding that that literature be judged according to an aesthetic
grounded in Afro-American culture. Many of these new critics
insist that, to have value, black literature must contribute to
tlie revolutionary cause of black liberation, not merely in polemics
against white oppression but also in reinterpretation of the
black experience. All the new critics agree that the literature
should not be judged good or bad according to its imitation
of the styles and tastes of Europeans, but according to its pres
entation of the styles and traditions stemming from African
and Afro-American culture. For example, they point out the
foolishness of expecting iambic meter in work of a poet who
moves instead to the rhythms of jazz or be-bop, and they argue
that it is supercilious or even racist to complain that litera
ture does not conform to the patterns and tastes of the white
hterary world if it does suit and meet the needs of black
people.
None of these critics has yet produced a book; they were
given platforms originally by Hoyt Fuller of Negro Digest and
John Henrik Clarke of Freedomwatjs, More recently, they have
been publishing in newer magazines. The best-known are LeRoi
Jones and Larry Neal, who coedited Black Fire (1968). Jones is
known as a writer of the new htcratme; Neal has been more
productive as an exponent of tlie theories of the new Uterature.
Others of significance are Clarence Major, editor of N ew Black
Poetry (1969); Carolyn Rodgers, whose 'Black PoetryWhere
Its At*' {Negro Digest, 1969) is the best essay on tlie work of
new black poets; Sarah Fabio; Cecil Brown, author of a recent
novel, The L ife and Loves of Mr, Jive-Ass Nigger; and Ed
Bullins, tlie leading interpreter of current black theater.
It is important that these new critics are explaining theory
rather than merely commenting on practice. Previously, as I
have said, most Afro-Ameriean critics assumed that the desirable
standards were necessarily those currently favored by the Ameri
can literary establishment. This attitude inevitably restricted
black writers to imitation rather than innovation: the "good
writer was expected to use the forms and styles that appealed
to white readers. And he dared not aspire to the avant-garde,
because he needed assurance that the style was approved. In
a sense, then, he continued to permit himself to be defined
by the white American. Today, however, black critics are postu
lating theories about what literature is or should be for black
people, according to a Black Aesthetic, as was explained in a
recent issue of Negro Digest,
The writings of these theorists and critics are not hammering
at the consciousness of the American literary masses, because
most new critics are not attempting to publish in the journals
subscribed to predominantly by whites. Most are publishing in
Negro Digest, Journal of Black Poetry, Critique, The Black
Scholar, Black Theater, and other popular publications aimed at
a black market. One who wishes to learn what the new black
critics are doing and saying must read sueh journals as these.
At present, the major weakness of the Black Aesthetic critics
are their tendencies to denigrate older black writers while laud
ing the newest. They are further handicapped by the necessity
of devising theory prior to the creation of works. That is,
Aristotle actually did little more than examine works he and
other Greeks admired. He distinguished the elements these
works shared. Then he stipulated that great literature must
include such elements. Arnold, too, deduced his theories from
literature already created. Many new black critics, however, are
structuring theories while calling for writers to create the works
that are needed to demonstrate the excellence of the theories.
It is not accidental, therefore, that most of the new critics are

writers. And because their social theories are as revolutionary
as their literary theories, few are permanently connected with
the well-estabhshed academic institutions.
It is always dangerous to predict the future for any group of
writers; nevertheless, a few guesses can be made about future
directions of black critics. First, as increasing numbers of pre
dominantly white institutions hire black instructors, and as
additional money is given to black institutions, black scholars
will find the time, the motivation, and the connections for
publishing. This means that they will be producing increasing
numbers of books about both white and black writers. As their
publications increase, more black critics will become recognized
and respected.
Second, as some of the present ferment subsides, the new
black critics will look more closely at the current black writers.
They will begin to evaluate more carefully on aesthetic bases,
as Carolyn Rodgers is now doing. Perhaps by that time, or
soon afterwards, they will have expanded American critical
theory to a degree at which Americans can more fuUy appreciate
poetry that depends on oral presentation and can appreciate
drama that involves less physical action than has been the
custom in the Anglo-American theatre. In short, the new black
critics may develop theory that may become influential in the
evaluation of all American literature.
I would like to conclude on this note of optimism. But I
cannot. The chances are great that unless America changes
drastically witliin the next few years, most American readers
will continue to look at literature through the eyes of the white
critics rather than the black. Full awareness of black critics
will develop only when publishers make greater effort to look
beyond the prestige colleges for authors of scholarly books, and
when the literary public learns to look beyond the prestige
journals for literary scholarship. And full appreciation of the
criticism of Afro-American literature will develop only when
all readers perceive that a thorough knowledge and understand
ing of the Afro-American experience, culture, and literary his
tory is a prerequisite for an individual who wishes to be a critic
of that literature.
II Music
INTRO DUCTIO N TO BLA C K A ESTH ETICS IN M USIC
Jimmy Stewart
Usually when a serious examination of the cultural products

of a people is undertaken, there is always the tacit assumption,
on the part of the person who is doing the writing and on the
part of those who read it, that the ingredients that go into the
production of those products are the integral results of their
particular cultural communality. This is presupposed by writers
and readers alike when they deal with, in this particular case,
the aesthetics of music. This has been, in most of the lands
of writings weVe been accustomed to, the reason for the cul
pability we attribute to whites in their handling of materials
pertaining to our cultureparticularly those writings, mostly by
whites, that deal widi the aesthetics of the music of Black
people in this country. The assumption is, of course, that the
music of Black people in this country, aside from certain un
avoidable ethnic considerations, can be defined in the same
terms and by the same requirements as those that define the
music produced by them (whites). Consequently, in most of the
works available pertaining to the aesthetics of our music, the
terms of their inquiries bear this general assumption.
But the fact of the matter is that such a case has never
existed in this country. There have always been two musical
traditions: the musical tradition or aesthetic of white people in

the West, and the musical tradition of Black people in this
country. Even though there has been considerable borrowing
between the two cultures, the two distinctive aesthetic traditions
have always existed. And it has been this cultural tradition or
aesthetic that has determined the values in the music in each
case and that has determined everything in the terms of the
respective musics, e.g., the way the musical instruments were
utilized, and the over-all philosophy of music. In relation to this,
the fact that aesthetics as a formal concern involving the material
and mechanics of creation is fundamentally a reflective occupa
tion, and the fact that, generally speaking, musicians as a group
are not generally concerned with the philosophical or theoretical
problems of how they make music, may account in part for the
present state of affairs we find in the West in generalthat
those who were concerned about such matters, the musicologists
and historians, were in every case procureurs of the traditions
of their own particular cultural history, and in and by its terms
they established the basis for the critical standards for the music
or miLsics they became authorities'" of. Even in the face of the
fact that actually, in this country, the cultural condition required
a recognition of two distinct cultural matrices, the obstacles
that this recognition, by implication, introduced into their aes
thetic formulations presented no apparent obstacles to them
(whites), since the critical system was theirs entirely, and not
one, as a formal criticism, of our own making. The incongruity
of this situation as a condition of a disjunct cultural situation
has been exacerbated at this present moment to the point that
our present necessity for a sequestered body of critical thought
is not even debatable.
Hitherto, the literature concerning the aesthetics of our music
has aboimdcd with all sorts of wliite cultural paternalism in
judgments regarding the music produced. It could not have
been otherwise, since most of the people who provided the
critical material were wliite, and generally tlie attitudes they
have shared, and still do for that matter, are that tlie concep
tions of culture in their context is applicable to us and to those
products of our culture as well. This applies to aU the intellectual
assumptions whites bring to bear in their critical evaluations in
the West in general, and in this coxmtry in particular. The
situation here is all the more deplorable for the fact that it is
the judgments of whites that are being foisted on Black people
a situation not only extremely reprehensible to us in its disgust
ing avoidance of acknowledging the requirements of our specific
cultural frame, but a situation further compounded by being one
wherein the requirements are those aesthetic values we find
in what the critic produces in his or her role as the agent of a
particular cultural tradition. For in America there has never
existed a common cultural interest and heritage in the sense
in which cultural interest and heritages exist in other countries.
This, though the idolum of a national culture is promulgated
in the aesthetic writings produced by the compradors of the
white national aesthetic, may account for the reason why, until
now, nobody among them, the majority of whom are white,
have been able to deliver an adequate theory of aesthetic
value concerning what we have produced. This is due in a
great part to the long historical consequence of the way slavery
was practiced in this coimtry, and the ensuing consequence of
the slaves' introduction into the domus of the enslaving society.
The exclusive belief by whites, and those blacks who share
it, that black people in this country constitute a culturally lost
minority stems from this history. In addition, the terms that
were used by whites to define culture, specifically in the case
where culture is defined as the accumulation of discernible
artifacts of a people, which in turn was construed to mean
that any form culture" took, i.e., discernible artifacts such as
sculpture, pottery, garment designs, and so on, contributed
greatly to this notion by whites that Black people in this country
possessed no culture. And since they had ruthlessly seen to it
that no formal representation of the culture of those Black
people brought to the West (neither in the form of artifacts or
language or religious worship) was retained in their new slave
situation in the new world, then the logical conclusion by terms

of their definition of culture enabled them to add insult to
injury by saying that the Black people in this country are a
culturally lost people in the West.
But, as a matter of fact and to the contrary, culture in
our sense transcends those kinds of objectifications of our ex
periences, by being manifestly cultiural in terms of their move
ment with existence, instead of as an ossification of existence
that happens when an object of art is produced. African philoso
phy and metaphysics have always been animated by a total
vision of life; so we, as legatees of that vision of the world,
have manifested that index of our culture in the only approxi
mation we could: in our music. This is observable in a formal
sense in the music we have produced in the West, but more
significantly in that music s inner dynamic. In the inner workings
of our music has been the ideal paradigm of our understanding
of the creative process as a movement with existence.
This means, then, that the concern of aesthetic being, in our
sense, is to accompany reality, to "move with it, so to speak,
and not against it, which all, yes all, the white cultural art forms
do. The art of the white culture is, in that sense, against life
and art. This is why none of the world s non-white peoples have
ever evolved museums. This is why black people in the West
never had to wait for a phonograph record or a book to
accomplish the transmission of our cultural values. Art, in our
sense, must be imderstood as the accomplishment of creating,
the operation of creating. What results therefrom is merely the
momentary residue of that operationa perishable object and
nothing more, and anything else you might imbue it with
(which the white aesthetic purports to do) is nothing else but
mummification. The point isand this is the crux of our two
opposing conceptions of beingthat the imperishability of crea
tion is not in what is created, is not in the art product, is not
in the thing as it exists as an object, but in the procedure of its
becoming what it is. The opposite view of this, the view that
European aesthetics developed, has been responsible for the
cut de sac that workers in that tradition have encountered in
this century. They have been forced to reappraise their aes
thetics to such an extent that they have decided, as for example,
Pollack did, to posit their aesthetic, on the action aspect in its
production, even though the fundamental material nature of
painting qua painting is its fixity, as it has always been, and not
its motion. Picasso, for another, presumed to resolve the ubiq
uitous dilemma of the same aesthetic by expropriating certain
visible aspects of the traditional African wood carvings he dis
covered in Parisian objet (fart shops around the turn of this
century, and applying them to his exhausted tradition.
To give you an idea of what he had to do to achieve what
he did, consider that he had to negate entirely the most
cherished characteristic of Western painting: the property of
perspective. Or to choose another example of Black aesthetics
in relationship to physical matter and durability in the tactile
properties of aesthetic products, we might look at the state of
certain pieces of art as physical articles, which in the case of
music can only refer to notations on paper. In the sense that
music has no property as physical matter, in the sense in which
a painting does or a building, it comes as close as we know
to being in existence in a sense in which none of the other
forms of art are. Even though those forms that utilize words
possess this property, as well as the dance to an elaborate
degree, they nonetheless lack the simultaneity one encounters
in the musical experience.
Our music in the Afro-Christian era was largely vocal and
therefore amenable to pitch-orderinga situation that was altered
considerably when we began to handle musical instruments.
The employment of instruments, with the attendant problems
of sound production, meant that a regulation was introduced
into our aural framework, where previously the antiphonal
features in our singing, which didn't have to come through an
attachment, could have been varied at will. The fact that the
instruments could not accommodate the microtonal variants that
were peculiar to our singing meant that adjustments had to
be made, which, put another way, meant simply that when

those Black brothers got hold of those instruments, the instru
ments didn t come with free lessons and all, like you get at
Wurlitzer. And the whites didnt much care how or what we
did with them. It was a matter of being left to our own
resources to determine how the music was going to be produced
on those instruments. This, and the fact that none of the
instruments we used were invented by us, meant that we had
to impose on borrowed instruments an aesthetic convention that
we obviously possessed even before we acquired them. This is
significant. It indicates that a Black aesthetic existed, and that
this aesthetic has always governed what we have produced.
However, let us go back to an examination of the nature of our
religious worship, then. In the pre-Christian slave period, all
the Blacks that were brought to this country brought their gods
\vith them, which meant that if a Black man was brought here
and he was from the Dagomba people, the god he brought he
called Wuni. If he was from the Fo people, he called his god
Mawu. If he was from the Kikuyu people, he called his god
Ngai. What Im getting to is that, even aside from the vicious
practices of the slavers to eradicate any form of a formal religious
worship among us, there never existed in our situation a domi
nant tribal metaphysical frame such as existed in Haiti, for
example. So when a form of worship arose among Black people
in this coimtry, that form of worship comprised a synthesis of aU
the ingredients of those various forms of our previous African
worships we retained in the New World. These were spiritual
things, not physical artifacts. The orishas were in those early
churches. The gods were in our voices, and when we left those
churches and went out into the world, those gods went with us.
They went with us out into those fields, in our work songs and
blues. And so, by the time we got to King Oliver, the gods tliat
had been in the churches had to be where gods always really
arein the world, among people. When those Black men began
to handle those instruments, they were direetly in contact with
their gods. They were fully in contact with power. An instn.unent
focuses and situates your function, whether you are driving a
car or a lathe, or playing a saxophone. You could sing anywhere,
whenever you pleased. You could sing while you worked, which
was just what we were doing during those early vocal periods
of our music. But a musical instrument entailed preparation
and a concentration of function. You couldnt do anything eke
while you were doing that. Here, you might say, as a formal
category of our aesthetics Jazz began, but only in the sense
that a distinction was established. Because the fact of the matter
is that the kind of arbitrary compartmentalizing we invariably
do when we try to intelligently talk about our music doesnt
exist at all. For example, the collective improvisation that Ornette
Coleman introduced into our music in the sixties was employed
in the Oliver and Armstrong period, all the way back to our
early churches, back to forms in Africa, yet conspicuously absent
in the BeBop development of the forties. Yet the repeated
cadences, or fours, which typified the music of the BeBop
phase relate directly to the call and response that is still
a definite practice in certain of our Baptist churches today. In
addition to these examples of an aesthetic continuums existing,
the only parting comment I wish to make on its nature before
we move to the social aspects that must be taken into account
is that the state of our aesthetics before the acquisition of
musical instruments might be said to resemble a compost of
diverse Black spiritual factors. But the inevitable secularization
that followed in the wake of the Civil War, and the constraints
of segregation which held at bay the physical distention of
Black people, could not stay the ideas, the ideologies, that the
black musician freely appropriated from the white society. This
culminated in the monstrous display of an aesthetic individualism
(an antiquated white Renaissance concept) during the Bop
movement, which in the forties was a white aesthetic counterpart
to the theory of laissez faire, and corresponded to a capitalistic
philosophy more rampant in its economics then than ever before.
It was during this period that the words genius and artist
came to signify the approbative status of aesthetic stature that
most Black musicians were pursuing then and that was being
bestowed on them by white critics.
We find, from the hindsights of historical perspective, that
the situation I mentioned as pertaining to the attitudes and
values of the proponents of our music during the forties and
fifties didnt just suddenly occur, but was in truth the logical
consequence of the boiurgeois impedimenta that were always
a part of the music. The contention was that what occurred
thenthe quest for white approvalwas adumbrated in the
creole ethics that accompanied the development of the music
from its New Orleans days to then. Even though this white
approval was sought, in many ways, obvious and/or subtle, it
nonetheless characterized our Black artists under the various
regimes. For example, in the i8oos, within the limited confines
of the Negro community in New Orleans, the Black people were
moving toward two definite societies: the society of the cafe-
au-lait creole members of the community, and that of the Blacks.
The expressed social philosophy of this creole class was the
eventual assimilation of their members into the white society-
something they achieved partially in a genetic sense, and toward
which end they were attempting by other means to go, politically
and socially. But the white society halted this movement by
closing all access the creoles had into the dominant white social
stream. This foreclosure on the plans of this class to eventually
assimilate into the great American schema forced them to re
appraise and utilize their resources within the segregated limits
of the negro community. This meant that the skills, and equally
significant values, were brought into the larger Black portion
of the community. And as the century groimd on into the
twentieth with the war (World War One), Black soldiers went
to Eiu-ope, the home of white values in the West, and, back in
America, were exposed in the twenties to the egalitarianism of
tlie white aesthetes and the white upper middle class that
brought blacks and whites into closer proximity than they had
ever shared previously. In perspective it seems no surprise tliat
the black aitist of the forties and fifties was a ready prey for
the aesthetic ideological traps the whites had laid for him. And
as we reach for an understanding of what was going on, in terms
of the development of our music, we get a more coherent view of
its development in tenns of those social components that de
termined the attitudes the men had concerning themselves and
toward what they produced, than what theretofore was available
to us in accounts by whites. The astounding fact of the matter
is tliat though there were inchoate rumblings of perceiving our
selves as a national entity in this country in the thoughts
and writings of such men as Martin Delaney and Blyden, the
factors in support of Negroes conceiving of themselves as merely
a disenfranchised minority in the national American system
torpedoed that notion, and our energies were expended, instead
of seeking full equality, legally and socially. Consequently, these
same nationalistic imperatives, expressed as they were in the
political realm and reflected in our aesthetic philosophy, were
in the same fashion ignored in the integrationist process of
casting our music as a cultural contribution to the music of
the white national culture of America. Lacking a national
frame of cultural reference, thus actually lacking a bourgeoisie
which in that context could supply and support an aestheticas
an ideologywe took the aesthetic ideology of the white national
culture. This understanding of our aesthetics historically shows,
without a doubt, that the music of the sixties represents an
absolute break with the past in this sense.
But before we get to the national basis of our aesthetic
ideology, let us consider some of the factors in the past that,
retrospectively, indicated the necessity of consciously moving
our music ahead ideologically. These factors in the past have
been the relationship of the music to function, to our social
functions. And in that assessment, the form of our instrumenta
tion then was governed by the function the music served
in our social framework. The early bands were usually sextets,
consisting principally of a lead horn, usually a comet; a
clarinet, which supplied obbligatos, nms, and various other
ornamental figurations to the lead voice; and a trombone, which
behaved as a sort of melodic bass, often counter moving

melodically or utilizing slide devices and fills whenever the
other voices or parts were stationary. In addition to these, the
rhythm section then comprised drums, guitar, and bass. There
were variations to this arrangement, but basically this was the
instrumental composition of the early bands. Occasionally the
tuba was used instead of the bass, particularly during the
marching aflFairs, at lodge functions, and to and from the cemeter
ies. Understandably the piano was not used on those occasions.
The piano, significantly, occupied a niche all by itself in those
early days. The very nature of its stationary weight would have
made it an awkward addition to the bands diuig those aflfairs,
which were very mobile. The smaller instruments were more
suitable. As the music became more sedentary, at least in the
form of its presentation at dances, at homes, and in bars, the
piano figured more prominently in the make-up of the band.
However, prior to that, the piano had been the major soiurce
of music in the bawdyhouses that proliferated in New Orleans
during the sporting house period, e.g., the whore-house period
in Storyville, when the piano was usually played unaccom
panied. The player supplied his own rhythmic and harmonic
background. To achieve this, he made use of aU the musical
adornments that we now accept as standard to the type of
playing associated with that period: mordants, turns, appog-
giaturas, and clever chordal manipulations. But when the piano
was added to the other instrumental combinations as a supportive
voice, that elaborate and ornate conception of piano playing had
to be altered as a contributing musical voice. From the role of
establishing the harmonic frame for the compositions that were
played, the piano progressed, or retrogressed, depending on how
you interpret the importance of the instrument, to that of a more
skeletal form of piano style in the form of playing weVe come
to know as comping. By saying progressed or retrogressed,
as I did above, I chose to view the role of this instnunent, the
progression of tliis instrument, from a period of elaborate exjores-
sion to a diminution of its function and importance in the music
of the sixties. This seems to be due to its being the most Eiu-o-
pean of the instruments utilized in the instrumentation of our
music; the pitches being unalterably fixed meant that it was the
only instrument impervious to the pitch variations that were pos
sible on the other instruments, which were and still are so essen
tial to the production of our music. It was the most white instru
ment in our groups. So the music of the sixties was the force of
our aesthetics, which obliged us to discard the piano. We could
no longer pay obeisance to the Western tempered harmonic
system in the form of the harmonic demands this instrument
imposed on the music.
Changes in the manner and make-up of the aesthetic product
reflect the changes in the relationships of the product to its
social activities, its place, and its function. It is finally in this
sense, in the sense of the changing relationships of the music,
in this case, to the departments of social activities, that a
coherent understanding of Black aesthetics emerges. The music
that accompanied the parades and the dances, the music played
in the bawdyhouses, and the music played in the bars situated
our art as a function in our communities, and as an art it had
also a function as entertainment. But as weVe seen, that finally
had to end. For in the Bop movement of the forties, a rift
was becoming apparent between the music and its function in
the Black community. That wedge expressed (aside from the
immediate espousals on the part of some of our Black artists
on the primacy of the seriousness of what they were doing)
a deeper development that meant they were examining their
aesthetic in its relationship to the economic and political factors
that determined its being. So when Mingus and Max Roach
addressed themselves to the forms of cultural imperialism that
the white proprietors and entrepreneurs practiced, it was ap
parent, without a doubt, that the days of producing our music
within the context of those former departments of social activities
were at an end. And the music that ushered forth would
no longer be compatible to those departments, e.g., the bars
and the entire popular music field. It meant that our music,
which was in essence the music from Ornette Coleman to the

present, would no longer be applied to these departments of
the white American social organization. Which gives us every
indication that our music, in terms of form and content, has
now become more and more expressive of our own distinctive
theory of art And this theory is by implication posited in a
"nationalistic context of culture. Which, after all, all cultural
theories are. Within this frame, and only by this frame, can a
valid definition of aesthetics in the context of our culture be
arrived at. The necessity for a sequestered body of critical
thought is part of moving our music toward the future, where
the music we will supply will be applied to the departments we
will create in that world.
I hope that in reading the essays that will accompany
this introduction in this section on Black aesthetics in music,
the reader will keep in mind that the requirements of a totally
new vision of aesthetic reality will require that some of the
continuants of the past, as they pertained to certain aspects of
the production of our music, must be severed, and that, perhaps
to the lament of some, many of the requirements of the past
cannot be taken intact into the future. It is in this one aspect
that the music of the sixties is crucially different from the music
that went before it, in that in one fundamental sense the re
quirements of all our musics prior to the sixties developed
out of a definite system of protocol, i.e., there was a well-de
fined procedure for qualification as a musician tliat required
that the neophyte musician serve a required period of appren
ticeship by studying the acknowledged masters, which he did
usually by listening to records, then the arduous practicing or
"shedding where he perniciously attempted to emulate his
teacher, and then finally putting all of it to the test by applying
it witli others in the act of making music, which meant working
with combos and bands of various sizes and so forth. Con
comitantly, a serious form of competitiveness was nurtured that
stimulated creativity, in most cases of the kind that Basie
nurtured in the bands he had tliat included Chuck Berry and
Hershel Evans at the same time, and Hershel and Lester Young
at another. Norman Ganz produced a situation of this sort in his
Jazz at the Philharmonic packaging, by staging Howard McGee
with Roy Eldridge (if my memory serves me correctly), Illinois
Jacquet with Prez, Gene Ammons with Sonny Stitt, and Bird
with WiUie Smith, and numerous other couplings I'm sure the
reader can recall, which I haven't mentioned. This was a funda
mental practice that was traditionally expressive of our culture.
Our poets practiced it in our traditional African societies, where
poets engaged each other in contests of improvisational verse-
making. One that immediately comes to mind is such a contest
the Swahili poets used to participate in, called kufumbana,
in w hidi two poets try to 'trip the other up" by composing
two lines of a verse, which the other must complete by two
lines in the same meter and rhyme. But in addition to this,
the fact that each line had to have sixteen syllables with a
caesura, which is a pause denoting the rhythmic division in
a line of verse, should give you an idea of the skill that
was required. This is what went on in our jam sessions"
in our music in this country, and this is a feature of the
way our music was produced then, and what I called a con
tinuant" in that context. Values of aesthetic status were bound
to be created that had nothing at all to do with what the
whites were talking about when they spoke about our musical
giants. And those values were concomitant with customs of
aesthetic succession in very much the way I've described above.
This is what aU our muscians, in the context of that develop
ment of our music we know by the name of Jazz, were required
to pass through. From the days that Louis served his apprentice
ship in the band of King Oliver, to the time when Coleman
Hawkins had to assert his aesthetic supremacy over all the
tenor saxophonists that remained in America while he sojourned
in Europe, which he did on his return. This is told in an
apocryphal story of how Ben Webster baited the Hawk" by
tauntingly inviting him to bring his horn with him the next
tme he came to the club Ben was currently playing in, and
how the "Hawk continued to return to the club to hear Webster

play but never brought his instrument and how Ben got some
body to take the Hawks tenor from his apartment and bring
it to the club, thus forcing Ben and Coleman to "get one on.
These practices were adhered to. The music literally prolifer
ates with tales such as this one. Even the John Coltrane/Sonny
Rollins encounter, and the self-imposed retirement of Sonny
from the music scene after that encounter, gave credence to
those arguments that Trane and Sonny had indeed participated
in a contest of saxophone playing and Sonny had lost and
that a new voice in tenor playing was on the scene. And Bird
most conclusively Birdcomplied with this form of aesthetic
succession by literally demolishing every existing practitioner of
the music extant in his day. Thus he asserted his supremacy
by the terms of the requirement of the art in that way in
which the music we made came to be. But in terms of what
Tve described, the music of the sixties represents a cleavage
with the past in this essential and fundamental sense, in that
Ornette and those who are considered as forerunners of the
new Black music did not "earn their leadership status in any
of the ways by which leadership was "earned in our music
previously, from New Orleans to the present. And what can
be stated as "revolutionary involves more than technical innova
tion. It involves the temerity of these men to suggest that all
the assumptions or at least some of the basic and most funda
mental ones, which Iv e recounted above, had to be discarded.
This is at the essential core of what has happened in the new
revolutionary Black music. This connects to the ideological posi
tion of Black music in the sense that the ego-ridden individualism
of our music in all the antecedent periods of its development
is superannuated at this time in our history. Thus the entire
context of tlic music that John Coltrane produced in conjmiction
with Pharaoh Sanders was a conjunction and relationship one
could have hardly conceptualized between Gene Ammons and
Sonny Stitt, for example, since Sonny and Genes association
was governed in a definite sense by the procediures of aestlietic
behavior that I am sure they would agree was customary in

terms of how things were always done in "jazz. It would be
safe to assume that such assumptions applied in the case of
the collaborating functions of John and Pharaoh, or Milford
Graves and Don Pullins, or Sun Ras entire orchestral con
stituency. A. B. Spellman has presented an adequate explanation
of the ideological basis of the new music in his essay "Revolution
in Sound, which appeared in the August 1969 issue of Ebony
magazine. His statement in that article that "these black art
conscious musicians do not constitute a vanguard in the political
sense* may qualify as a correct assessment of the state of the
musicians and the language they use, since the language is not
vanguardist in a political sense, which is the case here, but
we must be careful, however, not to overlook the revolutionary
political implications in terms of the inner dynamic of the
new Black music. What I mean is that the rhetoric does not
have to be explicitly political, but it may be implicit in practice,
which IVe tried to bring to your attention in relating as I did
how the music of the sixties differs fundamentally from the
music of our past. In this sense, the music is certainly consistent
with nationalist-revolutionary tenets, even if Sim Ra is speaking
of space spheres. When Leon Thomas sings "The Creator Has a
Master Plan, there is something explicitly political in that.
In practice, in the social sense and consequently in the
economic sense, the musicians are in a very critical relationship
to the departments of the existing state of the art-and-entertain-
ment dispensation industry in this country. Insofar as these de
partments have always been in the control of whites, the implicit
indicators of the new music are forcing the new-music practi
tioners and their products into an untenable relationship be
tween themselves what they produce, and their function in the
art-and-entertainment apparatus in the general white American
society. And if the white musical industry has made it appear
that the proponents of the music of the forties and the fifties
have secured a hard-fought-for position in their system of things.
then the regrettable consequence portends an aesthetic advocacy
as deliberately iconoclastic in terms of those continuants of
our own past as those Black aesthetics pose vis--vis the white
cultural hegemony.
O F TH E SORROW SONGS
W. E. B, DuBois
I Wtolk through the churchyard

To lay this body down;
I know moon-rise, I know star-rise;
I walk in the moonlight, I walk in the starlight;
m lie in the grave and stretch out my arms,
Ill go to judgment in the evening of the day,
And my soul and thy soul shall meet that day,
When I lay this body down.
N eg r o S ong .
They that walked in darkness sang songs in the olden days

Sorrow Songsfor they were weary at heart. And so before each
thought that I have written in this book I have set a phrase, a
haunting echo of these weird old songs in which the soul of the
black slave spoke to men. Ever since I was a child these songs
have stirred me strangely. They came out of the South unknown
to me, one by one, and yet at once I knew tliem as of me
and of mine. Then in after years when I came to Nashville
I saw the great temple builded of these songs towering over
the pale city. To me Jubilee Hall seemed ever made of the

songs themselves, and its bricks were red with the blood and
dust of toil. Out of them rose for me morning, noon, and night,
bursts of wonderful melody, full of the voices of my brothers
and sisters, full of the voices of the past
Little of beauty has America given the world save the rude
grandeur God himself stamped on her bosom; the human spirit
in this new world has expressed itself in vigor and ingenuity
rather than in beauty. And so by fateful chance the Negro
folk-songthe rhythmic cry of the slavestands to-day not simply
as the sole American music, but as the most beautiful expression
of human experience bom this side the seas. It has been
neglected, it has been, and is, half despised, and above all it
has been persistently mistaken and misunderstood; but notwith
standing, it still remains as the singular spiritual heritage of
the nation and the greatest gift of the Negro people.
Away back in the thirties the melody of these slave songs
stirred the nation, but the songs were soon half forgotten. Some,
like Near the lake where drooped the willow, passed into
current airs and their source was forgotten; others were cari
catured on the minstrel stage and their memory died away.
Then in war-time came the singular Port Royal experiment
after the capture of Hilton Head, and perhaps for the first
time the North met the Southern slave face to face and heart
to heart with no third witness. The Sea Islands of the Carolinas,
where they met, were filled with a black folk of primitive
type, touched and moulded less by the world about them
than any others outside the Black Belt. Their appearance was
uncouth, their language funny, but their hearts were human
and their singing stirred men with a mighty power. Thomas
Wentworth Higginson hastened to tell of these songs, and Miss
McKim and others inged upon the world their rare beauty.
But the world listened only half credulously until the Fisk
Jubilee Singers sang the slave songs so deeply into the worlds
heart that it can never wholly forget them again.
There was once a blacksmith s son bom at Cadiz, New York,
who in the changes of time taught school in Ohio and helped
defend Cincinnati from Kirby Smith. Then he fought at
Chancellorsville and Gettysburg and finally served in the Freed
mans Bureau at Nashville. Here he formed a Sunday-school
class of black children in 1866, and sang vdth them and taught
them to sing. And then they taught him to sing, and when
once the glory of the Jubilee songs passed into the soul of
George L. White, he knew his life-work was to let those Negroes
sing to the world as they had simg to him. So in 1871 the
pilgrimage of the Fisk Jubilee Singers began. North to Cin
cinnati they rode,four half-clothed black boys and five girl-
women,led by a man with a cause and a purpose. They stopped
at Wilberforce, the oldest of Negro schools, where a black bishop
heard them. Then they went, fighting cold and starvation, shut
out of hotels, and cheerfully sneered at, ever northward; and
ever the magic of their song kept thrilling hearts, until a burst
of applause in the Congregational Council at Oberlin revealed
them to the world. They came to New York and Henry Ward
Beecher dared to welcome them, even though the metropolitan
dailies sneered at his Nigger Minstrels. So their songs con
quered till they sang across the land and across the sea, before
Queen and Kaiser, in Scotland and Ireland, Holland and Swit
zerland. Seven years they sang, and brought back a hundred
and fifty thousand dollars to foimd Fisk University.
Since their day they have been imitatedsometimes well, by
the singers of Hampton and Atlanta, sometimes ill, by straggling
quartettes. Caricature has sought again to spoil the quaint
beauty of the music, and has filled the air with many debased
melodies which vulgar ears scarce know from the real. But
the true Negro folk-song still lives in the hearts of those who
have heard them truly sung and in the hearts of the Negro
people.
What are these songs, and what do they mean? I know little
of music and can say nothing in technical phrase, but I know
lOO The Black Aesthetic
something of men, and knowing them, I know that these songs

are the articulate message of the slave to the world. They tell
us in these eager days that life was joyous to the black slave,
careless and happy. I can easily believe this of some, of many.
But not all the past South, though it rose from the dead, can
gainsay the heart-touching witness of these songs. They are the
music of an unhappy people, of the children of disappointment;
they teU of death and suffering and imvoiced longing toward
a truer world, of misty wanderings and hidden ways.
The songs are indeed the siftings of centuries; the music is
far more ancient than the words, and in it we can trace here
and there signs of development. My grandfather s grandmother
was seized by an evil Dutch trader two centuries ago; and
coming to the valleys of the Hudson and Housatonic, black,
little, and lithe, she shivered and shrank in the harsh north
winds, looked longingly at the hills, and often crooned a
heathen melody to the child between her knees, thus:
-
J
- J'
Do ba-na co-ba, ge-ne me, ge-ne me!
w------ w
Tlie child sang it to his children and they to their children s

cliildren, and so two hundred years it has traveled down to
us and we sing it to our children, knowing as little as our
fatliers what its words may mean, but knowing well tlie meaning
of its music.
Of the Sorrow Songs lo i
This was primitive African music; it may be seen in larger

form in the strange chant which heralds The Coming of John :
You may bury me in the East,

You may bury me in the West,
But rU hear the trumpet sound in that morning,
the voice of exile.

Ten master songs, more or less, one may pluck from this forest
of melodysongs of undoubted Negro origin and wide popular
currency, and songs peculiarly characteristic of the slave. One
of these I have just mentioned. Another whose strains begin
this book is Nobody knows the trouble Tve seen. When,
struck with a sudden poverty, the United States refused to
fulfill its promises of land to the freedmen, a brigadier-general
went down to the Sea Islands to carry the news. An old woman
on the outskirts of the throng began singing this song; all the
mass joined with her, swaying. And the soldier wept.
The third song is the cradle-song of death which all men
know,Swing low, sweet chariot,whose bars begin the life
story of Alexander Crummell. Then there is the song of many
waters, Roll, Jordan, roll,' a mighty chorus with minor cadences.
There were many songs of the fugitive like that which opens
The Wings of Atlanta, and the more familiar Been A-Listen-
ing. The seventh is the song of the End and the Beginning
My Lord, what a mourning! when the stars begin to fall; a
strain of this is placed before The Dawn of Freedom. The
song of gropingMy w ays cloudybegins The Meaning of
Progress; the ninth is the song of this chapterWrestlin' Jacob,
the day is a-breaking, a paean of hopeful strife. The List
master song is the song of songsSteal away,sprung from
The Faith of the Fathers.
There are many others of the Negro folk-songs as striking and
characteristic as these, as, for instance, the three strains in the
third, eighth, and ninth chapters; and others I am sure could
easily make a selection on more scientific principles. There are.
too, songs that seem to be a step removed from the more

primitive types: there is the maze-like medley, Bright sparkles,
one phrase of which heads The Black Belt''; the Easter carol,
Dust, dust and ashes''; the dirge, My mother's took her flight
and gone home''; and that burst of melody hovering over The
Passing of the First-Bom''I hope my mother will be there in
that beautiful world on high.
These represent a third step in the development of the slave
song, of which You may bury me in the East'' is the first,
and songs like March on'' (chapter six) and Steal away'' are
the second. The first is African music, the second Afro-American,
while the third is a blending of Negro music with the music
heard in the foster land. The result is still distinctively Negro
and the method of blending original, but the elements are both
Negro and Caucasian. One might go further and find a fourth
step in this development, where the songs of white America
have been distinctively influenced by the slave songs or have
incorporated whole phrases of Negro melody, as Swanee River
and Old Black Joe.'' Side by side, too, vrith the growth has
gone the debasements and imitationsthe Negro minstrel
songs, many of the gospel hymns, and some of the con
temporary coon songs,a mass of music in which the novice
may easily lose himself and never find the real Negro melodies.
In these songs, I have said, the slave spoke to the world. Such
a message is naturally veiled and half articulate. Words and
music have lost each other and new and cant phrases of a
dimly understood theology have displaced the older sentiment.
Once in a while we catch a strange word of an unknown
tongue, as the Mighty Myo, which figures as a river of death;
more often slight words or mere doggerel are joined to music of
singular sweetness. Purely secular songs are few in number,
partly because many of them were tinned into hymns by a
change of words, partly becaiLse the frolics were seldom heard
by the stranger, iuid the music less often caught. Of nearly
all tlie songs, however, the music is distinctly sorrowful. The
ten master songs I have mentioned tell in word and music of
trouble and exile, of strife and hiding; they grope toward some
unseen power and sigh for rest in the End.
The words that are left to us are not without interest, and,
cleared of evident dross, they conceal much of real poetry and
meaning beneath conventional theology and unmeaning rhap
sody. Like all primitive folk, the slave stood near to Natures
heart. Life was a rough and rolling sea like the brown Atlantic
of the Sea Islands; the 'Wilderness was the home of God,
and the lonesome valley led to the way of life. Winterll
soon be over, was the picture of life and death to a tropical
imagination. The sudden wild thunder-storms of the South
awed and impressed the Negroesat times the rumbling seemed
to them mournful, at times imperious;
My Lord calls me.

He calls me by the thunder.
The trumpet sounds it in my soul.
The monotonous toil and exposure is painted in many words.

One sees the ploughmen in the hot, moist furrow, singing:
Dereks no rain to wet you,

Dere*s no sun to bum you.
Oh, push along, believer,
I want to go home.
The bowed and bent old man cries, with thrice-repeated wail:
O Lord, keep me from sinking down,
and he rebukes the devil of doubt who can whisper:
Jesus is dead and Gods gone away.
Yet the soul-hunger is there, the restlessness of the savage,

the wail of the wanderer, and the plaint is put in one little
phrase:
My soul wants some-thing that's new, thats new
Over the inner thoughts of the slaves and their relations one
with another the shadow of fear ever hung, so that we get but
glimpses here and there, and also with them, eloquent omissions
and silences. Mother and child are smig, but seldom father;
fugitive and weary wanderer call for pity and aflFection, but
there is little of wooing and wedding; the rocks and the moun
tains are well known, but home is unknown. Strange blending
of love and helplessness signs through the refrain;
Yonde/s my ole madder.

Been waggin at de hill so long;
*Bout time she cross over.
Git home bime-by.
Elsewhere comes the cry of the "motherless and the "Farewell,

farewell, my only child.
Love-songs are scarce and fall into two categoriesthe frivolous
and light, and the sad. Of deep successful love there is ominous
silence, and in one of the oldest of these songs there is a depth
of history and meaning;
Heavn shall home.

A black woman said of the song, "It cant be sung without
a full heart and a troubled sperrit The same voice sings
here that sings in the German folk-song:
Jetz Geh t ans brele, trinlc aber net.
Of death the Negro showed little fear, but talked of it famil

iarly and even fondly as simply a crossing of the waters, perhaps
who knows?back to his ancient forests again. Later days
transfigured his fatalism, and amid the dust and dirt the toiler
sang:
Dust, dust and ashes, fly over my grave,

But the Lord shall bear my spirit home.
The things evidently borrowed from the surrounding world

undergo characteristic change when they enter the mouth of
the slave. Especially is this true of Bible phrases. W eep, O
captive daughter of Zion, is quaintly turned into "Zion, weep-
a-low, and the wheels of Ezekiel are turned every way in
the mystic dreaming of the slave, till he says;
There's a little wheel a-turnin inâ-my heart.
As in olden time, the words of these hymns were improvised

by some leading minstrel of the religious band. The circum
stances of the gathering, however, the rhythm of the songs,
and the limitations of allowable thought, confined the poetry
for the most part to single or double lines, and they seldom
were expanded to quatrains or longer tales, although there are
some few examples of sustained efiForts, chiefly paraphrases of
the Bible. Three short series of verses have always attracted
me,the one that heads this chapter, of one line of which
Thomas Wentworth Higginson has fittingly said, "Never, it
seems to me, since man first lived and suffered was his infinite
longing for peace uttered more plaintively. The second and
third are descriptions of the Last Judgment,the one a late

improvisation, \vith some traces of outside influence:
Oh, the stars in the elements are falling.

And the moon drips away into blood,
And the ransomed of the Lord are returning unto God,
Blessed be the name of the Lord,
And the other earlier and homelier picture from the low coast
lands:
Michael, haul the boat ashore.

Then youll hear the horn they blow.
Then youU hear the trumpet sound.
Trumpet sound the world around.
Trumpet sound for rich and poor.
Trumpet sound the Jubilee,
Trumpet sound for you and me.
Through all the sorrow of the Sorrow Songs tliere breathes

a hopea faith in the ultimate justice of things. The minor
cadences of despair change often to triumph and calm con
fidence. Sometimes it is faith in life, sometimes a faith in
death, sometimes assurance of boundless justice in some fair
world beyond. But whichever it is, the meaning is always dear:
that sometime, somewhere, men will judge men by their souls
and not by their skins. Is such a hope justified? Do the Sorrow
Songs sing true?
The silently grovidng assumption of this age is that the proba
tion of races is past, and that the backward races of to-day are of
proven ineflBcicncy and not worth the saving. Such an assumption
is the arrogance of peoples irreverent toward Time and ignorant
of the deeds of men. A thousand years ago such an assumption,
easily possible, would have made it difficult for the Teuton to
prove his right to Ufc. Two thousand years ago such dogmatism,
readily welcome, would have scouted the idea of blond races
ever leading civilization. So woefully unorganized is sociological
knowledge that the meaning of progress, the meaning of swift

and slow in human doing, and the limits of human per
fectibility, are veiled, unanswered sphinxes on the shores of
science. Why should iEschylus have sung two thousand years
before Shakespeare was bom? Why has civilization flourished
in Europe, and flickered, flamed, and died in Africa? So long
as the world stands meekly dumb before such questions, shall
this nation proclaim its ignorance and unhallowed prejudices
by denying freedom of opportunity to those who brought the
Sorrow Songs to the Seats of the Mighty?
Your country? How came it yours? Before the Pilgrims landed
we were here. Here we have brought our three gifts and
mingled them with yours: a gift of story and songsoft, stirring
melody in an ill-harmonized and unmelodious land; the gift
of sweat and brawn to beat back the wilderness, conquer the
soil, and lay the foundations of this vast economic empire two
hundred years earlier than your weak hands could have done
it; the third, a gift of the Spirit. Around us the history of the
land has centred for thrice a hundred years; out of the nation s
heart we have called all that was best to throttle and subdue
aU that was worst; fire and blood, prayer and sacrifice, have
billowed over this people, and they have found peace only
in the altars of the God of Right. Nor has our gift of the
Spirit been merely passive. Actively we have woven ourselves
vrith the very warp and woof of this nationwe fought their
battles, shared their sorrow, mingled our blood with theirs,
and generation after generation have pleaded with a headstrong,
careless people to despise not Justice, Mercy, and Truth, lest
the nation be smitten with a curse. Our song, our toil, our cheer,
and warning have been given to this nation in blood-brotherhood.
Are not these gifts worth the giving? Is not this work and
striving? Would America have been America without her Negro
people?
Even so is the hope that sang in the songs of my fathers well
sung. If somewhere in this whirl and chaos of things there
dwells Eternal Good, pitiful yet masterful, then anon in His
good time America shall rend the Veil and the prisoned shall
go free. Free, free as the simshine trickling down the morning
into these high windows of mine, free as yonder fresh young
voices welling up to me from the caverns of brick and mortar
belowswelling with song, instinct with Hfe, tremulous treble
and darkening bass. My children, my little children, are singing
to the sunshine, and thus they sing:
r r^r-i
Let us cheer the wea -ly travel - le r,.
J, |V- J l
f
Cheer the wea - ry trav - el - ler,. . Let us
i r '
cheer the wea - rv.

^ 1
trav - el - ler
^
A
I 1^ H f
m
long the heav - en - ly way.
_I______ h
And the traveller girds himself, and sets his face toward the
Morning, and goes his way.
JAZZ AT HOME
J, A. Rogers
Jazz is a marvel of paradox: too fundamentally human, at

least as modem humanity goes, to be typically racial, too inter
national to be characteristically national, too much abroad in the
world to have a special home. And yet jazz in spite of it all
is one part American and three parts American Negro, and
was originally the nobodys child of the levee and the city
slum. Transplanted exotica rather hardy one, we admitof
the mundane world capitals, sport of the sophisticated, it is
really at home in its humble native soil wherever the modem
unsophisticated Negro feels happy and sings and dances to his
mood. It follows that jazz is more at home in Harlem than
in Paris, though from the look and sound of certain quarters
of Paris one would hardly think so. It is just the epidemic
contagiousness of jazz that makes it, like the measles, sweep
the block. But somebody had to have it first: that was the
Negro.
What after all is this taking new tiling, that, condemned
in certain quarters, enthusiastically welcomed in others, has
nonchalantly gone on until it ranks with the movie and the
dollar as a foremost exponent of modem Americanism? Jazz
isnt music merely, it is a spirit that can express itself in
Jazz at Home 111
almost anything. The true spirit of jazz is a joyous revolt from

convention, custom, authority, boredom, even sorrowfrom
everything that would confine the soul of man and hinder its
riding free on the air. The Negroes who invented it called their
songs the Blues,*' and they weren't capable of satire or decep
tion. Jazz was their explosive attempt to cast oflF the blues
and be happy, carefree happy, even in the midst of sordidness
and sorrow. And that is why it has been such a balm for
modem ennui, and has become a safety valve for modem
machine-ridden and convention-bound society. It is the revolt
of the emotions against repression.
The story is told of the clever group of Jazz-specialists
who, originating dear knows in what scattered places, had
found themselves and the frills of the art in New York and
had been drawn to the gay Bohemias of Paris. In a little
cabaret of Montmartre they had just entertained into the wee
small hoius fascinated society and royalty; and, of course, had
been paid royally for it. Then, the entertainment over and the
guests away, the entertainers entertained themselves with their
very best, which is always impromptu, for the sheer joy of it.
That is jazz.
In its elementis, jazz has always existed. It is in the Indian
war-dance, the Highland fling, the Irish jig, the Cossack dance,
the Spanish fandango, the Brazilian maxixey the dance of the
whirling dervish, the hula hula of the South Seas, the danse du
vntre of the Orient, the carmagnole of the French Revolution,
the strains of Gypsy music, and the ragtime of the Negro.
Jazz proper, however, is something more than aU these. It is
a release of all the suppressed emotions at once, a blowing off
of the lid, as it were. It is hilarity expressing itself through
pandemonium; musical fireworks.
The direct predecessor of jazz is ragtime. That both are
atavistically African there is little doubt, but to what extent
it is difficult to determine. In its barbaric rhythm and exuber
ance there is something of the bamboula, a wild, abandoned
dance of the West African and the Haitian Negro, so stirringly
described by the anonymous author of Untrodden Fields of

Anthropology, or of the ganza ceremony so brilliantly depicted
in Maran s Batouala. But jazz time is faster and more complex
than African music. With its cowbells, auto horns, calliopes,
rattles, dinner gongs, kitchen utensils, cymbals, screams, crashes,
clanldngs and monotonous rhythm it bears all the marks of
a nerve-strung, strident, mechanized civilization. It is a thing
of the junglesmodem man-made jungles.
The earliest ja2z-makers were the itinerant piano players who
would wander up and down the Mississippi from saloon to
saloon, from dive to dive. Seated at the piano with a carefree
air that a king might envy, their box-back coats flowing over
the stool, their Stetsons puUed well over their eyes, and cigars
at an angle of forty-five degrees, they would "whip the ivories
to marvellous chords and hidden racy, joyous meanings, evoking
the intense delight of their hearers who would smother them
at the close with huzzas and whiskey. Often wholly illiterate,
these humble troubadours knowing nothing of written music
or composition, but with minds like cameras, would listen to
the rude improvisations of the dock laborers and the railroad
gangs and reproduce them, reflecting perfectly the sentiments
and the longings of these humble folk. The improvised bands
at Negro dances in the South, or the little boys with their
harmonicas and jews-harps, each one putting his own individual
ity into the air, played also no inconsiderable part in its evolution.
Toverty, says J. A. Jackson of the Billboard, "compelled im
provised instruments. Bones, tambourines, make-shift string in
struments, tin can and hollow wood effects, aU now utilized
as musical novelties, were among early Negroes the product of
necessity. When these were not available patting juba prevailed.
Present-day Charleston is but a variation of tliis. Its early
expression was tlie patting for the buck dance.
The origin of the present jazz craze is interesting. More
cities claim its birthplace than claimed Homer dead. New
Orleans, San Francisco, Memphis, Chicago, all assert the honor
is theirs. Jazz, as it is to-day, seems to have come into being
Jazz at Home 113
this way, however: W. C. Handy, a Negro, having digested the
airs of the itinerant musicians referred to, evolved the first
classic, Memphis Blues. Then came Jasbo Brown, a reckless
musician of a Negro cabaret in Chicago, who played this and
other blues, blowing his own extravagant moods and risqu
interpretations into them, while hilarious with gin. To give
further meanings to his veiled allusions he would make the
trombone talk" by putting a derby hat and later a tin can
at its mouth. The delighted patrons would shout, More, Jasbo.
More, Jas, more." And so the name originated.
As to the jazz dance itself: at this time Shelton Brooks, a
Negro comedian, invented a new strut," called Walkin' the
Dog." Jasbo s anarchic airs found in this strut a soul mate.
Then as a result of their union came The Texas Tommy,"
the highest point of brilliant, acrobatic execution and nifty foot
work so far evolved in jazz dancing. The latest of these dances
is the Charleston," which has brought something really new
to the dance step. The Charleston" calls for activity of the
whole body. One characteristic is a fantastic fling of the legs
from the hip downwards. The dance ends in what is known
as the camel-walk"in reality a gorilla-like shambleand
finishes with a peculiar hop like that of the Indian war dance.
Imagine one suffering from a fit of rhythmic ague and you have
the effect precisely.
The cleverest Charleston" dancers perhaps are urchins of
five and six who may be seen any time on the streets of
Harlem, keeping time with their hands, and surrounded by
admiring crowds. But put it on a well-set stage, danced by
a bobbed-hair chorus, and you have an effect that reminds you
of the abandon of the Furies. And so Broadway studies Harlem.
Not all of the visitors of the twenty or more well-attended
cabarets of Harlem are idle pleasure seekers or underworld
devotees. Many are serious artists, actors and producers seek
ing something new, some suggestion to be taken, too often in
pallid imitation, to Broadway's lights and stars.
This makes it difficult to say whether jazz is more char
acteristic of the Negro or of contemporary America. As was

shown, it is of Negro origin plus the influence of the American
environment. It is Negro-American. Jazz proper, however, is
in idiomrhythmic, musical and pantomimicthoroughly Amer
ican Negro; it is his spiritual picture on that Ughter comedy
side, just as the spirituals are the picture on the tragedy side.
The two are poles apart, but the former is by no means to
be despised and it is just as characteristically the product of
the peculiar and unique experience of the Negro in this country.
The African Negro hasnt it, and the Caucasian never could
have invented it. Once achieved, it is common property, and
jazz has absorbed the national spirit, that tremendous spirit of
go, the nervousness, lack of conventionality and boisterous good
nature characteristic of the American, white or black, as com
pared the more rigid formal natures of the Englishman or
German.
But there still remains something elusive about jazz that
few, if any of the white artists, have been able to capture.
The Negro is admittedly its best expositor. That elusive some
thing, for lack of a better name. Til call Negro rhythm. The
average Negro, particularly of the lower classes, puts rhythm
into whatever he does, whether it be shining shoes or carrying
a basket on the head to market as the Jamaican women do.
Some years ago while wandering in Cincinnati I happened
upon a Negro revival meeting at its height. The majority present
were women, a goodly few of whom were white. Under the
influence of the spirit the sisters would come forward and
strutmuch of jazz enters where it would be least expected.
The Negro women had the perfect jazz abandon, while the
white ones moved lamely and woodenly. This same lack of
spontaneity is evident to a degree in the cultivated and in
hibited Negro.
In its playing technique, jazz is similarly original and spon
taneous. The performance of the Negro musicians is much
imitated, but seldom equalled. Lieutenant Europe, leader of
tlie famous band of the Tifteentli New York Regiment, said
Jazz at Home 115
that the bandmaster of the Garde Rpublicaine, amazed at his
jazz effects, could not believe without demonstration that his
band had not used special instruments. Jazz has a virtuoso
technique all its own: its best performers, singers and players,
lift it far above the level of mere trick or mechanical effects.
Abbie Mitchell, Ethel Waters, and Florence Mills; the Blues
singers, Clara, Mamie, and Bessie Smith; Eubie Blake, the
piam*st; Buddy Gilmore, the drummer, and Bill Robinson, the
pantomimic dancerto mention merely an illustrative feware
inimitable artists, with an inventive, improvising skill that defies
imitation. And those who know their work most intimately trace
its uniqueness without exception to the folk-roots of their artistry.
Musically jazz has a great future. It is rapidly being sub
limated. In the more famous jazz orchestras like those of Will
Marion Cook, Paul Whiteman, Sissle and Blake, Sam Stewart,
Fletcher Henderson, Vincent Lopez and the Clef Club units,
there are none of the vulgarities and crudities of the lowly
origin or the only too prevalent cheap imitations. The pioneer
work in the artistic development of jazz was done by Negro
artists; it was the lead of the so-called syncopated orchestras
of Tyers and Will Marion Cook, the former playing for the
Castles of dancing fame, and the latter touring as a concertizing
orchestra in the great American centers and abroad. Because
of the difficulties of financial backing, these expert combinations
have had to yield groimd to white orchestras of the type of
the Paul Whiteman and Vincent Lopez, organizations that are
now demonstrating the finer possibilities of jazz music. Jazz,
says Serge Koussevitzy, the new conductor of the Boston Sym
phony, is an important contribution to modem musical literature.
It has an epochal significanceit is not superficial, it is funda
mental. Jazz comes from the soil, where all music has its be
ginning. And Leopold Stokowski says more extendedly of it:
Jazz has come to stay because it is an expression of the

times, of the breathless, energetic, superactive times in which
we are living, it is useless to fight against it. Already its new
vigor, its new vitality is beginning to manifest itself. . . . Americas
contribution to the music of the past will have the same re
vivifying effect as the injection of new, and in the larger sense,
vulgar blood into dying aristocracy. Music will then be vulgarized
in the best sense of the word, and enter more and more into the
daily lives of people. . . . The Negro musicians of America are
playing a great part in this change. They have an open mind, and
unbiassed outlook. They are not hampered by conventions or tradi
tions, and with their new ideas, their constant experiment, they are
causing new blood to flow in the veins of music. The jazz players
make their instruments do entirely new things, things finished mu
sicians are taught to avoid. They are pathfinders into new realms.
And thus it has come about that serious modernistic music

and musicians, most notably and avowedly in the work of the
French modernists Auric, Satie and Darius Milhaud, have be
come the confessed debtors of American Negro jazz. With the
same nonchalance and impudence with which it left the levee
and the dive to stride like an upstart conqueror, almost over
night, into the grand salon, jazz now begins its conquest of
musical Parnassus.
Whatever the ultimate result of the attempt to raise jazz
from the mob-level upon which it originated, its true home is
still its original cradle, the none too respectable cabaret. And
here we have the seamy side to the story. Here we have some
of the charm of Bohemia, but much more of the demoralization
of vice. Its rash spirit is in Grey's popular song, Runnin W ild:
Runnin wild; lost control

Runnin wild; mighty bold.
Peelin gay and reckless too
Carefree all the time; never blue
Always goin* I dont know where
Always showin that I dont care
Don love nobody, it aint worth wliile
All alone; runnin wild.
Jazz at Home 117
Jazz reached the height of its vogue at a time when minds
were reacting from the horrors and strain of war. Humanity
welcomed it because in its fresh joyousness men foimd a tem
porary forgetfulness, infinitely less harmful than drugs or alcohol.
It is partly for some such reasons that it dominates the amuse
ment life of America to-day. No one can sensibly condone its
excesses or minimize its social danger if uncontrolled; all culture
is built upon inhibitions and control. But it is doubtful whether
the jazz-hounds of high and low estate would use their time
to better advantage. In all probability their tastes would find
some equally morbid, mischievous vent. Jazz, it is needless to
say, will remain a recreation for the industrious and a dissipater
of energy for the frivolous, a tonic for the strong and a poison
for the weak.
Yet in spite of its present vices and vulgarizations, its sex
informalities, its morally anarchic spirit, jazz has a popular
mission to perform. Joy, after all, has a physical basis. Those
who laugh and dance and sing are better off even in their
vices than those who do not. Moreover, jazz with its mocking
disregard for formality is a leveller and makes for democracy.
The jazz spirit, being primitive, demands more frankness and
sincerity. Just as it already has done in art and music, so
eventually in human relations and social manners, it will no
doubt have the effect of putting more reality in life by taking
some of the needless artificiality out. . . . Naturalness finds
the artificial in conduct ridiculous. Cervantes smiled Spains
chivalry away, said Byron. And so this new spirit of joy and
spontaneity may itself play the rle of reformer. Where at
present it vulgarizes, with more wholesome growth in the future,
it may on the contrary truly democratize. At all events, jazz is
rejuvenation, a recharging of the batteries of civilization with
primitive new vigor. It has come to stay, and they are wise,
who instead of protesting against it, try to lift and divert it
into nobler channels.
T H E CHANGING SAME
(R&B AND NEW B L A C K M U SIC)
LeRoi Jones
The blues impuke transferred . . . containing a race, and its

expression. Primal (mixtures . . . transfers and imitations).
Through its many changes, it remained the exact replication of
The Black Man In The West.
An expression of the culture at its most un-self- (therefore
showing the larger consciousness of a one self, immune to
bulkhit) conscious. The direct expression of a place . . . jazz
seeks another place as it weakens, a middle-class place. Ex
cept the consciously separate from those aspirations. Hence the
so-called avant-garde or new music, the new Black Music, is
separate because it seeks to be equally separate, equally unself
conscious . . . meaning more conscious of the real weights of
existence as the straightest R&B. There are simply more temp
tations for the middle-class Negro because he can make believe
in America more, cop out easier, become whiter and slighter
with less trouble, than most R&B people. Simply because he is
closer to begin with.
Jazz, too often, becomes a music of special, not necessarily
emotional, occasion. But R&B now, with the same help from
wliite America in its exploitation of energy for profit, the same
as if it was a gold mine, strings that music out along a similar
The Changing Same (R6-B and New Black Music) 119
weakening line. Beginning with their own vacuous understand

ing of what Black music is, or how it acts upon you, they
believe, from the Beatles on down, that it is about white life.
The Blues, its ^kinds'* and diversity, its identifying parent
styles. The phenomenon of jazz is another way of specifying
cultural influences. The jazz that is most European, popular
or avant, or the jazz that is Blackest, still makes reference to
a central body of cultural experience. The impulse, the force
that pushes you to sing . . . all up in there . . . is one thing . . .
what it produces is another. It can be expressive of the entire
force, or make it the occasion of some special pleading. Or it
is all equal . . we simply identify the part of the world in
which we are most responsive. It is all there. We are exact
(even in our lies). The elements that turn our singing into
direction reflections of our selves are heavy and palpable as
weather.
We are moved and directed by our total response to the
possibility of all eflFects.
We are bodies responding diflFerently, a (total) force, like
against you. You react to push it, re-create it, resist it. It is
the opposite pressure producing (in this case) the sound, the
music.
The City Blues tradition is called that by me only to recognize
different elements active in its creation. The slick city people
we become after the exodus, the unleashing of an energy into
the Northern urban situation. Wholesale.
The line we could trace, as musical tradition, is what we
as a people dig and pass on, as best we can. The call and
response form of Africa (lead and chorus) has never left us,
as a mode of (musical) expression. It has come down both
as vocal and instrumental form.
The rhythm quartet of the last thirty years is a very obvious
continuation of Black vocal tradition, and a condensation in
the form from the larger tribal singing units . . . through the
form of the large religious choirs (chorus) which were initially
dancers and singers, of religious and/or ritual purpose.
Indeed, to go back in any historical (or emotional) line of

ascent in Black music leads us inevitably to religion, i.e., spirit
viôrship. This phenomenon is always at the root in Black art,
the worship of spiritor at least the summoning of or by such
force. As even the music itself was that, a reflection of, or the
no thing itself.
The slave ship destroyed a great many formal art traditions
of the Black man. The white man enforced such cultural rape.
A cultureless people is a people without a memory. No
history. This is the best state for slaves; to be objects, just like
the rest of massa s possessions.
The breakdown of Black cultural tradition meant finally the
destruction of most formal art and social tradition. Including
the breakdown of the Black pre-American religious forms. Forci
bly so. Christianity replaced African religions as the outlet for
spirit worship. And Christian forms were traded, consciously
and unconsciously, for their own. Christian forms were em
phasized under threat of death. What resulted were Afro-
Christian forms. These are forms which persist today.
The stripping away, gradual erosion, of the pure African
form as means of expression by Black people, and the gradual
embracing of mixed Afro-CIiristian, Afro-American forms is an
initial reference to the cultural philosophy of Black People,
Black Art.
Another such reference, or such stripping, is an American
phenomenon, i.e., it is something that affected all of America,
in fact the entire West. This, of course, is the loss of religiosity
in the West, in general.
Black Music is African in origin, African-American in its total
ity, and its various forms (especially the vocal) show just
how the African impulses were redistributed in its expression,
and the expression itself became Cliristianized and post-Chris-
tianized.
Even today a great many of the best known R&B groups,
quartets, etc., have church backgrounds, and tlie music itself
is as churcliified as it has ever been . . . in varying degrees of
The Changing Same (R & B and New Black Music) 12 1
its complete emotional identification with the Black African-

American culture (Sam and Dave, etc. at one end . . . Dionne
Warwick in the middle . . . Leslie Uggams, the other end . . .
and fading).
The church continues, but not the devotion (at no level of
its existence is it as large, though in the poorest, most ab
stractly altruistic levels of churchgoing, the emotion is the de
votion, and the God, the God of that feeling and movement,
remains as powerful though "redistributed somewhat).
But the kind of church Black people belonged to usually
connected them with the society as a whole . . . identified
them, their aspirations, their culture: because the church was
one of the few places complete fullness of expression by the
Black was not constantly censored by the white man. Even the
asking of freedom, though in terms veiled with the bibhcal
references of "The Jews, went down in church.
It was only those arts and cultural practices that were less
obviously capable of "alien social statement that could survive
during slavery. (And even today in contemporary America, it
is much the same . . . though instead of out and out murder
there are hardly more merciful ways of limiting Black protest
or simple statement . . . in the arts just as in any other aspect
of American life.)
Blues (Lyric) its song quality is, it seems, the deepest ex
pression of memory. Experience re/feeling. It is the racial
memory. It is the "abstract design of racial character that is
evident, would be evident, in creation carrying the force of
that racial memory.
Just as the God spoken about in the Black songs is not the
same one in the white songs. Though the words might look
the same. (They are not even pronounced alike.) But it is a
different quality of energy they summon. It is the simple tone
of varying evolution by which we distinguish the races. The
peoples. The body is directly figured in it. "The life of the
organs.
But evolution is not merely physical: yet if you can un
derstand what the physical alludes to, is reflect of, then it

will be understood that each process in life is duplicated at
all levels.
The Blues (impulse) lyric (song) is even descriptive of a
plane of evolution, a direction . . . coming and going . . .
through whatever worlds. Environment, as the social workers
say . . . but Total Environment (including at all levels, the
spiritual).
Identification is Sound Identification is Sight Identification
is Touch, Feeling, SmeU, Movement. (For instance, I can tell,
even in the shadows, halfway across the field, whether it is a
white man or Black man running. Though Whitney Young would
like to see us all run the same.)
For instance, a white man could box like Muhammad Ah,
only after seeing Muhammad Ah box. He could not initiate that
style. It is no description, it is the culture, ( a d 1966)
The Spirituals . . The Camp Meeting Songs at backwoods

churches . . . or Slave Songs talking about deliverance.
The God the slaves worsliipped (for the most part, except
maybe the pure white*" God of the toms) had to be willing
to free them, somehow, someway . . . one sweet day.
The God, the perfection of what the spiritual dehvery and
world are said to be, is what the worshippers sang. That perfect
Black land. The land changed with the God in charge. The
churches the slaves and freedmen went to identified these Gods,
and their will in heaven, as well as earth.
The closer the church was to Africa, the Blacker the God.
(The Blacker the spirit.) The closer to the will (and meaning)
of the West, the whiter the God, the whiter the spirit worshipped.
The whiter the worshippers. This is still so. And the hard
Black core of America is African.
From the different churches, the different Gods, the different
versions of Earth. The different weights and classic versions
of reality. And the different singing. Different expressions (of a
whole). A whole people . . . a nation, in captivity.
The Changing Same (R irB and New Black Music) 123
Rhythm and Blues is part of the national genius,** of the

Black man, of the Black nation. It is the direct, no monkey
business expression of mban and rural (in its various stylistic
variations) Black America.
The hard, driving shouting of James Brown identifies a place
and image in America. A people and an energy, harnessed
and not harnessed by America. JB is straight out, open, and
speaking from the most deeply religious people on this continent.
The energy is harnessed because what JB does has to go
down in a system governed by aliens,** and he will probably
never become, say, as wealthy, etc., that is he will never reap
the material benefits that several bunches of white folks will,
from his own efforts. But the will of the expression transcends
the physical-mental material,** finally alien system-world it has
to go through to allow any benefits* in it. Because the will of
the expression is spiritual, and as such it must transcend its
mineral, vegetable, animal, environment.
Form and content are both mutually expressive of the whole.

And they are both equally expressive . . . each have an identify
ing motif and function. In Black music, both identify place
and direction. We want different contents and different forms
because we have different feelings. We are different peoples.
James Browns form and content identify an entire group
of people in America. However these may be transmuted and
reused, reappear in other areas, in other musics for different
purposes in the society, the initial energy and image are about
a specific grouping of people. Black People.
Music makes an image. What image? What environment

(in that words most extended meaning, i.e., total, external and
internal, environment)? I mean there is a world powered by
that image. The world James Browns images power is tlie
lowest placement (the most alien) in the white American social
order. Therefore, it is the Blackest and potentially tlie strongest.
It is not simply the strongest because of the transmutation
and harnessing I spoke of earlier. This is social, but it is

total. The world is a total. (And in this sense, the total
function of free music can be understood. See, especially,
H. Dumas' story in Negro Digest W ill the Circle Be Un
broken? and understand the implications of music as an auton
omous judge of civilizations, etc. Wowl)
By image, I mean that music (art for that matter . . or
any thing else if analyzed) summons and describes where its
energies were gotten. The blinking lights and shiny heads, or
the gray concrete and endless dreams. But the description is
of a total environment The content speaks of this environment,
as does the form.
The whitened Negro and white man want a different con
tent from the people James Brown describes. They are different
peoples. Tlie softness and so-called well being of the white
mans environment is described in his music (art) . in all
expressions of his self. AU peoples are.
If you play James Brown (say, Money Won t Change You . .
but time will take you out ) in a bank, the total environment
is changed. Not only the sardonic comment of the lyrics, but
the total emotional placement of the rhythm, instrumentation
and sound. An energy is released in the bank, a smnmoning
of images that take the bank, and everybody in it, on a trip.
That is, they visit another place. A place where Black People live.
But dig, not only is it a place where Black People live, it is
a place, in the spiritual precincts of its emotional telling,
where Black People move in almost absolute openness and
strength. (For instance, what is a white person who walks into
a James Brown or Sam and Dave song? How would he
function? What would be the social metaphor for his existence
in that world? What would he be doing?)
This is as true, finally, with the John Coltrane world or the
Sun-Ra world. In tlic Albert Ayler world, or Oniette Coleman
world, you would say, well, they might just be plajang away
furioiLsIy at some stringed instnmient. You undershuid?
In tlie Leslie Uggams world? They would be marr}ang a
The Changing Same {R irB and New Black Music) 125
half-white singer and directing the show . . . maybe even wliis-

pering lyrics and stuff from the wings. You understand? The
song and the people is the same.
The reaction to any expression moves the deepest part of
the psyche and makes its identifications throughout. The middle-
class Negro wants a different content (image) from James
Brown, because he has come from a different place, and wants
a different thing (he thinks). The something you want to hear
is the thing you already are or move toward.
We feel. Where is the expression going? What will it lead
to? What does it characterize? What does it make us feel
like? What is its image? Jazz content, of course, is as pregnant.
The implications of content
The form content of much of what is called New Thing or

Avant-Garde or New Music differs (or seems to differ) from
Rhythm and Blues, R&B oriented jazz, or what the cat on the
block digs. (And here Tm talking about what is essentially
Black Music. Although, to be sure, too often the unswinging-
ness of much of the new is because of its association,
derivation and even straight-out imitation of certain aspects of
contemporary European and white Euro-American music . . .
whether they are making believe they are Bach or Webern.)
Avant-garde, finally, is a bad term because it also means a lot
of quacks and quackers, too.
But the significant difference is, again, direction, intent, sense
of identification . . . land of consciousness. And thats what
its about; consciousness. What are you with (the word Con-
With/Scio-Know). The new musicians are self-conscious. Just
as the boppers were. Extremely conscious of self. They are
more conscious of a total self (or want to be) than the R&B
people who, for the most part, are all-expression. Emotional
expression. Many times self-consciousness turns out to be just
what it is as a common figure of speech. It produces world
weariness, cynicism, cominess. Even in the name of Art. Or
what have you . , . social uplift, Now we can play good as

white folks,*' or I went to Juilliard, and this piece exhibits a
Bach-like contrapuntal line, and so forth right on out to
lunch.
But at its best and most expressive, the New Black Music
is expression, and expression of reflection as well. What is
presented is a consciously proposed learning experience. (See
The New Wave. ) It is no wonder that many of the new
Black musicians are or say they want to be Spiritual Men
(Some of the hoppers embraced Islam), or else they are in
terested in the Wisdom Religion itself, i.e., the rise to spirit.
It is expanding the consciousness of the given that they are
interested in, not merely expressing what is already there, or
alluded to. They are interested in the unknown. The mystical.
But it is interpretation. The Miracles are spiritual. They sing
(and sing about) feeling. Their content is about feeling . . .
the form is to make feeling, etc. The self-conscious (reflective,
long-form. New Thing, bop, etc.) Art Musicians cultivate con
sciousness that wants more feeling, to rise . . . up a scale one
measures with ones life. It is about thought, but tliought can
kill it. Life is complex in the same simplicity.
R&B is about emotion, issues purely out of emotion. New
Black Music is also about emotion, but from a difFerent place,
and, finally, towards a different end. What these musicians feel
is a more complete existence. That is, the digging of everything.
What the wisdom religion preadbes.
(But the actual New Black Music will be a larger expression.
It will include the pretension of The New Music, as actuality,
as summoner of Black Spirit, the evolved music of the then
evolved people.)
The differences between rhythm and blues and the so-called
new music or art jazz, the different places, are artificial, or
they are merely indicative of the different placements of spirit
(Even purely social, like what the musicians want, etc.)
For instance, use of Indian music, old spirituals, even heavily
rhytlimic blues heks (and soon electronic devices) by new
music musicians point toward the final close in the spectrum
The Clmnging Same {R & B and New Black Music) 127
of the sound that will come. A really new, really all inclusive
music. The whole people.
Any analysis of the content of R&B, the lyrics, or the total

musical v^dll and direction, will give a placement in contrast
to analysis of new jazz content. (Even to the analysis of the
implied vocalism of the new music: what are its intent and
direction, what place it makes, etc., are concerned.) Again
even the purely social, as analyzing reference, will give the
sense of difference, what directions, what needs are present
in the performers, and then, why the music naturally flows
out of this.
The songs of R&B, for instance, what are they about?
What are the people, for the most part, singing about? Their
hves. Thats what the New Musicians are playing about, and
the projection of forms for those lives. (And I think any
analysis will immediately show, as I pointed out in Blues
People, that the songs, the music, changed, as the people
did.) Mainly, I think the songs are about what is known as
love, requited and un. But the most popular songs are al
ways a little sad, in tune with the temper of the peoples
hves. The extremes. Wild JoyDeep Hurt.
The songs about imrequited, incompleted, obstructed, etc.,
love probably outnumber the others very easily. Thinking very
quickly of just the songs that come readily to my mind, generally
current, and favorites of mine (and on that other top ten,
which is, you bet, the indication of where the minds, the people,
are). Walk On By Where Did Oiu: Love Go? W hat Becomes
of the Broken Hearted? The Tracks of My Tears, high poetry
in the final character of their delivery . . . but to a very large
extent, the songs are about love affairs which do not, did not,
come off. For God knows how many reasons. Infidelity, not
enough dough, incredibly secret reasons where the loved and
the lover or the lovers are already separated and longing one for
the other, according to whos singing, male or female. And all
more precise and specific than the Moynihan Report, e.g.,
listen to Jr. Walkers Road Runner. And this missed love
that runs through these songs is exactly reflect of what is the

term of love and loving in the Black world of America Twen
tieth Century.
The miss-understanding, nay, gap . . . abyss, that separates
Black man and Black woman is always, over and over, again
and again, told about and cried about. And its old, in this
country, to us. Come back baby. Baby, please dont go . . .
Cause the way I love you. Baby, you will never know . . . So
come back. Baby, let s talk it over . . . one more time. A
blues which bees older than Ray Charles or Lightnin Hopkins,
for that matter. I got to laugh to keep from cryin, which
The Miracles make, I got to dance to keep from cryin, is not
only a song but the culture itself. It is finally the same cry,
the same people. You really got a hold on me. As old as our
breath here.
But there are many songs about love triumphant. I feel
good . . . I got you . . . Heyl the score, the together self, at
one and in love and swinging, flying God-like. But a differently
realized life-triumph than in the older more formally religious
songs. The Jordans, the Promised Lands, now be cars and
women-flesh, and especially dough. (Like, power.) There are
many many songs about Money, e.g., Barrett Deems Money,
J.B. s I Got Money . . . now all I need is love, among
so many others. But the songs are dealing with the everyday,
and how to get through it and to the other side (or maybe not)
which for the most part still bees that world, but on top of it,
power full, and beauty full.
The older religiosity falls away from the music, but the
deepest feel of spirit worship always remains, as tlie musics
emotional patterns continue to make reference to. The new
jazz people are usually much more self-consciously concerned
about God than the R&B folks. But most of the R&B people
were really in the church at one time, and sang tliere first,
only to drift or riLsh away later.
Even the poorest. Blackest, Black people drifted away from
the church. Away from a church, usually corrupted, Eiuropean-
ized, or botli, tliat coidd no longer provide for their complete
The Changing Same (R6-B and Neio Black Music) 129
vision of what this world ought to be, or the next. The refuge
the church had provided during the early days of the Black
man s captivity in America, when it was really the one place
he could completely unleash his emotions and hear words of
encouragement for his life here on earth. Now the world had
opened up, and the church had not. But the emotionalism the
church contained, and the spirit it signified, would always de
mand the animating life of the Black man, and as Frazier says,
The masses of Negroes may increasingly criticize their church
and their ministers, but they cannot escape from their heritage.
They may develop a more secular outlook on life and complain
that the church and the ministers are not suflBciently concerned
with the problems of the Negro race, yet they find in their
religious heritage an opportunity to satisfy their deepest emo
tional yearnings." {The Negro Church in America, E. Franklin
Frazier, Shocken, 1963, p. 73.)
It was the more emotional Blacker churches that the blues
people were members of, rather than the usually whiter, more
middle-class churches the jazz people went to. The church, as I
said, carries directly over into the secular music, which is really
not secular at all. It s an old clich that if you just change the
lyrics of the spirituak they are R&B songs. That s true by and
large, though there are more brazen, even whiter, strings and
echo effects the blues people use that most of the spiritual
and gospel people dont use. But thats changed and changing,
too, and in the straight city jamup gospel, echo chambers,
strings, electric guitars, all are in evidence, and Jesus is jamup
contemporary, with a process and silk suit too, my man.
But the gospel singers have always had a more direct con
nection with the blues than tiie other religious singers. In
fact, gospel singing is a city blues phenomenon, and Professor
Thomas Dorsey, who is generally credited with popularizing
the gospel form back in Chicago in the late twenties and
thirties was once a blues singer-piano player named Georgia
Tom, and even worked with Ma Rainey. (He was last known
to be arranging for Mahalia Jackson, who with Ray Charles at
another much more legitimate and powerful level, were the
popularizers of Black church sound in popular' music during

the 50 s .) But then so many of them, from G.T., and even before
that to J.B., have all come that vây.
The meeting of the practical God (i.e., of the existent
American idiom) and the mystical (abstract) God is also the
meeting of the tones, of the moods, of the knowledge, the differ
ent musics and the emergence of the new music, the really
new music, the all-inclusive whole. The emergence also of the
new people, the Black people conscious of all their strength, in
a unified portrait of strength, beauty and contemplation.
The new music began by calling itself free," and this is
social and is in direct commentary on the scene it appears in.
Once free, it is spiritual. But it is soulful before, after, any time,
anyway. And the spiritual and free and soulful must mingle
with the practical, as practical, as existent, anywhere.
The R&B people left the practical God behind to slide into
the slicker scene, where the dough was, and the swift folks
congregated. The new jazz people never had that practical
God, as practical, and seek the mystical God both emotionally
and intellectually.
John Coltrane, Albert Ayler, Sun Ra, Pharaoh Sanders, come
to mind immediately as God-seekers. In the name of energy
sometimes, as with Ayler and drummer Sunny Murray. Since
God is, indeed, energy. To play strong forever would be the
cry and the worshipful purpose of life.
The titles of Trane s times, A Love Supreme," Meditations,"
Ascension," imply a strong religious will, conscious of the re
ligious evolution the pure mind seeks. The music is a way into
God. The absolute open expression of everything.
Albert Ayler uses the older practical religion as key and
description of his own quest. Spirits, Ghosts. Spiritual Unity,
Angels, etc. And his music shows a grapliic connection with
an older sense of the self. Tlie music sounds like old timey
religious tunes and some kind of spiritual march music, or
probably the combination as a religious marching song if you
can get to that. (New cnisades, so to speak. A recent interview
article, with Albert Ayler and his brother, tnmipet player Donald
The Changing Same (R 6B and New Black Music) 13 1
Ayler, was titled The Truth Is Marching In/' and this is an

excellent metaphor of where Albert and his brother Donald
want to move.)
Albert's music, which he characterizes as spiritual," has much
in common with older Black-American religious forms. An open
ness that characterizes the shouts" and hollers." But having
the instruments shout and holler, say a saxophone, which was
made by a German, and played, as white folks call it, legiti
mately" sounds like dead Lily Pons at a funeral, is changed
by Ayler, or by members of any Sanctified or Holy Roller
church (the blacker churches) into howling spirit summoner
tied around the mad" Black man's neck. The Daddy Grace
band on 125th Street and 8th Avenue in Harlem, in the Grace
Temple, is a brass band, with somewhat the same instrumenta
tion as a European brass choir, but at the lips of Daddy's
summoners, the band is free" and makes sounds to tear down
the walls of anywhere. The instruments shout and holler just
hke the folks. It is their lives being projected then, and they are
different from the lives Telemann, or Vivaldi sought to reani
mate with their music.
But James Brown still shouts, and he is as secular as the
old shouters, and the new ones. With the instruments, how
ever, many people would like them to be more securely Eu
ropean oriented, playing notes of the European tempered scale.
While the Eastern Colored peoples' music demands, at least,
that many many half, quarter, etc. tones be sounded, implied,
hummed, slurred, that the whole sound of a life get in . . . no
matter the precision" the Europeans claim vvrith their reason
able" scale which wiU get only the sounds of an order and
reason that patently deny most colored peoples the right to
exist. To play their music is to be them and to act out their
lives, as if you were them. There is then, a whole world of
most intimacy and most expression, which is yours, colored
man, but which you will lose playing melancholy baby in
B-flat, or the Emperor Concerto, for that matter. Music lessons
of a dying people.
TH E BLA C K A EST H ET IC IM PER A TIV E
Ron Wellburn
Any attempt to define or illustrate an aesthetic for contemporary

African-American music must proceed from the basis that the
music, like the lives and life-styles of its creators, is at a stage
more crucial than is obvious. If we speak of the "development
of a music, that term, like "evolution, ought to be imderstood as
having had an involuntary impetus. It is the politics of culture
in the United States that is responsible for the character of
black music. Black music has been the vanguard reflection of
black feeling and the continuous repository of black conscious
ness. It has a symbiotic relationship to black poetry, drama,
and fiction, and also painting, sculpture, and dance forms. Black
music culture in America has attempted to maintain manifesta
tions of its African heritage amidst continual harassments against
religious expression. Black culture cannot be separated from
economic and political considerations; nor can black music be
separated from its related creative/expressive forms. For the
1970s and beyond, the success of political, economic, and edu
cational thrusts by the black community will depend on both
an acstlietic tliat black artists formulate and the extent to
Copyright, 1970, by Ron Wellbum.
which we are able to control our culture, and specifically our
music, from theft and exploitation by aliens. It is imperative
for black artists today to become concerned about the politics
of this society, which draws its lifeblood from black culture.
We must recognize that the music created by young whites is,
like that of their forebears, a musical subculture; the musical
culture is ours and we must learn to protect it. In this essay,
I am to be particularly concerned about contemporary American
classical music; for want of a better descriptive, I will refer
to it as jazz." However, what has been happening in American
music culture and aesthetics will necessitate brief comments on
soul and rock music. The latter form is included because of
the threat it has become to jazz and its survival; this is the
first time that jazz has been so strategically undermined by a
music stiictly in the popular idiom. What has been described
as the "evolution of jazz" or of the blues is really the black
musicians continual response to cultural subterfuge by white
jazz." The late-sixties rock movement is testimony to the en
durance of black music, as well as to our careless watch over
it; rock music reflects the spiritual, creative, and sociological
weaknesses of white America; and finally, it is a profound
indication that the racial impasse in this country is coming to
a head. If for no other reason, this is why we must endeavor
to hold our grip on our music at this time, while we prepare
an aesthetic consciousness that will keep the music in our
hands for the future. The consciousness found in black poetry
during the sixties has caught up to the music. Our music is
the foremost expressive quality of our being; black music de
scribes and celebrates life through black people. The degree to
which we shape our music and protect it will dictate the full
range and extent of our survival in the United States.
Black people in the Americas must be imderstood as an

Eastern people whose African homeland is only a part of the
Afro-Asian world. It is helpful to contrast Eastern and Western
cultural values and distinguish their most essential differences.
In terms of the "evolutionary aesthetic progress of a music

or a literatiu*e, Eastern culture is more stable than that of
Europe. Because traditional values in a culture tend to be
immediate in their disposal to the Eastern man, culture does
not change its aesthetic conception rapidly, if indeed at all.
On the other hand, the nature of fluctuation in European
cultural genres reflects instabilities in European social and spir
itual values. Western man has understood fluctuation as mere
chaos, and each so-called level of aesthetic development was an
attempt to restore order to the universe in those terms. The
Western aesthetic sense fosters the notion of conquering the
universe, not blending with it as you are, as one finds in the
Eastern world.
The instabihties of the Western world have evolutionized its
aesthetic values into obsolescence and decay. Black music in
the Americas has been victimized by its proximity and acces
sibility to this European idea of "aesthetic development, hence
the jazz-is-dead argument by white critics and some musicians.
The fact that black music has changed in its various ways over
a seventy-year period is not because it has been searching for
any aesthetic ideal based on Platos Republic; the changes
have been caused by economic, social, and spiritual pressures.
Soul music of the mid-sixties, and jazz since i960, were attempts
to keep the music of black people in the black idiom.
It can be said accurately that these changes have occurred in
a paradoxical manner. In jazz it was the mystical sensibility
within Ornette Coleman and Cecil Taylor and Sun Ra that
caused tliem to create a music in 1957 that unwittingly on their
part was to become an expression of black nationalism by 1963.
It must be understood that the music did not take tliis position
on its own; because of its inherent essentials, it did not need to;
it was forced to become harmonically, melodically, rh)thmically,
and spontaneously liberated from restricting European musical
structures. Since improvisation is not the basis of European
music, the new music withdrew from Europe spiritually and
psychologically, thus forcing the white listener further outside
his level of comprehension.
Any changes that occur in Afro-American music during the
1970s will be forced changes that will be brought about by
the harassment of an Afro-Asian people in anti-cultural white
America, and the spiritual, sociopolitical, and economic positions
these people will be forced to take.
It is difficult to discuss aesthetics and aesthetic changes in

black music through a particular decade. The roots of the
musical consciousness of the sixties were planted in the mid
fifties, and to a large degree had matured by i960. But whatever
constitutes a Black Aesthetic has and will rest on the musician.
The black musician is ahead of everyone in the expression
of true black sensibility. For him, ngritude or soul or blackness
has never been a matter for soapbox articulation. The musician
has not expressed his self through the power of speech or
an African wardrobe. More than any other kind of black artist,
the musician creates his own and his peoples soul essence, his
own ngritude. He can also do more damage to the oppressors
image of liimself than heavily armed urban guerrillas. All the
entities of a Black Aesthetic have long been in existence,
but they have been seldom recognized. Black musicians do not
really think about the aesthetic; they simply project it. Soul is
a manner of dancing, walking, speaking, interpreting life as
we see and know it. In The Negro and His Music (1936),
Alain Locke advocated we . . become musical by nmture
and not rest content with being musical by natine."* We should
all, then, re-establish ourselves as musicians: every black
American can at least become a drummer or learn to play
on a simple reed flute, just as every black person can dance.
Besides a life-style reference, black music and tlae Black
Aesthetic will need a spiritual reference. So far, we have had
an Africanized Christian conception of the spirit world that in
its European form is limiting. Hence, many musicians have
tinned to Islam, and others have gone farther east to Buddhism.
Whatever other Eastern religion besides Christianity is leaned

to heavily in the coming years will be the result of a forced
stance, just like the character of the music and the life-style.
The argument for Islam is strong today, but those who have
gone farther east have incorporated a panreligiosity into their
conception of the universe. Black people in America have more
in common spiritually with the spirit world of the Asian con
tinent than with European Christianity. The presence of ex
otic instruments and musical flavorings is, in the hands of black
musicians, a serious attempt to assimilate into the Black Aes
thetic non-Westem elements, without assimilating the present
idiom into something that will not relate to the Afro-American
experience. The Afro-American is really no stranger to any
music or any religion, because of his heritage in mysticism.
But the Afro-Asian world is somewhat of a stranger to the
scientific emphasis of Europe; science and technology replaced
mysticism, and the rest of the world is now forced to hold
on to its mysticism while learning to use these European achieve
ments in a meaningful manner.
The progress of the Black Aesthetic in jazz styles has reflected
the motion of the spirit, and the images that the spirit manages
to project. It is too easy to say that it has moved toward
Africa; it is more accurate to say that it has moved into the
heart and soul of the universe, meaning into the people that it
reflects. It is a curious and almost unexplainable phenomenon
that two approaches to a Black Aesthetic in jazz commenced
simultaneously. In the years to come, it will be clearer to us
why one managed to survive and the other was killed, or
perhaps went underground. Somewhere along the line, a Black
Aesthetic must emerge having the ingredients of both the jazz
forms and an energy boost from tlie popular soul form.
Percussionist Art Blakey has made several trips to Africa since
the mid-forties. When he returned in 1955, he literaly brought
in a drum fever, which served as the primary impetus to
the black musicians reaction to the West Coast cool, a pre
dominantly white jazz musicians thing that liad sucked its blood
from Lester Young and Miles Davis back in 1949. Within the
next three years after Blakey's return, he recorded several al
bums using African percussion, while Olatunji and Guy Warren
got more exposure by performing in the same idiom. The music
was a fiery, relentless, and yet subtle display of African passion
and beauty that could be rhythmically overpowering.
Meanwhile, the jazz mainstream took on a harder sound,
rhythmically similar to bop but harmonically richer. In 1957,
Horace Silver started his own group and composed a number
of jazz pieces that have become famous. Lucy,*' Cookin'
at the Continental," Seor Blues, and others mingled big-city
jazz blues with an urban image of soulful blues and funk" in
the tenor-trumpet lines, while Silver's own brand of piano mixed
these with Cape Verdian creole elements.
Another pianist, Bobby Timmons, the son of a Philadelphia
preacher, joined Blakeys Jazz Messengers around this time and
composed the memorable Moanin' and Dat Dere." The brand
of funk Blakey's group projects has the big-city sound; his and
Silver's (his former employee) are very similar, and both have
left an indelible stamp on Blue Note records. But Timmons,
especially through those two compositions, injected the camp
meeting and gospel sound into the Blakey group. The sensi
bility for grits and gravy invoked in the music assumed a rural
instead of an urban frame of reference. Melodically, Timmons
is deep in the rural existence and rural memory of the black
American; his compositions are reminiscent of the levee hollers,
work and chain-gang songs, and the country blues.
For bassist Charles Mingus, the rule was ^better git it in your
soul." Mingus made a strong impression on the texture of the
music before i960. His Blues and Roots (Atlantic) album ex
plores a wide range of soul/down-home impressions from
Wednesday Night Prayer Meeting" to the Cryin' Blues to
Tensions."
Ray Charles emerged into the jazz vocalist spotlight, and his
band, perhaps the first of the contemporary soul bands, also
left a great impression under the direction of Hank Crawford

and the soloing of David Fathead Newman.
The final big push for this back-to-the-roots idiom began in
September 1959, when Bobby Timmons joined Cannonball Ad-
derley and his brother Nat. Timmons' Dis Here catapulted
Cannonball into the success he continues to enjoy. Timmons'
presence and his originality were perfect for this group; he
shared a folk-gospel-soil reference with both Adderleys and vrith
bassist Sam Jones, aU natives of Florida. There was a warmth
and closeness in their music not to be found in its urban
counterpart. Like Jean Toomer s Cane, it evoked a nostalgia for
the South in people not even bom therea racial memory. The
music re-enforced images and memories of the country."
Besides the Adderleys' rural frame of reference, a feeling of
wide-open spaces and land happens to be the basic character
istic of the southwestern tenor saxophone sound, a sharp,
piercing timbre strong in the high register, which has been
around in R&B bands in the Texas-Arkansas area and reached
jazz prominence by 1961. Booker Ervin, Don Wilkerson, Fat
head, and James Clay projected this blues-drenched brand
of soul. Significantly, Ornette Coleman hails from Texas, and
Pharaoh Sanders from Arkansas, and the sound and feeling of
the region, with all of its sweeping grandeur, is in their playing
styles.
Although there were numerous others involved, these were
the most important taste makers of the soul/funk movement from
1957-62. Nearly all black musicians joined it in one way or an
other. With the proficiency of Jimmy Smith and Wes Mont
gomery, the organ and guitar received their greatest exposure
in the serious jazz mode. However, in the mostly all-white
jazz critical establishment, whites worried about the exclusive
ness of soul music (fewer whites were in the movement than
were in the avant garde at its strongest). They warned about
the future of jazz, that the music would drift into commercialism,
etc. Downbeat and Metronome magazines from 1959-63 were at
the peak of this frustrating turn of events. When tenor-organ-
guitar combinations became popular, the critics called for art.
Integration was a dominant social theme at this time. Jazz, the
music of the American-American, had become too black and ex
clusive. One morning in the spring of 1962, we all woke up to
the fresh, clean sound of Desafinado, and the white sycophant
establishment applauded the resurgence of Stan Getz. Bossa
nova, or rather, a watered-down version of the original, proved to
be tlie successful antidote. The bossa nova interjection was
not a musical movement, but it served its purpose: it killed off
the down-home, earthy musical dominance of black music; it was
popular long enough to let whites straighten themselves out
psychologically. Also, bossa nova rapidly attained the commer
cialism jazz critics had warned about vrith soul jazz.
The music now known as soul music actually gathered
momentum around the time that the soul/funk jazz movement
was being killed off. It did make certain changes in the R&B
idiom; the use of 6/4 rhythm on slow love ballads, along with
the replacement of drumsticks by brushes; an emphasis on
the beat amidst other, richer percussive subtleties; a choral and
less staccato vocal background; the replacement of the tenor
saxophone with the heavier baritone model; and with the song
writing of Smokey Robinson and the team of Holland, Dozier,
and Holland, a richer melodic framework, reminiscent of the
church and the jazz blues. Black vocal groups are noted for
their ability to chirp, but vrith Aretha Franklin and James
Brown, the preference ranges from urgent singing to the pure
shout. Any black shoutcr throughout the history of black song
in America handles the most African sensibility in American life.
The James Brown bands saxophone section deserves special
attention. It is the most deadly and earthy music section in the
history of American music. The riffs on Cold Sweat or Lickin*
Stick evoke racial memory. The voices that are the reed section
give it its wicked and its spiritual essence (in black music,
one and the same). Drums, Fender bass, and rhythm guitar
are approached by black musicians as spiritual/melodic voices.
Timbre and sensibility come closer to Wolof traditional orches
tras of xylophones, lyres, and drums. The James Brown band
represents the quintessence of an African-directed movement
in black music expression from the popular idiom, and it has
influenced many of the latest dance styles. In this combination
of music and the body, the wedding of impulses, we find soul
in its most expressive and resilient terms. Black poets will waste
their words if they do not give articulation to the spirit of the
dance motion.
The new music started in three geographic areas: New Yorks

Lower East Side, Chicago, and Los Angeles. The respective
personalities involved were Cecil Taylor, Sun Ra, and Ornette
Coleman. The socio-aesthetic reasons for the impetus of this
evolution in black music are not as simply aligned as those
under which bebop sprang. In 1941, Diz and Monk began
to work out some complex variations on chords . . . and we
used them at night to scare the no-talent guys." Given the
presence of white musicians at Mintons, they must have com
prised a majority of the no-talent guys" for a strictly black
musical idiom, Diz and Monk and their cohorts were restructur
ing the European-derived elements of their music. It was Monk,
the high priest, who insures the meaning of what Diz alluded
to; . . w ere going to create something that they can't steal
because they cant play it." (e.g.. Hear Me Talkin* to Ya,
pp. 337-4 1) That statement by a man who doesnt do much
talking sums up the changing Black Aesthetic in jazz history.
Bebop promised new musical freedom. The new music, wliich
the critics called everything from free jazz" to anti-jazz,"
marked a complete break with chordal music restrictions. As
the music grew, it was evident that it was an insurrection
against European musical bondage. But at its inception there
was no real conscious spirit of rebellion; in a sense, it just
happened; yet, social and music histoiy will prove that these
innovators were great men in the vanguard of a gieat age;
they possessed profound spiritual qualities and d)Tiamic creative
energy; their deep sensibilities pennitted them to interpret tlie
restless sixties five years in advance. They have been unusual
men because their souls are large; their souls defy limitations
on their own expressiveness, on labels for what they are doing,
and on their musical tastes. Out of their sensibilities, and the
sensibilities they have inspired since 1957, a new aesthetic for
black music was founded on feeling: black music was to give
spontaneous expression to black feeling. The function of the
total sensibility preceded form in importance. Self/spirit be
came the focal point, individually and collectively. White critics
drew irrelevant parallels with the spiritually alienated music of
the serial composers. In form, timbre, and spontaneity, the new
black music was moving from European rigidity, and though
many whites have screamed 'black nationalism! none have
quite figured out what is happening.
Sun Ra must be recognized as a forerunner in composition
and improvisational format. He nurtured an organization of
strong musicians who have been with him on and off since
the mid-fifties. The earliest Sim Ra records have so many
thematic centers and variations that either side of a recording
seems longer than it actually is. The band s orchestration was
flexible enough for many ensemble passages that did not require
repetition. Meanwhile, a sun-conscious mysticism developed,
with its earthly reference as Egypt and its otherworldly refer
ence as outer space. By the mid-sixties, his Solar Arkestra had
become liberated from traditional composition and become more
spontaneously conceived and executed. Sun Ra is the first con
temporary composer of black music of a symphonic quality.
Upon improvisational liberation, the total Arkestra could take the
music where it wanted it to go. Bill Dixon and John Coltrane
have tried this format. Tlie form may be symphonic, but the
effect is hardly European. Sun Ra prefers to work with densi
ties of sound, appropriate for his soul-space reference. He has
developed a myth-science, and his outer-space consciousness
should not be taken lighdy; he is ahead of the space age, is
a part of an energy unit, the sun, and with piano or amplified
piano, vibes, or marimbas or organ, his universe-consciousness

has made a lasting imprint on black music.
In the Greenwich Village enclaves, pianist Cecil Taylor cre
ated a version of the New Music that was not the experi
mentation his critics perceived. Taylor is an exceptionally gifted
and weU-schooled musician and an outstanding composer/ar-
ranger. He once described jazz as . . the imposition of black
feeling on an Aryan culture, which might best describe what
he, particularly, is doing. One can hear Bartk and Stravinsky
in his work, but only because his articulation is so rapid. In
the late fifties, everything he did seemed to come out in a
minor key. Looking Ahead (Contemporary) is probably his
easiest-obtainable record of the few made before i960 ( Coltrane
Time, on United Artists, was originally Taylors record in 1958).
The World of Cecil Taylor (i960) on the invaluable but now
defunct Candid label, presents Taylor in a relaxed setting doing
his thing. His linear development is best recognized here, and
there are few real chord structures to inhibit him. With drummer
Sunny Murray and altoist Jimmy Lyons, he recorded two albums
in Copenliagen in 1963 that illustrate a high level of group
improvisation and co-ordinated energy. Many New Music bands
have followed tliis fonnat of group playing, which was the way
jazz started out. Unit Structures (1966) and Conquistador
( 1967) again show us Cecil Taylor the skilled composer/arranger.
The best example of his energetic style can be heard on Com
munications ^ 1 1 (the Jazz Compose/s Orchestra), where he
thrashes, swirls, and dances, snarls and ice-skates his percussive
ideas with overpowering strength. It is this energy that dis
tinguishes Cecil Taylors music from any European classicism.
Tlie piano becomes tlie orchestra it can be, and on this record
Taylor engulfs the arrangement of Vieiinese-bom Mike Man tier.
Taylor is quite melodic in his approach; the macliine-giin effect
of his articulation contains two or tliree musical ideas operating
simultaneously.
Ornette Coleman was kicked out of a black blues band in
Texas for teacliing another musician bebop. After settling in
Los Angeles, he began working out compositional and improvisa-
tional alterations for his own pleasure; he soon attracted atten
tion. When in 1959 he and trumpeter Don Cherry played the
old Five Spot in New York, it was his irreverence, sincerity,
and humor that made it clear that Cecil Taylor was not by
himself, and that something was afoot in jazz. Coleman dis
organized all established concepts of perfect harmony, pitch,
and rhythmic senses. Charlie Parker brought harmonic improvis
ing to its peak; Coleman merely broke it down again and re
established it in terms that were spontaneous. Don Heckman
spent months deciphering this music for D ownbeat Critics
finally realized that Coleman was not observing the restrictions
of the twelve- or sixteen-bar blues or even the thirty-two-bar
aaba form; his conception is closer to folk blues and vride-
open (Texas) jazz playing. He starts any particular idea wher
ever he chooses, wherever he feels it, and the ideas often
overlap choruses; he does not observe the conventional chorus
break. Despite all the excitement, Ornette Coleman, as altoist,
trumpeter, violinist, or composer, is a very old-fashioned musi
cian. He is closer to bebop than altoists Byard Lancaster or
Sonny Simmons; or the late Eric Dolphy, who was able to
achieve a sarcastic vocal quality on both alto sax and bass
clarinet.
Ornette Coleman has influenced Archie Shepp s street-blues
sarcasm and blatant come-on in rapping. But most of these
qualities are pure Shepp. His musical references delve into
urban folklore and personalities. Archie Shepp has been accused
of vaudeville by critics who have no conception of the movement
toward music plus something else occurring in the black com
munity.
Cecil Taylors music has fire and energy-consuming im
pulses (in that sense it is electrici). Coleman is perhaps free-
bop,"' and Sun Ra pulls away from earth bondage. The evolve-
ment of John Coltrane s music envisioned earth man re-establish
ing his relationship with the universe in spiritual terms, not
necessarily going out to it in the physical sense. Since most of
the non-white world is concerned about earth aliens and not

space aliens, and about full stomachs, the music of the mystic
Ohnedaruth is of great significance.
Coltrane had turned heads his way in 1955 with Miles Davis
and in 1957 with Monk. His obbligatic sense was metamor-
phosized on his Prestige recordings: it was compressed hori
zontally and extended vertically, so that by the time he re
corded Giant Steps (Atlantic) in 1959, the "sheets of soimd"
technique was a fact, and the entire language of black music
was irrevocably changed. Up to 1961, Trane was concerned
with time and harmonics, the bases of European music; he
destroyed their European conception for all time. He first used
the soprano sax on Mtj Favorite Things (19 6 1), and as he was
becoming deeply interested in the relationship between man
and God, his music involved more space and melody. Melodic
improvisation, extended over long periods of time, as in Asia,
became his forte. B y 1965, he expressed a panreligious reference
for the music, which actually defies attempts to place him solely
in Islam; the quality and meaning of the music, and its power,
place its impetus somewhere in the Himalayas. Coltrane s music
was distinctly Afro-Asian; while it got its vitality from the
African world. East and West, its deepest spiritual qualities
were East Indian. McCoy Tyner, Jimmy Garrison, and Elvin
Jones brought the groups music closer to Ravi Shankar and
Bismillah Khan in its use of the long form of hypnotic creativity.
Tyner was lyric personified. His 3/4 or 6/8 accompaniments
voiced in fourths were milike anything heard before in Western
music. One imagines him building cities. He hirs a lyric urgency
that is strongly African. Elvin Jones liberated Coltrane and
countless other black musicians from the traditional 4/4 bebop
rhythms. Max Roach developed 3/4, but in die Coltrane band
Jones gave it spiritual dimensions. He is not as heavy-handed
as he seems; his style is a fusion of African elements and
Indian sensibility. As he affirmed die liberation of impulses,
he set the stage for Coltrane s need for more drununers.
In the work of Sunny Murray and Rashid Ali can be heard
the spreading eflFect of multiple impulses, which appears to
be as far away from the beat of soul music as anything can be.
Bassists and drummers, often more of one or the other or both
in any group, re-evaluated the roles of their instruments. The
idea of the rhythm section gave way to the *energy miit,
which meant that bass and drums became soloists in a col
lective performance. Mingus influenced the new bassists, and
blacks Henry Grimes and Richard Davis emerged with in
destructible foundation for rhythm. Louis Worrell and Jimmy
Garrison influenced the polymetric percussion work that seems
to be no rhythm and several rhythms at the same time. Besides
Murray and Ali with freer impulses, and Ed Blackwell and
Elvin Jones who were, then, aligned with set rhythmic varia
tions, Andrew Gyrille and Milford Graves fall somewhere in
the middle, but to the impulsive side of center. Rhythmically,
a performing group seemed to float, then suddenly lurched,
and jet-streamed or changed direction, carried by its own in
ternal rhythm; the frame of reference was inner-directed, with
bass and drums together having the pulse of breathing and
body motion.
Coltrane hoped to enlarge his group to the size of the
Ascension format (seven horns, piano, drums and two basses).
Like the drum, the horn is a voice, and the late Dolphy used
his reed instruments to that effect He developed long-phrased
passages of vocal ecstacy, and went as far as he could with
his exciursions. He needed a horn, a voice, a being of "deep
spiritual reservoir to continue in this musical search for God
and gods where he had to leave off; he found an extension
of his projection in Pharaoh Sanders. Pharaohs articulation in
the extreme high registers of the tenor sax is not only astound
ing, but for many, unbearable. He is no screeching Junior
Walker, nor does he use the propulsion and creaking-door effect
of Albert Ayler. There is melody in his high register and long
phrases; and there is blood, scars, hope, and the compassion
to love and to be. Pharaoh Sanders represents the ultimate
spiritual projection thus far. He and John Coltrane reached

into the heart of the universe through the hearts of the people.
With percussion instruments, Coltrane was helpful in remov
ing congas and bongos from an infectious rhythmic taste in
soul/funk groups and restoring their African intentions. He per
formed with these drums often from 1965 on. Big Black,
whose long performances are closest to Tranes in their con
ception, is a conga man. African percussion and reed instru
ments have been coming into jazz since bebop, but many other
kinds are coming in now. Ed Blockwell and Nat Bettis are adept
with rhythm logs. Thumb pianos and lyres are also coming
in. Maracas and tambourines never really left black music in
the Americas. Rufus Harley works gallantly with the diflRcult
bagpipe, a North African instrument that got into Scotland by
visits. Yusef Lateef long ago used Arabic and East Asian reed
flutes; we can expect more of these, and flutes from Yugoslavia
and Greece that are of Arab origin. Milford Graves has re
corded with the tabla, and Giuseppi Logan and others play
well the various oboes from Pakistan. Whether Far Eastern
instruments such as the Japanese koto come into the New
Music in the black community, remains to be seen. Jazz/
New Music can conceivably develop into a Third World music
consciousness, and its strongest references could come in from
the Afro-Arab sector. The music of the Afro-Asian world as a
whole is one large musical culture that is harmonically, melodi-
cally, and rhythmically closer to the African-American sensi
bility than non-Gypsy-flavored European folk ballads and
hymns. Our Black Aesthetic has been in the Afro-Asian world
for centuries, waiting for us to use it and protect it.
In The Negro and His Music, Alain Locke recognized the

importance of music for the salvation of the black American.
One of the handicaps of Negro music today, he said, is that
it is too popular. Even during the depression, black music and
musicians were being exploited as commodities. Jazz has
evolved as its practitioners were throwing off the leeches. Locke
felt that we needed . a class of well-trained musicians
who know and love the folk music and are able to develop
it into great classical music, and a class of trained music lov
ers who will support by appreciation the best in the Negros
musical heritage and not allow it to be prostituted. . . r In
America s game of musical beds, black music is now the reluctant
prostitute of rock music in its various formsstolen musics de
rived from R&B. Ameer Baraka (LeRoi Jones) has mentioned in
Black Music that the names that rock groups give themselves fit
their idea of the black people they are imitating. One better, it is
indicative of just how imhuman they must be. The people,
or forces, practicing this music have no conception of a mystical
universe, and hence no conception of their drums and guitars
as voices embodying spirits. They do not even approach music
spiritually. The music that is being imitated is lost in the ampli
fiers; sound, not subtlety, is needed. Alfons Dauer, a European,
noted perceptively that the Europeans rhythmic conception
is based on hearing, while the Africans conception of rhythm
is based on motion. White rock is sustained by props that, if
removed, would destroy the music and probably its listeners.
Blow out Con Edision during simultaneous rock and soul music
concerts, and see who suffers the most.
Rock attempts to imitate the city blues of the forties and
fifties. Paul Butterfield worships Muddy Waters, who has never
had so much money in his life. In fact, a black fathers/white
sons syndrome is developing. A Chess label album cover pictures
a black God giving the life-touch, h la Michaelangelo, to a
white neo-Greek hippie in shades. This is part of the Euro-
American scheme. The black music impetus is only to be
recognized as sire to the white world; a kind of wooden-Indian
or buffalo-nickel wish. A vampirish situation indeedi
Other features of rock music should be pointed out so that
they will not creep into the Black Aesthetic. The Euro-American
lives in a psychological and real world where mysticism has
been replaced by science and technology; hence, he doesnt
know how to use his inventions constructively for peaceful
purposes. Rock music has some falsely attractive elements that
show no relationship at all to any Afro-Asian music of the
past. Rock musicians are in no orisha line. But they are in a
technological lineage extending through John Cage, Stockhausen,
Edgard Varese, all the way back to Marconi and the wireless.
White rock is a technology, not a real music. It is an aflFectation,
not a felt experience. It is parasitic, not symbiotic, to black
culture and life-styles. It has a quasi-aesthetic. Ralph Naders
Raiders are worried that American (white) youth will do
damage to their nervous systems with this musico-technology;
at least he and Ameer Baraka would agree that the wliite
race might die out.
African-Americans should continue to move as far away from
this madness as humanly possible, spiritually, psychologically,
and in the immediate physical sense at least. We cannot afford
to allow our music to remain a surrogate for white American
psychosexual illusions. A time is coming when we will have to
develop a music that will have the same strong relationship
to our mystical nature and conception of the universe as re
ligious songs of the nineteenth century and our daily life in
Africas past; a religious music will evolve that we wont be
ashamed to dance to, as we continue our motion for survival
and liberation. If this music is stolen and imitated, we will
understand it as stealing our religion and abusing it. We should
then respond accordingly. Black music should not be allowed
to become popular outside the black community, which means
that the black community must support tlie music, as Alain
Locke begged almost forty years ago. We must become more
concerned about protecting black music and culture than in
merely defending it; defending is a gesture, a reaction after
the goods have been swiped, something we could do via public
masturbation when we hear tlie newest minstrels doing their
tiling. Protection restricts harasstnent from without,
Alain Locke and Ameer Baraka, tliirty years apart, agreed that
tlie art and folk forms of black music must be fused into a
vital and superior product. Locke said: W e must distinguish
between a superficial jazz that is superficially Negroid and a
deeper jazz that is characteristically Negro. Much can still
be developed from Afro-Cuban and Afro-Caribbean idioms. Mix
these with James Browns soul, subtle or obvious African drum
and dance patterns, and Indian spontaneous and long composi
tion, and you might have something like Pharaoh Sanders and
Leon Thomas The Creator Has a Master Plan. Black music
in the 1970s must incorporate a world of non-white musics if
black people in America hold the key to the worlds survival.
AU kinds of percussion instruments can be used (and you can
do the popcorn to the merengue). Saxophones and other horns,
or even pianos, do not necessarily have to be amplified as Miles
Davis prefers now. Afro-Asian music has done without it for
centuries, but if it must be done it must be done wisely.
It was inevitable with the guitar and the organ; but the vari-
tone gimmick for saxophone muddles the feeling and sound.
Electronic music can make the black man blind from the sight
of money and the white man rich on his deathbed, laughing
absurdly at having fooled the niggers this last go-round. Black
musicians should re-evaluate the technological intrusions now
threatening our music; times may come when that technology
will be useless. Our music is our key to survival.
R EF LE C T IO N S ON TH E EVO LUTIO N
O F POST-WAR JAZZ
Leslie B. Rout, Jr.
I
The Time of the Boppers
1945-50
When Jesus Christ began preaching his gospel to the world,
the Bible informs us that the local sages could not believe
"anything good could have come out of a hicktown like Naza
reth. According to George W. Pierce, a renowned student of
insect life, the most avant-garde cacophony being produced will
not be heard tonight in some Harlem loft. Nay friends, the
most "far out combo will be blowing improvised solos aroimd
the summer world in your local field or hedgel Put another
way, did you ever pay attention while the grasshopper, click
beetle, cicada, and katydid bantered back and forth? Not until I
spent a night in the Paraguayan Chaco being serenaded by
thousands of such insects, did Pierce s argument take on the aura
of credibility.
Jazz buffs and historians might listen to such stories respect
fully, then confidently reply that they could top such para
doxical tales. For example, they might relate how the initial
step in the development of post-World War II jazz styles oc
curred in 1939, by accident, in an obscure Harlem chili house.
The blackman upon whom this supernatural flash was bestowed
was Charles Christopher Parker, Jr., better known to all his
lgions as Tardbird or Bird. Parker had become bored with
the hackneyed chords employed by most of his contemporaries,
and was seeking something new. One night in December, while
playing the song Cherokee with guitarist Biddy Fleet, Parker
discovered that by running higher intervals of a chord as a
melody line and backing these vidth appropriately related chord
changes, he could play what he had been hearing. As Parker put
it, I came alive. Skeptics, please note that the red peppers and
beans in close proximity were probably in no way responsible.
While the Bird unquestionably dominated the 1940-60 gen
eration of jazz performers, he was not the only originator of
the post-war jazz movement. As early as 1938-39, Swing, the
pre-eminent jazz style of the pre-War era, had nearly ex
hausted its inventive potential. Youth and the listening public
were still entranced with the likes of Glenn Miller, Benny Good
man, and Artie Shaw, but young jazzmen found those same
offerings increasingly jejune. In 1940, a Harlem jazz club, Min
ton s Playhouse, became the headquarters of a clique of young
musicians who were hoping to create a new musical language.
Along with Parker, the Mintons experimenters of 1940-41 (nota
bly John Birks Dizzy Gillespie, trumpet; Kenny Clark, drums;
Thelonious Monk, Mary Lou Williams, pianists; and Charles
Christian, guitar) evolved the basis of the jazz style eventually
called re-bop, be-bop, and inevitable perhaps, *TDop. One
observer of the Mintons scene, when asked about the origins
of be-bop, provided a reply that was simplicity in itself; Bird
was responsible for the actual playing of it, and Dizzy (Gil
lespie) put {i.e., wrote) it down.
Whimsy aside, the perfecting of the new jazz style took time,
and no one party was totally responsible. The innovators had
to make a living while polishing and perfecting their creation;
in candid terms, this meant playing in aggregations that per
formed the old jazz. Fortunately, such band leaders as Earl
15 2 The Black Aesthetic
Hines and Billy Eckstine (1942-45) allowed their orchestras

to become musical laboratories. By the time Dizzy Gillespie
formed the first bop combo in 1944 most of the rough edges
had been rounded off, and the sponsors of a revolutionary
new style were ready to test it on an unsuspecting public. Be
fore the war ended, the center for bop had moved from Harlem
to mid-town Manhattan. The new jazz had begun making
converts. East, North, West, and South. Even staid Europe
soon had a significant number of disciples.
Chiefly because of his gregarious personality, Dizzy Gil
lespie was elected premier bopper by the communications
media, and the trumpet star formed a large ensemble in 1946.
This was to be until June, 1950, the paramount orchestra dedi
cated to the preservation and promulgation of bop. In 1947,
Woodrow Wilson (Woody ) Herman formed another such
ensemble; by 1949, even Benny Goodman had one leg up
on the bop band wagon. In addition to these orchestras, at
least a dozen top flight combos, including that led by Charlie
Parker, made their appearance upon the national scene. Pro
ponents of Swing and Dixieland took a dim view of mush
rooming boperations, but they were powerless to halt the
changes taking place.
Unfortunately, the election of King be-bop by critics, musicians
and certain jazz fanatics in no way indicated that the public
concurred. The new jazz was diflBcult to dance to, full of
weird notes and imexpected intervals; these features alone
suggested troublesome days ahead. The press and radio con
centrated their attentions on the sartorial eccentricities favored
by bop musicians (that is, their berets, hom-rimmed glasses
and Icpard-skin jackets). To some observers, the eccentricities
became the essence of the music. Such persons might support
the latest fad for a year or two, but then what? These un
certainties were multiplied by the fact that any musician with
a beret or hom-rimmed glasses now became a bop musician.
Youngsters who could hardly blow their horns, but who could
sprout a goatee and shout cool, my man, loudly proclaimed
both their devotion and expertise. The result was increasing
confusion in the public mind as to what bop was, and who
were its most credible exponents.
Though Gillespie maintained his position as the high priest
of bop, the major financial attraction of the 1946-50 period was
the orchestra of Stanley Newcomb Kenton. Fronting a 19-20
piece outfit and dubbing his repertoire Trogressive Jazz," Ken
tons brassy, intensely controversial crew became the first jazz
orchestra to earn $1,000,000 in a twelve-month period (1948).
While the musical efforts of the band rarely fell into the
generally accepted bop framework, such Kenton soloists as Art
Pepper (alto sax), Ray Wetzel (trumpet), Bob Cooper (tenor
sax), and Eddie Bert (trombone) bopped freely whenever
awarded solo opportunities.
The year 1949 marked the beginning of the end of the bop
era. Its collapse gave the entire jazz world a bad case of in
digestion. In November, 1949, Charlie Barnet, who had formed
a bop orchestra earlier in the year, announced, "We re running
in the red, so theres no percentage in going on." The following
month, Woody Herman also threw in the sponge. He was
joined by Charlie Ventura, whose combo had been elected
the outstanding small jazz group in the 1949 Metronome maga
zine annual poll. One musician who had never believed bop
to have been more than a corpse was Doc Evans, a Dixieland
trumpeter since time immemorial. In December, 1949, with
Evans playing a dixie-style dirge, "concerned" students at the
University of Minnesota gave "old-man be-bop" an officious fu
neral. Disbanding his orchestra in July, 1950, even Dizzy Gil
lespie announced that bop had reached the end of the trail.
Bop ceased to exist as a style of jazz totally distinct from
other styles, but the majority of jazz soloists continued to
perform in the tradition of Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie.
Bops harmonic and chromatic ideas gradually became accepted
parts of American popular music; only the name really died.
Woodrow Wilson Herman summed it up most succinctly. When
asked in 1955 whether bop was dead, he replied; "No . . . the
fiinny and sad thing is today you can play the same music that
was damned in 1947 and 1948 and get away with it completely."
Repetition of sounds apparently works wonders on the public
ear. It is now 1969. The next time you come home after listening
to live jazz, put a stack of Charlie Parker records on your
hi-fi set and listen; many of todays jazzmen are still "getting
away with it."
II
The Socio-Economic Origins
of the Be-Bop Revolution
While America today is at least dimly aware of the pre

eminent role of the Afro-American in both the origin and
development of jazz prior to World War II, the blackman had
rarely been the recipient of the profits which theoretically should
have come his way. The problem, in part, lay in the belief of
popular musics overlords (i.c., booking agencies, record com
panies, owners of major nightclubs) back in the 1920s that the
white public would never accept musical innovations unless the
supposed innovator was also white. While this assumption was
probably valid at the time, its socio-economic ramifications were
catastrophic. Witness the case of the late Fletcher Henderson. As
early as 1928, this bandleader had worked out the basis of the
jazz style later known as Swing. By the early 30s he had
assembled an outstanding aggregationbut it was still a black
orchestra. A compromise of sorts resulted; Benny Goodman be
came King of Swing"everywhere except in Harlem and otlier
urban ghettosand Fletcher Henderson became his chief ar
ranger.
White bands led by Artie Shaw, Tommy Dorsey, Glenn
Miller, and Biiimy Berrigan soon joined Goodman as members
of the Swing hierarchy. Black powerhouse battalions led by
Count Basie, Chick Webb and Jimmy Lunceford came into
existence, played better jazz, but earned less than half as much
as their white counteiparts. In all fairness, it must be noted
Reflections on the Evolution of PostAVar Jazz 155
that Goodman and Shaw demonstrated their belief that racial
bars in jazz should not be tolerated by hiring black musicians
despite strong opposition. Curiously enough, such attitudes prob
ably increased black discontent, because from the latter s point
of view, acceptance into white orchestras demonstrated how
badly black swingsters were neededi Why then be satisfied
with a few crumbs while Whitey took the cake?
What was obvious was that improvement in the blackmans

socio-economic status in jazz necessitated some kind of musical
turnover. The time was ripe in 1940-41, because Swing had then
passed its inventive peak. It should not be surprising therefore
tiiat a major purpose of the previously mentioned Minton^s"
clique was the creation of a jazz form that whites could not
playl Ideally, this would insure for black jazzmen the recogni
tion they craved, plus a lion s share of profits, any skeptic could
have pointed out that the new jazz would be financed largely
by white customers. Some of these would be musicians, and
most certainly they would eventually be able to reproduce what
they heard. Furthermore, since the black innovators would em
ploy Western tools (i.e., saxophones, chords, traditional notation)
to express themselves, it was only a question of time before the
whites at least partially caught on. Black hopes of maintaining
a monopoly on their creation were ultimately fanciful, but con
ditions tended to change after World War II. As has been
previously noted, from the onset of the be-bop era. Dizzy
Gillespie was accepted as be-bops pre-eminent figure. For the
first time, a jazz style would have a blackman as its publicly
acknowledged leader. Young partisans of all races slavishly
copied Gillespie s affectations, as well as the social and physical
habits of other famous hoppers.
It was the social-psychological outlook of the hoppers that
was most unnerving. The music had seemingly sprung from
nowhere, and insinuated itself into the public consciousness
following a war which had caused a maximum amount of
social dislocation. The young post-war hoppers (and the hosts
of non-playing bop adherents) began by rejecting all past jazz

forms; bop was the only jazz. Sometimes audiences in clubs
proved hostile or apathetic to the music. Obviously, thought the
young bop musician, pearls have been cast before swine. Never
did it occur to him that his fumbling imitation of Parker or
Gillespie might further postpone the publics acceptance of the
new jazz. The hoppers redacted by adopting a patronizing at
titude toward paying patrons, not announcing tunes and gen
erally performing as if the feelings of the audience were not
important. Many of these practices have since become tradi
tional.
Dixieland had been good time music, nice to get drunk to.
Swing had been music largely for dancers. With the bop era,
jazz musicians became more conscious of their role as artists.
In practice this meant that they often acted like prime donnas.
Charlie Parker, Dexter Gordon and other greats were predict
ably late for club and recording dates, often not showing up
at all. Young jazzmen took their cues accordingly. Time con
siderations were unimportant, and those who objected to the
hopper s cavalier attitude on the subject were obviously square.
Laws were for the common folk, not for hoppers who could
easily dispense with the assistance of the Establishment. Idealis
tically, the new jazz would help black jazzmen establish them
selves as artists rather than as musical comedians. In a sense,
it was an attempt by both black and white jazzmen to destroy
the things they hatedTin Pan Alley, unscrupulous agents and
bookers, band leaders who could not play and, indirectly, middle
class society. Indeed, the be-bop panorama was all of these
thingsplus an apparent acceptance of horse (f.e., heroin) as
a necessity for existence.
It is imdeniable that musicians had been heroin users prior
to 1945, but a frightful number of bops leading figures were
hopeless addicts. To both young hopper and fan, if the heroes
were hooked, a ride on tlie horse was for them, too. Only
since a growing number of youths have become users of
psychedelic and other drugs has it become possible for many
to realize how heavily the nuances of fad, curiosity, or tlie
weight of social pressure can weigh on immature minds. Some
misguided souls thought that, through heroin, peaks of per
formance could be reached which nonusers could never hope
to arrive at. Others became addicted because this was a means
of rebelling against family and/or society. Some died, some
ruined their health and a few men broke the habit; but only
the pusher (t.e., drug supplier) rejoiced on his way to the
bank.
And so the word bop temporarily at least faded into disuse.
Modem Jazz was a better descriptive monicker, and it did
not evoke visions of hopped-up musicians sneering at customers
or collapsing on the bandstand. Artistically, be-bop had been a
smashing success. Cashwise, however, it had laid an egg. Musi
cal entrepreneurs subsequently looked elsewhere for commer
cially exploitable presentations. New crooners, vocal quartets
and Glenn Miller-styled dance bands provided entertainment
for the masses during most of the 1950's. Unfortunately, the bop
era marked the parting of the ways between jazz and the
public. After 1949-50, modem jazz was a creation loved by the
hipbeautiful when well performed, but appreciated by only a
few.
Ill
The New Thing-igsg
1959 with one LP released and one other completed,
Ornette Coleman came to New York. He hufied and puffed
and the house of be-bop began crumbling at the edges. With
his white plastic saxophone, dark-hued Mr. Coleman blew up
a storm that is still raging. Cometh now free jazz, what its
advocates term the new thing, but what was really the first
new jazz form since the development of be-bop. As usual,
there were impassioned statements pro and con with numerous
musicians and jazz critics playing an equivocal role. Many had
been wrong about bop in 1945-46 and nobody wanted to look
foolish this time. Coleman has since become a major influence,
affecting in some fashion the playing style of countless numbers.
Coleman s music has been described as raw, shrill, beautiful,

repulsive, provocative, but rarely boring and always extremely
personal. Some listeners respond wildly in support of Cole
man, while others walked out of clubs five minutes after he
started playing.
As in the development of bop, while Coleman was the man
whose break with convention was most pronounced, such little
known pianists as Cecil Taylor and Sun-Ra and saxophonists
John Coltrane and Sonny Rollins, had been edging away from
conformity for some time. In keeping with previous jazz develop
ments, the music of Ornette Coleman made its greatest impact
on the young practitioners of the jazz art. There were other
significant influences on jazz performers also. The 1960 s have
been years of burgeoning racial tension, and numerous young
performers (chiefly New York-based) began touting free jazz as
a music of revolt. Most of these free-blowers were Afro-Amer
icans, some of them were highly articulate, and they interpreted
the jazz they played to be a condenmation of this society.
Critics such as LeRoi Jones spoke of free jazz as black music**
and emphatically insisted that whites could not play it. The
impression usually given by this new avant garde, white or
black, was that they were sick of the capitalist world, the
nightclub circuitand also people who did not sing paeans of
praise about their latest musical efforts. It remains to be seen
what the firebrands of today will be saying or playing a decade
from now, especially if they taste success in some fashion.
Considering the stylistic changes of the last two decades, one
might assume that the socio-economic milieu in which jazzmen
carry on their activities has changed radically. Nothing could
be further from the truth. A couple of examples should readily
demonstrate this contention. A most menacing development
since the end of World War II has been the oversupply of
good jazz performers. Admittedly, the introduction of the
jazz LP has allowed more musicians to be heard and has
created a means whereby many musicians can eke out a reason
able livelihood. At the same time, the number of large jazz
ensembles has not made any significant increase during the
last 20 years and the number of jazz clubs has obviously de
creased. One notes, for example, that as of the fall of 1967
there did not exist on the South Side of Chieago a smgle
club that booked nationally established jazz talent on a con
sistent basisi In reality then, despite the theoretical improbabil
ity of there being too many talented jazzmen, the jazz world
cannot put an unlimited number of saxophonists, percussionists,
trumpeters, and pianists to work. Taking the cue, many gifted
jazzmen have entered other fields, because they could not find
suflBcient work in the jazz musical jungle.
Note also that there remains no means of comprehensively
regulating hours, working conditions, or entrance into the field.
One realizes that the jazz artist is not a steelworker, and
that in a comparatively free society, the jazz artist cannot be
forced to accept a great deal of regimentation. On the other
hand, I have known many jazzmen who do not pay social
security and because of the nature of their work cannot get
many forms of insurance. Freedom is one thing, degradation
another.
The fact is that jazzmen have almost no control over the

business end of their vocation. Few of them can determine
which of the records they make will be released, or even what
club engagements they will play. Such problems as poor acous
tics, out-of-tune pianos, domineering club-owners, and imfavor-
able relations with the communications media have long been
topics of serious concern for jazzmen, but little has been done
to remedy these grievances. Disgracefully, jazz, perhaps Amer
icas only art form, had to wait untQ 1968 before an individual
jazzman, Ornette Coleman, received a Guggenheim Foundation
fellowship. Bear in mind that classical musicians and com
posers have been happily drawing similar kinds of stipends
for years.
Jazzmen have blamed nearly everyone for these and other
similar situations, but the problem is really theirs. It is un
l6o The Black Aesthetic
likely that conditions will improve significantly until jazz per

formers have taken it upon themselves to organize on a much
more sophisticated level than they have done in the past It
is an open secret that some musicians, both black and white,
selected the jazz world as their center of operations particu
larly because they viewed it as being one free from what they
believed to be excessive social and cultural restrictions. This
craving for individualism has resulted in the creation of an
unoflScial hierarchical system whereby a handful of artists walk
off with the profits, and the mass of the others have difficulty
working even six months out of the year.
Since 1945-46, jazz has evolved into an extremely self-con
scious art music. It tends to manifest an inherent effervescence,
but it can no longer masquerade as being either the music
of the young or of the masses. Despite the number of long-
playing records being turned out, or the apparent prosperity
of a Miles Davis or a Cannonball Adderley, the lack of places
where the music can be heard and the decreasing number
of traveling aggregations means that the field is not prospering.
What is to be done?
Probably a majority of those who consider themselves jazz
musicians are black. An overwhelming majority of those con
sidered giants in the field have been Afro-Americans. If jazz
is to thrive, that race which nursed it, rehearsed it, and first
paraded it across the American stream of consciousness will
have to do something, as they have the most to lose.
The halycon days are over. Tightly-knit associations of jazz
artists, allied on either a regional or local basis and led predomi
nantly by black Americans, must gain significant control over
the production, cost, and presentation of their art, or face the
perpetuation of the intolerable conditions so often criticized.
There is no doubt that such a task proves more difficult than
putting together a new jazz style, but just as necessary. Doc
Evans and friends, as you may recall, thought that they had
buried be-bop. The next funeral may be for lady jazzand
she is, we hope, much too vital to pass away.
A COM PARATIVE ANALYSIS OF TH E AFRICAN AND
TH E W ESTERN A ESTH ETICS
Ortiz M. Walton
The art of improvisation first found expression in Africa. This

can be seen as a natural development in a culture that en
couraged free expression of emotion through art The accent
culturally and aesthetically was on spontaneity. Spontaneity
in turn means to express feelings as they occur, hence im
provisation becomes instrumental toward the attainment of spon
taneity. The melodies used in African music were considered
merely a starting point for elaborating and developing melody
through improvisation. It is highly probable that improvisation
first began through the use of various vocal devices such as
trills, glissandos, vibrato, and falsetto. These were all devices
to alter the melody, or to add to it, and can thus be con
sidered to be rudimentary forms of improvisation. Although
trills, etc., were used in the West, particularly during the Ba
roque period, these were always written or notated. In Africa,
notation was not used, the music being passed down through
memory. Therefore, these European devices cannot be said to
be improvisation.
Western music became highly rationalized with the Greeks.
Copyright, Ortiz M. Walton, 1970.
l62 The Black Aesthetic
There are, for example, many references in Aristotle concerning

music theory. The seeds were sown then that would ultimately
lead to the process of rationalization of music. This process
as applied to Western institutions has been discussed at length
by the sociologist Max Weber. The latter correlated this phe
nomenon with the rise of capitalism in the West. But as we can
see, the process had already taken place with the Greek theo
rists, insofar as music was concerned.
The Greeks attempted to catch the magic of music, to dis
cover its essence. They attempted to analyze mxisic into certain
modes or scales, each of which had its own psychological
quality. The latter were termed ethoi. This was the beginning
of a system of notation in the West, which has been added
onto in the following centuries, casting Western music into
a rigid, imalterable, fixed phenomenon. The Church, during the
medieval period, also encouraged the invention of notational
devices. One might add that this was also to a great extent
an attempt to inculcate Church doctrine, which was contained
in the chants and hymns. If only one set of notes could be
selected and if all variations melodicaUy were precluded, then
the content could easily be controlled. Music has always been
a potent force and has occasionally been used to subvert.
Ecclesiastical heretics could more easily be weeded out by
their non-conformity to ecclesiastical canons. Prior to this ar
rangement, during the early medieval period, a notational de
vice had been worked out called neumes, but these only indi
cated a rise or fall in pitch, but not how much rise or fall.
Thus the element of predictability, though on its way, was
not then fully established. The final element or variable to
be controlled was pitch variation. For even though bound by
the fixed notational system, the pitch of these various notes
was a variable, and the ratios of vibrations between the
notes changed from octave to octave. Bach completed the
process of rationalizing the scale by tempering it. One octave
was artificially made to resemble another. Gb, which was for
merly different in pitch from F ^ , was now made to soimd
Analysis of the African and the Western Aesthetics 163
identical to it, although this process was the result of making
the various intervals out of tune. Now the diatonic scale took
over from the non-tempered Church modes and added an ad
ditional element of rationalization and predictability to the
nûsic of the West.
Consequences for the West
European instrument makers reflected this tendency toward

rationalization by expressing the same tendency in a new tech
nology of tempered instruments. Much of the music of the
medieval period had been vocal. The instruments that were
used v/ere either of the viol type suited to a style of playing
called continuo, or of the valveless wind type. The viols were
non-fretted and resembled African string instruments. They were
non-tempered and could either play a single note over and
over again, ostinato style, or as a figured bass, which was
a prearranged series of notes outlining the chords from which
a written melody would be played.
Valveless horns resembling their African prototypes, and key
less woodwind instruments, were replaced by the highly ra
tionalized and mechanical keys and valves. It is diflBcult to
comprehend these developments in the West except as a pas
sion for the rational. Certainly the technical ability of players
on the non-tempered and non-mechanized instruments was con
siderable, since many of thfe concertos and sonatas written for
such non-tempered instruments were diflBcult even for the new
instruments. The order of the auditory world had now been
transformed into a visual mechanical and predictive phenome
non. Now all a player had to do was look at the music
and put the finger a certain place and out would come the
sound that had been conceived long before in somebody s head.
Instruments now diflFered only insofar as the particular maker
had more or less expertise in the mass production of uniform
instruments. The standard pitch was also conceived of during
this process, and now the A had a vibration of 440 per
second, as opposed to the much lower and slower-vibrating

A of the Baroque and pre-Baroque periods. This made the
entire tempered scale have a different timbre. The quality
now became more shrill and less capable of subtle variation.
Perhaps it was because of the intrinsic freedom inherent in
improvisation that it held on until the time of Beethoven.
Up to this time, composers and performers were synonymous,
and public performances usually included some, if not all, im
provisation. Bach and Mozart often took part in contests
testing improvisatory skills. But these men were also vassals
to a lord or rich family who paid them for their efforts. How
ever, the music-publishing business was on the rise and sought
a direct profit from musical enterprises, especially musical com
position. Music publishing, ironically, freed the Western musician
from the lowly position of servant that Haydn and others oc
cupied, only to enslave them in the tradition of written composi
tion and the wiles of capitalistic commercial endeavors.
The culminating achievement toward complete rationalization
of music was the invention of the symphony orchestra. Here
specialization reached its peak, for every man had a specific
sheet of music to play, the same way each time. No melodic,
harmonic, or rhythmic deviations were to be allowed, and an
assembly-line-type operation was set into motion by a foreman,
the conductor. Each player, like an assembly-line worker, was
expected to contribute his share to the final product. The
symphony orchestra is furthermore organized along lines of
maximal efficiency, with a division into sections, and a further
hierarchy of section foremen or leaders and sidemen. A large
clock usually adorns the rehearsal hall, and orchestra members
are expected to be neat and punctual. In accordance with
union rules, members are given a ten-minute coffee break,
during which they may discuss their grievances. As in a fac
tory, there is the professional manager who collects the money
and pays people according to their relative eflBciency and
position on the hierarchy. There is none of the romantic con
ception of musicians playing their instruments in lonely chiuch-
Analysis o f the African and the W estern Aesthetics 165
yards in southern France, like Casals. Nor is there the freedom
that is associated with an artist like Picasso, casually throwing
paint on walls to discover new color combinations. Instead,
there is the awesome impression of gravity, of men having
an important mission to accomplish. Gray morning coats and
knee-length tails are worn, and the facial expressions, rather
than reflecting the ecstasy of creation, are severe and strained.
Each note is indicated not only as to exact pitch, but in
terms of loudness, intensity, duration, and even the feeling
state that is intended by the composer. One note may thus
have four or five signs concerning how it is to be played.
As on the assembly line, if one gets behind or plays tlie
wrong rhythms or notes, the whole line comes to a stop.
To avoid this occurrence, this foreman or conductor is obliged
to rehearse the same music time after time, year after year.
The workers, when fed up, will occasionally discreetly sabotage
the music during a concert. This throws the foreman or con
ductor off, and he must apply his technical know-how to return
to the normal functioning of the machine.
The consumer, or concertgoer, like his counterpart in the
world of commerce, has been made into a passive recipient
of various sounds. He either accepts the product or rejects
it, but never is he allowed to add his own creativity to it.
His response to the music comes in box-ofiBce receipts, not in his
active participation, as is the case in African music. Com
posers* names are like any other trade-marksignifying the
quality of the merchandise. Some of these names or trade-marks
are brand names, such as Mozart or Beethoven; they command
respect and are used in polite company. So even though one
has heard Beethovens Symphony Number 5 for the hundredth
time, he still keeps listening to it, claiming falsely that he
hears something new every time. His participation is limited
to applause after the finale or occasional coughing during the
sections played loud enough to cover the sound. It is highly
amusing to hear the coughing of those who are not familiar
with the score. They begin the tension-releasing coughing in
16 T h e Black A esthetic
the mezzo forte passages, but it suddenly becomes noticeable

when the music becomes softer. In such a situation, the lis
tener becomes embarrassed and ceases the now-epidemic
coughing at once, which makes it apparent that the problem
is not of medical origin. It would be considered absolute mad
ness to dance or pop the fingers during a symphony or opera
performance. When an occasional listener attempts to whistle
softly or hum the melody line, he is immediately the object
of menacing stares.
It will become apparent soon that my lengthy discussion
of Western musical values and concepts is germane to our
discussion of African music, since it is only via a comparative
analysis that the full import of both the European and the
non-European musical systems can be explicated. In Africa,
none of the afore-mentioned musical innovations took place,
and it is from Africa that the basic concepts of Black music
emerged. The cries, falsettos, slurs, and trills found their way
directly to Black music during the slave era. The tendency for
instruments to act as imitations of the human voice is also
a direct African carry-over. Contrasted with the music-for-the-
elite philosophy prevalent in the West, African music retained
its functional and collective characteristics. The element of
improvisation was developed rather than abandoned, and it
found its way into Black music in this country. Similarly, the
unifying element of audience participation was also retained.
These foregoing statements are in direct opposition to self-
styled ethnomusicologists who hold that Black music is of Euro
pean origin or that it is a completely new music. Again, the
peculiar savage circumstances of America did go to shape the
music in a different manner from most contemporary African
music, at least superficially so. But a close listening to Hugh
Masekcla, who is from the sister to the United States, South
Africa, will reveal a close similarity between South African
Black music and that of tlie United States. In botli, one can
find tlie same mingling of joy touched with a melancholy
Analtjsis o f the African and th e W estern A esthetics 167
pathos. In both, one can find the element of social protest.
When Masekela sings of the oppression in the diamond mines,
it is very similar to songs about the ghetto that have become
so popular in this country. Another outstanding diflFerence
between Western and African music is the latter s use of
syncopation. In European music, syncopation was not the natural
by-product of its structure, as was the case in Africa. The ac
cented oflF-beats that characterize syncopation had to be de
veloped as a product of the ^rest.^ The rest was not in
vented until the twelfth century. Until this time, free rhythm
was employed, with the neumes not denoting the duration of
a note. At this time, the rhythm, which consisted of groups
of syllables and of neumes, was unmeasured; it was like the
prose rhythm of the Psalms and other poetry in the Bible.
Since most of these literary pieces are of an even, measured
quality, and since the music composed during this period was
often in unison, with very little harmony, it can be assumed
that the music was also non-syncopated. The music of Palestrina
and Monteverdi bears this out. In Africa, on the other hand,
syncopation was a necessary and vital part of the musical
structure. It was built right into the music and the languages
that the music reflected. No such connection between language
and music existed in Europe, with the exception of the in
fluence of the vowel-oriented Italian language. But this influence
was limited in practical application to vocal music. African
language, however, not only contains a generous proportion of
vowels, but is based upon a system of tonality and accents,
which allows for the possibility of music that could be in
terpreted as language, with the additional possibility of in
corporating lingual rhythms into music vis--vis the talking
drums. African writing can thus be achieved through the subtle
use of music.
In the case of the West, mathematics had to be used to
achieve what for the Africans was a natural phenomenon. In
comparing the two general cultures, Lvi-Strauss comments:
i68 T h e Black A esthetic
The rise of handwriting always stands in an immediate re

lation with the establishment of cities and empires, the or
ganization of men into a political system, and the formation of
classes and castes. The Africans, however, did not need an
alphabet to convey information; instead, they developed the
drum language, which could imitate the spoken language. This
constitutes in essence a form of writing minus the disadvantages
of Western-style alphabetic writing. Jahn explains the difficulty
in applying the Latin alphabet to African languages: When
the alphabet was introduced to Africa, . . it was necessary
to utilize accents in order to make it possible to write the
language in letters at all. Thus, for example, the Yoruba language
has three different pitches: high, middle, and low. A word
like gkg (the cediUa is necessary to distinguish the open from
the closed o) has a different meaning for each different pitch.
Alphabetical script therefore distinguishes the high pitch by
the accent 6, the low by the accent 6, the middle tone re
mains unmarked, and the intermediate pitches as in okocanoe.
What expense, what trouble, how many auxiliary marks, are
necessary in order even to write a name such as Ldyiko
Or6kulabebejd. He goes on to state that pitch is in fact more
important in many African languages than either vowels or
consonants: The dun-dun, the most well-known of the African
talking drums, is capable of not only representing the tones
but also all of the modulations. The talking drum does not
use a kind of Morse system, as imagined by most non-Africans.
The drum language is the immediate and natural reproduction
of speech; it is a script intelligible to every trained person,
only it is directed not to the eye but to the ear. The young
European learns in school to connect optical phonetic signs
with their meanings, and, similarly, the young African had
formerly to leam the art of understanding the acoustical phonetic
signs of the drums.
Africans therefore acquired at an early age the principles
of music, since it was such an intrinsic part of the language
education. Perhaps this goes a long way to explain the seminal
Analysis o f the African and th e W estern A esthetics 169
influence exerted by African music, and also why African music
is participated in by such a large group, making a collective
art form.
Since the inculcation of Western languages and methods of
education, the drum script has all but been lost. The oflBcial
drummers, who once were chosen carefully for their work and
considered sacred, were discouraged from practicing their art.
Much of the history of Africa had been retained in this manner,
despite tlie Western contention that Africa lacked a history.
Even so, the basic texture, rhythms, and linguistic influences
were preserved both in African and Afro-American music.
Antiphomjy and the Origin of Improvisation
Whenever a musical phrase, sung or played by a soloist,

is afterward repeated or answered by an instrumental or vocal
chorus or group, antiphony takes place. It is referred to com
monly as call-response or question-answer, form. Much of African
music is of this nature, owing to the cultural demand for
collective, participatory music. The chorus could, because of
antiphony, be unfamiliar with the melody and yet be able
to sing i t The soloist could vary his stanzas easily and also
change the melody from time to time. The more skilled the
performer, the more adept he was in the art of improvisation.
Instrumental antiphony was of a similar nature, with the master
drummer setting the beat and pattern, followed by answer
like figures from the chorus of drummers. The master drummer
would also employ deviations in the various rhythmic patterns,
and gradually improvisational abilities increased. Without im
provisation, there cannot be freedom of expression or spontane
ity, and without these, music would be worthless to African
culture, which is in unity with the arts.*
The five varieties of antiphony developed in African music are: instru
ment-instrument, instrument-voice, instrument-chorus, solo voice-chorus,
vocal solo-instrument.
The Origin of Polyphony
Like antiphony, polyphony*^ can be traced to African origin.

When two or more independent musical phrases are played
at the same time, polyphony occurs. This form was first prac
ticed by African drummers, playing many rhythmic patterns,
each independent of the other and yet played to fit into
the general musical or over-all pattern. When one drummer
plays in one meter, and another in another, polyphony is the
inevitable result. The intricacy of African polphony is obscured
by the masterful techniques and ease with which it is ac
complished. It is still not dear just how and under what
circumstances slaves were brought to America. In the trick-
nological history books, usually the story goes that African
chiefs sold other Africans, who were already enslaved to the
white slave merchants. But there are also suggestions here and
there that force might have been employed in the process.
Thus Thomas Pettigrew writes that wars had to be fought
in order to get slaves. Unfortunately, he does not go further
to explicate the matter, nor does he reveal his sources. It
is certainly within the realm of probability that a people who
did not hesitate to use force and violence against Americas
original inhabitants would not abhor its use in the acquisition
of those who were earmarked to build AmericaAfrican slaves.
Perhaps black scholars will begin to research this important area
and substantiate this hypothesis.
African slaves undoubtedly came from all parts of the con
tinent, including Egypt and parts of East Africa. They were
shipped not only to the United States, but to all sections of
the West Indies and Latin America. In the latter cases, African
musical and cultural survivals are at first glance more pro
nounced, since most of tliese countries were under the influence
The three forms of polyphony are: multi-rhytlimic, miilti-inelodic, and
multi-rhytlun-multi-melody simultaneously.
Analysis o f the African and the W estern Aesthetics 171
of the Catholic Church, which was more tolerant to the African

gods than the largely Protestant slaveholding group in the
United States. They have also been able to avoid the effects
of technology and commercialism that have plagued musicians
of African descent here. Almost all the names given to Latin
American dances are names of African religious dances. These
include the rhumba, samba, mambo, etc. The following illustra
tion of an Afro-Cuban orchestra reveals many instruments of
African origin, including claves, guerro, conga drums, timbale,
marimba, bongos, etc. In some of these countries, such as
Brazil, Cuba, and Haiti, African religions such as Voodoo are
practiced. Voodoo in fact is the religion most practiced by
Haitians, from Papa Doc Duvalier to the average citizen.
Duvalier is a Voodoo priest as well as a medical doctor. The
music of these countries did not develop therefore in quite
the same way as that of the African people in the United
States. Slavery conditions in this country were much harsher
than those in the Indies and Latin America. And of course,
here, unlike the other slave sectors, was a concerted effort
to remove all traces of African cultiure from language to music.
But the black man in America was, despite these attempts,
able to hold on to the essential elements of African music,
which even find expression in today s contemporary Black music.
Black culture, of which Black music is a reflection, has also
retained much that is African. This can be seen immediately
in the highly expressive artistic styles of Black poets, painters,
and musicians. Our language is not English, or at least many
of the words we use are not English. Our life-styles are also
subject to African influence, as well as our personal philosophies,
which are inclined toward an ability to be deeply sympathetic
to the plights of others, and to feel deeply, whether it be in
joy or grief. All over the United States today, Voodoo is still
practiced, despite earlier attempts to ban it. Voodoo is a way
of life that permeates every phase of life, unlike Western
religion, which is separate from a secular life. As both a religion
and a philosophy, Voodoo remained in the United States and
T h e Black A esthetic
was manifest in both Black religions music and the blues.

Specific Africanisms were also introduced early in America.
These included the expressive use of the voice, the instrumental
imitation of the human voice, songs about animals and songs
of a parable nature, vocal devices such as falsetto, trills, glis-
sando, bends, slurs, and melisma. African-like instruments were
invented when the materials were availableinstruments such
as bones (claves), washbucket bass, kazoo (merliton) and var
ious drums (especially in Louisiana). Of course, the slavemaster
didnt buy expensive instruments for his slaves, who were con
sidered mere property, nor was the slave allowed to bring over
his own. For this reason, slave music was primarily vocal. After
the Civil War, relatively inexpensive instruments became avail
able as war surplus, left over from the regimental bands. Now
blacks also had an income, if but a meager one, to buy the de
sired instruments, making it possible to redevelop an instrumental
music.
Ill Poetry
TH E NEGRO ARTIST AND TH E
R A C IA L MOUNTAIN
Langston Hughes
One of the most promising of the young Negro poets said

to me once, I want to be a poetnot a Negro poet," meaning,
I believe, *1 want to write like a white poet"; meaning sub
consciously "1 would like to be a white poet"; meaning behind
that, I would like to be white." And I was sorry the young man
said that, for no great poet has ever been afraid of being
himself. And I doubted then that, with his desire to run away
spiritually from his race, this boy would ever be a great poet.
But this is the mountain standing in the way of any true
Negro art in Americathis urge within the race toward white
ness, the desire to pour racial individuality into the mold of
American standardization, and to be as little Negro and as
much American as possible.
But let us look at the immediate background of this young
poet. His family is of what I suppose one would call the
Negro middle class: people who are by no means rich yet
never uncomfortable nor hungrysmug, contented, respectable
folk, members of the Baptist church. The father goes to work
every morning. He is a chief steward at a large white club.
The mother sometimes does fancy sewing or supervises parties
for the rich families of the town. The children go to a mixed
school. In the home they read white papers and magazines.

And the mother often says Don't be like niggers" when the
children are bad. A frequent phrase from the father is, Look
how well a white man does things. And so the word white
comes to be unconsciously a symbol of all the virtues. It holds
for the children beauty, morality, and money. The whisper
of I want to be white runs silently through their minds.
This young poets home is, I believe, a fairly typical home of
the colored middle class. One sees immediately how difiBcult
it would be for an artist bom in such a home to interest
himself in interpreting the beauty of his own people. He is
never taught to see that beauty. He is taught rather not to
see it, or if he does, to be ashamed of it when it is not
according to Caucasian patterns.
For racial culture the home of a self-styled Txigh-dass Ne
gro has nothing better to offer. Instead there will perhaps
be more aping of things white than in a less cultured or less
wealthy home. The father is perhaps a doctor, lawyer, land-
owner, or politician. The mother may be a social worker, or
a teacher, or she may do nothing and have a maid. Father
is often dark but he has usually married the lightest woman
he could find. The family attend a fashionable church where
few really colored faces are to be found. And they themselves
draw a color line. In the North they go to white theaters and
white movies. And in the South they have at least two cars
and a house like white folks. Nordic manners, Nordic faces,
Nordic hair, Nordic art (if any), and an Episcopal heaven.
A very high mountain indeed for the would-be racial artist
to climb in order to discover himself and his people.
But then there are the low-down folks, the so-called common
element, and they are the majoritymay tlie Lord be praisedi
The people who have their nip of gin on Saturday nights
and are not too important to themselves or the commimity,
or too well fed, or too learned to watch the lazy world go
round. Tliey live on Seventh Street in Washington or State
Street in Cliicago and tliey do not particulaily care whether
The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain 177
they are like white folks or anybody else. Their joy runs,
bangl into ecstasy. Their religion soars to a shout. Work maybe
a little today, rest a litde tomorrow. Play awhile. Sing awhile.
O, lets dancel These common people are not afraid of spirituals,
as for a long time their more intellectual brethren were, and
jazz is their child. They furnish a wealth of colorful, dis
tinctive material for any artist because they still hold their own
individuaiity in the face of American standardizations. And per
haps these common people will give to the world its truly
great Negro artist, the one who is not afraid to be himself.
Whereas the better-class Negro would tell the artist what to
do, the people at least let him alone when he does appear.
And they are not ashamed of himif they know he exists
at all. And they accept what beauty is their own without
question.
Certainly there is, for the American Negro artist who can
escape the restrictions the more advanced among his own group
would put upon him, a great field of unused material ready
for his art. Without going outside his race, and even among
the better classes with their white cxilture and conscious Amer
ican manners, but still Negro enough to be different, there
is suflBcient matter to furnish a black artist with a lifetime
of creative work. And when he chooses to touch on the relations
between Negroes and whites in this country with their in
numerable overtones and undertones, surely, and especially for
literature and the drama, there is an inexhaustible supply of
themes at hand. To these the Negro artist can give his racial
individuality, his heritage of rhythm and warmth, and his
incongruous humor that so often, as in the Blues, becomes
ironic laughter mixed with tears. But let us look again at
the mountain.
A prominent Negro clubwoman in Philadelphia paid eleven
dollars to hear Raquel Meller sing Andalusian popular songs.
But she told me a few weeks before she would not think of
going to hear that woman, Clara Smith, a great black artist,
sing Negro folksongs. And many an upper-class Negro church.
even now, would not dream of employing a spiritual in its

services. The drab melodies in white folks hymnbooks are much
to be preferred. W e want to worship the Lord correctly and
quietly. We dont believe in shouting. Lets be dull like the
Nordics, they say, in effect
The road for the serious black artist, then, who would pro
duce a racial art is most certainly rocky and the mountain is
high. Until recently he received almost no encouragement
for his work from either white or colored people. The fine
novels of Chesnutt go out of print with neither race noticing
their passing. The quaint charm and humor of Dunbars dia
lect verse brought to him, in his day, largely the same land
of encouragement one would give a sideshow freak (A colored
man writing poetry I How odd!) or a clown (How amusing!).
The present vogue in things Negro, although it may do as
much harm as good for the budding colored artist, has at least
done this: it has brought him forcibly to the attention of his own
people among whom for so long, unless the other race had no
ticed him beforehand, he was a prophet with little honor. I
understand that Charles Gilpin acted for years in Negro theaters
without any special acclaim from his own, but when Broadway
gave him eight curtain calls, Negroes, too, began to beat a tin
pan in his honor. I know a young colored writer, a manual
worker by day, who had been writing well for the colored
magazines for some years, but it was not until he recently
broke into the white publications and his first book was ac
cepted by a prominent New York publisher that the best
Negroes in his city took the trouble to discover that he lived
there. Then almost immediately they decided to give a grand
dinner for him. But the society ladies were careful to whisper to
his mother that perhaps shed better not come. Tliey were not
sure she would have an evening gown.
The Negro artist works against an midertow of sharp criticism
and misunderstanding from liis own group and imintcntional
bribes from tlie whites. Oh, be respectable, \vrite about nice
people, show how good we are, say the Negroes. Be stereo
The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain 179
typed, dont go too far, dont shatter our illusions about you,
dont amuse us too seriously. We will pay you, say the whites.
Both would have told Jean Toomer not to write Cane. The
colored people did not praise it. The white people did not buy
it Most of the colored people who did read Cane hate it. They
are afraid of it. Although the critics gave it good reviews the
public remained indifferent. Yet (excepting the work of Du-
Bois) Cane contains the finest prose written by a Negro in
America. And like the singing of Robeson, it is truly racial.
But in spite of the Nordicized Negro intelligentsia and the
desires of some white editors we have an honest American
Negro literature already with us. Now I await the rise of the
Negro theater. Our folk music, having achieved world-wide
fame, offers itself to the genius of the great individual American
Negro composer who is to come. And within the next decade
I expect to see the work of a growing school of colored artists
who paint and model the beauty of dark faces and create with
new technique the expression of their own soul-world. And the
Negro dancers who will dance like flame and the singers who
will continue to carry our songs to all who listenthey will be
vdth us in even greater numbers tomorrow.
Most of my own poems are racial in theme and treatment,
derived from the life I know. In many of them I try to grasp
and hold some of the meanings and rhythms of jazz. I am as
sincere as I know how to be in these poems and yet after
every reading I answer questions like these from my own peo
ple: Do you think Negroes should always write about Negroes?
I wish you wouldnt read some of your poems to white folks.
How do you find anything interesting in a place like a cabaret?
Why do you write about black people? You arent black. What
makes you do so many jazz poems?
But jazz to me is one of the inherent expressions of Negro
life in America: the eternal tom-tom beating in the Negro soul
the tom-tom of revolt against weariness in a white world, a
world of subway trains, and work, work, work; the tom-tom
of joy and laughter, and pain swallowed in a smile. Yet the
i8o T h e Black A esthetic
Philadelphia clubwoman is ashamed to say that her race created

it and she does not like me to write about it. The old sub
conscious white is best runs through her mind. Years of study
under white teachers, a lifetime of white books, pictures, and
papers, and white manners, morals, and Puritan standards made
her dislike the spirituals. And now she turns up her nose
at jazz and all its manifestationslikewise almost everything
else distinctly racial. She doesn't care for the Winold Reiss
portraits of Negroes because they are "too Negro. She does not
want a true picture of herself from anybody. She wants the
artist to flatter her, to make the white world believe that all
Negroes are as smug and as near white in soul as she wants
to be. But, to my mind, it is the duty of the younger Negro
artist, if he accepts any duties at all from outsiders, to change
through the force of his art that old whispering "I want to be
white, hidden in the aspirations of his people, to "Why should
I want to be white? I am a Negroand beautifull
So I am ashamed for the black poet who says, "I want to be
a poet, not a Negro poet, as though his own racial world
were not as interesting as any other world. I am ashamed, too,
for the colored artist who runs from the painting of Negro
faces to the painting of simsets after the manner of the academi
cians because he fears the strange un-whiteness of his own fea
tures. An artist must be free to choose what he does, certainly,
but he must also never be afraid to do what he might choose.
Let the blare of Negro jazz bands and the bellowing voice of
Bessie Smith singing Blues penetrate the closed ears of the
colored near-intellectuals imtil they listen and perhaps under
stand. Let Paul Robeson singing "Water Boy, and Rudolph
Fisher writing about the streets of Harlem, and Jean Toomer
holding the heart of Georgia in his hands, and Aaron Douglas
drawing strange black fantasies cause the smug Negro mid
dle class to turn from their white, respectable, ordinary books and
papers to catch a glimmer of their own beauty. We younger
Negro artists who create now intend to express our individual
dark-skinned selves vrithout fear or shame. If white people
The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain i8 i
are pleased we are glad. If they are not, it doesnt matter. We

know we are beautiful. And ugly too. The tom-tom cries and
the tom-tom laughs. If colored people are pleased we are glad.
If they are not, their displeasure doesnt matter either. We
build our temples for tomorrow, strong as we know how, and
we stand on top of the mountain, free within ourselves.
TRIPPIN G W ITH B LA C K W RITIN G
Sarah Webster Fabio
The move toward liberation from slave to serf to self, for

Black folk, has meant a long, arduous trip. The history of
this development, which we might call "The Black Experience,
has been chronicled in the annals of Black Literature. Always
the movement has had to be bilateralthat is, both external and
internal; language has played an important part in communicat
ing the experience from vdthin and without. And while Blacks
have had to define and validate Black reality, they, concur
rently, have had to protest and protect themselves from ex
ploitation and dehumanization. They had to not only devise
ways of speaking in tongues so that "the man could not always
understand everything, but also had to speak out of both sides
of their moutlishurrahing Black; badmouthing White.
Original hoodoo, badmouthing the man, forenmners of the

"Stomp Me, O Lord slave accoimts and protests Black-per
spective accoimts of what was really going down wnth the wind,
start with Lucy Terry, digging tlie scene of an Indian Miissacre,
1746;
Tripping w ith Black W riting 183
And had not her petticoats stopt her

The awful creatures had not cotched her
And tommyhawked her on the head
And left her on the ground for dead.
Or Jupiter Hammon on An Evening Thought, Salvation by

Christ, with Penitential Cries,'" turning hearts and souls away
from an unbearable reality to spiritualism:
Lord turn o\ir dark benighted Souls;

Give us a true Motion,
And let the Hearts of all the World,
Make Christ their Salvation,
Early turnings; trying to turn these bedeviled mothers around,

shame them in their human traflBcking; these wrenchings of
conscience from those short on conscience but long on bread
and black goldearliest forms of Black power. Image-making
from early days from pure spirit and communion with nature.
Nation-building from the ground. Loss of kmg-of-the-jungle
images, lion-and-panther form. Beaten to the groimd; gagged
and shackled, but singing free:
Keep a-inching along

like a poor inch worm
JESUS IS COMING BY AND BY.
Or George Moses Horton transcending that hell-boimd scene

in On Liberty and Slavery, rapping on "the man, calling on
the ancestors' spirit world:
Say unto foul oppression. Cease:

Ye tyrants rage no more,
And let the joyful trump of peace.
Now bid the vassal soar.
Soar on the pinions of that dove

Which long has cooed for thee,
And breathed her notes from Africs grove.
The Sound of liberty. . . .
And with The L ife of Olanudah Equiano or Gustavos Yassa,

The African, Written by Himself, the beginning of the Black
gift to American Mainstream Literature, a new genrethe slave
narrative. Tor-real world literature. Gustavus Vassa running
it down how he was run across the world, making giant steps,
building civilization. Bom in Benin, slaved in Virginia and
Pennsylvania, farmed-out on a Caribbean plantation, working out
as an abolitionist in Englandas a self-made man. Bootstrap
puUing; defying laws of gravity and gravitation. Gaming for
self, and bootstrap-yanldng for brother boots.
Getting that soul together in times of dehumanization and

desecration of the souls of Black men. L ife and Times, Frederick
Douglass, a put-dovm as early as 1845; altogether in 1881.
Whipping it to the original outhouse ruler of the Harry Sam
vintage, Abe Lincoln; mnning down such a heavy game that
runaway slave turns presidential adviser and Consul General
to Haiti. Shades of Papa Docl Wearing two faces. Seer. In
voking spirits, calling for an exorcism of the spirit and body of
racism manifested by Dred Scott decision and the act of nul
lifying the Fourteenth Amendment in 1883. Instances of bad
Supreme Court decisions which made him cry out;
But when a deed is done for slavery, caste, and oppression

and a blow is struck at human progress, whether so intended
or not, the heart of humanity sickens in sorrow and writlies
in pain. It makes us feel as if some one were stamping upon
tlie graves of our mothers, or desecrating our sacred temples.
Only base men and oppressors can rejoice in a triimiph of
injustice over the weak and defenseless, for weakness ought it
self to protect from assaults of pride, prejudice, and power. . . .
(pp. 541-47)
Tripping w ith Black W riting 185
No man can put a chain about the ankle of his fellow-man, with
out at last finding the other end of it about his own neck.
The lesson of all the ages upon this point is, that a wrong
done to one man is a wrong done to all men. It may not
be felt at the moment, and the evil may be long delayed,
but so sure as there is a moral government of the universe,
so sure will the harvest of evil come.
Stomp us, O LordI Getting into the power of speaking in

tongues. W. E. B. DuBois. The Souls of Black Folk. Those of the
double consciousness, bom with veils over their eyes . . .
From Darkwater, A Litany at Atlanta, Done at Atlanta, in the
Day of Death, 1906 :
. . . Wherefore do we pray? Is not the God of the fathers

dead? Have not seers seen in Heaven's halls Thine hearsed and
lifeless form stark amidst the black and rolling smoke of sin,
where all along bow bitter forms of endless dead? . , .
Thou art still the God of our black fathers, and in Thy soul's
soul sit some soft darkenings of the evening, some shadowings
of the velvet night.
Stomp us, O Lordl James Weldon Johnson raising God's

Trombones, giving a new folk "Creation," rhapsodizing about
Africa's prodigal son's return home. Setting the beat of marching
feet on the road to victory in "Lift Every Voice and Sing":
. . . Stony the road we trod.

Bitter the chastening rod.
Felt in the days when hope imbom had died;
Yet with a steady beat.
Have not our weary feet
Come to the place for which our fathers sighed?
Speaking in tongues. Uncle Julius, in "The Goophered Grape

vine," describes one of Sycorax's daughters, Aun' Peggy, who
has goophered, cunju'd, bewitched the scuppemon' vineyard:
She sauntered 'roun mongs' de vmes, en tule a leaf fum dis

one, en a grape-hull fum dat one, en a grape-seed fum an-
nuder one; en den a little twig fum here, en a little pinch
er dirt fum dere,en put it all in a big black bottle, wid a
snake s toof en a speckle' hen s gall en some ha'rs fum a black
cats tail, en den fill de bottle wid scuppemon wine.
Speaking in tongues and running his games. Charles Ches-

nutt. And Paul Laurence Dunbar running it down how We
wear the Mask/That grins and lies." An African orientation . . .
Alain Lockethat necessary critic for The New Negro; a

special critic for a special time. Harlem Renaissance. Fathering
Ngritude. Giving the possibility of showing forth a triumph
of spirit and mind. A decolonized mind shining through colonial
language. Locke sees Caliban's early move:
. . . Then eventually came the time when the hectic rhetoric

and dogged morahsm had to fall back in sheer exhaustion on
the original basis of cultural supply. Through Dunbar,part of
whose poetry, nevertheless, reflects the last stand of this rhetorical
advance, Negro poetry came penitently back to the folk-tradition,
and humbled itself to dialect for fresh spiritual food and rai
ment.
William Stanley Braithwaite, who gave America the possi

bility of an American poetry, speaks of Dunbar as closing one
age in Black poetry and beginning another. Check out tlie
Sesqui-Centennial Edition of Braithioa\te*$ Anthology of Maga
zine Verse for 1926, Yearbook of American Poetry, Black
poetrya main tributary of mainstream American poetry. A
Black man willing to bring an indigenous, non-derivative poetry
into being. He got lost in the shuffle after 1929. But he'd done
his thing. Sterling Brown, one of the most capable wTiters
using Black form chronicling the literary movement in Negro
Caravan. Sterling Brown in liis Negro Poetry ami Drama said
this:
Tripping with Black W riting 187
Dialect, or the speech of the people, is capable of expressing

whatever the people are. And the folk Negro is a great deal
more than a buffoon or a plaintive minstrel. Poets more intent
upon learning the ways of the folk, their speech, and their
character, that is to say better poets, could have smashed the
mold. But first they would have had to believe in what they
were doing. And this was diBcult in a period of conciliation
and middle class striving for recognition and respectability/*
Early there was a self-consciousness and a mold which a

deriding white America put on Black folk speech. This meant
that many feigned representing folk speech, according to
Brown, by:
A few pat phrases, a few stock situations and characteristics,

some misspelling: these were the chief things necessary. The wit
and beauty possible to folk speech, the folk-shrewdness, tlie hu
manity, the stoicism of these people they seldom say.**
The Harlem Renaissance period closed the credibility gap

between the Black man, his articulation of his experience, and
his selfhood. Zora Neal Hurston, anthropologist, throwing light
on language. Open the way for todays freedom-wigged freaks.
Stone-cold, bad-blood revolutionaries. Escapees from prisons of
Anglo rhetoric. Frontiersmen in the lumbering netherlands of
Black language. Medicine men schooled in witchcraft, black
magic, the voodoo of words. Immortalized, subterranean, out-of-
this-world travelers. Dutchmen. LeRois. LeRoi Joneses. Quick-
change sleight-of-hand magicians. Dons. Don Lees. Changing.
Change your enemy change your change change change your
enemy change change . change your mind nigger." KiUens.
Killens* chilluns. On their jobs. Taking care of business. De-
niggerizing the world." Voodoo cowboys. Loop Garoo Kids.
Riding loosecool onesinto the whirlwind of change; who, as
they gallop into town, have a posse of spells phone in sick."
Ishmaek. Ishmael Reeds. Yeah. Yellow Back Radio Done Show

Good Broke-Down. Up against the wall, Prospero.
Calibans all. Exploding Prospero s premises with extraordinary,

for-real, supernatural departures. Trips. More benevolent despot
ism, spelled Tyranny. Any way you look at it. And his gift of
languagehis prison in which Calibank achievements will be
realized and restrictedis a boomerang. New-breed Blacks,
those desperadoes who Take the Money and Run, leave the
man behind bound and bankrupt; marooned on a barren island
of derivative Anglo-Saxon, European-like culture. Walled in by
the law and order of his own restrictive rhetoria And those
newly free? They are on their jobs making jujus, working their
mojos, peeping Chucks hold cards. Understanding the real
meaning of his excessive articulation of so much nonsense.
Seers and sages. Reporters such as Eldridge Cleaver sending
back messages about the technologically gifted moon men : I
heard what he said; he said oink. LeRoi Jones-created
criminak intent on robbing the family of its jewek in Home on
the Range. Mystified, momentarily, with the fathers talk;
bagfest. Gobble Gobble. Gobble. But understand their
task is to give these robots the gift of soul, of language of the
real world. Once more, Mr. Tooful; I was born in Kansas
City in 1920. My father was the vice-president of a fertilizer
company. Before that we were phantoms. . . Which explains
all that shit. Packaged under the brand name of Standard
English, mainstream American literature. Or Sister Carolyn
Rodgers taking a look at the spineless, flat imitation in Tortrait
of a White Nigger ! who talks like/a biscuit tliat will/not
rise . . . got a jelly mind/and shimmy thighs ; whose purpose
in life is reduced to an endless search trying to find the M AGIC
that/will/PRESTO/Black/off/ . . .
No mere children of nature these. Tliey are indeed, Sycorax-

the-Sorceress offspring. With magic potions to tame the beasts of
natiure. With so many thumping, twangling instnunents giving
Tripping with Black W riting 189
the beat. Informing William Melvin Kelley and his likes that
he moves to the rhythms of A Different Drummer. Deres
Us ns and deres Dem. Magic knowledge. Source of power
found rooted in the residue of a wellspring of aged and ageless
African native culturesoul. Spooky Stuff. Sins of the fathers
revisitedi Great balls of fire! 11 Brother, brush off your Brer
Rabbits foot. Shine up your John-The-Conqueror root. Whip
up your own brand gris-gris. Its Voodoo time again.
LeRoi Jones, dramatizing the dilemma. Don Lee, chronicling

the changes. Ishmael Reed, S-p-e-l-l-im-g it out. Nikld Giovanni,
recording "Records : "a negro needs to kill/something/trying to
record/that this country must be/destroyed/if we are to live/
must be destroyed if we are to Uve/must be destroyed if we are
to live. Jimmy Garret, bucking the whitewashed system. White
powerthe same which done got his mamachallenged to a
duel. By a deathly game of dozens, in the one-act And We Own
the Night. Cracker-waUed prisons of rhetoric crumbled before
the double-whammied eyes of crumb-snatching blues logic,
Semple-fied by Langston Hughes, passed on as sacrament to
Stanley Crouch and Dante. Stone walls of martial law and
bad conditions failing to imprison the spirit of Blacks. Etheridge
Knight, breaking through in Cell Song, answering the call to
"take/your words and scrape/the sky, shake rain/on the desert,
sprinkle/salt on the tail/of a girl . And Sonia Sanchez pre
paring for Homecoming: "Leaving behind me/all those hide and
/seek faces . . . I have learned it/aint like they say/in the
newspapers. Soul talk for soul folk. Boss Soul, by Sarah
Fabio: ". . . gut bucket, gospel spiritual, jazz/touching cords of
Feeling any live person/has to tune into or turn on to that/special
deepdown/inside you thing.
New Day. Dawn. Light of Broken Night. Night breaks.

Night trippers. Check out the Bad, Bold scene of the Mojo
workers. Dig the star-crossed bones uncovered by Ishmael Reed
in 15 Nigromancers From Now. If you dare. Any day or night-or
igo T h e Black A esthetic
sance in betweenget on down to what*s really there. Clean-

picked bones. The skulls of ones who talked too much. Get to
that. Another necessary trip: Amistad, with Charles Harris
and John Williams piloting.
Black writers, finding themselves up a tree with the man s**
rhetoric and aesthetic, which hangs them up, lynching their
black visions, cut it loose. All the wayswinging free. Flying
home. Wings flapping, raucously, in the breeze. So many im-
natural demands from the establishment, the tradition, beamed
into a subject people from a hostile, alien culture, shined off as
irrelevant, self-defeating. Needing to respond as integral beings
not having to compromise integrity. Bringing black perspective,
black aesthetic, black rhetoric, black language to add authentic
ity to the felt reality. Knowing America has no rhetoric match
ing its racist reality; no reality matching its universal" and
democratic" idealistic state of existence. Knowing the simple-
minded, fascist, pseudo-Europeanized mandate of universality"
to be a funky issue in any aesthetic consideration. A hustle
to make walleyed, white-eyed America the all-seeing Cyclops
of our age.
Giving the finger to blind justice. Peeping the loosened blind
fold. Peeping her peeping; favoring the apples of her e y e -
rotten though they may be. Playing the game of dozens with
her. Combating her status-quo games. Knowing the truth about
this society. One that devaluates the lives of a people for the
duration of its existence. One that dehumanizes them for fun
and profit. A mere matter of pragmatism and utilitarianism.
Knowing that society to be guilty of: emasculating manhood;
deflowering womanhood; exploiting spirit and soul; blinding
vision; binding motion; dulling sensitivity; gagging speedi.
Black Writingrepressed, suppressed, ignored, denounced.
Black writers having rained upon tliem not respect, riches,
rewards, but disrespect, discouragement, non-rccognition, d
culturation, assimilation, isolation, starvation, expatriation, de
rangement, criminal indictment. LeRoi Jones s case but a recent
and flagrant example of a system s way of dealing with creative.
Tripping xoith Black Writing 191
liberated black minds. The same brutal white backlash that
cut the cord of David Walkers life after his writing of his
A ppear in the early nineteenth century still tears at the flesh
of articulate Blacks of the recent past and the presentmen
such as Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, Eldridge Cleaver,
Bobby Seale.
No turning back, though. This is the day of Biggers and
ghosts of Biggers. Black writersmost of them poets plushave
always been barometers, even when America kept bell jars on
them. Have always been/still are/will be. Always traveling with
ears to the ground; attuned to the drumbeats of the age. Check
out the Harlem Renaissance poets, such as Langston Hughes,
Claude McKay, Sterling Brown. Check out the post depression
poets of the thirties, including Richard Wright. Check out
Margaret Walkers words to her people in the early forties.
Check out the poets in Beyond the Blues, a time when Black
poetry was so far underground it had to travel to England for
publication. Check out Black poets publishing with Broadside
Press, Third World Press, Success Press. Check out Black period
icals/owrrwZ of Black Poetry, Black Dialogue, Negro Digest,
Liberator.
Take the A-Train to Black liberation. Black writing of the
seventies will be the Sweet Chariots of our time: swinging low/
swinging high/swinging free. Commimicant. Continuum.
Change. Consummation.
BLA C K N ESS CAN: A Q UEST FO R A EST H ET IC S
James A. Emanuel
(I will be as black as blackness can, The blacker the mantle the

mightier the man . . .
W. E. B, DuBois, The Song of the Smoke)
Writing in 1925 his now famous essay about the bold black
artist who was then being crowned "the New Negro, Alain
Locke recorded the following prediction:
With this renewed self-respect and self-dependence, the life

of the Negro community is bound to enter a new dynamic
phase, the buoyancy from within compensating for whatever pres
sure there may be of conditions from without. The migrant
masses, shifting from countryside to city, hurdle several generations
of experience at a leap, but more important, the same thing hap
pens spiritually in the life-attitudes and self-expression of the
Young Negro, in his poetry, his art, his education, and liis new
outlook, with the additional advantage, of course, of the poise
and greater certainty of knowing what it is all about. From
this comes the promise and warrant of a new leadership.
But "the New Negro slowly died. In the 1930s, the Depres
sion emaciated him. In the 1940s, global warfare drained the
energies and diverted the attitudes vital to his recovery. In
tlie 1950s, fitful surges toward racial integration deluded him
into believing tliat the question of his death had become less
relevant. When tlie 1960s began, his grandcliildrcn waved him
Blackness Can: A Q uest for Aesthetics 193
a respectful but apprehensive farewell from their fiery buses

and grim lunch counters in the South. On the verge of the
1970s, they threw away his clothes, his hair, and his name.
They emerged as the Young Blacks, fevered by the past and
determined to make non-negotiable demands upon the future.
The Young Blacks fire has spread to some of their more
spirited elders, including authors and critics. This conflagration,
certain to sweep literary black America in the 1970s with
harrowing choices, is implicitly foretold in the passage quoted
above. Locke must have known that, in this drama of the
1920s (now restaged more than a decade after his death by
what he called the three noms [Fates] who have traditionally
presided over the Negro problem ), relatively few actors could
transform their lines into living philosophy. In no country can
masses of people liurdle several generations of experience with
a leap without a staggering casualty list. Nor can the best-
educated and the most artistically gifted of a raceincluding
those blessed with the certainty of knowing what it is all
aboutsurvive the accompanying concentrated doses of racial
philosophy without proportionate losses.
Although almost half a century separates these two periods
of upheaval in black America, the phenomena are instructively
similar. In the 1920s, one kind of New Negro followed the
trail of wartime migrants from the Southa countrified work
ingman whose mind expanded among the new freedoms and
new hazards of the North. He has been comparable, in the
late 1960s, to the black urban slum dweller whose awareness
of sit-ins and street demonstrations has quickened him with
new visions of working-class power. The literary, artistic New
Negro of the 1920s, on the other hand, suddenly found himself
attractive to white authors, white publishers, and white party-
givers. He can be likened to three categories of black people
today; ( 1 ) the black college student whose matriculation has
been solicited, or whose elective courses have suddenly included
Black Studies, at universities reacting to the current swell of
racial pride; (2) the black actor, entertainer, or model whose
194 T lie Black A esthetic
multiplying image on television and in other public media has

nourished both him and his people; and (3) the black author
or critic who has received writing and editing contracts from
highly reputable publishing firms that have traditionally ignored
him.
One significant national difference, however, marks these
periods and their dominant attitudes. The loud, joyous relief
from war that characterized the Jazz Age seems frivolous today
when viewed from the menacing gloom of our demoralizing
war abroad and our iconoclastic ruin at home. At the fulcrum
of this half-century-long span sits the black American, more
aware of his nascent power than of his historic leverage. Amer
icas contrasting national attitudes of confidence and joy versus
cynicism and despair represent the dichotomy that has been
steadily controlled and internally balanced by this black man
and his ancestors for two hundred and fifty years. Facmg the
1970s with a consequent subconscious poise, he must also look
backward to the leap that his forebears often could not take,
one that he can hardly take now. In the 1920s it was the
leap described by Locke as the jump 'from medieval America
to modem. Today it is the leap from the physical underside
to the spiritual and ideological peak of national life, from suf
fering as the hindmost, to thinking and acting as the foremost,
of Americans.
Precariously balanced, then, at tlie center of American life,
the black man feels the tremors of directional forces, sensing
for the first time the magnitude of his own motive power.
A prescient boldness of imagination opens to him a view of
himself as the democratic spokesman for his country, the body
and soul of its final possibilities. But the logic behind tins
revolutionary self-image, requiring support from his fellow
citizens, black and white, cannot of itself move him to fulfill
his destiny. White America has shown that it cannot be tnisted
to respond wisely and humanely to any massive expression of
black Americas consciousness of long abuse, even when that
expression is restrained in nature and is demonsh*ably linked
Blackness Can: A Q uest for Aesthetics 195
with moral urgencies in our international impasse. The assassi
nation of Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., symbolized the
death of the black mans nave Christianized faith. But black
people are far from being united in their acceptance of their
fated role as examplars of the new American. The perceptual
leap from a centuries-old environment of despisal and scorn
to one of globally recognized leadership and heroism would
be extremely difficult even if it were being encouraged. But
ignorance, duplicity, and organized opposition on the part of
both white and black Americans are formidable impediments
to the required reversal of self-image.
The area of black people s activity in which this revaluation
and leadership should most authentically occur is that in which
critical intelligence as an instrument and racial responsibility as
a principle are most irrevocably joined. Educational and
journalistic institutions seem best indicated by these considera
tions. If rigorous concern for truth and for its means of historical
development and preservation are to be more important in the
1970s than commercialized rapport with the average black buyer
of newspapers and magazines, then schools and colleges will
remain the primary battleground for what Locke correctly em
phasized in the 1920s: "the mind of the Negro. Further,
since the truth of human experience is concentrated and pre
served best through literary art, it is mainly the black author
and his public interpreter, the critic, who will inspire their
race toward its destiny.
These public thinkers, veritably forced to respond creatively
and critically to the evolving spirit of black America, have
become self-conscious to an unprecedented degree. The spot
light of social responsibility, which in times of crises searches
out elevated positions before it can fix upon individuals with
elevated principles, has illuminated the customarily private work
rooms of black literary men, regardless of their competence.
America faces an exciting decade in which the Young Blacks
will throng the air with animated poetry and prose. Their
intensities, mirrored in the daily lives of their growing audience.
will often be emulated by their elder contemporaries who find

it either useful or pleasing to express racial passions long sub
dued by accommodation and despair. The nature of literature
itself, tlien, appears to be changing for black authors and their
followers. It seems to be more social, more programmatic, more
therapeutic. There is some resultant confusion of posture with
performance, of theme with permanent merit. Yet it is undeni
able that, to black men as American citizens, erect literary
postures and libertarian themes are symbolically and materially
of singular importance.
In order to identify the basic issues involved, and to estimate
the magnitude of their probable impact upon black America of
the 1970s, one needs a sampling from the record of the growing
controversy. More than a year of commentary, as found in the
pages of Negro Digest alone from September 1968 through Nov-
vember 1969, adequately outlines this crucial impasse in our
literary tradition. The main issues are centralized conveniently
in the tentatively accepted phrase around which the disputation
swells: the black aesthetic.*'
If the term itself is appropriate, the theory involved should
emphasize beauty, artfulness, and good tastein short, aesthetic**
qualities. The black aesthetic, as a formally accepted set of
literary principles, has not quite yet been bom. The 1970s,
should that decade indeed witness such a birth, might well
dawn upon new notions of functional beauty, subordinating
such skills as authentic rhyme and phonetic subtleties to the
celebration of American blackness as tlie crest of the human
spirit. As of October 1969, according to the editor of Negro
Digest (Hoyt W. Fuller), two poets from Chicagos Organiza
tion of Black American Culture, which Fuller helped to establish
in 1967, were setting up preliminary criteria for the evaluation
of black poetry. Tliis action by two young black writers, Rhonda
Davis and Carolyn Rodgers, responds to some of the needs of
their fellow authors, whom Fuller describes in The New York
Times Book Review of October 19, 1969, as stripping themselves
of the creative chains with which tlic literary Establisluncnt
bound them for so long. Whether or not such criteria can sub
stantially influence a still-evolving poetic tradition remains to
be seen.
It might be useful to consider why a black aesthetic is
needed, just as one might wonder, rhetorically, about the validity
of black studies and black universities. Black Man Thinking,
however, quickly disposes of these objectionswhich are usually
made by white Americawhen he reflects that the nation itself
has always insisted upon the overwhelming significance of black
ness. Therefore, to view any subject deliberately through a
black mans eyes is to accept a traditionally American emphasis.
And to use such an approach for the purpose of deep in
tellectual exploration, designed to benefit ones race rather than
to disparage it, is to t o n deficit into profitan admirable success
in any free society.
The need for a black aesthetic, in the opinion of the popular
young poet Don L. Lee, derives from the fact that black
people see nothing in the same frame of reference as white
people.^ The absolutism of this statement, mitigated by the
presently fluid definition of black, is representative of the
hardening attitudes that are feeding irreversible currents into the
flow of literary ideas. This concept of a unique *T)lack per
ception is differently set forth by Cecil Brown, who declares:
Every Negro baby in America is bom . . . into a world of
white values, and if he is to survive that world, he has to
achieve blackness (12-68:48). Assuming these statements of
Lee and Brown to be complementary, one sees the lifelong
tension in black peoples minds as their struggle to will into
being an environment of salutary blackness to counteract hos
tilities and debasements projected by white society. A black
aesthetic could ease that struggle by making it wholly con
scious and public among culturally alert citizens, and by serving
1 September/October 1968 number of Negro Digest, page 31. Future ref
erences to essays in Negro Digest will be simplified in the text; tliis one
would read 9/io-68;3i.
igS The Black Aesthetic
as a standard by which the success of the transformation could
be measured.
This need for a black aesthetic has been argued, not only on
the basis of the black mans psyche, but also on the basis of
institutionalized racism. The South African poet and essayist
William Kcorapetse Kgositsile points out that young writers
"come out of Western institutions of higher learning strongly
convinced that tlie university in the West is an extension of
racism, because of which "the Black poets sensitivity explodes
(9 /10 -6 8 :4 1). The Church, which has recently suffered from
the disaffection of Young Blacks, has been scored as an in
stitution that encourages racism. Carolyn F. Gerald, in her
thoughtful examination of the role of cultural images in the
revilement and belittling of black people, reminds us that "white
images are implanted at the core of black life, the most obvious
example being that of the Church, where God is white ( 1 -
69:46). Universities as well as churches are subsumed by Don
L. Lee in what he sees as "a decadent culture that has sys
tematically, over the centuries, debased and dehumanized us
with the fury and passion of an unfeeling computer (3-69:52).
And poet Lee can be allowed to make his point through self-
contradiction, in attacking the part of his society that thrives
malignantly on that very fallacy.
A black aesthetic must develop, authors are saying with
mounting emphasis, because of racism in the literary establish
ment. Black writers object vigorously to the domination of
white publishers, white editors, and white critics over the public
acceptance and interpretation of their works. Relating this on
erous situation to the distortions fostered by our schools and
colleges, Hoyt W. Fuller accuses the cstablisliment: "Generations
of black students have gone out into the world as professionals
believing that the white view of black literature is the vidid
view (3-69:83). The editor of Negro Digest continues by
expressing bitter resentment of the establishments belief that
"only white writers have the objectivity toward race which
is necessary to produce art when the subject matter is race.
Naming earlier a few of the oflFending publications, Lee strength
ens Fullers protest by declaring his glad anticipation of the
day when no white boys in the pages of The Nation, the
New Republic, Saturday Review, New York Times, etc., will
direct or affect our efforts (9/10-68:32).
The seriousness and possible ramifications of these strictures
against the privileged eminence of white critics and editors
should not be underestimated. As of November 1969, black
subterranean rumblings had risen and spread with suflBcient
heat to threaten the birth of a new scholarly journal, to be
devoted to black literature and culture, because of allegations
of racism in its tentative organization and in its self-opinions.
The same month, a national academic convention, echoing the
October disruptions of the Montreal international conference of
the African Studies Association, fell into a predicament prophetic
of the 1970S. It faced potential black-and-white polarization
stemming from preconvention hostilities over the elevated role
of the white critic of black literature.
American literature might never record, with regard to black
literature, any thoughtful consensus among its stellar critics,
for they have generally failed to give that literature the respect
of serious examination. Thoughtless statements by such men as
Richard Gilman and Louis Simpsonto name just two white
critics who have been justifiably censinred since the fall of 1968
in the pages of Negro Digesfremain representative targets.
Editor Fuller keeps alive the memory of Gilman, then theater
editor of Newsweek, declaring from his platform seat at the
Negro Writers Conference at the New School for Social Research
in 1965 that black writers, being incomplete men, could not yet
perform as good playwrights. Similarly unforgetful on behalf
of his fellow writers. Fuller recalls (also in his November 1968
number) Louis Simpsons judgment that being a Negro is
not important as poetic matter. The added reminder that
Simpson and Gilman softened their detractions. In Harpe/s
and in the New Republic, respectively, because now it is not
politically expedient to publish such viewpoints, erodes the
flimsy position of careless or shallow white critics. As for the
silent white giants of the academy, their unforgivable long
neglect has rather suddenly changed the challenging terrain of
black literature into a no man s land into which only the most
spirited of them vAB dare to venture and hold their groimd.
White critics are simply not wanted, not only by many of the
Young Blacks, but also by some of their older, more charitable
contemporaries. Young playwrights at the Pan-African Cultural
Festival in Algiers in July 1969 proclaimed their artistic free
dom: negatively, they said to hell with the Richard Gilmans of
tliis world"; positively, they foresaw a new functional style de
veloping directly from honestly racial substance. Some young
poets think of white critics as subhumans" trying to define and
direct their efforts. Addison Gayle, Jr., briefly tracing the ra
cial dichotomy in criticism from Plato through the medieval mo
rality play, Robinson Crusoe, Hinton Helper, and on to the twen
tieth century, argues, the extent of the cultural strangulation of
Black literature by white critics has been the extent to which
they have been allowed to define the terms in which the
Black artist will deal with his own experience*^ (7-69:38).
White critics exacerbate this unfortunate situation by contin
uing their strangulation," often through arbitrary disparagement
of generations of black authors. For example, in The New York
Times Book Review (Childrens Books) of November 19, 1969,
Selden Rodman records his disrespect for the creations of out
standing black writers, saying:
. . . until recently there hasn't been any Afro-American verse that

was more than just thatverse. Wlien I was editing anthologies
in 1938, and again in 1946, I remember going through the
complete works of Countee Cullen, Claude McKay, Langston
Hughes, and the others, hoping desperately to find a poem,
and falling back reluctantly on the spirituals and blues (page
?)
Rodman characterizes the objects of his disfavor as black

verse-smiths" and hunents the publication of their poetry (in
this instance, in Walter Lowenfels The Writing on the Wall
(1969) as a disservice to poetry, and perhaps in the long run to
the black cause itself. One easily understands why so many
black writers are hoping desperately that negligent judgments
so undeep and unabidingto borrow a phrase from poet Gwen
dolyn Brookswill be swiftly demoted from the rank of legiti
mate criticism. It should be literary suicide for any critic, white
or black, to demean so eflEortlessly Cullen s Heritage, McKays
The White House, Hughess Mulatto, and the best poems of the
numberless black authors lumped together in bold denigration as
the others.
Whiter villains, almost ghostlike in anonymity but massively
real in power, are those many white publishers whose racist
predilections drive them, in dispensing black-vogue editing and
writing contracts, toward overriding preferences for white ex
perts. The trade publishers among them, serving an over-the-
counter morality fleshed out at the cash register, and disposed,
as businessmen, to manufacture whatever salable commodity
they cannot find at hand, produce bastard white critics upon
their printing presses and cry up their wares through scores of
white book reviewers. Although this system pays unavoidable
homage, through book contracts, to the few conventionally com
petent white critics now active, it thrives upon privileged me
diocrity. When black authors are allowed to profit from the
black vogue, trade publishers either use more-highly selective
criteria in granting contracts, or otherwise alter their standards
the end result being invariably the exclusion of too many able
black authors and critics. Sometimes these trade publishers, turn
ing semipolitical, enforce the exclusions through the sinister
practice of blacklisting. Sometimes they are enforced through
publishers arbitrary rejection of black critics offers to write
books designed to explore the black literary tradition in depth.
Consideration of racism in publishing leads inevitably to seri
ous doubts about the integrity, or at least the literary assump
tions, of American university presses. Among the many books
published from May 1 to July 3 1, 1969, by the sixty-six presses
listed in Scholarly Books in America (October 1969)a list
covering seventy-two pagesonly two books are concerned with
black literature. They are William Edward Farrisons William
Wells Brown: Author and Reformer (The University of Chicago
Press) and Mercer Cook and Stephen E. Henderson's The Mili
tant Black Writer in Africa and the United States (The Univer
sity of Wisconsin Press). At least three factors should have
combined before the dynamic 1970s to thrust the university
presses into the forefront as publishers of studies of black litera
ture: their commitment to thorough and objective scholarship;
their closeness to the nationwide reservoir of professional critics,
black and white; and their degree of immimity from the
narrowness of popular taste and from some of the debasements
of commercialism. The fact that the university presses have been
sluggish for so long in a discipline so promising in intellectual
discoveries and so rewarding to the democratic conscience in
dicates that they have collectively judged black literature to be
unworthy of prolonged investigation. Thus outfaced by the most
significant cultural challenge of the twentieth century, university
presses are uniquely culpable in the light of their professional
eminence and idealistic stance. The indictment of trade pub-
fishers and of university presses is compounded by the existence
of documented proof of the racism and actual dishonesty of
editors-in-chief and of directors in their communications with
black authors.
The ignorance about black literature, combined with the du
plicity and hostility in much of the white literary establishment,
then, throws upon black America the burden of discovering and
preserving its literary culture. It avails little to argue that the
black publishing industry should expand and help multiply books
in the racial tradition. The slow expansion of scholarly publica
tion is foreseeable in tlic purposes of the recently established
Negro Universities Press in Connecticut, for its 1969 catalogue
declares, Books on and about tlie Negro and tlic Black Exqêri-
cnce are of sj)ccial concem to the Press. Future developments
in black and black-front publisliing, whenever they are merely
mercenary responses to the demands of the growing black audi
ence now extrapolated, might not rise far above mechanical
exploitation. Black Americas cultural dilemma now is the
eternal problem of the artist: the problem of material, purpose,
and method. To the black artist serving as the culture hero of his
race, his material is the unsorted mass of what is being called
the black experience; his purpose is to memorialize in beauty
and in truth the essence of that heritage. His method, if he is
faithful to himself as a man and as an artist, must be sanctioned
in his own being whenever it cannot be purely individual. It
mustto enlist the language that closes Robert Hayden s poem
Frederick Douglass-^convey his personal gift to lives grown
out of his life, the lives/fleshing his dream of the beautiful,
needful thing/'
The notion of a black aesthetic does not seem conspiratorial
or inflammatory within the circle of brother artists when its
three components are first examined. Surely black writers have
much T)lack experience ; they should desire to understand it, to
make it beautiful, and to transmit that mature sense of life to
others. Surely they cannot seriously object to proposals on style,
on the means of enlivening with form the truth beneatli the
affectionate shibboleth "Black is beautiful. But black artists,
color aside, belong to an obstinate fraternity traditionally in
dividualistic, mainly because so much of their sensitive being
is in their creative works. Anyone touching those works unfeel
ingly, either with Philistine dullness or with presumptuous
dogma, incurs estrangement; and should he remain to make an
institution of his error, he invites animosity, if not rebellion.
Insensitivity will not likely be the blunder of framers of the
black aesthetic, for they are, for the most part, literary artists
themselves. But racial passion and belated zeal in striking back
at the iron face of prejudice might harden into a dogmatic
insistence that all black writers concentrate on punitive exclusion
of whites and on recuperative embraces of blacks. Such a pro
gram would offer much emotional solace to those in direst need
of it, but it would sour the free-running sympathies of a number
of creative artists. Trouble looms, then, in the universal person
ality of the artist as the man most likely to ignore all voices
but his own.
In order to estimate further the controversial as well as the
uncontested voices now defining tentatively the black aesthetic,
one can return to sampling the Negro Digest. Fifteen months of
commentary in that popular journal does not reveal the entire
range of opinion now in ferment, but it does define the general
outlines of energetic thought that are mounting the offensive.
The positive commentary, as distinguished from the illogical
"get W hite/ mood that nerves much of the attack already
represented by quotations, centers upon the following topics:
the identification of black poets, the function of black poets, the
nature of black American experience, the poetic techniques, the
qualifications of black critics, the critical terminology, and the
black critics pitfalls.
Some stumbling is discernible in the first step of the black
aesthetic, for the creed of its formulators is being composed for a
somewhat nebulous advance guard. In her essay Who Speaks
Negro? What Is Black? (9/10-68), Sarah Webster Fabio, after
stating that a black writer could be Negro in the use of the
standard English language (page 33), answers her titular ques
tions thus:
Negro is a psychological, sociological, and economical fabrication

to justify the status quo in America. Nigger is the tension created
by a black man's attempt to accommodate himself to become
a Negro in order to survive in a racist country. Black is the
selfhood and soul of anyone with one drop of black blood, in
America, who does not deny himself. . . . America wants Negroes
and niggers but not black people (page 34).
To Don L. Lee, writing for the same niunber, a Negro is a simi

larly abstract lie: " . . . a filthy invention, which didnt come into
existence until about 1620; his next sentence refers to a Negro
as an "imitation white" forsaking his "true experience," which is
"the Black Experience" (page 27).
Negro" and black" are scarcely more denotative for modem
usage when Carolyn F. Gerald, in her already mentioned essay,
reminds us, " . . . the word black is a translation from the Portu
guese slave term negro, gone into the English language as
Negro" (page 46). Her reminder sanctions the Young Blacks"
current distaste for the slavery-time connotations of Negro/"
Her subsequent sentences refer to the social brotherhood in
black" as a powerful attributive in the fight against what poet
Claude McKay has called the potent poison" of Negrophobia.
She writes:
But black is also the generalized term which we use to symbolize

unity of origin, whether we are called Anglophobe, Francophobe,
coloured, mulatto. West Indian or American Negro by the white
image-makers. Black is the highly imagistic term we use . . . to
destroy the myth based on the complex of images which polarize
black and white.
The faltering toward racial identity and unitynot in the mind

of any one of these three writers, but in the projected synthesis
that any creed presupposesreveals itself here. The polariza
tion mentioned by Carolyn F. Gerald is presented as the black
man's dug-in acceptance of the battlefield historically marked
out by whites. It assumes no subpolarization among the despised
along an axis terminated by the blackest, on the one hand, and
the least black, or the most nearly white, on the other. But,
whereas this polarization leaves each writer in the group free
to call himself either Negro or black with impunity, the state
ments of Sarah Webster Fabio and Don L. Lee imply im
patience, at the minimum, toward the writer who does not cor
rectly label himself with a racial tag. The utter seriousness and
honesty of their comments, however, lead one to suppose that
they would permit a writers black" works to belie his Negro
label, whether it be mistakenly applied by himself or by another.
(L ees poem Gwendolyn Brooks, as a matter of fact, supports
the supposition in his case.)
Humorously awkward blunders, shrewd deceptions, and se
vere critical injustices would be unavoidable if authors and
critics took these labels nervously to heart. A Negro sentence
(one written in standard English) could turn black with a down-
home fillip at the end. A Negro critic attempting to evaluate a
black poets skill in using a Negro sonnet to praise so black an
experience as relishing a dish of "chitlins" might be disquahfied
on various aesthetic grounds. It would be deplorableand im
possible, one hopesthat writers should become guiltily intro
spective in a color-me-black syndrome, and that critics should
become luggers of motley game-bags rather than become
windows to a "selfhood and soiJ" not stricken with the pathol
ogies of American color-consciousness.
But color has been unshakably real in America; and the func
tion of black poets, as envisioned in these sampled essays, takes
practical cognizance of that fact. The profound morality at the
core of the black aesthetic is evident in remarks made by
Kgositsile and Lee. The former, in his previously mentioned
essay, describes the function of black poetry as the "restoration
of human and humane values for the salvation of man (page
4 1). Black poetry, asserts the latter, must "show those who
control the world how to live (9/10-68:28). "\Ve must move
that white boy toward righteousness, Lee continues, "show him
what a human being is, and can be (page 29). He specifies
that the purpose of black poets (who "will be examples of their
poems [page 28]) is no less than the redefinition of man.
Such confident insistence from a black African and from a black
American that tlieir tradition be recognized as central to tlie
redemption of mankind should not be underestimated.
Further, the direct connection between universal benefit and
black American need is implied in the anticipated ministerial
role of authors of the 1970s. Sociology professor Gerald A.
MeWorter, in his essay in tlie March 1969 number, ad\dses black
authors to be "models of peace and imderstanding for tlieir
race (page 90). Don L. Lee, thinking like both Whitman and
Yeats, writes in the same number:
Black art, as is African art, is perishable. . . . Like, a poem is

written not to be read and put aside but to actually become a part
of the giver and receiver; to perform some function, to move the
emotions, to become a part of the dance, or to simply make one
act. Whereas the work itself is perishable, the style and spirit of
the creation is maintained and is used to produce new works (page
78).
These two essays, one by an academician and one by a poet

neither restricting his activities to the single categoryhint at a
conceivable personalism in the black aesthetic. Historical du
ality in black men s consciousnesses, inseparable from such per
sonalism, is likewise observable. For example, the second half
of McWorters partly quoted sentence reads, . . . but when
necessary, we must fire the earth and fill the air with bullets.''
One might wonder, then, about complexities and poetic dualities
in Lee as a black 'giver and receiver" of racial ideas. It seems
fair that the query subside temporarily in the following work
by Marvin X, entitled "Don L. Lee Is a Poem" (9-69:59):
Don L. Lee
Is a poem
When he walks
When he talks
is a poem.
Don don't smoke pot
He always loaded
on his poems
Don L. Lee
Is a poem
A good poem.
Black authors, as advocates of social morality through either
their persons or their works, are outgrowing their tendency to
argue their humanity before the court of white opinion. The
African concept of negritude, mentioned briefly by Kgositsile
and explored in more detail by Richard A. Long (5-69), began
and developed in ways meaningful to framers of the black
aesthetic. During the Harlem Awakening of the 1920s, a last
ing black American literary creed might have been bom; but
the requisite wary thoughtfulness and stern impulse to hoard
and consolidate against a time of disaster were too infrequent.
Langston Hughes laid the full groundwork by penetrating what
he called his black soul world to an unprecedented and still
unsurpassed degree; and his African themes combined with
those of Claude McKay to forecast negritude beyond the Atlan
tic. Had a black aesthetic been formulated in the 1920s, it
would probably have been free of individual restrictions and
racial recriminationsechoing the very exuberance and geniality
that made the Jazz Age incompatible with hardening creeds.
While hard times and Hoover blankets were ehilling black
Americans in the 1930s, the African cultural leaders were nur
turing their distillation from the Harlem Awakening: its literary
celebration of vital parts of their common ancestral heritage. In
the 1940s, negritude, coalescing around shared black African
realities rather than against apartheid-level white hostilities,
was as self-justifying as the concept of brotherhood. In tlie
1950s, institutionalized in both a journal and a fonnal society,
negritude was able to beam rays of influence back toward
black America. But in America in the 1960s, the non-violent
black youth, who had to pass through tlie valley of the angry
white backlash into a morass of public espionage, private har
assment, and racist assassination, grew inevitably into a new
breed of men.
Now casting off faster than they are putting onand thus
outdistancing a black leadership imaccustomed to revolutioiiiu-y
philosophical changethey are returning to tlie primal nudity
of man bom defenseless in a monstrous environment. While
the clothing industry obediently manufactures the symbols of
their alienation and while merchants stack up overpriced picks
for tlieir Afros, their purity of predicament remains metaphori
cally uncorrupted. That is, their union in fundamental spirit
with their elders, authors included, is acknowledged in the black
communitys uncomplicated, uncompromised reading of native
brotherhood in the image of the clenched fist. Phenomenal
reality dictates that that image close out more than it close in.
It is precisely this enforced inbreeding of beleaguered minds
(literary ones included), emotionalized by desperation, that re
strains the Americanization of ngritude while denying the rele
vance of white opinion.
The function of black authors, then, according to most of the
recent essays in Negro Digest, should be to build psychologi
cal peace within the black community while carrying on psycho
logical war across the color line. Carolyn F. Gerald s essay insists
that black writers are involved in a black-white war over the
control of image. For to manipulate an image is to control a
peoplehood ( page 45 ). After carefully defending her thesis, she
advocates reverse symbolism as the tool for projecting our own
image upon the universe (page 47). Her counterpunching
mythmaker, scientifically aware of his reshaping of a reality
deep beyond the threshold of reason (page 43), compares to
Cecil Brown s wished-for supplier of a positive protest that
creates as it eliminates, . . . deals with the opposition s ugliness
by concentrating on its own beauty (page 46). Other essayists
also use the word peoplehood and urge aggressive promotion
of racial virtues in black people.
The selected commentators on the black aesthetic are under
standably silent on the details of stylistic technique expected
from authors. Their vision, however, is interdisciplinary in
breadth. Don L. Lee predicts, Black poems vrill complement
the art of Tom Feelings and Omar Lama; will be read to the
music of Coltrane and Sun Ra (9/10-68:30). Ameer Baraka
(LeRoi Jones) is less cryptic than he seems when he prophesies
about forthcoming style: How is a description of Who ; and
The forms will run and sing and thump and make war too
(9-69:5, 6). Carry yr book with you, he adds, in a bit of moral
izing complementary to that of Professor McWorter and Don L.
Lee.
LeRoi Joness fleshly book to be carried is the black experi
ence to be celebrated. Black authors can write in that book,
implies Hoyt W. Fuller in his afore-mentioned review of The
Militant Black Writer, through a conscious plunging into the
bosom of their blacknessa saturation of the total self in the
life-loving, life-sustaining fountain of Soul. Their easiest, or
first, subject, one speculates, will be the physical merits of the
race. Essayist Earl Ofari recalls a nineteenth-century black
orators praise of , the fine tough muscular system, the
beautiful rich color, the full broad features, and the gracefully
frizzled hair of the Negro (8-6 9 :21). In the same number, the
young photographer Chester Higgins, Jr., emphasizes that he
values in his race . the reality of poverty, of beauty, of
gendeness, of warmth, and of blackness (page 42).
Black experience, one might automatically assume, is known
to every black author. Henry James was pondering a similar as
sumption when he had May Bartram stick John Marcher with
the following sentences in The Beast in the Jungle: You take
your feelings for granted. You were to suffer your fate. That
was not necessarily to know it. This disparity between an ex
perience and knowledge of that experience is the longest bridge
that an artist must cross. Don L. Lee, by burying in a preposi
tional phrase his picture of the black poet . . studying his
own poetry and the poetry of other black poets (9/10-68:28),
misses the Jamesian emphasis while touching the crucial point.
In order to transform his own sufferingsor joysas a black man
into usable knowledge for his readers, the author must first ab
sorb and order his experiences in his mind. Only then can he
create feelingly and coherendy the combination of fact and
meaning that black audiences require for the re-exploration of
their lives. A cultural commiuiity of widely separated black
authors studying one anothers best works systematically would
represent a dynamic interchange of the spiritcorrective and
instructive and increasingly beautiful in its recorded expression.
The black experience to be explored, although it yields its
essence with diflBculty and only to the sensitive participant,
has vivid facets handily available to the literary craftsman. Don
L. Lee, in the last-quoted essay, enumerates a few of the con
crete images: . . sleeping in subways, being bitten by rats,
six people living in a kitchenette (page 27). No aesthetic could
justifiably claim that such images are racially exclusive, although
black Americans could establish priority with regard to the last
two. Cecil Brown, typical of other essayists in his being wary
of such a fallacy, declares, A black writer can write about
anything, . . . literally, and what he has to say will still be said
by a black man (page 48). Such a statement, unarguable and
not significant in itself, does keep alive the possibility that the
black aesthetic wiU not falter on repressive provincialism.
Somewhere between style and content belong the special
language and symbols that, to black authors, might be either
the substance of experience or the technique by which that
experience is brought to the printed page. Sarah Webster Fabio
floods the readers imagination with this challenging descrip
tion of language arts within the race:
Black language is direct, creative, intelligent communication

between black people based on a shared reality, awareness, under
standing which generates interaction; it . . . places premium on
imagistic renderings and concretizations of abstractions, poetic
usages . . . , idiosyncrasiesthose individualized stylistic nuances
(such as violation of structured syntax)which nevertheless hit
home and evoke truth; it is an idiom of integrated insight,
a knowledge emanating from a juxtaposition of feeling and fact
. . . (pages 34-35)
The descripbon is carefully and perceptively written. It con

tains implicit suggestions for new techniques, especially in po
etry, as well as bases for new critical terminology that must keep
pace with those evolutions in technique. One of the most useful
fmictions of the black aesthetic will be the fostering of such
originality as this passage foresees, and the quick recognition
of it when it appears.
Some of the objective literary symbols of the 1970s are al
ready evident. At the first Pan-African Cultural Festival, in
Algiers, black Americans varied in their attitudes toward what
Hoyt W. Fuller calls ". . . those symbols of African poverty-
sandals and dashikis (10-69:77). Fullers description of them
moving amongand sometimes wearingNehru suits, Mao shirts,
boubous, jellabas, and agbabas imphes literary value in such
colorful and racially symbolic images. Clearly, Don L. L ees
observation that the "images and symbols that are used will
come out of the poets immediate surroimdings (9/10-68:27)
must be modified or interpreted to take into consideration the
foreign travel and residence of many black authors. When pon
dering the means of that reversal of symbolism discussed by
Carolyn F. Gerald as an absolute necessity, one notices the in
herent reversal in favorable literary juxtapositions of non-West-
em with Western articles of apparel.
The task of listing credentials for the black critic is approached
only obliquely. The essayists usual failure to distinguish between
black author and black critic is either an oversight or an im
plication that imaginative creation and reflective evaluation can,
in their opinion, temporarily be exercised by the same faculties.
The urgency of the differentiation will depend upon the quality
of critical writing in the immediate future. Not to be postponed,
however, is the black critic s establishment of his own psycholog
ical equilibrium, if it is menaced by what Hoyt W. Fuller ob
served in Algiers. Black men who ". . . want most to be Ameri
can, he comments, "are terribly threatened by dashikis""; for,
unlike Nehru suits, **dashikis thrust upon tliem images they
cannot yet accept (10-69:77). Fullers concluding statement in
tlie same paragraph is more broadly challenging to critics:
But, as usual, neither tlie white press nor its sycophants, the
black integrationists, have much understanding of the black
consciousness movement. Tlie spiritual identification with Africa
and the Third World has little directly to do with literal emula
tion of African clothing and customs; it has more to do with
a rejection of tilings Western. . , .
Three points that follow reflection upon Fullers remarks seem

worthy of the strict attention of black literary critics and framers
of the black aesthetic. First, the critic must be able to accept
sympathetically and without distortion all imageswithin the
living culture and within the record of that culture, regardless
of whether he can personally wear them comfortably upon his
body. Second, the critic who is a l>lack integrationist*^ must
somehow avoid sycophancy and must somehow understand the
black-consciousness movementthe former achievement un
deniably requiring courage and independence, the latter requir
ing suffering the blows of honest memory and present aware
ness. Third, Fullers choice of the words emulation and
rejection catch the Americanized black man in a posture of
reaching-beyond and tuming-from. In the realm of ideas, which
is the critics special province, it is his highest duty to aid his
constituency in surpassing African customs and in turning toward
that new Afro-American blackness-of-being that the African
Kgositsile would call the salvation of man and that the Ameri
can Lee would style the best evidence of what a human being
is, and can be,
One hopes that black critics, newly assessing their qualifica
tions, will not be discouraged to the point of resignation by Pro
fessor McWorters prescribed training for literary competition;
H one thinks Black, one must live Black, dress Black, sleep
Black, look Black, speak Black, love Black, move Black, vacation
Black, write Black, study Black, eat Black, conference Black,
work Black, read Black, go to Black movies, lectxires, hospitals,
businesses, schools, churches, countries, restaurants, communities,
and . . , get ourselves together" , , , (page 89).
For black writers, such activity would indeed constitute Hoyt
W. Fullers recommended "plunging into the bosom of their
blackness,* a total immersion that is only theoretically possible
in an economy dominated by white people. Yet, should a con
ventionally educated critic attempt that plunge, he would un
doubtedly emerge more sensitive to the full weight of black
consciousness, more able to use it as an enriching corrective to
the illusions that have been staple in American culture.
The black critic, smarting from the pains of self-appraisal,
must anticipate the necessity of either mastering or rejecting a
stream of new critical terminology. In poetry, for example, the
language of such Establishment luminaries as Richards, Empson,
Brooks, and Wimsatt seems bewilderingly useless before the on
slaught of young Carolyn M. Rodgers' attempt . . to place
all Black poetry in several broad categories, aU of which have
variations on the main form (9-69:7). Her ten main categories
are the following: signifying, teachin/rappin, coversoflF, spaced,
bein, love, shoutin, jazz, du-wah, and pyramid. Among her
twenty-three subdivisions, four apply to the category of covers-
off: rundown, hipto, digup, and coatpuU. After quoting from two
relevant poems, she explains, "These poets hip you to something,
pull the covers oflE of something, or run it down to you, or ask
you to just dig ityoiu: coat is being pulled (9-69:9).
To dismiss this terminology as lively waywardness for tlie
"do-now opening of the seventies would be unresponsive to
its merits. Variations on what Miss Rodgers calls coatpuU have
been done by Langston Hughes; mindblower, by LeRoi Jones;
badmouth, by Claude McKayjust to name a few that come
easily to mind. Hughess volume Ask Your MarnCy which has
awaited knowledgeable extensive criticism since 1961, contains
examples of aU ten categories. The engaging terminology em
phasizes content, but the challenge is the implicit caU for
stylistic innovators of impressive talent. Rappin is only com
plaining, and riffin is only rhytlim, if made tame by a mediocre
poet.
A few of the pitfalls that gape before tlie black critic and
author alike have been mentioned in these essays in Negro
Digest, Addison Gayles final paragraph makes a vital point:
The acceptance of the phrase Black Is Beautiful . . . must

be followed by serious scholarship and hard work; and Black
critics must dig beneath the phrase and imearth the treasure
of beauty lying deep in the untoured regions of the Black ex
perience , , (pages 38-39)
Serious scholarship includes acquiring a historical perspective

that takes just account of time, place, and individual circum
stance in the past Destruction of the past is rarely a necessary
prelude to building for the future. It is, for example, of the
utmost importance, for the sake of critical integrity and historical
justice, that such a titanic figure as Richard Wright be not
brought low in our esteem on other than the most formidable
evidence. Cecil M. Brown argues thus: For Wright, it was his
damnation to be bom black, and his will to achieve whiteness
i,e,, to pull himself up to the literary standards of white
America (page 48). Brown tries harder to reverse Wrights
image in the following passage:
To reject Wright's art is not to reject protest; it is to reject

negative protest, . . . the white mans concept of protest, which
is that of a raging, ferocious, imcool, demoralized black boy bang
ing on the immaculate door of White Society, begging, not so
much for political justice as for his own identity, . . . consuming
himself, so that in the final analysis, his destiny is at the mercy of
the White Man (page 46),
It is true that a race demanding public recognition of its

heroes should not erect false ones. But no aesthetic is justified
in destroying past heroes merely to make way for new con
tenders. With regard to Browns first statement, one should bear
in mind that the black mans supposed self-hatred exists primarily
in the white mans self-protective interpretation of the black
Americans psyche. Applying an observation of Carolyn F.
2 l6 The Black Aesthetic
Gerald, one might conclude that the assumed self-hatred is
merely . . the reverse side of [the white mans] positive pro
jection of himself (page 45). Further, "to achieve whiteness
literally is but a doltish fantasy uncongenial to W righfs mind.
And to equate literary ambition, in a man of independent
judgment, with any version of such an illusory desire seriously
weakens the charge and glorifies whiteness far beyond its mea
ger deserts.
Browns second statement, urging the rejection of W righfs
art as "negative protest, exemplifies the kind of proud but
hasty thinldng that might hinder the balanced growtli of the
black aesthetic. The statement grants an unearned validity to
"the white mans concept of protesfwhich is imbedded in
the Establishments incomplete analyses of W righfs worksby
flinging the stone of that shallow concept against the armor of
a heroic black writer. The black critic must accept, as his
first principle, that no literary art can be fairly judged without
a minute examination of its context. Richard W righfs literary
art remains to be discovered in its fullness (as was implied
by the essay "Fever and Feeling: Notes on the Imagery in
Native Son, my contribution to the same special Richard
Wright number). If the "ferocious, uncool, demoralized black
boy scored in the passage is a Bigger Thomas begging . . .
for his own identity, one should reconsider the means by
which the doomed young man finds it within his own black
experience, together with the will to surpass the dubious humani-
tarianism beneath "the mercy of the White Man.
The value of black Americas literary pastwhich is the vital
question raised by Browns passagesmust be critically estimated
and carefully preserved. This action demands thorough research
into the autobiographical and biographical record, as well as
research into closely allied primary materials. Pursuing the
example at hand, if a Ijegging Richard Wright should by
chance be imagined behind a door-banging, pleading Bigger
Tliomas, one should postpone judgment until supportive evi
dence from W righfs correspondence has been documented. In
Blackness Can: A Quest far Aesthetics 217
the meantime, one might weigh, in Wrights favor, the bio
graphical record of the expatriate's courageous speech at the
American Church in Parisspecifying individuals, dates, and
places related to American espionage directed against black
men abroadshortly before his death.
Black America's past literary tradition will not depend for
its survival upon the racial attitudes of its leading authors.
The literary attitudes of the foremost black critics of the 1970s,
however, combined with their literary competence, will lastingly
affect twentieth-century opinions. It is imperative that the black
aesthetic encourage such professional training as will enable
critics to validate or enhance their interpretations of black
authors' works, whenever appropriate, through references to
other literatures. Again enlisting the example of Wright, one
hopes that a black critic would think of comparing the final
scenes of Native Son with those of Camus's The Stranger,
published two years later. He might well argue, after such a
comparison, that Bigger finally emerges just as independent of
the mercy of the White Man" as Meursault is free of the
guillotine-backed judgment of the court. The murders committed
by Bigger and Meursault lead them to a self-knowledge and
a self-justification impossible to men on their knees before a
hostile or indifferent society.
The pitfall pertinent to these references to Native Son is
not that the black aesthetic might fail to encourage a potential
critic's piling up university credits, but that it might over
emphasize the visibly black as the most acceptable stimulus to
mental engagement. The social and cultural equivalent of this
literary danger is conveyed in poet Nildd Giovanni's warning:
As a group, we appear to be vying with each other for the
title Brother and Sister Black. That will not get us our freedom"
(6-69:34). This connection between cultural labels and the
freedom of an entire race might not seem so tenuously drawn
when one recalls three or four southern white writers bom in
the middle of the nineteenth century. Led by Thomas Nelson
Page in the creation of what is now called the plantation
2i8 The Black Aesthetic
tradition (which pictured black men either as simple-minded,
clownish, picturesque slaves or as miserable, confused freedmen
after emancipation), these few men helped to insure the politi
cal suppression of the black race during their generation.
The black and white labels already prepared for the 1970s
are cause for reflection. Don L. Lee's afore-mentioned castiga
tion of Negroes as "imitation whites," and Hoyt W. Fullers
reference to "simulated whiteness" (in his book review) as the
outdated goal of blacks aspiring to manhood, should be absorbed
into the black aesthetic only after some interpretative con
sensus. It would be grossly unfair to oiu: black heritage to
label "white," and therefore objectionable, all the components
of the cultiural and literary tradition of the Establishment, as if
the profoimdest minds and best spirits among our black forebears
had had nothing to do with the formation and sanction of
parts of that tradition. (Neither Fuller nor Lee would be
inclined to transfer credit from black men to those very whites
who have fraudulently invested it for so long.) Being blindly
black is preferable to being blindly white, in the same way
that becoming redemptively brave excek remaining stubbornly
secure; but neither attitude befits men whose ultimate mission
is the salvation of a group larger than their own.
Framers of the black aesthetic will not be blind. The sym
posium in the November 1969 number of 'Negro Digest reveak
enough realism and sharp observation among the seventeen
contributors to strengthen this hope. The two topics of the
essays ( T h e Measure and Meaning of the Sixties" and "What
Lies Ahead for Black Americans?") supply the title of the thirty-
seven-page symposium, which recovers some of the already
sampled attitudes of Richard A. Long, Don L. Lee, Gerald
McWorter, Carolyn F. Gerald, and Cecil M. Brown. Significantly,
the difference that an average of ten months of reflection
has made in those attitudes is typically one of refinement or
elaboration indicative of clear and steady attention to racial
and national developments. Black, observes Long, " . . . is ugly
when a leader of one of tlic baddest bands of blacks sips tea with
Bhckness Can: A Quest far Aesthetics 219
a few woolly-headed whites at a white university and tells
them that the students of the Black college across town are
all Uncle Toms (page 4). Lee points to a dangerous crevice
in the rock of black solidarity: "The new class division, one
group of negroes saying that other negroes are not relevant,
and blacks saying that Afro-Americans are not relevant, and
vice versa (page 13 ).
Similarly widening a former emphasis, McWorter exhorts his
"righteous warriors as follows: "We must commit ourselves to
the task of constructing a new world, a world of men not
beasts, a world where love is what time it is and people
have evolved beyond hate (page ^ 1). Carolyn F, Gerald,
turning from persuasive psychologizing about the literary image
to pointed instruction in the recent history of the black literary
journal, reports usable findings:
. . . the fiction or poetry of survival is rendered through imagery,

through symbols, through experimentation with different rhythms,
with different syntactical forms, with a different vocabulary,
through the indirectness of its statement about our condition
(page 24).
And Brown, correctly seeing counterrevolution in television pro*

graming, writes, . . the moment protest is introduced into the
media it ceases being protest and becomes the news,' a new
TV show about spooks, etc/ (page 35). Little can be done
about the ponderable distance that art places between man
and his experience; and Brown would not likely argue for the
cessation of the news of protest. He then complains with under
standable foreboding, however, about a practice that makes
black America unsure of itself: "The latest technique is to
have blacks on television, yes, but to have them putting each
other down, on screen.
The seventeen authors of the symposium, as a group, focus
upon ten general topics. (Since their essays are easily acces
sible, only a negligible failure to credit them individually should
ensue if one forces upon them a T)lack togetherness" in order
to present actual trends of thought among black writers.) With
regard to general racial goals, they say nothing that overleaps
the essayists who preceded them, although such a concept as
a **post-American future (McWorter, page 2 1) shows their
advanced position. Concerning the black orientation of mind
that is to secure these goak, they wish it to be revolutionary
but righteous; they recognize obstacles to the spread of black
consciousnessmainly pretense and intolerance among those who
wear its mantle sweepingly, as well as the dragging Americanisms
of the loyal and the fearful.
Blackness as sentiment without substance, as pride without
program, is inadequate for the November essayists. They insist
upon the necessary knowledge, ideology, and leadership. Rich
ard A. Long, for example, cannot abide an ignorance of history.
John A- Williams believes that the . . major task of black
art is to delineate the political and social situation of today,
lest everyone perish (page 5). And John Henrik Clarke, won
dering if black America is equipped for nation building, cau
tions: We are, collectively, black and beautiful, but does this
fact help us to know what makes an airplane fly or how to
cure a stomach ache? (page 10)
Suggesting few details for the missing ideology, and con
cerned about the missing leadership that could best advance
oneas well as about the institutional tardiness in fostering
black leadershipthe essayists show their ambivalence toward
America. Under the watchful eyes of black children, according
to hopeful admonitions, each of their elders must morally res
urrect himself from the American graveyard. Locid urgencies
will produce, A. B. Spellman envisions, a new breed of leader,
one with little national charisma but with a functional local
constituency (page 22), Spellmans cynical prophecy about
Black Studies bodies tliem forth as a monster in the 1970s;
he foresees white colleges in particular turning out himdreds
of black-talking hourgws with Ph.D.s in Malcolm X and John
Coltrane (page 22). Edward Vauglm, witli tlie bitterness
Blackness Can: A Quest far Aesthetics 2.21
naturally proceeding from firsthand engagement with demoraliz
ing facts, records his knowledge of Black Studies programs
turning into agencies for spying on Black people (pages 29-30).
Yet, these latest essayists do not doubt that black literature
itself will flourish; they seem able to imagine the black writer,
center stage, doing his own thing despite signals in the wings,
hissing and apple-mimching in the pit, and policemen in the
aisles. Further, they imagine black literature absorbing all the
traditional means (mythology, ritual, symbols, and innovative
language) as it reorganizes itself, serving the cause of black
ness before continuing into new artistic realms. The approxi
mately thirty revolutionary black journals referred to by Carolyn
F. Gerald have, since their recent establishment, provided out
lets for the energies thathaving temporarily been forced to
forsake civil rights and integrationwill burst upon the 1970s
more purposefully.
Although black publishers and black bookstore owners receive
some praise in the November symposium, white publishers are
either scorned or waved into nonentity. Taking black authors*
manuscripts, says Joe Goncalves, they change them for white
people s consumption and arrange book distribution to suit a
white public. Their corruptive touch is the imprint of the
American majority, to Vaughn and Spellman, each of whom
uses the phrase a waste of time** in rejecting cooperation with
whites for anything (Vaughn), in any way, shape, or form**
(Spellman). Cecil M. Brown*s blast at hypocrisy in television
complements such views. The 1960s, ending with an accumula
tion of reneges and turnabouts, are reduced by John Henrik
Clarke to . . that decade of the black man's beautiful
dreaming before awakening to a new reality. . . . that each
generation must take and secure [freedom] with its own hands**
(pages 33-34).
This November symposium crystallizes some literary trends
and indicates the large terrain through which the black aesthetic
must cut new pathways. The black aesthetic, having at least a
name, consequently has a past. For it is through our names,
writes Ralph Ellison in ^'Hidden Name and Complex F a te "
that we first place ourselves in the world." The Scottish poet
and critic Edwin Muir records similarly in The Animals: For
with names the world was called/Out of the empty air,/With
names was built and walled,/Line and circle and square. . . ."
The creative task of calling forth the black American world
of fact and spirit was imdertaken in the eighteenth century in
poetry and non-fiction; in the nineteenth century, in fiction
and drama. The critical task of naming and placing, undertaken
before World War I by Benjamin Brawley and William Stanley
Braithwaite, has been evolving slowly into a tradition that, in
the 1970s, oflFers a reciprocal challenge to the framers of the
black aesthetic.
Those who accept the responsibility of charting a course
for black authors and critics, bearing in mind that such activity
is anathema to many of its assumed beneficiaries, must look
backward as well as forward. In their close inspection of roads
already traveled, they should buttress their aesthetic by refer
ences to earlier harbingers of the techniques, themes, and
matter recommended for the 1970s. The reversal of imagery
advocated by Carolyn F. Gerald, for example, is discernible
in the sixth and seventh stanzas of DuBois' nineteenth-century
poem The Song of the Smoke, in which blackness is joyful,
just, powerful, and divineand in whidi hell is white. And
Countee Cullens well-known poem Heritage, which vigorously
and logically proceeds to fashion dark gods" in its final stanza,
and chips away at the foundation of what the essayist plainly
describes as the Church, where God is white." Don L. Lees
concept of a functional black poem that should become a
part of the giver and receiver" is exemplified in Calvin C.
Hemton's poem The Distant Drum, in which both poet and
reader are made to agree that a poem can become tlieir common
fist Beating against your ear." Hemton's style approximates
the use of word bullets, one of Carolyn M. Rodgers new
tenns (a style named lioinicidal art" in my essay in the an
thology Black Expression and typified in Claude McKay s poem
The White House),
This fifteen-month span of essays in Negro Digest, then,
touches upon such crucial concenis of the black aesthetic as
definition, function, materials, technique, training, and evalua
tion. The essayists as a group do not look to the past for
guidance; and in some matters, such as the use of "black"'
and "Negro" (which was intermittently argued, along with sub
stitute terms, in the black press between 1899 and 1930), this
failure to indicate historical precedent seems a disadvantage.
Their forward-looking stance, however, yields the profit of a
stimulating insistence that the hour has struck for a unified
leap into black America s distinguished future.
The immediate issue is the question of the racial integrity
and the intellectual breadth of the molders of the black
aesthetic. That question is phrased with precision and moder
nityand with a shade of not-to-be-missed pathosin the follow
ing opening and close of Sonia Sanchezs poem blklrhetoric
(9-69:64):
whos gonna make all

that beautiful blk/rhetoric
mean something.
like. this, is an S.O.S.

me. calling. . . .
caUing. .
some/one.
pleasereplysoon.
TH E BLA C K A EST H ET IC
IN T H E T H IR T IES, FO RTIES, AND F IF T IE S
Dudley Randall
Every poet is molded by his age, by the great events or

Great Event that took place during his impressionable years.
In the thirties it was the Great Depression and the Spanish
Civil War. In the forties it was World War II. In the fifties
it was McCarthyism, the Korean War, and the beginning of
the Freedom movement with the Supreme Court school-deseg
regation decision of 1954.
Some poets, such as Langston Hughes and Ama Bontemps,
lived from the Negro Renaissance through the post-Renaissance
period into the period of the Black Aesthetic and black power
of the sixties. Others, like Gwendolyn Brooks and Robert Hay
den, published their first books in the forties and are still
creating. I shall describe these later poets only as they wrote
in the middle period between the Renaissance and the Black
Aesthetic, as their further development does not come witliin
the scope of this essay.
During this middle period, and previously during the Harlem
Renaissance, there was no such concept as a black aestlietic.
Negro writers wanted to be accepted into the mainstream of
American literature. The closest thing to a black aesthetic was
The Black Aesthetic in the 30% 40 s, and 50's 225
Langston Hughcss declaration in "The Negro Artist and the
Racial Mountain (1926). He wrote:
One of the most promising of the young Negro poets said to

me once, "I want to be a poetnot a Negro poet, meaning,
I believe, "I want to write like a white poet; meaning sub
consciously, 1 would like to be a white poet; meaning behind
that, "I would like to be white. And I was sorry the young
man said that, for no great poet has ever been afraid of being
himself. And I doubted then that, with his desire to run away
spiritually from his race, this boy would ever be a great poet. But
this is the mountain standing in the way of any true Negro art in
Americathis urge within the race toward whiteness, the desire to
pour racial individuabty into the mold of American standardiza
tion, and to be as little Negro and as much American as possible.
Hughes went on to state:
. . . But, to my mind, it is the duty of the younger Negro

artist, if he accepts any duty at all from outsiders, to change
through the force of his art that old whispering "I want to be
white, hidden in the aspirations of his people, to "Why should
I want to be white? I am a Negroand beautifull
This is as close to the Black Aesthetic cry of "Lm black, and

beautifull as it is possible to come.
Hughes continued:
So I am ashamed for the black poet who says, "I want to be

a poet, not a Negro poet, as though his own racial world
were not as interesting as any other world.
Hughes concluded with the oft-quoted declaration:
We younger Negro artists who create now intend to express

our individual dark-skinned selves without fear or shame. If white
people are pleased, we are glad. If they are not, it doesnt
matter. We know we are beautiful. And ugly too. The tom-tom
cries and the tom-tom laughs. If colored people are pleased we
are glad. If they are not, their displeasure doesn't matter either.
We build our temples for tomorrow, strong as we know how,
and we stand on top of the mountain, free within ourselves.
This sounds much like the Black Aesthetic credo, but there
are significant points of difference. For instance, Hughes uses
the word Negro. Some Negro ideologues have forbidden
Negroes to call Negroes Negroes. Hughes stresses individualism
('express our individual dark-skinned selves ). In the Black
Aesthetic, individualism is frowned upon. Feedback from black
people, or the mandates of self-appointed literary commissars,
is supposed to guide the poet. But Hughes says, If colored
people are pleased we are glad. If they are not, their displeasure
doesn't matter either. (Another expression of individualism.)
Hughes says, We know we are beautiful. And ugly too. In
the Black Aesthetic, Negroes are always beautiful.
In my own opinion, this feedback usually comes from the
most vocal group, ideologues or politicians, who are eager to
use the persuasiveness of literature to seize or consolidate power
for themselves. Politicians such as Stalin or Khrushchev have a
certain low cunning, but they cannot grasp the complexity or
paradoxes of life and literature, and they try to impose their
own simple-mindedness and conformity upon them.
The Great Event of the 1920s was the Depression. In contrast
to the aflSuent 1960s, poverty was everywhere. Millionaires as
well as poor people lost everything. Everyone was in this
catastrophe together. Eyes were turned toward Russia and
communism, and the Communists were active in organi2iing
rent strikes, labor unions, and campaigns for relief. Federal
Writers' Projects were started, where black and white autliors
worked togetlier. Even if black writers did not join the Com
munist Party, as did Richard Wright, they were sympathetic
toward it and its policy of non-discrimination. Black writers
did not give up their struggle for Negro rights, but regarded
it as part of the stniggle for tlie rights of man ever)Avhere. A
The Black Aesthetic in the 30*^, 40 s, and 50's 227
popular union organizing slogan was, **Black and white, unite
and fight.
Robert Hayden wrote his Speech, in which he urged black
and wliite workers to cooperate;
I have seen the hand

Holding the blowtorch
To the dark, anguish-twisted body;
I have seen the hand
Giving the high-sign
To fire on the white pickets;
And it was the same hand.
Brothers, listen to me,
It was the same hand.
The horizons of poets were widened beyond their own Negro

struggle to include world events. In his fiirst book, Heart-Shape
in the Dust, Hayden wrote of youths dying in the Spanish
Civil War, in Spring Campaign:
She wears a gas mask, fair Corinna does.

And thinks of spring s first air raid while
seeking spring's first rose.
In the same book (1940), he foretold the death of Adolf

Hitler, in Prophecy:
He fell with his mouth

Crushing into the cold earth
And lay imharming at last
Under the falling leaves and the fog. .
They returned to the ruined city
And began to build again.
Hayden's second book, A Ballad of Remembrance, was not

published until 1962, but in the meantime there were the
brochures The Lion and the Archer (with Myron O'Higgins,
1948) and Figure of Time ( 1 9 5 5 ), published in his own
Counterpoise Series. The surrealistic A Ballad of Remem
brance is chilling with its whirling, ghttering images and
rhythms and its feeling of nightmare and irrationality. It cap
tures the black experience, but filtered through the poet s sensi
tive subjectivity:
Accommodate, muttered the Zulu king, throned

like a copper toad in a glaucous poison jewel.
LfOve, chimed the saints and the angels and the
mermaids.
Hate, shrieked the gumetal priestess
from her spiked bellcoUar curved like a
fleur-de-lysl
As well have a talon as a finger, a muzzle
as a mouth. As well have a hollow as a heart
And she pinwheeled away in coruscations
of laughter, scattering those others before her.
In Middle Passage and Runagate Runagate, Hayden incor

porates all the innovations of the experimental poets of the
1920s: varied and expressive rhythms; anti-poetic materials such
as quotations from handbills, legal documents, ships logs; scraps
of poetry, hymns, spirituals; fusing all these together to make
two exciting narratives of the beginning and of the escape
from slavery.
Gwendolyn Brooks, in A Street in Broneville ( 1 9 4 5 ), wrote
of the black people on the South Side of Chicago, but world
events widened her vision to include also sonnets of black men
at war. In her Pulitzer prize-winning Annie Allen (1949), she
uses many poetic forms with easy mastery, from ballads to
crisp sonnets:
What shall I give my children? who are poor.

Who are adjudged the leastwise of the land,
Wlio are my sweetest lepers, who demand
No velvet and no velvety velour. . .
The Black Aesthetic in the 30*3, 40*3, and 50*3 229
In the tight, seven-lined trochaic stanzas of The Anniad,
she deftly balances narrative, images, and rhythm:
Leads her to a lonely room
Which she makes a chapel of.

Where she genuflects to love.
All the prayerbooks in her eyes
Open soft as sacrifice
Or the dolour of a dove.
Tender candles ray by ray
Warm and gratify the gray.
Like Tolson and Hayden, she has the long poem firmly in
control.
Langston Hughes continued to write of black urban folk, but
now he abandoned the glamour of night clubs and of a Harlem
pandering to white seekers of thrills. He wrote of the maids,
porters, and laborers of Harlem instead of the dancers, singers,
and lean-headed jazzers of the cabarets. His series on Madame
Alberta K. Washington presents with humor a strong-minded
Negro domestic worker.
He still wrote on racial themes, but he wrote within the
context of democracy for all. The Negro struggle was a part of
the world-wide struggle for freedom. This universality is ex
pressed in I Dream a World:
A world I dream where black or white.

Whatever race you be,
Will share the bounties of the earth
And every man is free. . . .
In his poems, instances of injustice are ironically juxtaposed

with the American Dream or with American ideals, as in his
poem Freedom Train. An unsolvable dilemma is presented in
his Merry-Go-Round, where a Negro child asks in frustration,
where is the back of the merry-go-round, as black people
always have to sit at the back.
The very title of M. B. Tolson's book Rendezvous with
America (1944) suggests a widening of the poets interest.
He writes from the point of view of the Negro, but he has
expanding sympathy with other ethnic groups, shown in his
tide poem.
A blind man said,

Look at the kikes,
And I saw
Rosenwald sowing the seeds of culture in the Black Belt. . .
A blind man said,
"Look at the Chinks,
And I saw
Lin Yutang crying the World Charter in the white mans
wilderness. . . .
In this book, Tolson uses a wide variety of poetic forms,

from rhymed quatrains and sonnets to long poems written in
varying measures. He shows his architectonic power in building
long poems that do not bore the reader, foreshadowing his
mastery of longer forms in Libretto to the Republic of Liberia
and Harlem Gallery, His sonnets are dramaticcompressing nar
rative, characterization, theme, and dramatic tension into four
teen lines. Perhaps his most successful sonnet is Incident at
VersailleSy with its succinct characterization of Clemenceau,
U oyd George, and Wilson, and its implicit prophecy of all
the future disasters that were to spring from the racism of
these world leaders. In general, the language of the poems is
vigorous, although it is sometimes marred by clichs and archaic
syntax.
In 1953 he published Libretto for tlw Republic of Liberia,
a long poem commissioned for the centennial of tlie African
nation, which earned him tlie title of Poet Laureate of Liberia.
The Black Aesthetic in the 305, 40's, and 50's 231
The preface was written by Allen Tate, and appeared also
in Poetry magazine, with an excerpt from the book.
In his preface, Tate said that Tolson had for the first time
incorporated the modem poetic language into a poem written
by a Negro. In this poem, Tolson used all the devices dear
to the New Criticism; recondite allusions, scraps of foreign
languages, African proverbs, symbolism, objective correlatives.
Many parts of the poem are obscure, not through some private
symbolism of the author, but because of the unusual words,
foreign phrases, and learned allusions. If the reader has a well-
stored mind, or is willing to use dictionaries, encyclopedias,
atlases, and other reference books, the poem should present
no great diflBculty. Reading this poem is like reading other
learned poets, such as Milton and T. S. Eliot.
The history of the poem is interesting. Tolson sent the
manuscript to Tate, who returned it. Then Tolson rewrote the
poem according to the tenets of the New Criticism. The irony
is that, about this time, the New Criticism was declining, and
tlie Beat poets, with their looser, freer, more emotional language
and form, were coming into popularity. In any case, the learned
allusive language is not the spontaneous speech of the Negro
people.
Hayden, Brooks, and Tolson can be grouped together as poets
conscious of technique, who were familiar with and learned
from the modem experimental masters such as Hart Crane,
Eliot, Pound, and Yeats, and not from minor poets such as
Housman or Edna St. Vincent Millay, or traditional poets such
as Keats, all of whom influenced Countee Cullen.
They were conscious of their Negro race, but they regarded
it in the wider context of a world-wide depression and a world
wide war against fascism. Their world view was wider and
more inclusive than that of the Renaissance poets.
Other poets, perhaps not more conscious of race, but in
whose work race occupies a more central position, were Sterling
Brown, Margaret Walker, and Frank Marshall Davis.
Sterling Brown was in the same age group as the Renaissance
poets, but his sole collection of poetry. Southern Road, was
published in 1932. In this book, the influence of Negro folk
poetry, of spirituals, blues, and ballads, is evident. Like Langs
ton Hughes, he brings the blues stanza into formal verse. He
has the unusual and valuable quality of humor, which permeates
his ballads of Slim Greer, a picaresque adventurer. There are
ballads of John Henry and of the chain gang, and poems of
sharecroppers and southern rural life. These are poems of Negro
life written out of black experience grounded in folk poetry
which he intensifies with his art.
Margaret Walker, bom in Jackson, Mississippi, is also in
fluenced by Negro folk poetry. In her only volume of poetry,
For My People, published in 1942 in the Yale University
Series of Younger Poets, there are ballads of rural southern
folk, of the witch MoUy Means, of "Bad-man Stagolee" and
"Big John Henry.
Unlike Brown, however, whose poems not in the folk tradi
tion and folk forms were apt to be personal and subjective.
Walker used the classical sonnet form (sometimes without
rhyme) to write about Negroes. The sonnet about miners and
sharecroppers titled Childhood, and the one titled The Struggle
Staggers Us are outstanding in this series.
Ours is a struggle from a too-warm bed;

too cluttered with a patience full of sleep.
Out of this blackness we must struggle forth;
from want of bread, of pride, of dignity.
More experimental tlian Brown, and probably influenced by

Carl Sandburg, she wrote some poems in long free-verse para
graphs like those of Fenton Johnson. The most famous of these
is the title poem. For My People. Tliis poem gains its force
not by tropesturns of language or thoughtor logicid develop
ment of a theme, but by the sheer overpowering accumulation
of a mass of details delivered in rhythmical parallel phrases.
The Black Aesthetic in the 30*3, 40 s, and 505
We Have Been Believers is another powerful poem in a similar
form and on a racial theme.
Race is central also in Frank Marshall Davis" books Black
M ans Verse, I Am the American Negro, and 4yth Street,
A Chicago poet, he is inspired not by traditional Negro folk
poetry, as are Brown and Walker, but by the teeming black
life of a northern metropolis. His free verse shows the in
fluence of Sandburg and Masters. In Giles Johnson Ph,D, and
Robert Whitmore, he satirizes the pretensions of the black
bourgeoisie. In the labor-organizing thirties, he wrote of share
croppers and labor unions. His poetry is black-centered, with
out the focus on wider horizons found in the poetry of Hayden
and Tolson.
Fenton Johnson was another poet who wrote in free verse
influenced by Carl Sandburg. His earlier poetry was romantic,
conventional, and traditional. In his later poetry he adopted the
long free-verse line-strophe of Sandburg, and wrote poems ex
pressing his disillusionment with America. Although marred by
clichs and conventional expressions such as "fallen woman,
they are new and different in their mood of frustration and
despair.
These poets exemplify the trends of the thirties, forties, and
fifties. There was a world depression, and a world war. In their
outlook, black poets saw race as one problem among the world
problems of poverty and fascism, and appealed to all men of
good will to help solve the problem. As for their style, they
no longer considered it sufiBcient to pour new wine of content
into old bottles of form, but absorbed the techniques of the
experimental poets Hart Crane, Pound, and Ehot In this group
were Tolson, Hayden, and Brooks. Another groupBrown,
Walker, Davis, and Fenton Johnsonwere influenced in varying
degrees by Negro folk poetry and by Sandburg and Masters.
Race was central in their poetry. Langston Hughes, growing be
yond the Renaissance attraction to the more superficial and
merely picturesque aspects of Negro life, wrote of its more
^34 The Black Aesthetic
serious aspects in the speech of the urban working man and in
blues and jazz cadences.
There was no consciously formulated Black Aesthetic. Black
poets considered themselves as part of American hterature, al
though most of them were excluded from textbooks, anthologies,
and, to a great extent, from magazines. It remains to be seen
whether, in our time, the Black Aesthetic will stimulate superior
poetry. The proof will have to be in the poems produced.
However, I will not hedge in caution, but will be imprudent
enough to weigh the historical facts, note the trends, and make a
prediction.
In the forties, black poets absorbed the innovations of white
poets. In future years, they will not only absorb them, but will
transcend them, and create their own innovations. Both Don
Lee and Ameer Baraka are weU-read, but they and poets like
them vrill not only absorb what theyre read, but, using their
heritage of folk poetry and black music, wiU build something
new upon that. In short, theyll do their own thing. They will
not depend upon white publishers, white audiences, or white
critics, as there are black publishers, black critics, and an in
creasing black audience. Robert Hayden and Gwendolyn Brooks
are mature and at the height of their powers, and are capable
of change and growth. There are many younger poets not yet
even published in book form. All that I can foresee is a poetry
of increasing power and richness, which will make a glorious
contribution to the world.
TOWARD A D EFIN ITIO N :
BLA C K POETRY OF TH E SIXTIES (A F T E R LER O I JO N ES)
Don L. Lee
We are going to talk about black art forms and movements.

Those black artists that are active and hip would gladly agree,
Im sure, that black music is our most advanced form of black
art The reasons for this are innumerable, but basically that,
regardless of outward conditions during slavery, postslavery,
etc., black music was able to endure and grow as A) a com
municative language, B) a sustaining spiritual force, C ) an
entertaining outlet, C) a creative extension of our African
selves, D ) one of the few mediums of expression that was
open and virtually free of interferences.
Very few people understand the music of John Coltrane; his
early critics and some of his fellow musicians called him crazy.
ClifFord Brown and Charlie Parker were giants in their time,
but they stayed broke ( penniless). Thelonius Monk transformed
and enlarged the sounds of the piano, but he is still not taught
in our institutions of higher learning. What this gets down to is
that to understand the aesthetic of black art or that which
is uniquely black, we must start with the art form that was
least distorted and was not molded into that which is referred
to as a pure product of European-American culture.
In reading LeRoi Joness critique in Black Music, we come
to understand that there are two distinct levels on which the
aesthetic works: gut-emotion level, which must predominate,
and a technical level, which must not be too obvious but must
seem (and in fact be) natural and real. Jones goes on to say:
The white musicians commitment to jazz, the ultimate concern,
proposed that the sub-cultural attitudes that reduced the music
as a profound expression of human feelings, could be learned
and need not be passed on as a secret blood rite. And Negro
is essentially the expression of an attitude, or a collection of
attitudes, about the world, and only secondarily an attitude
about the way music is made.'
As a collection of attitudes about the world, the aesthetic
moves toward a semblance of a definition if we can understand
the sensibility of the persons we are trying to reach. Especially
since we are to deal with black poetry of the sixties, we must
understand that which went down before the decade of the
sixties. Also, poetry as most of us understand it, is rather an
exclusive art form written and preferred by the intellectually
astute. That is to say, the poetry on the written page very
seldom found its way into the home or neighborhood of the
common black man, i.e., poetry in my home was almost as
strange as money.
The one subject that wasnt taught, but was consciously
learned in our early educational experiences was that writing
of any kind was something that black people just didn t do.
Today its popular to refer back to the Harlem Renaissance of
the twenties as a successful Negro literary movement in black
letters. That statement is only partially true; actually, tlie arts
or black arts as we now know them were alive and active
only at a very superficial, elitest level, being mainly patronized
by tlie uptown whites, e.g., Carl Van Vechten, Max Eastman,
DuBose Heyward, etc. Whereas, black people in Harlem hardly
knew that anything of a literary movement was in process,
let alone took part in it. Langston Hughes clarifies this in his
autobiography, The Big Sea, He states: The ordinary Negroes
hadn't heard of the Negro Renaissance. Which is to imply
Black Poetry of the Sixties 237
that because of its restrictions, the black literary movement
of the twenties forecast its own death. Out of the many writers
who took part, only a few are still widely read today: Langston
Hughes, Sterling A. Brown, Ama Bontemps, and Claude McKay.
Sejisibility: awareness, consciousness, fineness of feeling. Actu
ally, what it gets down to is, that which shaped our sensibilities
shaped us. What was it? Why are some of us Negroes, some
blacks, and some don't know what we are? Most of us have
been shaped by the same consciousness: a white nationalist
consciousness called Americanism that's really a refined, or un
refined, depending on your viewpoint, weak version of the
European sensibility. Whereas, black people in this country are
products of a dual culture: the duality is that of being formally
educated as a European-American" and informally schooled as
a black man, i.e., public schools or private schools in the a .m .
and street schools and home schools in the p . m .
The black sensibility is not new. The only thing new about
blackness today is the magnitude in which it has been gener
ated and the amount of people it has reached. You see, there
has always been a visible portion of the Negro people" that
were black, but then they were dismissed as being crazy.
Aesthetic: The branch of philosophy dealing with the beauti
ful, chiefly with respect to theories of its essential character,
tests by which it may be judged, and its relation to the human
mind; also, the branch of psychology heating of the sensations
and emotions evoked by the fine arts and belles-lettres." (W eb
ster's )
A Black Aesthetic would, in effect, encompass much of the
definition above, but in the context of Western culture is and
becomes a serious and profound variation on a loose theme.
Harold Cnise, in his Crisis of the Negro Intellectualy gives a
view of the prevailing school of criticism: The impact of the
Negro presence on American art forms has been tremendous,
and also historically conditioned; but this fact the American
psyche is loath to admit in its established critical school of
thought. As Americans, white people in America are also Wes-
temers, and American white values are shaped by Western
cultural values. Americans possess no critical standards for the
cultural arts that have not been derived from the European
experience. On the other hand, the basic ingredients for native
(non-European) American originality in art forms derive from
American Negroes, who came to America from a non-Westem
background. We need only point to American music to prove
the point. Thus in American art a peculiar kind of cultural
duality exists, which is an ideological reflection of the basic
attitudes of blacks and whites toward each other.
Black poetry of the sixties is not too different from black
poetry of the forties and fifties; there has always existed in
the verse a certain amount of blackness. But in the sixties the
black arts emerged as never before; e.g., music, theater (black
drama), art (painting, sculpture), film, prose (novel, essay),
and poetry. The new and powerful voices of the sixties came to
light mainly because of the temper of the times; it accented
the human-rights struggle of black people in the world. Also,
television played a very important role in projecting blackness
in the early sixtiesmainly in a gross misunderstanding, over
representing it as something new and queer. The men of the
moment were: John Coltrane, LeRoi Jones, Cecil Taylor, James
Baldwin, Charles White, Marion Brown, Ornette Coleman, Don
Cherry, John A. Williams, Lerone Dennett, Mari Evans, William
Melvin Kelley, John O. Killens, Grachun Manour III, Thelonius
Monk, Simny Murray, E d BuUins, Ronald Milner, Calvin C.
Hemton, Larry Neal, Dudley Randall, James Brown, A. B. B.
Spellman, Lew Alcindor, Hoyt Fuller, Conrad Kent Rivers,
Archie Shepp, Sun Ra, Pharaoh Sanders, Gwendolyn Brooks,
Malcolm X, Frantz Fanon, Martin Lutlier King, and we can
go on for days.
Black art of the sixties, on the national scene, started with
the advent of LeRoi Jones (Ameer Baraka) and the black
theater. We in tlic Midwest felt the pressures from both the
west and the east coasts. In the vanguard in tenns of publishing
black writing was Negro Digest under the extraordinary editor
ship of Hoyt Fuller, and a new quarterly came into existence
in the mid-sixties, The Journal of Black Poetry, edited by
quietly patient Joe Goncalves. Other publications that regularly
published black poets were: Soul Book, Black Dialogue, Libera
tor, and Black Expression. New presses to emerge in the sixties
that concentrated on poetry books were led by Broadside Press
of Detroit, Michigan, xmder the editorship of Dudley Randall
(a nationally known poet himself). Jihad Press of Newark, Free
Black Press of Chicago, Black Dialogue Press of New York
by way of California. The Journal of Black Poetry Press of
California, and the Third World Press of Chicago. Broadside
Press has been by far the most successful and productive.
The Poetry: The language of the new vmters seems to move
in one direction; that is to say that the poets of the sixties are
actually defining and legitimizing their ovm communicative
medium. We will see that the language as a whole is not formal
or proper Anglo-Saxon English. It carries its own syntax, which
is not conventional, and by Western standards could be referred
to as non-communicative, obscene, profane, or vulgar. In short,
its the language of the street, charged so as to heighten the
sensitivity level of the reader. We find that this concentration
on language is not unique to black poets of the sixties. James
Weldon Johnson, in his American Negro Poetry, talks about two
poets of another generation that were experimenters and innova
tors in language: Langston Hughes and Sterling A. Brown do
use a dialect, but it is not the dialect of the comic minstrel
tradition; it is the common, racy, living, authentic speech of the
Negro in certain phases of real life.** So we find that language is
constant only as man is.
The decade of the sixties, especially that of the mid-sixties,
brought to us a new consciousness, a perception that has come
to be known as a black consciousness. Embodied in most of the
poetry of the sixties, we find at least a semblance of this sensibil
ity. Along with the new awareness, we get a form that on the
surface speaks of newness (actually, most of the forms and
styles used by the newer poets may be as confusing as some
The Black Aesthetic
of the new black music forms.) In effect, the form that is
used may be a starting point for determining and categorizing
the Black Aesthetic. Some of the common occurrences, we find
in the black poets of the sixties are:
1. polyrhythmic, uneven, short, and explosive lines

2. intensity; depth, yet simplicity; spirituality, yet flexibility
3. irony; humor; signifying
4. sarcasma new comedy
5. direction; positive movement; teaching, nation-building
6. subject matterconcrete; reflects a collective and personal life
style.
7. music: the unique use of vowels and consonants with the
developed rap demands that the poetry be real, and read out
loud.
AH that s mentioned above, and more, can be seen much

more clearly in some of the poetry. First, exclusion is automatic
in a critique of this kind; Iv e purposely restricted myself to
the poets who have published widely and in most cases have
published several books. These writers look upon diemselves as
black men or black women first, then as poets. Thus, imder-
standing their responsibility to themselves and to their com
munity is a priority in no imcertain terms. Ron Wellbum said
of the new poets: No poets in America serve in such a priestly
capacity as do black poets. Priests, musicians, deacons, chanters,
poetsall bear the song and its power as their unfailing weapon.
Mari Evans moves beyond the self-reliant assertion of the
natural fact in her poem I Am a Black Womannot just a
woman. Mari in this poem creates an identity, a personality, a
role that is not newly black, but generically and historically
black: *Xook on me and be renewed. One may contrast her
with Stephanie in her book Moving Deep, in which Stephanie
characterizes herself as woman, a loversimply; or with West
Indian poets who prior to 1939 made a point of being univer
sal, which was to be not specifically black. Indeed, Mari is
universal here in exploring the natural arena of tlie role of the
woman in hiunan society. Her historical identity is created
through allusions to Nat Turner and Anzioall caught in a his
torical timelessness. She was/is always there. The naturalness
and the biological origins of herself are poignant, yet stoically
strong;
1 saw my mate leap screaming to the sea

and these hands/cupped the lifebreath
from my issue in tlie canebrake.'*
A kind of mystical yet hard strength reminiscent of Jean

Toomers women in Cane, The woman herein recreated is not
fragmented, hysterical, doesn't have sexual problems with her
mate, doesn't feel caught up in a liberated womanhood" com-
plex/bagwhich is to say she is not out to define herself
( that is, from the position of weakness, as the others do) and
thus wih not be looked upon as an aberration of the twentieth-
centiny white woman.
Margaret Danner is a poet of African descent. Africa is
throughout her poetry. If a true test for a black poem is whether
you can tell the author's color, we find that Sister Danner's
poem And Through the Caribbean Sea is an interesting example,
because she does not mention the word black in the poem. But
there is no doubt as to who she is. The colors are not literally
black, but still black;
We, like shades that were first conjured up

by an African witch-doctor's ire,
(indigo for the drum and the smoke of night,
tangerine for the dancing smudged fire)
have been forced to exist in a huge kaleidoscope world.
WeVe been shifting with time and sifting through
space,
at each whimsical turn of the hands that have thrown
the Kaleidoscope, until any pattern or place
or shade is our own. . . .
The bright arrangement of red and tangerine is very black,
whetlier here, in the West Indies, or in Africa. Also, the poem
is very subtle. She begins her poem with an inclusive we, which
means she acknowledges that she herself is a part of the
kaleidoscopic arrangement; and then with subtle simile immedi
ately estabhshes the link, tells who we are, which is the same
as saying where we came from. All her references are A frican -
indigo, drum, dancing, tangerine, African mask! Those references
or allusions that are not African are meant to indicate a loss of
identity: Louis Quinze Frame, Rococo, etc.
Eugene Perkins and Ebon emerged in the late sixties as two
of the stronger men poets. Perkins becomes a poet because hes
a man of his time and place: America, Chicago, Now. In
Black Patches, from his book Black Is Beautiful, the colors are
copper and ebony. Black Chicago is recreated into an analytical
photograph. A white social worker might make references to
Woodlawn and Robert Taylor Homes, but would hardly see
them for what they are:
The Congo Villages stand unclaimed under the

shadows of grotesque tenements
and the towering concrete
of welfare prisons. .
Critics would call his references metaphors, but politically they

are profound and well-stated truisms. It is Fanon and Nkrumah;
it s Lumumba, DuBois, and Stokely, all squeezed and purified in
four simple lines. He knows the beauty of the life-style, but
also its weaknesses:
A carnival strip in an ebony jungle

Still clinging to a tradition
of self styled hustlers
Jewish economy
and street comer preachers
Black Poetrxj of the Sixties 243
A distinct few white people even allude to the 'black patches
of this continent, but because they think they're liberal (and
are in reality stupid), they cant creatively criticize as Perkins
does. With this in mind, we realize how much of a poet Brother
Perkins is when he cops the lid off white boy's faade:
hide marijuana cigarettes

between the pages of Black Boy
and The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich
Ebon also lends his interpretation to that which he considers

black. Anyone who has ever heard Ebon read can still hear
and see the deep voice bounding out like a black barker at a
secret blood rite, as in Legacy: In Memory of Trane, from his
book Revolution:
Juba-Lover
bringing tales of
Coaldust gods
wrapped in sound,
striving to journey home,
beyond the light
into darkness . . .
into Truth
his voice a glistening Nomino
speechless now, hushed by
milky smiles
and snow June hate,
leaving songs of praise
a path to dance beyond . .
a journey quest to selfhood . . .
a love supremely unafraid . .
black bright, and binding
ear to sight unseen.
The first stanza of this strong poem is jubilant with flowing lines
and images of Africa, precious, but hidden. The use of Nommo
becomes its own meaning: the word, tlie power of the word,
communication. He mixes his metaphors and if one is familiar
with the music of John Coltrane, one will understand his rever
sal of images and double use of allusion: a love supremely un
afraid." And again his mixing of metaphor: "black bright, and
binding ear to sight unseen." Whereas Coltrane becomes an
image of links and heritage, and not a weird extension of a
Western musician.
Toward the end of the sixties, we were introduced to poets
such as Nikki Giovanni, S. E. Anderson, Jayne Cortez, June
Meyer, Audre Lorde, Sterling Plumpp, Mae Jackson, Julia
Fields, Marvin X, Alicia L. Johnson, Jon Eckels, Charles K.
Moreland, Jr., Rockie D. Taylor, Xavier Nicholas, Askia Mu-
hammed Toure, Doc Long, Ted Joans, and Larry Neal, with the
stronger voices of Etheridge Knight, Sonia Sanchez, Carolyn
Rodgers, Norman Jordan, Keorapetse Kgositsile, and Johari
Amini (Jew el C. Latimore) that continued to deafen us.
Sonia Sanches has moments of personal loneliness that are
not akin to some philosophical abstraction, but come because of
the absence of someone, her man, which is real. She is also
intense and able to do many things at the same time, as in
Short Poem, from her first published book. Homecoming:
My old man
tells me fm
so full of sweet
pussy he can
smell me coming,
maybe
i
shd
bottle
it and
sell it
when he goes.
It screams the fertile sense of being a woman desired; irony

suggests an attitude toward a sex life tliats natural (it c;mt be
sold): revealing-self bluesobscenity thats funny and easy to
relate to if you are black.
On the other hand, there is the formality and traditional
verse form of Etheridge Knight. Gwendolyn Brooks said of
Brother Knight: "[his] poetry is a major announcement. And
there is blackness, inclusive, possessed and given: freed and
terrible and beautiful.
Blackness:
Hard Rock was *1cnown not to take no shit
From nobody, and he had the scars to prove it:
Split purple lips, lumped ears, welts above
His yellow eyes, and one long scar that cut
Across his temple and plowed through a thick
Canopy of kinky hair.
Freed:
He sees through stone

he has the secret
eyes this old black one
who under prison skies
sits pressed by the sun
against the western wall
his pipe between purple gums.
Terrible and Beautiful:
Now you take ol Rufus. He beat drums,

was free and funky under the arms,
fucked white girls, jumped oflE a bridge
(and thought nothing of the sacrilege),
he copped outand he was over twenty-one.
We get a great deal in the poetry of Etheridge Knight; its

folkish as an African folk tale. It is simple/deep, as though the
man has actually lived his words. He uses traditional lines, and
we can see that obvious care is taken to bring forth the most
meaning. He has the ability to say much in a few words. Each
poem becomes a complete story that is not over- or understated.
Because of space limitations, I cant deal with other poets
of merit. But I would like to mention that poets such as Lucille
Clifton, Barbara D. Mahone, Zack Gilbert, Arthur Pfister, Jr.,
Ahmed Legraham Alhamisi, Stanley Crouch, Jay Wright, Kirk
Hall, Edward S. Spriggs, Ron Wellbum, Lance Jeffers, Carol
Freeman, D. L. Graham, and Bob Hamilton will be, along with
the others mentioned earlier, poets to watch in the seventies.
The seventies will be the decade of nation building for black
people. The poets, with their special brand of insight and
courage, will be in the forefront. Also, well see a deeper appre
ciation of Africa and that which is African. African literature
as well as African-American literature will be placed in the
positive context both deserve; bringing forth African poets like
Lopold Senghor, David Diop, John Pepper Clark, Christopher
Okigbo, Wole Soyinka, Lon Damas, and Aim Csaireall of
whom are already established poets in their respective home
lands, but relatively unknown in the United States.
Finally, the Black Aesthetic cannot be defined in any definite
way. To accurately and fully define a Black Aesthetic would
automaticaUy limit it. What weve tried to do is relate specific
points of reference. After all, that which is called the white
(Western) aesthetic is continuously reconsidered every time a
new writer, painter, or what they call a musician comes on the
scene. We now know that there are nuances and ideas that are
purely African. In the same vein, we can see things and ideas
that are purely black, or African-American. Weve talked about
tlie music and weve seen it in the poetry, but that which we
consider uniquely black can also be viewed in the way we pre
pare and eat food, the way we dance, our mode of dress, our
loose walk, and in the way we talk and relate to each other.
Wliat most of the young writers are doing is taking tlie lead
in defining that which is of value to them, and doing this gives
legitimacy to the community from wliich it stems. Tlierefore,
Black Poetnj of the Sixties 247
these writers undertake a rather pragmatic and realistic look at
the real world. Most of them grew up on Malcolm X and Frantz
Fanon, and they non-romantically understand that we are an
African people, but are also aware of the precariousness of tlie
great African-past cidt. As Fanon states, 1 admit that all the
proofs of a wonderful Songhai civilization will not change the
fact that today the Songhais are underfed and illiterate, thrown
between sky and water with empty heads and empty eyes.
And what the younger writers of the sixties (most under thirty-
five) are saying is that in order for the heads and eyes to be
filled, we have to develop that which is necessary to fill them.
Nation-building is the call; imderstanding how others have sur
vived in tliis country, we as writers must contribute to the
positive direction that is needed. Creativity and individuality are
the two nouns most often used to describe an artist of any
land. Black poets ascribe to both, but understand that both
must not interfere with us, black people, as a whole. Black
poets of the sixties have moved to create images that reflect a
positive movement for black people and people of the world.
The poets understand their own growth and education from a
new perspective. They comprehend that if all you are exposed
to is Charlie Chan, you'll have Charlie Chan mentality. John
Legett, in The New York Times Book Review, talking about
the WASP vision, said: 1 practice the Wasp novel. I can hardly
do otherwise. I write of a Wasp world for the good and simple
reason that I know it best. Just as there are the French writer,
the Jewish writer, the Russian writer, the African writer, we
have the black, or African-American, writer. Black poets have
discovered their uniqueness, their beauty, their tales, their his
tory, and have diligently moved to enlighten their people and
the world s people in an art form that's called poetry, but to
them is another extension of black music.
PATHS TO TH E FU TU RE
William Keorapetse Kgositsile
There are new voices very different from the ones that were
around before. Different not only in the sense that they are
new but essentially because of their attitude and intended pur
pose; precise as tools in the hands of skillful artisans. Lebert
Bethune ". . , tired of strange ghosts/Whose cool bones/
Lived on the green furnace of my blood" makes "a juju of
my own as one of the means of . baking my destiny to a
lullaby. . . He continues his song:
So she warned memy grandmother.

And now and now
When I kindle again her small eyes with their
quick lights
Darting ancient love into my infancy
And when I break through to her ancient voice
That voice like tlie pliant red clay she baked
She sings the only lullaby slie sang me
'Me no care for Bakra whip
Me no care fe fum-fum
Come Juju come
So I am fashioning this thing
My own Juju
Out of her life and our desire
Out of an old black love
I am baking my destiny to a lullaby
Lebert Bethune in Juju of My Own, a slim volume of robust

poetry. Like most of his peers he has been through American
institutions of higher learning and come back disillusioned. It
is no secret today that any honest Blackman in any western
institution learns, sooner or later, that there is a calculated denial
of his history, of his experience, by his oppressor. He is taught
to aspire to Western ideals. Finally he is taught to understand
and interpret his historical experience, his present existence and
his possibilities through white eyes.
But any Time is with us. And if we take control to shape our
attitudes and reshape om: memories, that time is always NOW
Our Time for the best possible uses of our lives. "Show the
chains. Let them see the chains as object and subject, and let
them see the chains fall away, says LeRoi Jones. So there
are these voices which attempt to move us in a very specific di
rection, criticizing us here, encouraging us there, clarifying for
us elsewhere. You might say that they are voices from the future
and they attempt to prepare us because they know that the
future will not change to make room for the undesirable. The
weak will be strengthened if there is any life left in them. And
memories, of past or future or any time, are made of very
specific selections from your sensibility. Memories move us, the
best possible uses of our lives move us. And if we are ahead of
the times the responsibility is ours to make the present Our
Time lest we be destroyed. Gloria House celebrates the new
day, our time:
Look for mind seering into the future with

tlie intensity of their satellites in orbit
And you will find it in our heads
And for power, latent and imminent like the panther's
In our bodies.
We were not made eternally to weepi
Steady, slow, knowing, like Ma Rainey with her man
The forces of time move on to Our Time
And ill these days
uncovered, the great deceits of the man's monstrous
mind
uprooted, his stone monuments to himself
destroyed, the armies of the psychotic, decadent
dead, a race of devils.
Yes, tliis decadetlie Sixtieshas produced a different caliber

of Black poets in America. The majority of them have been in
fluenced by Ngritude and protest poets and writers like Csaire,
Senghor, David Diop, Langston Hughes, Claude McKay,
W. E. B. DuBois, and others. These young poets felt the inade
quacy of a purely cultural or artistic self-determination be
cause the argmnents for it and its artifacts generally boil down to
an academic masturbation or deviation, a kind of mannerism-
fornicating with the wliite eye and tlien emerging on some stage
with Western arguments for the validity and glory of a Black
virginity. (Csaire, tliough among the Ngritude poets, is above
this because he is right there, "seering into tlie future with
the best of the younger poets.) In practical terms, for instance,
the younger poets realize that the most beautiful poem Senghor
can write about the validity of the existence of a glorious Black
cultme, without attempting to make the social institutions in
Senegal actually African, actually liberated from France, does
not even improve the diet of a single undernourished black
child anywhere in the world where black people are colonized
by Caucasians; most probably not even in independent Sene-
gal.
This does not mean that Ngritude and/or protest poetry is
not valid or functional. It is. But it is inadcxjuate in tenus of its
Patios to the Future ^5^
best possible social relevance or uses because it is limited to
vision. It justifies Black Art and Black Experience to a white
audience. Here again, Aim Csare is clean because, to him.
Ngritude was an introductory element, a prelude, to the re-
emergence of the Blackman on the stage of history. The young
Afro-American poets whose consciousness was awakened and
facilitated by Ngritude and protest poetry, among other in
fluences, feel an urgency to make their art as potent a weapon
as any in the assertion, not birth, of their humanism. In a poem
titled. The People Burning, LeRoi Jones realizes;
It is
choice, now, like a philosophical problem. It is choice, now, and
the weight is specific and personal. It is not an emotional decision.
There facts, and who was it said, that this is a scientific century.
Jones is not addressing white America or some ideal universal

intellect or conscience. He is talking to his people about his
condition, finally theirs, because he is his people.
Most of these yoimg writers of this decade, after verifying the
facts with all the historical evidence necessary, emerge strongly
convinced of the inhumanity of the Western world. They come
out of Western institutions of higher learning strongly convinced
that the university in the west is an extension of racism and the
so-called Cold War which they detest. Quite often, the war is
hot past any possible argument for or against it. Emmett Till.
James Powell. Lumumba. Malcobn. Little babies charred while
worshipping a Western God, for the perverted amusement of
the deranged maniacs. And the Black poets sensibility explodes.
The weight becomes specific and personal. But the poet does
not have explosives for the physical destruction of the West
in general, and America in particular. Not yet. Thus the im
mediate resort for the Black poet is applied poetry. He uses his
sensibility as ammunition. Brotherly love. Virtue. Construction
which, by definition, embraces and transcends the necessary de
struction. Restoration of human and humane values for the sal
vation of man. NOW.
Now, I see it like this:

You see da tree ou der?
It s a good shade tree in ne summertime
An you know, don nobody like to see dey
shade tree cud down
Thus Gloria House, in her "Alabama Farm ers Dialectic.'* The

Alabama farmer, like any other colonized person, knows that the
struggle for liberation is not easy because the oppressor does
not want him to be liberated"don nobody like to see dey
shade tree cud down. It is recognition and acknowledgement.
It leads to resolution. It is dialectic. After the fanner has
looked around and observed some truths, "we been dat tree for
dem folk/for a lotta summers, for instance, he makes the
necessary resolution:
Well, I coin be no shade tree all my lifel

Dat tree got to come down one a dese days
Aint dat right?
For Gloria, the making of a poetry is not escapist exploration

or fantasy that could be shattered to smitherings the moment
she ventures into the real world of the beauty of concrete hu
man possibilities or the shme of decadent brutes. She never
leaves actuality. Her language reflects this. The words she chooses
to mold and project the images and symbols to celebrate
the nature of her revelations/acts are very contemporary; that is,
they come directly from the world around her. Her sensibility
is informed by the pulse of actual, not imagined or imaginary,
people from Alabama and all points white of her vision. She was
down in Alabama giving tliat pulse form, direction. She lived
and worked with communities in Alabama. She has been in
Southern jails for attempting to help the people to "cud dat
Paths to the Future
tree down She was working with SNCC (Student Nonviolent
Co-ordinating Committee) down South when SNCC graduated
from the civil rights schools. And late in 1966, she came to New
York to tell a conference of civil rights lawyers why it was time
for SNCC to be unconditionally an Afro-American revolutionary
Movement.
Gloria has lived elsewhere with her eyes open, sensitive to
her condition as a Black woman under white domination, as
witness, DIRECTIO N/(Political advice for young Brothers) :
It's like where you live, man

And who lives there with you
For example:
You from Harlem?
Yeah? Well, coulda been Johannesburg or Birmingham,
Alabama, you know. It s all the same. I'm from Fillmore.
That makes us brothers, man
Like we grew up in the same family. You dig?
Like every attuned-to-the-twentieth-century, self-respecting

Black man and woman, Gloria believes in Unity and Pan-Afri
canism. And she realizes that young Brothersyoung in terms
of awareness of the world we live inhave problems of identity,
especially if they grew up in Western democratic societies:
I mean, like if you get shaky

About stuff like who you are and
Where you're going
Ask somebody who lives near you
Cause that's where it's atl man
They'll set you straighti
You can't just go and ask anybody, man
Cause, dig, they just don't know
They ain't been where you go
EVERYDAY
Very intimate and direct. This is education because in any
culture education serves to prepare people to be dear about
their roles, to tap their potential so that their lives can be
meaningful; so that they can better consolidate their resources
and be productive in, and useful to, their communities.
The colonial situation is changing the world over. The rela
tions between colonizer and colonized are changing, in America
and elsewhere. Gloria observes and informs us that:
They already dance to our drums.

Elemental rhythm of life
Attuned to the movement of the earth.
The language in this poem, like the period it celebrates, is

dramatic and pulsates with a divine arrogance. It is not, how
ever, a declaration of war. The war is onhas been on. This is a
song celebrating CHANGE, the images bathed in the blood
that flows when slaves turn men, burning plantations, be they
in Newark or Kinsangani;
There is a new Chief in the land

And all the people wiU imitate the customs of His tribe
And dancing to His heartbeat in His own compound.
One Night, at The Time, they will see His face
And they will be astounded tiiat it is black.
But there are signs of the revolution
The young turks of the nation are Ours.
Glorias clarity of vision also enables her to see our internal

contradictions. As a result, she can be boldly critical of our
mistakes and/or hang-ups as in Woman":
Has the length of one man alone

So blurred your view?
Can you leave the sons and daughters of Our Time
Motherless?no poems, no brown daughter, no acts of violence?
For love squandered on one man?
You see, you have to clearly understand that because we
do not have a long, active, collective memory of popular revo
lutionary movements; because we have endured abuse and all
sorts of other perversions so long; because we were dehuman
ized and depersonalized to a point where we didn't really
believe that we could rise as powerful men to threaten and
damage the power of the oppressor, we developed a tendency
to put all our hopes in individual courageous men who better
reflected the desires and aspirations we were too afraid to own
up to. To name a few from contemporary history, for instance:
Malcolm, Muhammad Ali, Patrice Lumumba, Kwame Nkrumah,
Rap Brown. The danger in this sort of tendency is that, should
the given hero die, or should he be lolled or run out of the
country, we are left without direction, without even the neces
sary self-confidence; which would mean that we had shifted aU
our necessary responsibility from our shoulders to those of a
given personality. This is criminal. This makes us traitors to our
cause, virtuallyGloria comments:
This is not Malcolm s sister

Who sits sobbing for the love of one man
While the nation groans for birthi
Yes, you see, Gloria House is striving for TRUTH, a measure,

to facihtate her explorations, forever digging past pretenses and
whatever superficial images of ourselves, our world and our
possibilities. As Barbara Simmons might say, "This ain't art/
it's real movin. There are other forces in Gloria's company.
Here is A. B. Spellman, for instance, looking into himself and
other similar victims. He readily acknowledges the ugliness he
sees:
. . . how stay clear in this place
do not eat soap relevance pays there squats
mundanity kick it in the nuts its crotch swallow
your foot now where are you footless
his of the hideous you goofed in the tactic a.b.
you're still too quiet break something larger
^56 The Black Aesthetic
But there is more to us than those hideous tendencies we
detest . . . if we are honest. A.B., moved by one of our spiritual
heroes, John Coltrane, sings him an impartial review :
may he have new life like the fall

fallen tree, wet moist rotten enough
to see shoots stalks branches & green
leaves (& may the roots) grow into his side
Jones says poetry is music made less abstract. And I agree.

Because poems dont mean if they are honest like the honest
explorations of music throbbing with hfe. Does a Charlie Parker
riflF mean anything? Poems are acts in motion. And acts, proc
esses which involve action and reaction, lead inevitably to
other acts. Confrontation forever moving towards resolving what
ever other contradiction. And I learned that recently, after
sufficient soul-searching, A. B. Spellman left New York to be
involved in more direct, concrete and relevant acts in black
communities in the South. Listen a little more often to Col
trane.
And then there is Edward Spriggs whose poetry is adequately
representative of the sentiments of the younger Afro-American
poets. Edward S. Spriggs is New York editor of Black Dialogue,
a meeting place for voices of the Black communitywherever
that community may exist. Spriggs states unequivocally: My
forefathers brought upon this continent physical strength, in
telligence, creativity, beauty, humanism, an unparalleled faith,
and more. Only the physical strength and that faitli has been
allowed to function in this consciousless place . . . our in
telligence, our creativity, our beauty and our humanism must
be forced now, by us, upon the universeupon ourselves even.
Spriggs argues that anything representative of America as
she exists now is a threat to keep the Blackman in perpetual
bondage, psychological and physical. Even the symbols of Amer
ican liberty must be destroyed because wliite Americas concept
of liberty and justice is a perversion tliat must be irrevocably
shoved out of our existence. The statue of liberty must go.
That bitch must vacate our minds. Spriggs has no explanations
to make to the white world. His dialogue is strictly with
black people. If he incites, excites, instructs or entertains, he
does so to and for black people. His ability to look at the
mirror of life boldly and shamelessly, his sensibility's functioning
as an inevitable receptacle of his people s collective soul, makes
him one of our spokesmen.
He is, hopefully, not preoccupied with merely analyzing and
articulating our misery. Wright, Baldwin, Killens and many
otherstheir shortcomings asidehave done that fairly com
petently already. He looks at America and sees in her ghettos
all of the material conveniences of the Western world. He
observes, for instance, in a short photographic poem on Har
lem, the Jew-owned bars, barbecue joints and many other
enterprises where black people live in squalor. Finally, he
reveals that the only thing owned by black people in Harlem
is death. This is the American experience which molded his
sensibility. He lives in a period during which millions of people
are murdered at random for the preservation of American dol-
larism. Sharpeville, Vietnam, Santo Domingo, Harlem, Watts,
Detroit, Newark and many more places. Responsibility to see
his people move from all things South imposes itself upon
him with an unrelenting passion. He apparently has a Black
conscience. Chauvinism? It depends on what the reader of
Spriggs relates to. After all, even the oppressor taught him that
cleanliness begins at home. He is far from being sentimental.
He expresses the collective soul of the ghetto and tries to
give direction because he is inherently part and parcel of the
moving black mass. He does not appeal to the conscience of
white America because white America has no conscience. In
stead he appeals to his people to:
Pray not for the Poet

saints
Pray instead
Saints, for his critics.
The critics, of course, are the white murderers who want
to control everything, including the Black poet's creativity. But
Spriggs' creativity cannot be checked by adolescent fascists
disguised as literary critics because he is tlie bearer of TRUTH.
Spriggs asserts:
A poet must & would

give trutii substance & form
Truth needs a second career
SO CRACK THE OTHER SIDE
Black Poet
that it be felt
that it be looked at
& into . .
Evidently poets like Spriggs know the TRU TH is essentially

the poet's business. Spriggs also believes that after the poet
has stood Truth on her feet again, unveiled, unadulterated,
a lot of cleaning up remains to be done. The Western white
man has made the world a filthy place. Because of the damage
done by the Western white man, the Blackman is even al
ienated from himself. So, in order that the job ahead be done
efficiently.
Black poets must make sons quick:

using magic substances . . .
Black poets must make soul anew . . .
must crack the pods & let the semen fly . . .
must carve epitaphs on their volume & numbers
Spriggs seems to have imdergone a psychological and creative

rebirtli. He got rid of tlie Western bourgeois aesthetic. He is,
then, a modem day "witchdoctor" whose art and expression
are a way of life. Pulsating witli love of life and love. Since
he cannot relate to it, he rejects the white frame of reference
he was programmed into from the very first day he went to
kindergarten. He seems to have established a new frame of
Taths to the Future 259
referenceghetto-oriented, because the Black community in a
white-dominated society is what he directly relates to.
Spriggs* language is free, is full of the free ghetto cadence
and colorful beauty, is Afro-American, is delicately sensitive
even in the midst of his unrelenting fury, is mystic, is magical,
is movingnot in search of, but in the assertion and restoration
of Truth, is present like the condition that molded his mind:
TRUTH IS PRESENT-HAPPENING LANGUAGE-PULSE:

is heart
is myth
is vatic
is Poetry.
Poetry, like any other art" form, is meaningless, that is,

has no usebeauty and good, inseparableunless it be a specific
act actual as dance or childbirth, carved bleeding from history,
our experience. Tears scorched to deep tracks on the mine
laborers back recording the national epitaph. Walls and what
shapes people your memory. Clarity is not a thought process
but a way of life.
There are many, many more young men and women wdth
a sense of mission across these United States. You might run
into some of them in small magazines like N egro D igest, Soul-
book, Black Dialogue, The Journal of Black Poetry, Freedom-
ways, Liberator, Presence Africaine, Transition, the back issues
of Black Orpheus and The New African. Yet others you might
run into only at poetry readings in Harlem or Newark or some
other black community across this coimtry.
These are transitional men and women moving to the ele
mental rhythms of Our Time. Transitional, because they are
trying in our time, through their rhythms, to deniggerfy us, to
bathe our pulse in revolutionary passions; attempting, as Le-
Roi Jones would sing, to look into Black skulls and teach
white people their death. But before one can be most ef
fectively instrumental in freeing a people, he must first himself
be free, so that he strives to assert and live up to what he
has and its possibilities, not what he in frustration desires to
have. One looks forward to a period when the majority of
these young poets abandon mannerism and get directly in
volved in very concrete community action; when **the state
of block desire'* becomes an everyday act to satisfy that desire
and split the skies with human and humanistic possibilities.
They will be free then like their rhythms. And so will be
the rest of us; the rhythms coming direcdy from the way we
live. Then we will join Nina Simone and sing:
And now we are one

Let my soul rest in peace
At last it is done
My soul has been renewed . .
IV Drama
TH E NEGRO AND TH E AM ERICAN TH EA TR E
(1927)
Alain Locke
In the appraisal of the possible contribution of the Negro to

the American theatre, there are those who find the greatest
promise in the rising drama of Negro life. Others see possibilities
of a deeper, though subtler influence upon what is after all
more vital, the technical aspects of the arts of the theatre.
Until very recendy the Negro influence upon American drama
has been negligible, whereas even under the handicaps of
second-hand exploitation and restriction to the popular amuse
ment stage, the Negro actor has already considerably influenced
our stage and its arts. One would do well to imagine what
might happen if the art of the Negro actor should really become
artistically lifted and liberated. Transpose the possible resources
of Negro song and dance and pantomime to the serious stage,
envisage an American drama under the galvanizing stimulus of
a rich transfusion of essential folk-arts and you may anticipate
what I mean.
A race of actors can revolutionize the drama quite as def
initely and perhaps more vitally than a coterie of dramatists.
(The late Alain Lockers essay is here reprinted hy permission of the au
thors estate from Theatre: Essays on the Arts of The Theatre, edited by
Edith y. R, Isaacs, Boston: Little, Brown, 1927),
The roots of drama are after all action and emotion, and our
modem drama, for all its frantic experimentation, is an essen
tially anemic drama, a something of gestures and symbols and
ideas and not overflowing with the vital stuff of which drama
was originally made and to which it must return for its
rejuvenation cycle after cycle.
Primarily the Negro brings to the drama the gift of a tem
perament, not the gift of a tradition. Time out of mind he has
been rated as a "natural bom actor without any appreciation
of what that statement, if true, really means. Often it was
intended as a disparaging estimate of the Negros limitations,
a recognition of his restriction to the interpretative as distin
guished from the creative aspect of drama, a confinement, in
terms of a second order of talent, to the status of the mimic
and the clovm. But a comprehending mind knows that the
very life of drama is an instinct and emotion, that drama begins
and ends in mimicry, and that its creative force is in the last
analysis the interpretative passion. Welcome then as is the
emergence of the Negro playwright and the drama of Negro
life, the promise of the most vital contribution of our race to
the theatre lies, in my opinion, in the deep but still un
emancipated resources of the Negro actor, and the folk arts of
which he is as yet only a blind and hampered exponent.
Dramatic spontaneity, the free use of body and the voice as
direct instruments of feeling, a control of body plastique that
opens up the narrow diaphragm of fashionable acting and tlie
conventional mannerisms of the stagethese are indisputably
strong points of Negro acting. Many a Negro vaudevillian has
greater store of them than finished masters of the polite
theatre. . . .
Unfortunately it is the richest vein of Negro dramatic talent
which is under the heaviest artistic impediment and pressure.
The art of the Negro actor has had to struggle up out of tlie
shambles of minstrelsy and make slow headway against very
fixed limitations of popular taste. Farce, buffooner)^ and pathos
have mitil recently almost completely overlaid tlie folk comedy
The Negro and the American Theatre (1927) 265
and folk tragedy of a dramatically endowed and circumstanced
people. These gifts must be liberated. . . . In the sensational
successes of Emperor Jones and All God*$ Chillun Got Wings
there have been two componentstlie fine craftsmanship and
clairvoyant genius of O'Neill and the acting gifts of Charles
Gilpin and Paul Robeson. From the revelation of the emotional
power of the Negro actor by Opal Cooper and Inez Clough
in the Ridgely Torrence plays in 1916 to the more recent half-
successful attempts of Raymond O'Neills Ethiopian Art Theatre
and the National Ethiopian Art Theatre of New York, with
Evelyn Freer, Rose McClendon, Sidney Kirkpatrick, Charles
Olden, Frances Corbie, Julius Bledsoe, and, more lately, in
the production of Paul Greens In Ahraham*s Bosom, an ad
vanced section of the American public has become acquainted
with the possibilities of the Negro in serious dramatic inter
pretation.
But the real mine of the Negro dramatic art and talent is
in the subsoil of the vaudeville stage, gleaming through its slag
and dross in the unmistakably great dramatic gifts of a Bert
Williams, a Florence Mills, or a Bill Robinson. Give Bojangles
Robinson or George Stamper, pantomime dancers of genius, a
Bakst or an expressionist setting; give Josephine Baker, Eddie
Rector, Abbie Mitchell, or Ethel Waters a dignified medium,
and they would be more than a sensation, they would be
artistic revelations. Pantomime, that most essential and elemen
tal of the dramatic arts, is a natmal forte of the Negro actor,
and the use of the body and voice and facile control of posture
and rhythm are almost as noteworthy in the average as in
the exceptional artist. When it comes to pure registration of
the emotions, I question whether any body of actors, unless
it be the Russians, can so completely be fear or joy or non
chalance or grief.
With his uncanny instinct for the theatre. Max Reinhardt
saw these possibilities instantly under the tawdry trappings
of such musical comedies as Eliza, Shuffle Along, and Runnin
Wild, which were in vogue the season of his first visit to
New York. "It is intriguing, very intriguing,'* he told me then,
"these Negro shows that I have seen. But remember, not as
achievements, not as things in themselves artistic, but in their
possibilities, their tremendous artistic possibilities. They are most
modem, most American, most expressionistic. They are highly
original in spite of obvious triteness, and artistic in spite of
superficial cmdeness. To me they reveal new possibilities of
technique in drama, of the art-dramal . . .
I didn't enthuse. What Negro who stands for culture, with
the hectic stress of a social problem weighing on the minds of
an overserious minority, could enthusel Eliza, Shuffle Along,
Runnin W ildy/hen I had come to discuss the possibilities of
serious Negro drama, of the art-dramal I didn't outwardly pro
test, but raised a brow already too elevated perhaps, and
shrugged the shoulder that carries the proverbial racial chip.
Herr Reinhardt read the gesture swiftly. "Ah, yesI see. You
view these plays for what they are, and you are right; I view
them for what they will become, and I am more than right
I see their future. Why? Well, the drama must turn at every
period of fresh creative development to an aspect which has
been previously subordinated or neglected, and in this day of
ours, we come back to the most primitive and the most basic
aspect of drama for a new starting point, a fresh development
and revival of the artand that aspect is pantomime, the use
of the body to portray story and emotion. And your people
have that artit is their special genius. At present it is prosti
tuted to farce, to trite comedybut the technique is there,
and I have never seen more wonderful possibilities. Yes, I
should like to do something with it."
With the New Russian Theatre experimenting with the
"dynamic baUet" and Meyerhold's improvising or creative actor,
with Max Reinhardt's own recently founded International Panto
mime Society, with tlie entire new theatre agog over "mass
drama," there is at least some serious significance to tlie state
ment tliat the Negro theatre has great artistic potentialities.
What is of utmost importance to diama now is to control the
The Negro and the American Theatre (1927) 267
primitive language of the art, and to retrieve some of the
basic control which the sophisticated and conventionalized thea
tre has lost. It is more important to know how to cry, sob and
laugh, stare and startle than to learn how to smile, grimace
arclily, and wink. And more important to know how to move
vigorously and with rhythmic sweep than to pirouette and
posture. . . .
Commenting on the work of the players of the Ethiopian
Art Theatre, discerning critics noticed the freshness and vigor
of their emotional responses, their spontaneity and intensity of
mood, their freedom from intellectual and artistic obses
sions. . .
Without invoking analogies, we can see in this technical
and emotional endowment great resources for the theatre. In
terms of the prevalent trend for the serious development of
race drama, we may expect these resources to be concentrated
and claimed as the working capital of the Negro theatre. They
are. But just as definitely, too, are they the general property
and assets of the American theatre at large, if once the barriers
are broken through. These barriers are slowly breaking down
both on the legitimate stage and in the popular drama, but
the great handicap, as Carl Van Vechten so keenly points out
in his "Prescription for the Negro Theatre, is blind imitation
and stagnant conventionalism. Negro dramatic art must not
only be liberated from the handicaps of external disparagement
but from its self-imposed limitations. It must more and more
have the courage to be original, to break with established
dramatic convention of all sorts. It must have the courage to de
velop its own idiom, to pour itself into new molds; in short,
to be experimental.
This development may have to await the expected growth
of the serious, worthwhile drama of Negro hfe, which for all
the dramatic intensities of Negro experience has lagged lamenta
bly imtil recently. There are many reasons for this; foremost,
of course, the fact that drama, unless it develops in its own
native soil, is the child of social prosperity and of cultural
maturity. Negro life has only recently come to the verge of
cultural self-expression, and has barely reached such a ripening
point.............
Propaganda, pro-Negro and anti-Negro, has scotched the
dramatic potentialities of the subject. Especially with the few
Negro playwrights has the propaganda motive worked havoc.
In addition to the handicap of being out of actual touch with
theatre, they have had the dramatic motive deflected at its
source. Race drama has appeared to them a matter of race
vindication, and pathetically they have pushed forward their
moralistic allegories or melodramatic protests as dramatic
correctives and antidotes for race prejudice.
A few illuminating plays, beginning with Edward Sheldons
The 'Nigger and culminating in All G ods Chillun Got Wings
and In Ahrahartis Bosom have already thrown into relief the
higher possibilities of the Negro problem play. Similarly, be
ginning with Ridgely Torrence's Three Plays for a Negro
Theatre and culminating in The Emperor Jones and The No
"Count Boy, a realistic study of Negro folk-life and character
has been begun, and with it the inauguration of the artistic
Negro folk play. The outlook for a vital and characteristic
expression of Negro life in drama thus becomes more promis
ing. . . .
The creative impulse is for the moment caught in this dilemma
of choice between the drama of discussion and social analysis
and the drama of expression and artistic interpretation. But
despite the present lure of the problem play, it ought to be
apparent that the real future of Negro drama lies with tlie
development of the folk play. Negro drama must grow in its
own soil and cultivate its own intrinsic elements; only in this
way can it become truly organic, and cease being a rootless
derivative. For the Negro it is futile to ex'pect fine problem
drama as an initial stage before the natimil development in
due (X)iu-se of the capacity for self-criticism. The Negro drama
tists advantage of psychologic^ intimacy is for the present
more than oflFset by the disadvantage of the temptation to
The Negro and the American Theatre (igay) 269
counter partisan and propagandist attitudes. The white drama
tist can achieve objectivity with relatively greater ease, though
as yet he seldom does, and has temporarily an advantage in
the handling of this material as drama of social situation. Proper
development of these social problem themes will require the
objectivity of great art. Even when the crassest conventions
are waived at present, character stereotypes and deceptive for
mulae still linger; only genius of the first order can hope to
penetrate to the material of high tragedyand, for that matter,
high comedy alsothat undoubtedly are there. For with the
difference that modem society decrees its own fatalisms, the
situations of race hold tragedies and ironies as deep and keen
as those of the ancient classics. Eventually the Negro dramatist
must achieve mastery of a detached, artistic point of view,
and reveal the inner stresses and dilemmas of these situations
as from the psychological point of view he alone can.
The folk play, on the other hand, whether of the realistic
or the imaginative type, has no such conditioned values. It is the
drama of free self-expression and imaginative release, and has
no objective but to express beautifully and colorfully race folk
life. . . .
In all of these plays as yet, there still comes the impres
sion that the drama of Negro life has not become as racy,
as gaily imconscious, as saturated with folk ways and the folk
spirit as it could be, as it eventually will be. Decidedly it
needs more of that poetic strain whose counterpart makes the
Irish folk drama so captivating and irresistible, more of the
joy of life even when life flows tragically, and, even should one
phase of it remain realistic peasant drama, more of the emo
tional depth of pity and terror. This clarification will surely
come as the Negro drama shifts more and more to the purely
aesthetic attitudes. With life becoming less a problem and more
a vital process for the younger Negro, we shall leave more
to the dramatist not bom to it the dramatization of the race
problem and concern ourselves more vitally with expression
and its interpretation. . .
2/0 The Black Aesthetic
The finest function, then, of race drama would be to supply
an imaginative channel of escape and spiritual release, and by
some process of emotional re-enforcement to cover life with
the illusion of happiness and spiritual freedom. Because of the
lack of any tradition or art to which to attach itself, this
reaction has never functioned in the life of the American
Negro except at the level of the explosive and abortive release.
With the fine African tradition of primitive ritual broken and
with the inhibitions of Puritanism snuEBng out even the spirit
of a strong dramatic and mimetic heritage, there has been
little prospect for the development of strong native dramatic
traits. But the traces linger to flare up spectacularly when the
touch of a serious dramatic motive once again touches them.
One can scarcely think of a complete development of Negro
dramatic art without some significant artistic re-expression of
African life, and the tradition associated with it. . . .
It may seem a far cry from the conditions and moods of
modem New York and Chicago and the Negro's rapid and
feverish assimilation of all things American. But art establishes
its contacts in strange ways. The emotional elements of Negro
art are choked by the conventions of the contemporary stage;
they call for freer, more plastic material. They have no mys
terious aflSnity with African themes or scenes, but they have
for any life that is more primitive and poetic in substance.
So, if, as seems already apparent, the sophisticated race sense
of the Negro should lead back over the trail of the group
tradition to an interest in things African, the natural affinities
of the material and the art will complete the circuit and they
will most electrically combine. Especially with its inherent color
and emotionalism, its freedom from body-hampering dress,
its odd and tragic and mysterious overtones, African life and
themes, apart from any sentimental attachment, offer a wonder
fully new field and province for dramatic treatment. . . .
But when our serious drama shall become as nave and
spontaneous as our drama of fun and laughter, and that in
turn genuinely representative of the folk spirit which it is now
The Negro and the American Theatre (ig2j) 271
forced to travesty, a point of classic development will have
been reached. It is fascinating to speculate upon what riotously
new and startling things may come from this. Dramatic ma
turings are notably sudden. Usually from the popular sub-soil
sometliing shoots up to a rapid artistic flowering. Of course,
this does not have to occur with the American Negro. But
a peasant folk art pouring out from under a generation-long
repression is the likeliest soil known for a dramatic renascence.
TH E B LA C K ARTS M O VEM ENT
Larry "Neal
The Black Arts Movement is radically opposed to any concept

of the artist that alienates him from his community. Black Art
is 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. In order to perform this
task, the Black Arts Movement proposes a radical reordering
of the western cultural aesthetic. It proposes a separate symbol
ism, mythology, critique, and iconology. The Black Arts and
the Black Power concept both relate broadly to the Afro-Ameri
can's desire for self-determination and nationhood. Both con
cepts are nationalistic. One is concerned with the relationship
between art and politics; the other with the art of politics.
Recently, these two movements have begun to merge: the
political values inherent in the Black Power concept are now
finding concrete expression in the aesthetics of Afro-American
dramatists, poets, choreographers, musicians, and novelists. A
main tenet of Bhick Power is the necessity for Black people
to define tlie world in their own tenns. The Black artist hiis
made tlie same point in tlie context of aestlietics. The two
The Black Arts Movement ^73
movements postulate that there are in fact and in spirit two
Americasone black, one white. The Black artist takes this to
mean that his primary duty is to speak to the spiritual and
cultural needs of Black people. Therefore, the main thrust of
this new breed of contemporary writers is to confront the con
tradictions arising out of the Black mans experience in the
racist West. Currently, these writers are re-evaluating western
aesthetics, the traditional role of the writer, and the social
function of art. Implicit in this re-evaluation is the need to
develop a T)lack aesthetic.'* It is the opinion of many Black
writers, I among them, that the Western aesthetic has nm its
course: it is impossible to construct anything meaningful wdthin
its decaying structm-e. We advocate a cultural revolution in
art and ideas. The cultural values inherent in western history
must either be radicalized or destroyed, and we will probably
find that even radicalization is impossible. In fact, what is
needed is a whole new system of ideas. Poet Don L. Lee
expresses it:
. . . We must destroy Faulkner, dick, jane, and other perpetuators

of evil. It*s time for DuBois, Nat Turner, and Kwame Nkrumah.
As Frantz Fanon points out: destroy the culture and you destroy
the people. This must not happen. Black artists are culture sta
bilizers; bringing back old values, and introducing new ones. Black
Art will talk to the people and with the will of the people
stop impending protective custody.**
The Black Arts Movement eschews *^protest** literature. It

speaks directly to Black people. Implicit in the concept of
'protest** literature, as Brother Knight has made clear, is an
appeal to white morality:
Now any Black man who masters the technique of his particular
art form, who adheres to the white aesthetic, and who directs
his work toward a white audience is, in one sense, protesting.
And implicit in the act of protest is the belief that a change
will be forthcoming once the masters are aware of the protestors
grievance (the very word connotes begging, supplications to
the gods). Only when that belief has faded and protestings
end, wiU Black art begin.
Brother Knight also has some interesting statements about the

development of a Black aesthetic :
Unless the Black artist establishes a Black aesthetic he will

have no future at all. To accept the white aesthetic is to accept
and validate a society that will not allow him to live. The
Black artist must create new forms and new values, sing new
songs (or purify old ones); and along with other Black authorities,
he must create a new history, new symbols, myths and legends
(and purify old ones by fire). And the Black artist, in creating
his own aesthetic, must be accountable for it only to the Black
people. Further, he must hasten his own dissolution as an in
dividual (in the Western sense)painful though the process may
be, having been breast-fed the poison of individual experience.
When we speak of a Black aesthetic several things are

meant. First, we assume that there is already in existence the
basis for such an aesthetic. Essentially, it consists of an African-
American cultural tradition. But this aesthetic is finally, by im
plication, broader than that tradition. It encompasses most of
the useable elements of Third World culture. The motive be
hind the Black aesthetic is the destruction of the white thing,
the destruction of white ideas, and white ways of looking at
the world. The new aesthetic is mosdy predicated on an Ethics
which asks the question; whose vision of the world is finally
more meaningful, ours or the white oppressors? What is truth?
Or more precisely, whose truth shall we express, tliat of tlie
oppressed or of the oppressors? These are basic questions.
Black intellectuals of previoiLS decades failed to ask them.
Furtlier, national and international affairs demand that we aj>-
praise tlie world in tenns of our own interests. It is clear that
tlie question of hiunan survival is at the core of contemporary
experience. The Black artist must address himself to tliis reality
The Black Arts Movement m
in the strongest terms possible. In a context of world up

heaval, ethics and aesthetics must interact positively and be
consistent witli the demands for a more spiritual world. Con
sequently, the Black Arts Movement is an ethical movement.
Ethical, that is, from the viewpoint of the oppressed. And
much of the oppression confronting the Third World and Black
America is directly traceable to the Euro-American cultural
sensibility. This sensibility, anti-human in nature, has, imtil
recently, dominated the psyches of most Black artists and
intellectuals; it must be destroyed before the Black creative
artist can have a meaningful role in the transformation of
society.
It is this natural reaction to an alien sensibility that informs
the cultural attitudes of the Black Arts and the Black Power
movement. It is a profoxmd ethical sense that makes a Black
artist question a society in which art is one thing and the actions
of men another. The Black Arts Movement believes that your
ethics and your aesthetics are one. That the contradictions be
tween ethics and aesthetics in western society is symptomatic
of a dying cultm*e.
The term Black Arts is of ancient origin, but it was first used
in a positive sense by LeRoi Jones:
We are unfair
And unfair
We are black magicians
Black arts we make
in black labs of the heart
The fair are fair
and deathly white
The day will not save them
And we own the night
There is also a section of the poem Black Dada Nihilismus

that carries the same motif. But a fuller amplification of the
nature of the new aesthetics appears in the poem Black Art :
2/6 The Black Aesthetic
Poems are bullshit unless they are
teeth or trees or lemons piled
on a step. Or black ladies dying
of men leaving nickel hearts
beating them down. Fuck poems
and they are useful, would they shoot
come at you, love what you are,
breathe like wrestlers, or shudder
strangely after peeing. We want live
words of the hip world, live flesh &
coursing blood. Hearts and Brains
Souls splintering fire. We want poems
like fists beating niggers out of Jocks
or dagger poems in the slimy bellies
of the owner-jews . . .
Poetry is a concrete function, an action. No more abstractions.

Poems are physical entities; fists, daggers, airplane poems, and
poems that shoot guns. Poems are transformed from physical
objects into personal forces:
. . . Put it on him poem. Strip him naked

to the world. Another bad poem cracking
steel knuckles in a jewlady s mouth
Poem scream poison gas on breasts in green berets . . .
Then the poem aflBrms the integral relationship between

Black Art and Black people:
. . . Let Black people understand

that they are tlie lovers and the sons
of lovers and warriors and sons
of waniors Are poems & poets &
all the loveliness here in the world
It ends with tlie following lines, a central assertion in both

the Black Arts Movement and tlie philosophy of Black Power:
We want a black poem. And a
Black World.
Let the world be a Black Poem
And let All Black People Speak This Poem
Silently
Or LOUD
The poem comes to stand for the collective conscious and

unconscious of Black Americathe real impulse in back of the
Black Power movement, which is the will toward self-deteimi-
nation and nationhood, a radical reordering of the nature and
function of both art and the artist.
2.
In the spring of 1964, LeRoi Jones, Charles Patterson, William

Patterson, Clarence Reed, Johnny Moore, and a number of
other Black artists opened the Black Arts Repertoire Theatre
School. They produced a number of plays including Jones"
Experimental Death Unit ^ One, Black Mass, Jello, and
Dutchman. They also initiated a series of poetry readings and
concerts. These activities represented the most advanced tend
encies in the movement and were of excellent artistic quality.
The Black Arts School came under immediate attack by the
New York power structure. The Establishment, fearing Black
creativity, did exactly what it was expected to doit attacked
the theatre and all of its values. In the meantime, the school
was granted funds by OEO though HARYOU-ACT. Lacking
a cultural program itself, HARYOU turned to the only organiza
tion which addressed itself to the needs of the community.
In keeping with its revolutionary" cultural ideas, the Black
Arts Theatre took its programs into the streets of Harlem.
For three months, the theatre presented plays, concerts, and
poetry readings to the people of the community. Plays that
shattered the illusions of the American body politic, and awak
ened Black people to the meaning of their hves.
Then the hawks from the OEO moved in and chopped ofiF
the funds. Again, this should have been expected. The Black
Arts Theatre stood in radical opposition to the feeble attitudes
about culture of the W ar On Poverty bureaucrats. And later,
because of internal problems, the theatre was forced to close.
But the Black Arts group proved that the community could
be served by a valid and dynamic art. It also proved that
there was a definite need for a cultural revolution in the Black
community.
With the closing of tlie Black Arts Theatre, the implications
of what Brother Jones and his colleagues were trying to do took
on even more significance. Black Art groups sprang up on the
West Coast and the idea spread to Detroit, Philadelphia, Jersey
City, New Orleans, and Washington, D.C. Black Arts move
ments began on the campuses of San Francisco State College,
Fisk University, Lincoln University, Hunter College in the Bronx,
Columbia University, and Oberlin College. In Watts, after the
rebellion, Maulana Karenga welded the Blacks Arts Movement
into a cohesive cultural ideology which owed much to the work
of LeRoi Jones. Karenga sees culture as the most important
element in the struggle for self-determination:
Culture is the basis of all ideas, images and actions. To move

is to move culturally, i.e. by a set of values given to you by
your culture.
Without a culture Negroes are only a set of reactions to white
people.
The seven criteria for culture are:
1. Mythology
2. History
3. Social Organization
4. Political Organization
5. Economic Organization
6. Creative Motif
7. Ethos
In drama, LeRoi Jones represents the most advanced aspects

of tlie movement. He is its prime mover and cliicf designer.
The Black Arts Movement m
In a poetic essay entitled The Revolutionary Theatre, he out

lines the iconology of the movement:
The Revolutionary Theatre should force change: it should be

change. (All their faces turned into the lights and you work
on them black nigger magic, and cleanse them at having seen
the ugliness. And if the beautiful see themselves, they will love
themselves.) We are preaching virtue again, but by that to
mean NOW, toward what seems the most constructive use of
the word.
The theatre that Jones proposes is inextricably linked to the

Afro-American political dynamic. And such a link is perfectly
consistent with Black Americas contemporary demands. For
theatre is potentially the most social of all of the arts. It is an
integral part of the socializing process. It exists in direct re
lationship to the audience it claims to serve. The decadence
and inanity of the contemporary American theatre is an accurate
reflection of the state of American society. Albees Who>s Afraid
of Virginia Woolf? is very American: sick white lives in a homo
sexual hell hole. The theatre of white America is escapist, refus
ing to confront concrete reality. Into this cultural emptiness come
the musicals, an up-tempo version of the same stale lives. And
the use of Negroes in such plays as Hello Dolly and Hallelujah
Baby does not alert their nature; it compounds the problem.
These plays are simply hipper versions of the minstrel show.
They present Negroes acting out the hang-ups of middle-class
wliite America. Consequently, the American theatre is a pallia
tive prescribed to bourgeois patients who refuse to see the world
as it is. Or, more crucially, as the world sees them. It is no ac
cident, therefore, that the most important plays come from
EuropeBrecht, Weiss, and Ghelderode. And even these have
begun to run dry.
The Black Arts theatre, the theatre of LeRoi Jones, is a radical
alternative to the sterility of the American theatre. It is primarily
a theatre of the Spirit, confronting the Black man in his
interaction with his brothers and with the white thing.
Our theatre will show victims so that their brothers in the audience
will be better able to understand that they are the brothers
of victims, and that they themselves are blood brothers. And
what we show must cause the blood to rush, so that pre
revolutionary temperaments will be bathed in this blood, and
it will cause their deepest souls to move, and they will find
themselves tensed and clenched, even ready to die, at what the
soul has been taught. We will scream and cry, murder, run through
the streets in agony, if it means some soul will be moved, moved
to actual life understanding of what the world is, and what it
ought to be. We are preaching virtue and feeling, and a natural
sense of the self in the world. All men live in the world, and
the world ought to be a place for them to live.
The victims in the world of Jones^ early plays are Clay,

murdered by the white bitch-goddess in Dutchman, and Walker
Vessels, the revolutionary in The Slave, Both of these plays
present Black men in transition. Clay, the middle-class Negro
trying to get himself a little action from Lula, digs himself and
his own truth only to get murdered after telling her like it
really is:
Just let me bleed you, you loud whore, and one poem vanished.
A whole people neurotics, struggling to keep from being sane.
And the only thing that would cure the neurosis would be your
murder. Simple as that. I mean if I murdered you, then other
white people would understand me. You understand? No. I guess
not. If Bessie Smith had killed some white people she wouldn't
needed that music. She could have talked very straight and
plain about the world. Just straight two and two are four. Money,
Power. Luxury. Like tliat. All of tliem. Crazy niggers turning
their back on sanity. When all it needs is that simple act. Just
murder. Would make us all sane.
But Lula understands, and she kills Clay first. In a perverse

way it is Clay's nascent knowledge of liimself that threatens
the existence of Lulas idea of tlie world. Symbolically, and
in fact, the relationship between Clay (Black Aiiierica) and
Lula (white America) is rooted in the historical castration
of black manhood. And in the twisted psyche of white America,
the Black man is both an object of love and hate. Analogous
attitudes exist in most Black Americans, but for decidedly
difiFerent reasons. Clay is doomed when he allows himself to
participate in Lula's "fantasy" in the first place. It is the
fantasy to which Frantz Fanon alludes in The Wretched of the
Earth and Black Skins, White Mask: the natives belief that
he can acquire the oppressor s power by acquiring his symbols,
one of which is the white woman. When Clay finally digs
himself it is too late.
Walker Vessels, in The Slave, is Clay reincarnated as the
revolutionary confronting problems inherited from his contact
with white culture. He returns to the home of his ex-wife,
a white woman, and her husband, a literary critic. The play
is essentially about Walkers attempt to destroy his white past.
For it is the past, with all of its painful memories, that is
really the enemy of the revolutionary. It is impossible to move
until history is either recreated or comprehended. Unhke Todd,
in Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man, Walker cannot fall outside
history. Instead, Walker demands a confrontation with history,
a final shattering of bullshit illusions. His only salvation lies
in confronting the physical and psychological forces that have
made him and his people powerless. Therefore, he comes to
understand that the world must be restructured along spiritual
imperatives. But in the interim it is basically a question of who
has power:
EASLEY.You're SO WTong about everything. So terribly, sickeningly

wrong. What can you change? What do you hope to change?
Do you think Negroes are better people than whites . . . that
they can govern a society better than whites? That they'll be
more judicious or more tolerant? Do you think they'll make fewer
mistakes? I mean really, if the Western white man has proved
one thing . . . it's the futility of modem society. So the have-
not peoples become the haves. Even so, will that change die
essential functions of the world? Will there be more love or
beauty in the world . . . more knowledge . . . because of it?
WALKER. Probably. Probably there will be more . . . if more people

have a chance to understand what it is. But that's not even
the point. It comes down to baser human endeavor than any
social-political thinking. What does it matter if there's more love
or beauty? Who the fuck cares? Is that what the Western ofay
thought while he was ruling . . . that his rule somehow brought
more love and beauty into the world? Oh, he might have thought
that concomitantly, while sipping a gin rickey and scratching
his ass . . . but that was not ever the point. Not even on the
Crusades. The point is that you had your chance, darling, now
these other folks have theirs. Quietly. Now they have theirs.
EASLEY. God, what an u g ly idea.
This confrontation between the black radical and the white

liberal is symbolic of larger confrontations occurring between
the Third World and Western society. It is a confrontation
between the colonizer and the colonized, the slavemaster and
the slave. Implicit in Easley's remarks is the belief that the
white man is culturally and politically superior to the Black
Man. Even though Western society has been traditionally vio
lent in its relation with the Third World, it sanctimoniously
deplores violence or self assertion on the part of the enslaved.
And the Western mind, with clever rationalizations, equates
the violence of the oppressed with the violence of the oppressor.
So that when the native preaches self-detennination, tlie Western
white man cleverly misconstrues it to mean hate of all white
men. When the Black political radical warns his people not
to trust white politicians of the left and the right, but instead
to organize separately on the basis of power, the white man
cries; racism in reverse." Or he will say, as many of them do
today: W e deplore both white and black racism." As if the
two could be equated.
There is a minor element in The Slave whicli assumes great
importance in a later play entitled Jello. Here I refer to the
emblem of Walkers army: a red-mouthed grinning field slave.
The revolutionary army has taken one of the most hated sym
bols of the Afro-American past and radically altered its mean
ing. This is the supreme act of freedom, available only to those
who have hberated themselves psychically. Jones amplifies this
inversion of emblem and symbol in Jello by making Rochester
(Ratfester) of the old Jack Benny (Penny) program into a
revolutionary nationahst. Ratfester, ordinarily the supreme em
bodiment of the Uncle Tom Clown, surprises Jack Penny by
turning on the other side of the nature of the Black man. He
skillfully, and with an evasive black humor, robs Penny of all of
his money. But Ratfesters actions are moral. That is to say,
Ratfester is getting his back pay; payment of a long over-due
debt to the Black man. Ratfesters sensibilities are different
from Walkers. He is blues people smiling and shufiling while
trying to figure out how to destroy the white thing. And like
the blues man, he is the master of the understatement. Or in
the Afro-American folk tradition, he is the signifying Monkey,
Shine, and Stagolee all rolled into one. There are no sterotypes
any more. History has killed Uncle Tom. Because even Uncle
Tom has a breaking point beyond which he will not be pushed.
Cut deeply enough into the most docile Negro, and you will
find a conscious murderer. Behind the lyrics of the blues and
the shufihng porter loom visions of white throats being cut and
cities burning.
Jones particular power as a playwright does not rest solely
on his revolutionary vision, but is instead derived from his
In Jones* study of Afro-American music. B lu es Peop le, we find the fol
lowing observation: . . Even the adjective fu n k y, which once meant to
many Negroes merely a stink (usually associated with sex), was used to
qualify the music as meaningful (the word became fashionable and is now
almost useless). The social implication, then, was that even the old ster
eotype of a distinctive Negro smell thiit white America subscribed to could
be turned against white America. For this smell now, real or not, was
made a valuable characteristic of Negro-ness.* And Negro-ness,* by the
fifties, for many Negroes (and whites) was the only strength left to Amer
ican culture.
deep lyricism and spiritual outlook. In many ways, he is funda
mentally more a poet than a playwright. And it is his lyricism
that gives body to his plays. Two important plays in this regard
are Black Mass and Slave Ship. Black Mass is based on the
Muslim myth of Yacub. According to this myth, Yacub, a Black
scientist, developed the means of grafting different colors of
the Original Black Nation until a White Devil was created.
In Black Mass, Yacub's experiments produce a raving White
Beast who is condemned to the coldest regions of the North.
The other magicians implore Yacub to cease his experiments.
But he insists on claiming the primacy of scientific knowledge
over spiritual knowledge. The sensibihty of the White Devil
is ahen, informed by lust and sensuahty. The Beast is the
consummate embodiment of evil, the beginning of the historical
subjugation of the spiritual world.
Black Mass takes place in some pre-historical time. In fact,
the concept of time, we learn, is the creation of an ahen
sensibihty, that of the Beast. This is a deeply weighted play,
a coUoquy on the nature of man, and the relationship between
legitimate spiritual knowledge and scientific knowledge. It is
LeRoi Jones most important play mainly because it is informed
by a mythology that is wholly the creation of the Afro-American
sensibihty.
Further, Yacubs creation is not merely a scientific exercise.
More fundamentahy, it is the aesthetic impulse gone astray.
The Beast is created merely for the sake of creation. Some
artists assert a similar claim about the nature of art. They
argue that art need not have a function. It is against this
decadent attitude toward artramified throughout most of West
ern societythat the play mihtates. Yacub s real crime, therefore,
is the introduction of a meaningless evil into a hannonious
universe. The evil of the Beast is pervasive, corrupting every
thing and everyone it touches. What was beautiful is twisted
into an ugly screaming thing. Tlie play ends witli destruction
of the holy place of the Black Magicians. Now tlie Beast and
his descendants roam tlie earth. An off-stage voice chants a
call for the Jihad to begin. It is then that myth merges into
legitimate history, and we, the audience, come to understand
that all history is merely someones version of mythology.
Slave Ship presents a more immediate confrontation with
history. In a series of expressionistic tableaux it depicts the
horrors and the madness of the Middle Passage. It then moves
through the period of slavery, early attempts at revolt, tend
encies toward Uncle Tom-hke reconciliation and betrayal, and
the final act of liberation. There is no definite plot (LeRoi
calls it a pageant), just a continuous rush of sound, groans,
screams, and souls wailing for freedom and relief from suffering.
TTiis work has special aflBnities with the New Music of Sun Ra,
John Coltrane, Albert Ayler, and Ornette Coleman. Events are
blurred, rising and falling in a stream of soimd. Almost cine-
matically, the images flicker and fade against a heavy back-drop
of rhythm. The language is spare, stripped to the essential. It
is a play which almost totally eliminates the need for a text.
It functions on the basis of movements and energythe dra
matic equivalent of the New Music.
Slave Shipps energy is, at base, ritualistic. As a matter of fact,
to see the play any other way is to miss the point. All the
New York reviewers, with the possible exception of John Lahr,
were completely cut off from this central aspect of the play
when it was performed at the Brooklyn Academy under the
brillant direction of Gfibert Moses. One of the prime motivations
behind the work is to suck the audience into a unique and
very precise universe. The episodes of this pageant do not
appear as strict interpretations of history. Rather, what we are
digging is ritualized history. That is, history that allows emo
tional and religious participation on the part of the audience.
And, hke all good ritual, its purpose is to make the audience
stronger, more sensitive to the historical realities that have
shaped our lives and the lives of our ancestors. The play acts
to extend memory. For black people to forget the realities
posed by Slave Ship is to fall prey to an existential paralysis.
History, like the blues, demands that we witness the painful
events of our prior hves; and that we either confront these
painful events or be destroyed by them.
LeRoi Jones is the best known and the most advanced

playwright of the movement, but he is not alone. There are
other excellent playwrights who express the general mood of
the Black Arts ideology. Among them are Ron Milner, Ed Bul-
hns, Ben Caldwell, Jimmy Stewart, Joe White, Charles Patterson,
Charles Fuller, Aisha Hughes, Carol Freeman, and Jimmy Gar
rett.
Ron Milner s Who*s Got His Own is of particular importance.
It strips bare the clashing attitudes of a contemporary Afro-
American family. Milner s concern is with legitimate manhood
and morality. The family in Who*s Got His Own is in search
of its conscience, or more precisely its own definition of life.
On the day of his father s death, Tim and his family are forced
to examine the inner fabric of their lives: the lies, self-deceits,
and sense of powerlessness in a white world. The basic conflict,
however, is internal. It is rooted in the historical search for
black manhood. Tim s mother is representative of a generation
of Christian Black women who have implicitly understood the
brooding violence lurking in their men. And with this under
standing, they have interposed themselves between their men
and the object of that violencethe white man. Thus unable
to direct his violence against the oppressor, the Black man
becomes more frustrated and the sense of powerlessness deep
ens. Lacking the strength to be a man in the white world, he
turns against his family. So the oppressed, as Fanon explains,
constantly dreams violence against his oppressor, wliile killing
his brother on fast weekends.
Tim s sister represents the Negro womans attempt to acquire
what Eldridge Cleaver calls iiltrafeminiiiity. That is, the at
tributes of her wliite upper-class comiterpart. Involved here is
Tlie Black Arts Movement 287
a rejection of the body-oriented life of the working class Black
man, symbolized by the mothers traditional religion. The sister
has an affair with a white upper-class liberal, ending in abortion.
There are hints of lesbianism, i.e., a further rejection of the
body. The sisters life is a pivotal factor in the play. Much
of the stripping away of falsehood initiated by Tim is directed
at her life, which they have carefully kept hidden from the
motlier.
Tim is the product of the new Afro-American sensibility,
informed by the psychological revolution now operative within
Black America. He is a combination ghetto soul brother and
militant intellectual, very hip and slightly flawed himself. He
would change the world, but without comprehending the partic
ular history that produced his tyrannicar father. And he
cannot be the man his father wasnot until he truly under
stands his father. He must understand why his father allowed
himself to be insulted daily by the honky types on the job;
why he took a demeaning job in the shit-house; and why
he spent on his family the violence that he should have di
rected against the white man. In short, Tim must confront
the history of his family. And that is exactly what happens.
Each character tells his story, exposing his falsehood to the
other until a balance is reached.
Who*s Got His Otvn is not the work of an alienated mind.
Milners main thrust is directed toward unifying the family
around basic moral principles, toward bridging the generation
gap. Other Black playwrights, Jimmy Garrett for example, see
the gap as unbridgeable.
Garretts We Otvn the Night (see this issue of TDK, pp. 62-
69) takes place during an armed insurrection. As the play opens
we see the central characters defending a section of the city
against attacks by white pohce. Johnny, the protagonist, is
wounded. Some of his Brothers intermittently fire at attacking
forces, while others look for medical help. A doctor arrives,
forced at gun point. The wounded boys mother ako comes.
She is a female Uncle Tom who berates the Brothers and their
cause. She tries to get Johnny to leave. She is hysterical. The
whole idea of Black people fighting white people is totally
outside of her orientation. Johnny begins a vicious attack on
his mother, accusing her of emasculating his fathera recurring
theme in the sociology of the Black community. In Afro-Ameri
can hterature of previous decades the strong Black mother was
the object of awe and respect But in the new literature her
status is ambivalent and laced with tension. Historically, Afro-
American women have had to be the economic mainstays of
the family. The oppressor allowed them to have jobs while at
the same time limiting the economic mobility of the Black man.
Very often, therefore, the womans aspirations and values are
closely tied to those of the white power structure and not
to those of her man. Since he cannot provide for his family
the way white men do, she despises his weakness, tearing into
him at every opportunity until, very often, there is nothing left
but a shell.
The only way out of this dilemma is through revolution.
It either must be an actual blood revolution, or one that psychi
cally redirects the energy of the oppressed. Milner is funda
mentally concerned with the latter and Garrett with the former.
Communication between Johnny and his mother breaks down.
The revolutionary imperative demands that men step outside
the legal framework. It is a question of erecting another morality.
The old constructs do not hold up, because adliering to them
means consigning oneself to the oppressive reality. Johnnys
mother is involved in the old constructs. Manliness is equated
with white morality. And even though she claims to love her
family (her men), the overall design of her ideas are against
black manhood. In Garrett s play the mothers morality manifests
itself in a deep-seated hatred of Black men; wliile in Mihier s
work the motlier imderstands, but holds her men back.
The mothers that Garrett and Milner see represent the Old
Spiritualitythe Faith of die Fathers of which DuBois spoke.
Johnny and Tim represent the New Spirituality. They appear
to be a type produced by tlie upheavals of tlie colonial world
of which Black America is a part. Johnnys assertion that he is
a criminal is remarkably similar to the rebels comments in
Aim Csaires play, Les Armes Miraculeuses {The Miraculous
Weapons). In that play the rebel, speaking to his mother,
proclaims: My namean oflFense; my Christian namehumilia
tion; my statusa rebel; my agethe stone age. To which the
mother replies: My racethe human race. My religionbroth
erhood. The Old Spirituality is generalized. It seeks to recognize
Universal Humanity. The New Spirituality is specific. It begins
by seeing the world from the concise point-of-view of the
colonialized. Where the Old Spirituality would live with op
pression while ascribing to tlie oppressors an innate goodness,
the New Spirituality demands a radical shift in point-of-view.
The colonialized native, the oppressed must, of necessity, sub
scribe to a separate morality. One that vrill liberate him and
his people.
The assault against the Old Spirituality can sometimes be
humorous. In Ben Caldwells play, The Militant Preacher, a
burglar is seen slipping into the home of a wealthy minister.
The preacher comes in and the burglar ducks behind a large
chair. The preacher, acting out the role of the supplicant minister
begins to moan, praying to De Lawd for understanding.
In the context of todays politics, the minister is an Uncle Tom,
mouthing platitudes against self-defense. The preacher drones
in a self-pitying monologue about the folly of protecting oneself
against brutal policemen. Then the burglar begins to speak.
The preacher is startled, taking the burglars voice for the voice
of God. The burglar begins to play on the preachers old time
religion. He becomes the voice of God insulting and goading
the preacher on until the preachers attitudes about protective
violence change. The next day the preacher emerges militant,
gun in hand, sounding like Reverend Cleage in Detroit. He now
preaches a new gospelthe gospel of the gun, an eye for an
eye. The gospel is preached in the rhythmic cadences of the
old Black church. But the content is radical. Just as Jones
inverted the symbols in Jello, Caldwell twists the rhythms
2Q 0 The Black Aesthetic
of the Uncle Tom preacher into the language of the new
militancy.
These plays are directed at problems within Black America.
They begin with the premise that there is a well defined Afro-
American audience. An audience that must see itself and the
world in terms of its own interests. These plays, along with
many others, constitute the basis for a viable movement in the
theatrea movement which takes as its task a profoimd re-
evaluation of the Black man s presence in America. The Black
Arts Movement represents the flowering of a cultural nationalism
that has been suppressed since the 1920 s. I mean the Harlem
Renaissance*which was essentially a failure. It did not ad
dress itself to the mythology and the life-styles of the Black
community. It failed to take roots, to link itself concretely to
the struggles of that community, to become its voice and spirit
Implicit in the Black Arts Movement is the idea that Black
people, however dispersed, constitute a nation within the belly
of white America. This is not a new idea. Garvey said it and
the Honorable Elijah Muhammad says it now. And it is on this
idea that the concept of Black Power is predicated.
Afro-American life and history is full of creative possibilities,
and the movement is just beginning to perceive them. Just
beginning to xmderstand that the most meaningful statements
about the nature of Western society must come from the
Third World of which Black America is a part. The thematic
material is broad, ranging from folk heroes like Shine and
Stagolee to historical figures like Marcus Garvey and Malcolm X.
And then there is the struggle for Black survival, the coming
confrontation between white America and Black America. If art
is the harbinger of future possibilities, what does the future
of Black America portend?
I WORK H E R E TO PLEA SE YOU
Loften Mitchell
During my school days I worked at terrible jobs that I would

not give to a Mississippi Dixiecrat. I assisted my father in
being janitor of a building, moving black folks* garbage, and
then I became the assistant janitor in a white building, where
I moved white folks* garbage. I ran an elevator in a building
where I took white folks up and down, and all the time I felt
as though I were going down, down. I delivered lunches to
Wall Street oflSces where white fellow students sat with their
feet thrown across desks, and I set pins in a bowling alley
where white men flung black balls down the lanes at me
and occasionally a measly tip. I mopped floors and cleaned
toilets and hopped bells and bussed tables and finally I gradu
ated and became a waiter.
I liked waiting tables, because it gave me a chance to dish
out smart remarks to customers as well as food. But the thing
I liked most about waiting tables was the opportunity it gave
me to listen to older black waiters and their words of wisdom.
Sometimes, even today, their words ring in my brain and I find
myself smiling.
On one occasion, I worked in a swank hotel where the
waiting staff was integrated. You see, in those days white
people actually worked for a living. Well, in this hotel there
was a wise waiter named Dan who carried the weight of sixty
years of being black in white America. He was the most
efficient waiter I have ever known. One morning, Dan got
ready for his set-up. He put his forks and faiives on his tray,
then his napkins and his juices, and then he went for his rolk.
When he did that, a white waiter calmly went to Dan s tray
and began to remove things from it and place them on his
own tray. I stood there, watching him steal from Dan s tray, in
nave amazement. Dan sauntered back just as the white waiter
was removing his forks and knives. The white waiter turned
to Dan and said innocently: Ohl I didnt know this was your
txayl
D ans tones were acidic. He said: Oh, thats all right, white
boy. I work here to please you.
I work here to please you. I laughed at this remark for
years. After all, it was what we in Harlem called a good
backcap. Those were the days, of course, when we got our
kicks by telling off white folks, then going uptown and telhng
our brothers what we had told the whites. Sometimes I think
we were more interested in beating the system that we were
in changing it. In fact, sometimes I think we were so interested
in beating the system that we beat up white folks and black
folks rather than change the system.
I work here to please you. Accurate, indeed, were the
words of that old black waiter, for the you is the system
built on power and profits, and we are all slaves to it, even
tliose who rebel against it. For, in the last analysis, as Dr.
W. E. B. DuBois has said, in Black Reconstruction, ministers,
teachers, and confirmed pacifists will resort to warin spite
of all their utterances. I have no right to add to Dr. DuBois
statement, but I am going to do just that: In the last analysis,
nearly all American revolutionists, black and white, can be
bought. For tliis is a land where tlic dollar is God, and many
a one hundred pennies is hustled in His name.
I work here to please you. And though these words came
I Work Here to Please You
from the lips of a black waiter, they might well have been
uttered by every American who reached these shores. An im
poverished Europe sought a new route to India, seeking endless
wealth. This Europe found a new land to the west, and it
claimed this land and called the red people Indians, although
they knew full well they had not found a new route to India.
Indeed, it is said that Christopher Columbus heard of this new
land to the west from his contact with Africans. But Western
world history is made up of myths and lies. We have first the
vicious deed, and then we have to make it respectable. This
underlines the actions of a horse thief named Cornelius Vander
bilt, who built Grand Central Station, then had his descendants
try to clean up his name. This is explained today when one
looks at that crook named John D. Rockefeller, whose children,
grandchildren, and great-grandchildren have tried to clean up
his name.
Right there we see why Nelson Rockefeller will never become
President of the United States and why his governorship of
New York State is a mealy-mouthed act of placating the upstate
power structure that makes the greatest city in the world into
a pit of slime.
I work here to please you. This statement has underlined
too much of the Black Aesthetic. At the end of the nineteen
sixties we find black men walking around in dashilds made by
white companies. We find them walking around with hair
nature made for close cropping in order to ward off the sun s
unrelenting rays, now long, defiantly long, defensively long. We
find black folks doing their thing, whichto quote my
wife, Marjorieis no thing or nothing. And, to further quote
Marjorie, the white folks are paying for it through foundations
and anti-poverty funds, which means that that thing' is a white-
influenced thing. In other words, subconsciously, black folks
exist to please white folks.
Marjorie is a charming, intelligent woman, but when she ut
tered these words, I could not help thinking that that has been
the historic role of black people in this country. Their primary
function is to make profits for white peoplefrom slavery time
to the present, from the cotton fields to the industrial swamps
to liquor to heroin. Doing your thing is welcome, indeed, as
long as it fills the coffers of white folks.
This was apparent when America was founded. The so-called
Founding Fathers ignored landless whites when they founded
this nation, and they considered black people as three-fiftlis
human. Those moneygrubbers who founded this nation were
unwilling to cut the King of England in on a share of the
profits. And they went to war, yelling about "Give me liberty
or give me death.*' And therein lies one of the ironies of history.
Five thousand black men and women fought in that war and
helped to turn the tide of the American Revolution.
Why???
Were they really nave? Were the red people naive when
they welcomed the white people and taught them to grow
com? Why, indeed? And speculation can only enter here. The
black man, like the red man, was commiinity-niinded, believing
that all belong to the land and the land to all. If you knocked
on the door and offered a friendly hand, you were invited
into the house and you could partake of all that was there.
The suspicion cannot be avoided, therefore, that the white
stranger who knocked on the door did so with malice afore
thought, seeking to obsequiously make his way inside the door
and to "take control. This was, in short, a hungry, desperate,
deceiving rat who was to chase the art-minded Jew from land
to land, enslave the black man, kill the red man, milk the Asian,
and make the Irish, the Italian, and the Polish into flunkies in
his power structure.
The first black men to reach the American shores must have
harbored dreams that are yet mifulfiUed. Tlie ancient works
of Latin American artists suggest that Africans reached America
long before Christopher Columbus. It is a matter of record,
however, that one of Columbus' ships was captained by a
black man, that tliere was a black man with Ponce de Len
when he "discovered Florida and one with Balboa when he
I Work Here to Please You ^95
"discovered*' the Pacific Ocean. Contrary to the lies of history,
black people were in the New World long before the first
slaves arrived at Jamestown in 1619.
New York City when it was a Dutch colony known as New
Amsterdam had black people. Peter Stuyvesant said, "all is
well, thanks to tlie employment of Negroes," and when he
left for Holland, he wrote, "Let the company's Negroes keep
good watch on my Boweryl"
In short, slavery in America was "integrated." Black people
and white people were indentured servants, and slavery was
a matter of labor, not color. In fact, there are records that
document that well-to-do black people owned slaves. The British
conquest of New Amsterdam in 1664 led to the introduction
of chattel slavery. A badge was placed on color, and the
Negro's visibility marked him as the man who was going to
be betrayed in the search for the American Dream.
But tliis dream burned bright in the hearts of black breasts.
How else can one explain Phillis Wheatley's lines of verse to
General George Washington? How else can one explain Phoebe
Fraunces saving the life of Washington when an Irish traitor
tried to poison him? How else can one explain Phoebe's father,
Sam Fraunces, giving up a lucrative restaurant business and
joining the staff of President Washington? How else can we
explain that five thousand black men and women fought in the
American Revolution while chattel slavery existed in the South?
We see, then, that black Americans had bought the American
Dream. We see tlie meaning of the words: "I work here to
please you."
And, indeed, we did. The theater illustrates this in sharp,
significant terms. In the eighteenth century, the American theater
attempted to deal with black people in The Fall of British
Tyranny. In that play, black slaves were offered their freedom
if they joined in the British cause during the American Rev
olution. Many did, including some of George Washington's
slaves, and the British latef freed them and settled them in
Nova Scotia, where their descendants live now. But the tone
2g6 The Black Aesthetic
set there was not to last. Murdocks The Triumph of Love
introduced a shuflBing, cackling "darky/' and the rape of the
black imagcand, indeed, of the Black Aesthetichad begun!
Bold attempts were made thereafter to laugh at the Negro s
features, his habits, his very being. He was a creature to
be scorned, humiliated, assailed from pulpits and public lec
terns. He was, therefore, placed on the defensivea position
he occupies to this day. And his songs about freedom are
sad songs, for he himself does not know the true meaning
of freedom; nor will he, unless, in the words of Dr. DuBois,
there comes to America "a vast social change.
This defensive action by black people led to interesting
cultural activities. One of the very first occurred in 1821, when
black tragedian James Hewlett spearheaded the foimding of
the African Grove Theatre in New York City. This theater
was located at Bleecker and Grove streets, and here the clas
sics were performed for black people. Tlie theater was a source
of inspiration for that great black actor Ira Aldridge. But
the police harassed tlie company, often arresting actors in the
middle of a performance. The actors retumed when they were
released from jail, and they perforaied again. White hoodlums
created disturbances in the theater, and the management was
compelled to post a sign asking whites to sit in tlie rear of
the theater because "white people do not know how to conduct
themselves at entertainment designed for ladies and gentlemen
of colour.
White hoodlums eventually wrecked the African Grove Theatre
and, with its destruction, Ira Aldridge realized that America
oflEered httle to tlie black creative artist. He sailed for Europe,
where he was acclaimed by royalty. It is significant to note
that, two years after he left these shores, tlie shuffling, cackling
black stereotype was acclaimed on tlie New York stage, pro
jected by a wliite man in blackface.
Long, bleak moments followedin tenns of the black mans
creative activity. He had been creating for a long time. Some
time during tlie eighteenth centmy, black slaves on soutliem
plantations had created the minstrel pattern. This formthe
forenmner of the American musical comedy patternwas de
signed by slaves to satirize slavemasters. Minstrelsy was a unique,
fast-moving, devastating art form until whites saw it, copied
it, tlien used that form to caricature the black man. The
black mans protest form was therefore used to destroy his
image. And when black men joined the theater at the end of
the Civil War, they had to do so as minstrels, blacken their
faces, and, in the words of James Weldon Johnson, they became
a caricature of a caricature."
They, in short, worked here to please you.
There were exceptions. William Wells Brown, an ex-slave,
wrote The Escape, or A Leap to Freedom. William Lloyd
Garrison wrote in The Liberator in 1853 of the playwrights
power and eloquence. Minstrelsy, however, was the order of
the day. James Bland, composer of Carry M e Back to Old
Virginntj and In the Evening by the Moonlight, was a Long
Island Negro, a minstrel man. And many were the minstrel
companies headed by black men. It was not until the latter
part of the nineteenth century that a group of black men
set out to deliberately destroy the minstrel tradition. Among
these were: Bert Williams, George Walker, Jesse Shipp, Alex
Rogers, Bob Cole, J. Rosamond Johnson, Will Marion Cook,
and Paul Laurence Dunbar. Butand this is easy to say in
the nineteen sixtiestheirs was a defensive action, geared
toward capturing white audiences without alienating them. They
had no love scenes in their plays, because they felt that white
audiences would not accept black people mating romantically.
They were pleasing the you of you.
There seems to be a popular illusion that the black play
wright is a recent phenomenon. Actually, he has been a part
of the theater as long as its has existed. Bob Cole, along
with J. Rosamond Johnson, composer of Lift Every Voice and
Sing, created the operas The Red Moon and The Shoofly
Regiment. In April 1898, Mr. Cole offered a vehicle known as
A Trip to Coontown, at the Third Avenue Theatre. Will Marion
Cook, the composer, and Paul Laurence Dunbar must be con
sidered among black theater writers. Their Clorindy^the Origin
of the Cakewalk was particularly well received. During this
era, Jesse Shipp and Alex Rogers were creating works for
Bert Williams and George Walker. The Williams and Walker
Company "crashed Broadway with an original musical. In
Dahomey, which went on to London, where it was presented
at a command performance at Buckingham Palace in 1903.
The companys next musical. In Abyssinia, with a book by
Jesse Shipp and Alex Rogers, opened in New York City with
a soaring musical number by Will Marion Cook known as
"Song of Reverence to the Setting Sun. One New York critic
blatantly described this work as a "little too high-brow for
a darky show.
Williams and Walker followed this work with Bandanna
Land, during which George Walker became ill and gave up
the theater. Bert Williams went alone into Air. Lode of Kole,
then later, at the invitation of Abraham Erlanger, joined the
cast of the Follies.
To my knowledge, Bert Williams was the only black artist
who worked in the Broadway theater between the years 1910
and 1917. Black people were excluded from Broadway as per-
fonners and patrons. Nor was this an accident. It was a product
of the sabotaging of the Reconstruction Era, of the same type
of backlash faced by black people in the United States today.
The United States Supreme Court was then an oracle for the
rights of white people and rampant racism, highlighted by
its Plessy V. Ferguson decision, in which it upheld the separate-
but-equal doctrine. The American power structure had placed
a "badge on color, and it became fashionable to attack black
people. Lynch mobs rode the southern night, and Jim Crow
laws appeared on the statute books of southern states. Race
riots flared in cities, and the rape of tlie black American con
tinued.
Big business assiuned control of tlie American tlieater. A
powerful group known as the Theatrical Tnist Syndicate took
control of all bookings, hirings, and firings. They punished
prominent white stars who failed to cooperate with them, forc
ing the great Sarah Bernhardt and Mrs. Dwight Fiske to per
form in second-rate theaters. This, then, was the tone of the
nation of the robber barons.
The attack on black people in New York City was merciless.
WTiite hoodlums crashed into black homes, beating women and
children. Black workers had to meet on street comers and
walk home together to prevent attacks. This type of terror
made many black people welcome the black development of
the community known as Harlem.
From 1910 through 1917, black theatrical artists worked pri
marily in the Harlem area. In 1909, writer-actor-producer Eddie
Hunter offered shows at the Crescent Theatre, on the site
of the present-day Lenox Terrace apartments. Many of the
shows produced at the Crescent were by Mr. Hunter, notably
Going to the Races and The Battle of Who Run. There were
also such ventures as Harry Lawrence Freemans opera An
African Kraal. And down the street, near Lenox Avenue, stood
the Lincoln Theatre, where Henry Kramer and S. H. Dudley
had their plays produced.
White America is paradoxical. Inconsistencyand, indeed,
ambivalenceis its middle name when it comes to black people.
It wants black people off to themselves in slave cabins, shacks,
ghettos; wants to hear them sing the blues and spew out
their hatred of white America, yet white America is compelled
to follow black people into these areas, wanting to know what
they are thinking, wanting to be loved and understood by
black people. It is, indeed, the modem slave system, the old
plantation system updated. It is a modem translation of the
slavemaster who beat his slaves, then wanted them to love
him. In fact, one can get Freudian here in terms of love-hate
relationships . . .
At any rate, white people followed black people to Harlem
to see shows and sit in black night clubs. In 1913, when
J. Leubrie H ills Darktown Follies opened at the Lafayette
Theatre, on Seventh Avenue and i32d Street, one critic vôte:
"It looked like a Broadway opening. Florenz Ziegfeld bought
the Finale of that show for use in his own Follies. Another
Lafayette show, Darkydom, by Aubrey Lyles and Flournoy
Miller, saw many of its sketches sold to Broadway.
Now, a note must be added here in terms of the Black
Aesthetic. At the outset, these Harlem ventures were black
indeedcreated by black people for the enjoyment of black
people. In short, jokes could be heard and music played and
sung in terms of the black idiom. But the invasion by whites
into the Harlem area brought rank commercialism to the fore.
Many black artists changed their repertories to conform to
what whites expected of them. Here we see the pleasing of
whites, expressed too often by the most militant of blacks
in these terms: "YouVe got to deal with whites because they
have the money. And this philosophy undercut and vitiated
the movement of a people in the direction of creating a truly
black theatrical form.
But the excitement and vitality of black life was too ap
parent for a dramatist to ignore. And so Eugene O'Neill wrote
his The Emperor Jones, which I consider a bad play with
a magnificent acting role for a Negro. It was performed by
Charles Gilpin at the Provincetown Playhouse in 1920. This
was the same Mr. Gilpin who had appeared in Abraham
Lincoln in 19 17 and marked the Negro performers return to
the downtown area. The latter work, along with Ridgely Tor
rence's Three Plays for a Negro Theatre in 19 17 indicated that
white dramatists saw the dramatic possibilities of Negro hfe.
In 1921, Shuffle Along, by Aubrey Lyles and Flournoy Miller,
with music and lyrics by Noble Sissle and Eubie Blake, opened
in New York and became a smash hit. It laimched the period
that came to be known at the Black Renaissance, in which
black-authored books, sculpture, and music held sway. Several
editions of Shuffle Along followed, as well as Blackbirds. In
1923, Eddie Himter's How Come? was seen on Broadway with
that great jazz musician Sidney Bechet.
Many fine black playwrights appeared during this period.
Willis Richardson, author of The Chipwomaiis Fortune; Gar
land Anderson, author of Appearances; Wallace Thurman, co
author of Harlem; and Eulalie Spence and Randolph Edmonds
had their work performed. These were serious writers at a time
when the musical theater was in vogue. Their work was fol
lowed into the nineteen thirties and forties by such plays as
Langston Hughes s Mulatto and Hall Johnson s Run, Little Chil
dren, both seen on Broadway; and in Harlem there were works
by J. Augustus Smith, Rudolph Fisher, George Norford, Abram
Hill, William Ashley, and Ferdinand Voteur. Some of these plays
were directed by Dick Gampbell at the Rose McClendon Players
Workshop. The American Negro Theatre later produced the
plays of Abram Hill, Theodore Browne, and Owen Dodson,
and it is said that veteran actor John Proctor practically wrote
Anna Lucasta for the American Negro Theatre.
In the nineteen fifties there were numerous plays: William
Branch's A Medal for Willie and In Splendid Error; Alice
Childress' Just a Little Simple, Gold Through the Trees, and
Trouble in Mind; Theodore Ward's John Brown; Louis Peter
son's Take a Giant Step; Sidney Easton's Miss Trudie Fair;
Sallie Howard's The Jackal; as well as plays by Virgil Richard
son, Gertrude Jeanette, Oliver Pitcher, Harold Holifield, Julian
Mayfield, Ossie Davis, and this writer.
Broadway saw Charles Sebree's Mrs, Patterson, Langston
Hughes's hilarious Simply Heavenly was first seen off Broadway;
then it moved to Broadway. In 1959 came Lorraine Hansberrys
first play, A Raisin in the Sun, a smash hit that won the
New York Drama Critics' Circle Award and set into motion
a series of critiques that reverberate until the present. What Miss
Hansberry wrote was an honest, moving, human drama, and
she well deserved the acclaim accorded her. What she did not
deserve was the many misinterpretations of her work. For
example, some critics said openly that this play about a ghetto
ized black family was a Negro Cherry Orchard* or a Negro
Awake and Sing,** Louis Peterson faced the same indignity when
some critic wrote that his Take a Giant Step was a Negro
Ah, Wilderness.^ Such categorizing is unique to the Black Aes
thetic and the black experience. One can search volumes of
criticism and never see such statements as Chekhovs The Sea
Gull being a Russian W ild Duck'* or Maxwell Anderson's Winter-
set being an American Hamlet." There is, indeed, an attempt,
conscious or unconscious or subconscious, to reduce the Black
Aesthetic to an imitative level, to deny it its originalityl
The success of Miss Hansberrys work brought waves of
scripts allegedly dealing with the black experience, written,
of course, by whites. Ironically, it was six years before Miss
Hansberry had another play done on Broadway. This was
The Sign in Sidney Brusteins Window, and she died of cancer
during its run.
Miss Hansberrys work was monumental in terms of com
mitment, of standing up and being counted." She was positive
and unflinching, deadly serious, and, in the words of her col
league Alice Childress, She did not wear the garments of this
world loosely." Another colleague, Julian Mayfield, described
her as . . . a ball of fire, visiting places as though she had
only one time to do so." It is almost simplistic to sayand,
indeed, deserves an apologythat she created for a broad
audience the reality of the black experience in the drama.
I say this with apology, for, having known her, I know she
would say, So did many others before me."
Between and after A Raisin in the Sun and The Sign in
Sidney Brusteirs Window, there were other Negro-authored
works that reached professional stages. Ossie Davis' Burile Vic
torious romped onto the Broadway stage. Ballad for Bimshire,
which I wrote with Irving Burgie (Lord Burgess), opened in
the downtown area. There were also William Hairston's A
Walk in Darkness, Langston Hughes's Tambourines to Glory,
Adrienne Kennedy's The Funny House of a Negro, the James
V. Hatch-C. Bernard Jackson musical Fly, Blackbird, and Ballad
of the Winter Soldier, which I wrote with John Oliver Killens.
The civil rights movement was in liigh gear by then, and
people were interested in what black people had to say
or at least in what they thought black people had to say
if it conformed to what they ivanted them to say.
By this time, however, white America was doing some trem
bling. Someone managed to get the message that the plays
black writers had been writing for many years had at their
very hearts the reality of the saying, We don t want to get
integrated into a burning building. That did itl That spelled
rejection of white values and white people. And the last thing
the American white man can stand is re/ecffonespecially by
his slave. What else, indeed, would make him think he is
a man miless he had a poor slave? The martini he has late
afternoon wears off by morning, but the slavethe slave should
be there.
He wasn't there, and the young crop of black writers let him
know why the slave wasn't there. LeRoi Jones ripped at his
values in Dutchman and held his precious white woman up
to be a sex-teaser, slanderer, and a false-faced murderer. Then
Jones turned around, in The Toilet, and told him his society
was a foul toilet, and in The Slave he told him he had a
slave system. James Baldwin stuck daggers farther into him
with Blues for Mr, Charlie and The Amen Corner, and he
began to wonder what was going on with these young black
writers that he had promoted. While he was wondering, Douglas
Turner Ward brought Happy Ending and Day of Absence to
tlie stage. Then there followed the works of Ron Milner, Ed
Bullins, Marvin X, Ben Caldwell, Paul Harrison, William Welling
ton Mackey, Clifford Mason, Ted Shine, Larry Neal, Sarah
Fabio, Lonne Elder, and others. And I suspect that the Amer
ican white man began to wonder: W/io is working here to
please meF*
The question, of course, arises as to whether or not the
black man has ever really worked here to please the white
man. The question remains as to whether or not tactics were
not involved in a country that talks democracy and practices
totalitarianism on every level. The question this projects is the
following: Has the black man given up on the subtlety he
practiced during the minstrel period, the musical-comedy pe
riod, and the well-made-play period? Has he said: You folks
don't understand art, so lets get out here and fight it out?
It is a tantalizing thought. I do not pretend that I have
an answer to that, but my suspicion is that subtlety and in
nuendo will not be the tools of black theater writers for a long
time to come. I have a hunch that in this era, when we see
more and more encroachments on civil liberties, and attacks
on the press and on political groups, we shall realize the
warnings raised not only by the present crop of black writers
but those of years gone by. In his marvelous play about Fred
erick Douglass and John Brown, In Splendid Error, playwright
William Branch has Douglass speaking to one of his characters,
Loguen:
Then, tell me, Loguen, how long this night? How long this
dark, dark night when no man walks in freedom, without
fear in this cradle of democracy, no man whos black? How
will it happen, what will we have to do? Nat Turner tried
it with guns and he failed. Dred Scott went to tlie high
courts, and they hurled him back into slavery. Old John said
it must be by blood, and tonight he lies wounded in a Virginia
prison. When will it end, Loguenhow long this night?
Loguen answers slowly: Douglass, this I believe as surely
as God gives me breath to speak it: No man lives in safety
so long as his brother is in fear. Once arouse consciousness of
that and there will be those living and those dead, there
will be guns and blood and the high courts, too. . . . But it
will come. I may not be here to see it, Dough\ss, but it
will come.
And Douglass says: How often do I wonder?
How often do I wonder when tlie Black Aesthetic is no
longer dependent upon defensive action, no longer dependent
upon working here to please you. How often, indeed, do I
wonder, for tlie freedom of that Black Aestlietic might send
our art forms soaring into undreamed-of realms beyond the
petty commercialism that makes a mockery of art. Indeed,
I wonder:
How long this night?
B LA C K T H E A T E R -G O HOME!
Ronald Milner
If a new black theater is to be bom, sustain itself and

justify its own being, it must go home. Go home psychically,
mentally, esthetically, and, I think, physically.
Now what does all that mean? First off, what do I, myself,
mean by a new black theater? I mean the rituaUzed reflection
and projection of a unique and particular w ay of being, bom
of the unique and particular conditioning of black people leasing
time on this planet controlled by white-men; and having some
thing to do with the breaking of that leasing-syndrome. A
theater emerging from artists who reahze that, for black people
of this world, and, specifically, tliis country, every quote uni
versal human malady, dilemma, desire, or wonder, is, by the
heat of the pressure of white-racism, compounded and enlarged,
agitated and aggravated, accented and distilled to make tliat
omni-suffusing, grinding sense of being we once called the blues
but might now just term: blackness. From tliis peculiar and
particular extra-dimension of being, of experiences, of condition
ing, will come the kind of theater Fm looking for.
Out of the faet that something as universal as tlie inner-
drive and desire for suecess takes on a different shade, another
prick-point, when it is beneath a black skin; there are some
Black Theater^-Go Home! 307
strange bi-level goals, some other, further obstacle considerations
involved. Out of the fact that even Love vibrates to these
ultra-earthy subterranean accents. Love for family, for woman,
for friend, for self, are all touched somehow, somewhere, by this
infra-shadow. And it is from this deep shadow that will come
this new theater I am seeing; come in many brilliant new
forms of enlightenment, illumination.
It will be a theater having to do with love of ones self,
and ones personal, national, and international family; with
wariness and hatred of ones personal, national, and international
enemies; with, ideally, points as to how to break their grip
and splatter their power.
Now, let me stay right in here a minute. I want to make
sure I get across at least some hint of all the levels I see
here; try a couple more parables, examples, simihes, or what
ever. All-right? So, lets take the French Film, Black Orpheus.
A sweet, bright, touching thing. (Just good to see a woman
like that in full color). But to make it Afro-American Orpheus
there would have to be some extending and deepening of
dimensions. Understand me? A writer in the new black theater
might want to make the Hell, the Death, the girls going into
the White-World, rejecting not only Orpheus but all other cats
and things black. That would be the Hell. And Orpheus going
to get her back with just courage and con and a song would
really be something, wouldnt it? And how could he not look
back at the past, at the promises of the Devil? Yeh, deep
stuff. Tragic. And neither Shaw, ONeill, nor any of those
other great ones, could write it. Not within this level of black
ness Im talking about. I can almost feel some of you thinking:
Racism, pure racism. Well, I dont know, now. All the universal
implications, messages, of the tale are still there. What this
imaginary writer has done is to put Hell up on Earth where
it belongs; and say that it has something to do vrith rejecting
And if there is racism in it, it only makes it more validly of
your own people and images for other people and images.
this time and of this world; Your fire driving others fires out
of your brain.
Now that little adaptation points at just one level of what
Im visualizing. But there will be so many other levels coming
simultaneously. Levels of love and joy and strength and courage.
Like, how did bighearted, big-bellied George Jones, this eleva
tor-operator, PuUman-porter, foundry-flunl^^, keep that deep
clean laughter going?Raise all those kids and keep that strong
groovy woman swept all those years on it? How did he do
it? How come everybody in the barbershop, poohoom, work-
house, and everywhere is glad to see him coming? Turning
to him to warm their psychic and spiritual hands? How?
Why? Who? What? Cant you see him, in a blue-light, sitting
up on the side of the bed, plotting next weeks bill-dodging
and bill-paying, with aU of them asleep, except maybe her
lying there touching his back now and then, telling him to
get some rest? But in the morning, with still no answers in
sight, hes got the right glovdng laugh of confidence to send
those kids on out ready to run through those prejudice teachers
and all that other crapto look for something he never saw.
Now how does he do that? He knows whats happening.
Hes been tlirough a tliousand hunky overseers on a thousand
poisonous jobs. Hes had to dodge and stall the buzzards so
long he can smell em a month away. Nowhow? Hes some
huge, terrific soul stretching his low-ceihnged cage all out of
shapedefeating it even while it lolls him. A peculiar and
particularly tragic-hero; made both tragic and heroic by his
way with a particularly peculiar poisonous situation. Getting
George Jones, and that deep resilient lady of liis and their
indigo moments, on stage, is being in anodier level of the
new black theater. So many levels. All levels.
Because there is no personal style, or hang-up, or revelation,
that cant be worked out witliin and through the stances and
situations of black people; tlirough the questions and answers
in the Right-Now relevance frequency we must tune ourselves
and our audiences into in order to nurture race, self, and art.
Black TheaterGo Home! 309
A writer coming this way wont lack in his work any of those
universals everyone screams aboutnot if he has any in him;
(if you look for em youll find em even in the comic strips)
but he will become involved in the projection of a certain
uniqueness that is his hard-earned birthright.
Now, any of you who know about vmting, or about speech-

making, probably realized that that was the return of the
bridge back there: that stanza ending in that riflF ofrace,
self, art. That brings me back to where I started. Where I
said that if this theater is to be it mustpsychically, mentally,
aesthetically, and I feel, even physicallygo home. Im sure
you know now what I mean by going home psychically and
mentally. But, just in case, let me try to run a short, quick
summary. By psychicalltj, I mean coming away from your
dues-paying to all those outside influences and going into
the real, black, YOU, by way of those places, people, and
experiences which began and had the most to do with the
shaping of what is now yourselfmean, making works, theater,
out of that and, in doing it, extending and validating that
particular psychic. By mentally, I mean understanding that
you and the experiences of you are in time and history col
lective repetitions, have been repeated and multiplied many
times; so, as artists, you are to try to find the terms, and the
pictures, which vrill most simply clarify those experiences and
that knowledge for the yous who do not, or could not, under
stand what is, or was, happening to you, and to future yous
who will need to be warned and directed in terms from
inside tliat level we call: blacknessfor it is within that
level that most of the added, making or breaking, weight
comes.
Going home aesthetically will follow naturally after those first
two stepssince your aesthetics come out of your mental and
psychic environment. So I wont go into the demand for new
dynamics, for a new intensity of language and form, that the
material and the desired atmosphere will make on you; ex
cept to say that the further you go home, the more startlingly
new and black the techniques become: Musicians are pointing
that out to us.
Now, going home physically with the new theater means
just that. Probably I should have started here. For this new
theater must be housed in, sustained and judged by, and be
a useable projection of, and to, a black community! The com-
mimity itself will be the theater, and the black artists house
of drama like a weirdly fixed and pointed looking-glass, a
light-prism casting warnings, directions, fruitful memories and
marvelous imaginings on the walls of the doomed, or soon
to be recreated, buildings. Right there in the community are
your materials, your situations and conflictsrelevant and power
ful.
When you stand on those streets feeling the human whimper
ing going on under the beasts muzzle, when the myriad poisons
are part of your natural everyday elements, the needs will
either come bursting out of your pens onto your stages, or
they 11 drive you sick with your own faggot cowardice.
The need to displace and replace pale and dark villains
and heroes, ideas and concepts, images and symbols; the need
for defined and dramatized, hugely-drawn, clearly shown, walk
ing and talking details as to how to organize community,
county, nation, world for a shattering attack against the most
voracious power-machine the world has ever known. Details!
Not stunning poetic generalities. Details! Details should be
moving around those stages in all kinds of explicit images;
huflBng and puflBng and working themselves out of the kill
ing situationsor showing why they cannot! Pictures of who
and what was the past; how it was called and who answered,
and why it all went down. Who were those heroes tlie lads
have got to know of and believe in before they can believe
tliat you, or any other black man, has anytliing to tell them?
What were the betrayals? How does Judas look when hes
black? Detailed pictures of who and what is domg tlie killing
now. And how itawesome as it might seemcan be maneu
Black Theater--Go Homel 3 11
vered into deathtraps. All the while youre singing about that
woman, that buddy, those personal art-promises you made to
yourself. All and any of it placed right in the context in
which you found it, and from which you can only free it
through direct confrontationthat is, Americas ball-cutting racist
vise.
Youve grabbed every piece of beauty, thought, insight and
style youve ever achieved in your life while dodging that crap.
And to put it out of your work before it is out of your life
is making a lie of your artwhich is nothing but your life
(thoughts, feelings, seeings, imaginings, doings) sent out to
others with an imposed re-order. You will never have a theater,
an art, a life really representative of the soul-beats and desire
lines of you and your kind until you and your kind have
come together and pooled desires, plans, resources and capa
bilities to throw oE the jailers.
The people, the communities, are trapped in both unconscious

suicide and subtle, dedicated genocide. You have a tool that
might be able to help. Whatre you going to do? Go out on
a bridge halfway between realities and blow to yourself? Or
serenade the downtown people and catch the pennies they
throw at your feet? I hope not.
Speaking of penniesand we have tothere is also a definite
practical, economical, reason for the new theater going physi
cally to the black communities. That is that Broadway doesnt
want your blackness, wasnt designed or intended for it; def
initely doesnt want any strange new forms inspired by that
very blackness. She is a contented fat white cow. If you can
slip in and milk her for a minutewell, then, more blackpower
to you brother. But, Im telling youits a weird price shes
asking; She wants you to be a singing hyena, dancing on tlie
graves of yourself and everyone you know. (Serious things,
dramas, are things that come from some other country, some
other century, and even then are best set in a mad-house.
And (quote) black-comedy has nothing to do with Afro-Ameri
cans!) Broadway cannot support you, brothers and sisters; it
would be against their interests.
If youre thinking that Off-Broadway is a haven, think again.
It is, finally, as a perfect example of what America would
have its artists involved in: a zoo, with a carnival, where the
animals and the freaks play delightfully, curiously, shockingly,
with lights, colors, words, forms, gestures, always with some
ingrown aspect of themselves, never with anything in the outer-
world should any relevance be uttered or implied it is usually
done so with the utmost obscurity. Now and again, I have to
admit, something disturbs that tranquil scene down there, some
thing real and relevant-related to other peoples livesseeps
in; then everyone does a double-take and goes back wondering
if maybe something could really be starting down there after
all. But its usually just something or someone healthy getting
ready to break-out of there; nothing to be alarmed about; wont
happen often. To round off my thinking on Off-Broadway, I tell
you that art for arts sake is: incest! And the offsprings of that
are usually strange and feeble.
We, black people, desperately need a healthy natural art-
form: art coming from an intercourse with life! Our lives! As
we have, and must, live them. In order for our art, theater,
to provide this for us, it must become an organic, functioning
part of our communities. As black artists we must go home
in every way; go wherever it is we most feel indigenous and
organic and, therefore, a natural observer and commentor. It
is there that our talents must pay dues and spend dividends.
The communities, the people, can sustain, assist, and inspire
us to essential and brilliant levels in our new black theater,
our new visions. But only if we assist and inspire them to the
same levels in the new black theater of tlieir li\"ing, to new
visions of their lives.
Ronald Milner, autlior of the article, Black Theater Go Hoinel, is aii-
thor-in-residence at Lincoln University (Pennsylvania). His full-length
play. W h o 's G o t H is O w n , was produced at the New Lafayette Theatre in
Harlem last fall. The play had been perfonned earlier at tlie American
Place Theatre in New York,
ON B LA C K TH EATER
Clayton Riley
I, Random Nigger Notes {Category D for Deception)
Insignificant crimes are carried out in the realm, in Americaare

the denial of truth and reality for purposes no sane people
would fail to recognize. Cultural lawbreakers, liars, and thieves
must be called by their rightful names whether or not dressed
in Balenciaga originals, fakes by Cardin and others, drifting as
merchants and purchasers of death in Broadway graveyards,
cemeteries called the LinCON SSSSSentah. (Make diem mem
ory, these freak palaces; let them bum.)
Wish them a shambles, smoldering wrecks, even for the
Black prides of the missionary ethic; hope such places pass
away quickly.
In such arenas, final resting place for those foolish enough
to practice or take seriously the distortion called Christianity,
Blacks, too, have longed to be welcome. Which is simply to
reconstruct ambition by Blacks in all other places, where
definition and acceptance demand whites sit patiendy as juries
their confusions hanging out, glazed eyes wishing to be any
where else.
These niggers, pretending to understand Shakespeare and
Kentucky Williams, or whatever his name really is. History as
a blind guide, spooks wandering in the general direction of
someone elses muse, seeking, out of experiences designed pre
cisely to murder them, some measured states of grace. Yeah.
Refined colored people imagining the limitless value of playing
King Lear in their old age, Hamlet in their nearly endless
BOYhood. Or constructing for themselves an image reflecting
the cracked mirror of an oppressor, aping his contempt for
those who look exactly like these mimics, these copycoons.
As with the eightieth annual production of The Glass Menag
erie at the Harlem Yor Blood versions of Fiddler on the Roof,
Insignificant crimes, you say? Second-rate shopliftingno need
to press charges. Let them be; assure their lives. And look
elsewhere for grand larceny, first-degree murder.
Somewhere around 63, bands of crazed field hands slip into
silver cities, sleepy golden villages, stoned on a new communion
wine, covered by the night and their own sense of darkness.
Thieves. Outlaws. The only heroes a thoroughly corrupt society
(America owns the patent) can logically produce. Bandits.
Ready to define the culture for the honest listener. As Bird
attempted, as Lady Day failed at trying; as with Coltrane,
Max Roach, others who bore genius into the wreckage of the
life offered them (Miles, in a strange way, breaking the pat
tern.)
Calling themselves playwrights, B L A C K actors, throwing some
new shit in the fan. From this point in time we can measure,
beyond any terminology fashioned by anyone else but ourselves,
past any previous measures for success or failure, a fresh design
for artistic living.
Trail-blazing given a new meaning, frontier land-grabbing
offered a new shape. And were there no losers, nobody running
a game on the territorial inhabitants? Oh, yes. Some of them,
too. Without talent or honor. Black Frankensteins, as well. Rub
bing everybody the wrong way, and teaclung nothing. Far more
important, however, is the fact, the reahty of emerging forces
and artistic personalities who have shaped what is today a black
On Black Theater 315
theater whose strength resides primarily in the fact that it need
not be compared to any other. What is more, it needs no
borrowed standard of excellence or worth to be sustained. Its
quarrels and loves are distinguished by a vitality that the
general run of American theater does not possess and, in all
likeliliood, has not witnessed in the past.
Black theater, as opposed to the theater of Negro participa
tion, has the distinct advantage of being responsible for its own
mistakes and triumphs, has a unique degree of perceptive
possibility and potential based on the fact of being peopled
by a membership grown to adulthood with a clarity about
AmericaBlack and whitedeveloped on the one hand by an
exclusion resulting in a forced awareness, and by a self-aware
ness proceeding from a pride in knowing intimately of survival
and endurance.
It is often an unsubde, relentlessly candid theater, brutalized
and brutalizing in the candor displayed, unsettling in the way
it exposes truths long submerged and disquieting information we
have deliberately closeted away. Wlien functioning at maximum,
black theater self-regulates with the rhythm of the lives re
sponsible for its being, charges and recharges with a beat even
those of us who can't really dance (but fake up a storm)
dig for the recollections inspired, the yesterdays rediscovered
and explained.
Black theater, if it served no other purpose, would prove
invaluable for the steps it already has taken to legitimize for
the illegitimate all phases and facets of their lives; in the
most definitively humanist terms, it has stated with an arresting
immediacy the essential worth of lives called valueless by those
who have no right whatsoever to establish standards for any
thing but the technology of destruction. Black theater has, as
perhaps nothing eke but Black music has, worked to show
Black people what they look like, and how much it is possible
to love themselves for being what they are, for looking as
they do. Black literature, whatever victories it has sought and/or
won, has not really managed to accomplish this. Film, as yet,
3 i6 The Black Aesthetic
has not had the time to do so. These forms, in addition, have
not developed their own language and rhythm, as has the Black
theater. (Not in terms serviceable to the nations Blood, cer
tainly.)
The legitimacy I speak of can be seen in Black poetry,
too, particularly in the spoken form, which is, by definition, a
specialized rendering of a new (for this country) channel of
theatrical expression.
That legitimacy implies, as well, an essential and previously
unexplored region of blacknessdeterminedly pursuing what
self* can mean when we want to know. We are the descend
ants of people whose survival of this masked and often well-
disguised asylum, this camouflaged dungeon, makes them, by
standards we ourselves must propose and maintain, the most
complete and enviable examples of contemporary heroism. In
recognizing and, indeed, glorifying our existence, we do honor
to those who produced us.
II. Artists and Outlaws
When LeRoi Jones presented to the world a one-act play

called Dutchman, he struck a discordant note on an abandoned
gong, a note residing within the chambers holding all our
music, all our melodic frames of reference. The play introduced
a vision of what had always been (within) and what would
now stretch and exercise itself beyond all former artistic limita
tions. For the middle sixties, Dutchmans language was a shock
ing displaythe most bluntly communicative and blackest out
pouring of a vibrant heart. It was a language steeped in the
purest traditionalism of Americas original bandit population
nigger words, a crackling brush fire of secret native intelligence
and total description. It stabbed America in every private place
and part, quickly, with the urgent force of total commitment
to such truths as the nation surely knew but hoped never to
make public.
Clay, a middle-class suburban Negro youth, suffers an en
counter with a white female representative of the country's
continually denied but genuinely truthful level of sanity, and
plays games with her on a subway train. Word games. A proces
sion of documented examples of his precisely fonnulated train
ing as well-spoken, well-mannered issue of a colonized tribal
group. From his dress to his speech. Clay is all America could
want to claim as a product of its emasculating social machinery.
He is, perhaps more than all those imemployed gas-station at
tendants who double as the ruling class's assassin corps in
Mississippi, the being who makes the system work. He wants
no trouble, will sacrifice self-respect in small but lifelong doses
toward tliat end, and in his carefully developed and thoroughly
contrived sense of himself as charming and debonair, we bear
witness to the nation's force of arms in shaping life among its
house-servant class.
Jones wrote, in the introductory portion, of Clay's appearance
a character who possessed both the ability to be painfully
recognizable to blacks who observed him, and one who was
completely believable and welcome to the consciousness of all
whites who watched his life imfold in perfectly understandable,
pleasing blandness before them.
Here was a colored fellow who didn't (quite obviously) carry
a knifenot surely in the classically flat pockets of an Ivy
League suit. Certainly, then, he could be beaten in a "fair"
fight, if it came to that, if things got out of hand, as they seem
always to do with even the best of "these people.
Moreover, he was reading a bookalways an excellent sign;
can't be plotting much, with his nose in some approved reading
material. Wears glasses, too; a sign, perhaps, that he's not too
fit physically, not outstanding in the sheets, hopefully.
And he bears the girl's eventual insults quite well. Good, good.
LULA. What've you got that jacket and tie on in all this heat
for? And why're you wearing a jacket and tie like that? Did
your people ever bum witches or start revolutions over the price
of tea? Boy, those narrow-shoulder clothes come from a tra
dition you ought to feel oppressed by. A three-button suit. What
right do you have to be wearing a three-button suit and striped
tie? Your grandfather was a slave; he didn't go to to Har
vard.
. . come on, Clay. . . . let's do the thing. . . . Clayl Clayl You
middle-class black bastard. Forget you social-working mother for
a few seconds and let's knock stomachs. Clay, you liver-lipped
white man. You would-be Christian. You ain't no nigger, you're
just a dirty white man. . . .
. . . That's all you know . shaking that wildroot cream-
oil on you knotty head . . so full of white man's words.
Yet the Clay we assign to the worst dreams we have, gets it all
together. Brings things down front. Works his show.
CLAY.. . . you just shut the hell up . . . just shut up. You don't
know anything. So just keep you stupid mouth closed.
Shit, you don't have any sense, Lula, nor feelings either. I could
murder you now. Such a tiny ugly throat. I could squeeze it
flat, and watch you turn blue, on a humble. For dull kicks.
And all these weak-faced ofays squatting aromid here, staring
over their papers at me. Murder them too. Even if they ex
pected it. That man there. . . . I could rip that Times right
out of his hand, as skinny and middle-classed as I am, I could
rip that paper out of his hand and just as easily rip out his
throat. It takes no great effort. For what? To kill you soft
idiots? You don't understand anything but luxury.
. . . let me be who I feel like being. Uncle Tom. Thomas.

Whoever. It's none of your business. You don't know anything
except what's there for you to see. An act. Lies. Device. Not
the pure heart, the pumping black heart. You don't ever know
that. And I sit here, in this buttoned-up suit, to keep myself
from cutting all you throats.
You great liberated whorel You fuck some black man and right
away you're an expert on black people. What a lotta shit that
is. The only thing you know is that you come if he bangs you
hard enough. And tliat's alll
Spiels for days, and for the cotton-chopping spirit in every
one of us. (Even Uncle Roy of the EN -D O U BLE HEYl has
indicated, in recent times, his ability to get an attitude. )
In the plays final stanza, Lula stabs Clay to death, and fixes
her make-up in anticipation of another victim, who shortly ap
pears and sits down near her.
Clay s death, on the heels of his explosive great gettin up
insured the plays success insofar as white audiences were con
cerned (dying is an act consistently present in Joness work),
who overlookedas was correct and necessary for them to do
the rambling code messages throughout the piece, messages only
Blood could really imderstand. (Jones's intention, one must
assume.)
Listen:
Old bald-headed ofays popping their fingers . . . and don't know

yet what they're doing. They say, "I love Bessie Smith. And
dont even understand that Bessie Smith is saying, Kiss my ass,
kiss my black unruly ass. Before love, suffering, desire, anything
you can explain, she's saying, and very plainly, Kiss my black
ass. And if you don't know that, it's you that doing the kiss
ing.
All the hip white boys scream for Bird. . . . they sit there
talking about the tortured genius of Charlie Parker. Bird would've
played not a note of music if he just walked up to East Sixty-
seventh Street and killed the first ten white people he saw.
. . . if Bessie Smith had killed some white people she wouldn't

have need that music. She could have talked very straight and
plain about the world.
Now who understands all this, whom is this intended for?
My people's madness. Hahl That's a laugh. My people. They

dont need me to claim them. They got legs and arms of their
own. Personal insanities. Mirrors. They don't need all those words.
They dont need any defense. . . . tell this to your father, who's
probably the kind of man who needs to know at once. So he can
plan ahead. Tell him not to preach so much rationalism and cold
logic to these niggers. Let them alone. Let them sing curses at you
in code and see your filth as simple lacklack of style. Don't make
the mistake, through some irresponsible surge of Christian charity,
of talking too much about the advantages of Western rationalism,
or the great intellectual legacy of the white man, or maybe they'll
begin to listen. And then, maybe one day, youll find they actually
do understand exactly what you are talking about, all these fantasy
people. All these blues people. And on that day, as sure as shit,
when you really believe you can "accept them into your fold, as
half-white trusties late of the subject peoples . . . with no more
blues except the very old ones, and not a watermelon in sight,
the great missionary heart will have triumphed, and all of those
ex-coons will be stand-up Western men, with eyes for clean hard
useful lives, sober pious and sane, and they'll murder you. They'll
murder you, and have very rational explanations. Very much like
your own. They'll cut you throats and drag you out to the
edge of your cides so the flesh can fall away from your bones,
in sanitary isolation.
Jones brought to the theater a remarkable, stunning poetry.

Black sensibilities defined beyond the traditionally acceptable
American caldron. Prior to Dutchman, even the most iconoclastic
white playwrights did not dare to utilize language as Jones did
could not dare, in factand no one had every presented a more
concise and devastating view of what America is as opposed
to what it pretends to be. The play was written to run approxi
mately thirty-five minutes. In that time, in the characters of
Clay and Lula, there is an oflFering of precision-tooled master
craftmanship revealing all we could want to know of one facet
of Black life in an encounter with a portion of the national state
of mind.
So powerful is the work that no production of it seems
able to completely capture and relate all the symbols within,
not any production of it that I've seen or played in, that
is. A diflScult work, because it demands so mucli, because
it speaks in shifting tenninologiescodes, to be suresome of
wliich are more clarified by reading than by presentation. The
complexities implicit for the actor preparing to work as Clay
begin with the difficulty of playing (as nearly all actors dis
like doing) an essentially unglamorous, certainly near-Tom, role
for a good deal of the short one-acter. The monologuethe
explosion near the end is relatively easy to playplays itself
to some extent, but the beginning, that sheepish, head-in-a-
book beginning, is a number. One measure of Joness genius
is this duality, intricately structured and realized in the vmting
of an extremely brief piece. In Lula, one confronts even more
complexity. Jones's text gives a perceptive actress the opportunity
to render seemingly idle chatter into a primer on the nation's
peculiar forms of sanity."
In another of his works. The Toilet, Jones pulled off the
incredible feat of bringing the world into the lavatory of a
public school (or, perhaps, vice-versa) and making the words
and activities there blaze with universal truths. Here, with out
rageously blunt, razor-sharp delineation, a group of Black youths
(and one non-black one) peel away the lies that protect Amer
ica from what has been done to them; the resulting exposure
brings into focus the frailties and the strengths proceeding from
lives shaped by an oppressive regime. Once again, in this play,
Jones displayed his brilliant facility with the language and
rhythm implicit in the life-style he explored. No one, with the
possible exception of E d Bullins, deals with the sound of black
life with more-formidable powers of persuasion. Even as Joness
design and purpose regarding his work have changedor been
redirected by himthe weight of his words and the soundness
of his dramatic structure have traveled well with him to new
stations. In his recent Great Goodness of Life, he has examined
the crippling effects of the black civil-service mentality with a
scalpel that somehow manages to penetrate with a retained
measure of love for the legions of black men (of whom my
father is one) who found in the Post Office some way to save
both their lives and their beliefs, at a cost too dear for calcula
tion. Court Royal, the protagonist, setdes for all time any ques
tions about the damage done and the price paid, when he
responds to an inquiry investigating whether or not he has
been harboring a criminal: Of course Tm not guilty. I work in
the Post OflBce. . . . you must have the wrong man, I work in
the Post Office. . . . IVe done nothing wrong, 1 work in the
Post Office. .
The criminal is, finally, Court Royals sonwho is, in turn,
all the sons of all those men who went oflE on all those terrible
mornings, mumbling to themselvesBadge, keys, do I have
everything?'and left so many of us wonder if the Post Office
was indeed the only safe haven in the world.
Great Goodness was, as is most of Jones's work, a magnificent
example of an artists ability to communicate in a manner
meant to force one to confront personal levels of awareness.
His work is relentlessly Black because it is concerned with a
response by Blacks, demands their attention, their recognition.
White audiences abandoned Jones when they discovered that
his primary concerns were not with them. Blacks moved toward
his art for precisely the same reason; what whites were not
intoso far as Jones was concernedcould turn Blood on for
having had their lives serve both as a source of inspiration and
congregation of review. In turning the theater onto new streets
Black streetsJones legitimized for many others the notion that
a play could be validated by the reaction of Black people
to it. He revamped a process in which the Black dramatist
needed a white decision on his work before anything Blacks
said about it had any relevance whatever.
The Black Arts Theater, which Jones was instnuncntal in
starting in Harlem, was of pivotal importance to the current
movement in Black drama. Although internal dissension ulti
mately brought the project to an end (with considerable assist
ance from outside sources in the local and federal governments),
the reality of a viable Black creative arena was furthered
by the fact of its existence. What Jones had begun with his
own w ork-in tenns of an artistic and cultural fonun distinctly
oriented to community interestsdeveloped into a notably larger
and more ambitions experience for Black writers, particularly
playwrights. For Jones s success, even that part of it growing
out of the masochistic homage paid him (and subsequently
withdrawn) by white liberal dilettantes, did much to create an
atmosphere and a confidence conducive to the emergence of other
artists. The difiSculties he experienced during a period when his
talents delighted downtown New York audiences, seemed to have
an effect of producing a body of work by new Black writers who
came to regard the stage as a proper, if not always easily handled,
proscenium from which all ranges and levels of defiance could
be moimted.
Such as Ed Bullins. And Ron Milner. Giants of a particular
movement. Recognizing life in Black America as an experience
without genuinely valuable creative documentation brings the
work of Bullins and Milner toward us with an attending and
awesome significance. Both writers have dealt with basic Black
folks, the people in the phrase a l l p o w e r t o , those souls
whose existence in this country touches all, I say all, bases in
the ball game, who know of Ufe from a continuing physical
confrontation with itno quarter ever given, no point missed
in the range of things: pain, joy, anguish, terror, loveall these;
the survivors, a collective will to continue in spite of, by all
means, with any tools, having defined morality, sophistication,
coinage, as attributes as well determined (if not better) by
the curriculum fashioned in the street as by any other.
Ed Bullins, with a one-act drama called Claras Old Man,
made terror and menace over into beauty: a South Philly
kitchen as a purgatorial chamber, splendid and profane cathe
dral-worshippers without prayer, concocting evil ceremonies,
riding off on the wine of their own communion. Here was
Bullins as a new force. In that kitchen a tableau, a wandering
ritual, as Clara, a young and attractive sister, brings home for
a visit an innocent. Jack, who just doesn't know, even when
faced with jeopardy, even when looking at Big Girl, Clara s
"old man, just cannot see until the hard ones from tlie block,
the neighborhood death merchantsteen street-hustlerstill
they come and bring the revelation and the end. Claras Old
Man as a mystery with no detective, as a suspenseful episode
fiUed with vibrating danger signs, remains a work of constant
and consummate elegance. Style. A gloomy luster is attached
to it throughout, the sort of fascination provoked by criminal
personalities in mohair, in alligators, in real and thorough dark
ness. BuUins revealed hereand has continued to reveala
nearly unparalleled ability to take lives he knows as he finds
them, to stick with them and not shrink from whatever horror
they may contain, thus creating in the worst** folks a belief
in themselves as legitimate human beings whose only credential
for being worthy of acknowledgement and respect is that they
live. They live, and more completely than most, with greater
risks and less hope. Their lives are maintained precariously, yet
are sturdy and vital; the fullest measmre of the beauty and pro
found nature of what they are resides, we know, in the realiza
tion that all Christian virtue and righteousness would cease to
be, were it not for the pimp and the whore, the thief and
the junkieall the criminal saints whose blasphemous acts allow
others to see themselves as practicers of goodness, citizens of
good will and charity, all because their crimes are carried
out in secret and bear no public scrutiny.
BuUins, with Gain* a Buffalo and In the Wine Time, took us
part way to the life, brought the rest to us. Both these plays
took a long, unhurried look at the world of blacks forgotten,
or deliberately ignored, or bothback-yard South Philly once
again, (W ine Time) and hustlers in Los Angeles (Buffalo) The
look was hard, straight. There was retained from his earlier
piece a unique ability to design a dramatic situation that
didnt need to depend simply on dialogue for tlie tense, some
times quiet, always boiling, human encoimters in liis work.
Again, aU about Black. With no apologies. With a front calcu-
kited to get him into trouble with wliite people who look for
reflections in his work and dont see tlie ones they remember
from lily ponds in the coimtiy and the long ago.
BuUins was profoundly influenced and greatly encouraged
On Black Theater 3^5
by the work of LeRoi Jones, and has, as is natural, moved
even further into drama than his predecessor. He (BuUins) is
as prolific a playwright as lives among us today, who writes
long as well as short, with equal facility. The only poor example
of his work I can recall is The Gentleman Caller, which was
a lazy efiFort he filled with masked and painted ritual figures
struggling amid the nation s mad living room, a play unlike
his previously acknowledged ones in its obviously derivative
quality, a kind of forced symbolism popular among self-styled
avant-gardists.
The power of BuUins" work liesCoin a Buffalo is, I feel,
the best examplein his bringing, indeed elevating, apparently
ruined lives (in this instance, a nomadic band of lifers and
their pimps), toward a profanely beautiful state of grace
without romanticizing them. His use of language is expansive
and brutal; he spares an audience (or himself) nothing in
this respect. And by exploring the Uves of his "faUen" heroines
and heroes so thoroughly, he carves through every clich and
presumption about those who lead Uves that many of us know
only through our dreams and speculations.
Completing the triumvirate of playwrights having the greatest
impact to date on the black theater, is Ron Milner. While the
body of his presented work is smaU, his gifts and his perceptions
are exceptionaUy largevast, let us say. In speaking of him,
we may refer only to Who*s Got His Own, a big, sprawling
family drama, and The Warning: A Theme for Linda, a shorter,
sprawling family drama. Milners forte and primary concern is
the black family, more particularly the black family with recog
nizable southern rootsblues, the Baptist rhythm in Uving, the
societal and imposed dislocationsexisting, often badly, in a
large city. Detroit, although specific mention of that Midwest
city is seldom pushed, seems to be the place for Milner.
He deals relentless hands of woe in these works, first with the
Bronson familymother, son, daughterin the aftermath of
the death of a husband and father who, in Ufe, had been that
incredibly complex, frustrated black personaUty James Baldwin
3^6 The Black Aesthetic
has detailed when he speaks of men putting their lives in a

fire every day of their lives. So it was, unquestionably, with
Tim Bronson. Milner made the man live, even though in his
casket (and, in some productions, the casket is on stage) when
the play begins. Rarely has a dead man spoken so eloquently
of his life, or had its intricate design articulated for him within
the context of a play. TTirough his son and daughter, whose
hatred and fear of their father has nearly squeezed their own
lives dry, we see the raging giant roaring around his home,
violently assaulting his children and woman in both word and
deed, and going ofi to work in the factory where he cleans
toilets for a living. His son, as a yoimg boy, had seen the
father who struck such notes of terror in his own house, mocked
as a lackey by the whites on his job. When, they asked of
Bronson, Sr., when are you going to bring your boy around
and teach him your trade?
A son cannot feel much more hate for a father than would
be induced by such a moment, could not endure much more
shame. Milner brought us aU home who had, for this or other
imprecise reasons, discovered our own fathers at some imbear-
able juncture, some destroyed or destroying instant. And Milner
went further, opened the familys closets and its wounds, a
daughter whose disastrous affair with a white college student
had resulted in a near-fatal abortion and a subsequent relation
ship with an imusually affectionate woman, and a mother who
could only counsel her children against blaming their father for
too much, for seeing in the past aU the possibility for claiming
vengeance on the future. TTou cant, says the mother, la y in
ambush for yesterday. . . . its gone, aint never coming back.
In a somewhat different way. The Warning foimd fruit on
the same plain, with a family essentiaUy composed of women
grandmother, motlier, and daughter. This was another instance
of a work abounding witli riches in the dialogue and the de
veloping characters. The work came dangerously close to being
anti-male (more to the point, anti-Black man), whidi, I now
tliink, is often tlie result of careless playing by the actors, and
a failure to explore the very subtle texture of Milner^s writing.
A mixture of symbolic and naturalistic references revealed in
Milners work an especially well-developed dual sense of drama
and black musicmusical BLA C K N ESS as a sturdy vehicle for
conveying a vision of our lives.
Vision. This, perhaps more than any other single quality, sets
Jones, BuUins, and Milner apart from others in the Black
theater movement What they see is not simply a photographic
view of the terrain, is not only an artistic duplication of the
facts contained in the L IF E ; the witness they bear leads
them to elaborate on the quality of blackness in this country
in a way that avoids the clinical approaches traditionally associ
ated with such efforts. Moreover, they all serve a new artistic
purpose, new for the reason that each has either begun at
or moved to the point of designing art best judged by black
audiences, while not necessarily excluding white ones. Jones
has managed to speak to the black middle class (a misnomer
if ever there was one, for being applied to a group of people
who constitute no class, but simply a cracked reflection of the
worst attributes of white America) in a way no writer has ever
managed to do. He has managed this, particularly in Dutchman
and Great Goodness of Life, by exposing the reality of the
falsehoods implicit in an existence structured to accommodate
evil and glorify inaction.
Bullins, by contrast, concentrates his sphere of concern upon
the so-called criminal element in Black America, the outlaws
whose hfe-style and maintenance of confrontations with the
terms of their existence make them the only true frontier
personalities and thoroughly honest people in the nation. (Genet
succeeds in like fashion to convince white people that more
than a little of their language, style, and social dispositions
emanate from the outlaw sensibility; thieves offer romantic
notions about courage, as do killers; homosexuals define the
limits of tragedy and a hopeless form of bravery.)
Bullins also has been able to deal with ordinary Black people,
street people, with an interest proceeding from genuine regard.
as opposed to the flabby emotions connoted by sociological

jargon-compassion, understanding, etc.
Through Milner, the Movement in Black Art has come to
recognize and turn toward, instead of away from, the central
ingredients that shaped so many Black personalities. The family
as a Black crucible where so much was formedand perhaps
deformed as wellbecomes a phenomenon from which new
strengths can be derived. Milner is responsible for many of the
heads sent drooping by the Moynihan Report rising up to look
with clearer eyes at where they, not the social scientists,
have come from.
What others? Who else?
A number of playvmghts have had productions of their work
offered in the growing community of Black theater artists across
the country. In New York, Ben Caldwells short one-acter The
First Militant Minister, which appeared as part of the off-
Broadway production called A Black Quartet, was a notable
work, well crafted and hilariously funny within the context
of a specific message. In it, a burglar is surprised into playing
the voice of God when a minister returns home during a heist.
As a satirical departure, it was a brief, grand tour de force.
IIL Where Else Are We Com iii From?
Black is, of course, more than theater. Or should be. One real
situation developingrecently developedis a belief on the part
of many new participants in the struggle that plays can rise
above the fact of being essentially limited things, incomplete
things, designed to be encountered, and enjoyed, and learned
from, and elevating, but more tlian anything else, constructed
to take a less than primary place on the priority scale. Theater
wall play a role, if it is Black enough, in shaping the consciousness
of black people, but at a level existing this side of activist
considerations: nobody s gonna see a play and go into the streets
to destroy the Guggenheim Museum (and it needs to fall),
because Uieater cannot deal \vith reality that specifically. Black
theater as a clarion (. . . an* TU hear the trumpet sound in
the momin* . . . ) is no more than a continuing instigation,
a provocation, an agitatorthe playground signifier (you re
member him) standing on the sidelines talking shit and getting
people fucked up. Can you dig it? Recognizing theater for
what it really is, an artifact, structured to take people away
from basics, from fundamentals, into a special kind of chapel
atmosphere for rituals and other procedures. Which is cool.
As long as we remember where w ere coming from. What
we can do with that particular aspect of our lives. Great Black
theater, like any other kind, can, and quite probably will,
leave in its wake the same rotting tenements, the same killers
of our dream, all the pain and loss we endure now. Awareness
pointing a finger at the scene for what it really isain't
hardly enough-
Black theater is a theater of warfare. What if the battle is
won? What do we do with an art form we have come to
revere beyond the framework in which it remains usable?
We must assign to theater a realistic place in a sector of
our lives, recognizing what it can and cannot accomplish. ( Sev
enth, maybe, on a scale of ten for living programs.) The vitality
growing among black playwrights, actors (or Liberators, as they
are called in Barbara Ann Teers National Black Theater), di
rectors, technicians, should not permit anyone the luxury of
drifting away from the harsh and unrelenting immediacy pres
ent in the lives around us, lives on the sidewalk instead
of in the third row.
One need only to read of the recent past in Negro theater-
read the patronizing nonsense of Doris E. Abramson in her book
'Negro Playwrights in the American Theater 19^5-1959, a book
absurdly defective in its assumptions, and steeped in a planta
tion-oriented, thinly veiled contempt for plays and playwrights
who could not live up to the standards she regards as the only
important onesthose previously established by white artists.
Thus, Doris Abramson can declare, as Scarlett O'Hara in Gone
With the Wind, might have: Louis Peterson's Take a Giant
Step . . . is a Negro Ah, WildernessI, and Lorraine Hansberrys
A Raisin in the Sun, a Negro Awake and S in g r This, because
Doris Abramson has no standardno Zi/ethat is not controlled
by norms established in the most racist terms, the most relent
lessly white terms. As the book indicates, she deals in the past,
when everything colored was an imitation dependent on the
good graces of enlightened whites for an existencelet alone
a life. She deals there, and still lives there.
We learn, then, from this. Black theater can both recognize
itself in rational and realistic terms, and avoid the mistake of
allowing those whose sensibilities and concerns have been
shaped in other places, by other considerations, to formulate a
system of critical judgment regarding Black works.
To the extent that a Doris Abramson will never be able to
say that an Ed BuUins play is a Neal Simon comedy ( although
E d should have Simons money), or a Ron Milner observation
of the family is consistent with those by Arthur Millerto that
extent will a Black theater exist, exist with sensible review
and analysis. Exist and give us valuable new insights on both
where we were and where we will be.
I wi'ote earlier of the Black theaters advantage of having
the responsibilities for both mistakes and triumphs assigned
solely to those participating in it. That advantage must be
cultivated and maintained with self-generating standards, unflinch
ing critical evaluations, and, finally, the ability to recognize the
time and the possibility of stagesas we now use tliemvanish
ing, passing away, into an oblivion brought on by more-genuine
revolutions than theater can contain.
Teachwhile you can. Dowhen you must.
V Fiction
INTRODUCTION; BLU E PR IN T FO R NEGRO W RITIN G
Richard Wright
i ) The Role of Negro Writing: Two Definitions
Generally speaking, Negro writing in the past has been con

fined to humble novels, poems, and plays, prim and decorous
ambassadors who went a-begging to white America, They en
tered the Court of American Public Opinion dressed in the
knee-pants of servility, curtsying to show that the Negro was not
inferior, that he was human, and that he had a life comparable
to that of other people. For the most part these artistic am
bassadors were received as though they were French poodles
who do clever tricks.
White America never offered these Negro writers any serious
criticism. The mere fact that a Negro could write was astonish
ing. Nor was there any deep concern on the part of white
America with the role Negro writing should play in American
culture; and the role it did play grew out of accident rather
than intent or design. Either it crept in through the kitchen
in the form of jokes; or it was the fruits of that foul soil which
was the result of a liaison between inferiority-complexed Negro
geniuses and bumt-out white Bohemians with money.
On the other hand, these often technically brilliant per
formances by Negro writers were looked upon by the majority

of literate Negroes as something to be proud of. At best, Negro
writing has been something external to the lives of educated
Negroes themselves. That the productions of their writers should
have been something of a guide in their daily living is a matter
which seems never to have been raised seriously.
Under these conditions Negro writing assumed two general
aspects: i ) It became a sort of conspicuous ornamentation, the
hallmark of "achievement.*' 2) It became the voice of the edu
cated Negro pleading with white America for justice.
Rarely was the best of this writing addressed to the Negro
himself, his needs, his sufferings, his aspirations. Through mis
direction, Negro writers have been far better to others than they
have been to themselves. And the mere recognition of this places
the whole question of Negro writing in a new light and raises a
doubt as to the validity of its present direction.
2) The Minority Outlook
Somewhere in his writings Lenin makes the observation that

oppressed minorities often reflect the techniques of tlie bour
geoisie more brilliantly than some sections of the bourgeoisie
themselves. The psychological importance of this becomes mean
ingful when it is recalled that oppressed minorities, and espe
cially the petty bourgeois sections of oppressed minorities, strive
to assimilate the virtues of the bourgeoisie in the assumption
that by doing so they can Hft themselves into a higher social
sphere. But not only among tlie oppressed petty bourgeoisie
does this occur. The workers of a minority people, chafing
under exploitation, forge organizational forms of struggle to bet
ter their lot. Lacking the handicaps of false ambition and prop
erty, they have access to a wide social vision and a deep
social consciousness. They display a greater freedom and initia
tive in pushing their claims upon civilization than even do
the petty bourgeoisie. Tlicir organizations show greater stiengtli,
Blueprint for Negro Writing 335
adaptability, and efficiency than any other group or class in
society.
That Negro workers, propelled by the harsh conditions of
their lives, have demonstrated this consciousness and mobility
for economic and political action there can be no doubt. But
has this consciousness been reflected in the work of Negro writers
to the same degree as it has in the Negro workers struggle
to free Herndon and the Scottsboro Boys, in the drive toward
unionism, in the fight against lynching? Have they as creative
writers taken advantage of their unique minority position?
The answer decidedly is no. Negro writers have lagged sadly,
and as time passes the gap widens between them and their
people.
How can this hiatus be bridged? How can the enervating ef
fects of this longstanding split be eliminated?
In presenting questions of this sort an attitude of self-conscious
ness and self-criticism is far more likely to be a fruitful point of
departure than a mere recounting of past achievements. An
emphasis upon tendency and experiment, a view of society
as something becoming rather than as something fixed and ad
mired is the one which points the way for Negro writers to stand
shoulder to shoulder with Negro workers in mood and outlook.
3) A Whole Culture
There is, however, a culture of the Negro which is his and has
been addressed to him; a culture which has, for good or ill,
helped to clarify his consciousness and create emotional attitudes
which are conducive to action. This culture has stemmed mainly
from two sources; 1) the Negro church; and 2) the folklore of
the Negro people.
It was through the portals of the church that the American
Negro first entered the shrine of western culture. Living under
slave conditions of life, bereft of his African heritage, the
Negroes struggle for religion on the plantations between 1820-
60 assumed the form of a struggle for human rights. It re
The Black Aesthetic
mained a relatively revolutionary struggle until religion began
to serve as an antidote for suffering and denial. But even today
there are millions of American Negroes whose only sense of a
whole universe, whose only relation to society and man, and
whose only guide to personal dignity comes through the archaic
morphology of Christian salvation.
It was, however, in a folklore moulded out of rigorous and in
human conditions of life that the Negro achieved his most
indigenous and complete expression. Blues, spirituals, and folk
tales recounted from mouth to mouth; the whispered words of
a black mother to her black daughter on the ways of men, to
confidential wisdom of a black father to his black son; the swap
ping of sex experiences on street comers from boy to boy in the
deepest vernacular; work songs sung under blazing sxmsall these
formed the channels through which the racial wisdom flowed.
One would have thought that Negro writers in the last century
of striving at expression would have continued and deepened
this folk tradition, would have tried to create a more inti
mate and yet a more profoundly social system of artistic com
munication between them and their people. But the illusion
that they could escape through individual achievement the
harsh lot of their race swung Negro writers away from any
such path. Two separate cultures sprang up: one for the
Negro masses, unwritten and unrecognized; and the other for
the sons and daughters of a rising Negro bourgeoisie, parasitic
and mannered.
Today the question is: Shall Negro wTiting be for the Negro
masses, moulding the fives and consciousness of those masses
toward new goals, or shall it continue begging the question of
the Negroes' humanity?
4) The Problem of Nationalism in Negro Writing
In stressing the difference between the role Negro writing

failed to play in the fives of the Negro people, and tlie role
it should play in tlie future if it is to serve its historic function;
Blueprint for 'Negro Writing 337
in pointing out the fact that Negro writing has been addressed
in the main to a small white audience rather than to a Negro
one, it should be stated that no attempt is being made here
to propagate a specious and blatant nationalism. Yet the na
tionalist character of the Negro people is unmistakable. Psycho
logically this nationalism is reflected in the whole of Negro
culture, and especially in folklore.
In the absence of fixed and nourishing forms of culture, the
Negro has a folklore which embodies the memories and hopes of
his struggle for freedom. Not yet caught in paint or stone, and as
yet but feebly depicted in the poem and novel, the Negroes
most powerful images of hope and despair still remain in the
fluid state of daily speech. How many John Henrys have lived
and died on the lips of these black people? How many mythical
heroes in embryo have been allowed to perish for lack of hus
banding by alert intelligence?
Negro folklore contains, in a measure that puts to shame
more deliberate forms of Negro expression, the collective sense
of Negro life in America. Let tliose who shy at the nationalist
implications of Negro life look at this body of folklore, living
and powerful, which rose out of a unified sense of a common
life and a common fate. Here are those vital beginnings of a
recognition of value in life as it is lived, a recognition that
marks the emergence of a new culture in the shell of the old.
And at the moment this process starts, at the moment when a
people begin to realize a meaning in their suffering, the civiliza
tion that engenders that suffering is doomed.
The nationalist aspects of Negro life are as sharply manifest
in the social institutions of Negro people as in folklore. There is
a Negro church, a Negro press, a Negro social world, a Negro
sporting world, a Negro business world, a Negro school system,
Negro professions; in short, a Negro way of life in America.
The Negro people did not ask for this, and deep down, though
they express themselves through their institutions and adhere
to this special way of life, they do not want it now. This special
existence was forced upon them from without by lynch rope,
bayonet and mob rule. They accepted these negative conditions

with the inevitability of a tree which must live or perish in
whatever soil it finds itself.
The few crumbs of American civilization which the Negro
has got from the tables of capitalism have been through these
segregated channels. Many Negro institutions are cowardly and
incompetent; but they are all that the Negro has. And, in the
main, any move, whether for progress or reaction, must come
through these institutions for the simple reason that all other
channels are closed. Negro writers who seek to mould or in
fluence the consciousness of the Negro people must address
their messages to them through the ideologies and attitudes
fostered in this warping way of life.
5) The Basis and Meaning of Nationalism in Negro Writing
The social institutions of the Negro are imprisoned in the Jim

Crow political system of the South, and this Jim Crow political
system is in turn built upon a plantation-feudal economy. Hence,
it can be seen that the emotional expression of group-feeling
which puzzles so many whites and leads them to deplore what
they call l>lack chauvinism is not a morbidly inherent trait of
the Negro, but rather the reflex expression of a life whose roots
are imbedded deeply in Southern soil.
Negi*o writers must accept the nationalist implications of their
lives, not in order to encourage them, but in order to change
and transcend them. They must accept the concept of na
tionalism because, in order to transcend it, they must possess
and understand it. And a nationalist spirit in Negro writing
means a nationalism carrying the highest possible pitch of social
consciousness. It means a nationalism that knows its origins, its
limitations; that is aware of the dangers of its position; tliat
knows its ultimate aims are unrealizable within the framework
of capitalist America; a nationalism whose reason for being lies
in the simple fact of self-possession and in tlie consciousness
of the interdependence of people in modem society.
For purposes of creative expression it means that the Negro
writer must realize within the area of his own personal ex
perience those impulses which, when prefigured in terms of
broad social movements, constitute the stuff of nationalism.
For Negro writers even more so than for Negro politicians,
nationalism is a bewildering and vexing question, the full ramifi
cations of which cannot be dealt with here. But among Negro
workers and the Negro middle class the spirit of nationalism is
rife in a hundred devious forms; and a simple literary realism
which seeks to depict the lives of these people devoid of
wider social connotations, devoid of the revolutionary signifi
cance of these nationalist tendencies, must of necessity do a
rank injustice to the Negro people and alienate their possible
allies in the struggle for freedom.
6 ) Social Consciousness and Responsibility
The Negro writer who seeks to function within his race as a

purposeful agent has a serious responsibility. In order to do
justice to his subject matter, in order to depict Negro life in all
of its manifold and intricate relationships, a deep, informed,
and complex consciousness is necessary; a consciousness which
draws for its strength upon the fluid lore of a great people,
and moulds this lore with the concepts that move and direct
the forces of history today.
With the gradual decline of the moral authority of the Negro
church, and with the increasing irresolution which is paralyzing
Negro middle class leadership, a new role is devolving upon
the Negro writer. He is being called upon to do no less than
create values by which his race is to struggle, live and die.
By his ability to fuse and make articulate the experiences
of men, because his writing possesses the potential cunning to
steal into the inmost recesses of the human heart, because he
can create the myths and symbols that inspire a faith in life,
he may expect either to be consigned to oblivion, or to be
recognized for the valued agent he is.
This raises the question of the personality of the writer. It

means that in the lives of Negro writers must be found those
materials and experiences which will create a meaningful picture
of the world today. Many young writers have grown to believe
that a Marxist analysis of society presents such a picture. It
creates a picture which, when placed before the eyes of the
writer, should unify his personality, organize his emotions,
buttress him with a tense and obdurate will to change tlie
world.
And, in turn, this changed world will dialectically change the
writer. Hence, it is through a Marxist conception of reality and
society that the maximum degree of freedom in thought and
feeling can be gained for the Negro vmter. Further, this dramatic
Marxist vision, when consciously grasped, endows the writer
with a sense of dignity which no other vision can give. Ultimately,
it restores to the writer his lost heritage, that is, his role as a
creator of the world in which he hves, and as a creator of
himself.
Yet, for the Negro writer, Marxism is but the starting point.
No theory of life can take the place of life. After Marxism
has laid bare the skeleton of society, there remains the task
of the writer to plant flesh upon tliose bones out of his will to
live. He may, v^th disgust and revulsion, say no and depict
the horrors of capitalism encroaching upon the human being.
Or he may, with hope and passion, say yes and depict the
faint stirrings of a new and emerging life. But in whatever
social voice he chooses to speak, whetlier positive or negative,
there should always be heard or oocr-heard his faith, his neces
sity, his judgement.
His vision need not be simple or rendered in priincr-like
terms; for the hfe of the Negro people is not simple. The
presentation of their lives should he simple, yes; but all the
complexity, the strangeness, the magic wonder of life that pla>3
like a bright sheen over the most sordid existence, should be
tliere. To borrow a phrase from the Russians, it should have a
complex simplicity. Eliot, Stein, Joyce, Proust, Hemingway, and
Anderson; Gorky, Barbusse, Nexo, and Jack London no less
than the folklore of the Negro himself should form the heritage
of the Negro writer. Every iota of gain in human thought and
sensibility should be ready grist for his miU, no matter how
far-fetched they may seem in their immediate implications.
7) The Problem of Perspective

WTiat vision must Negro writers have before their eyes in
order to feel the impelling necessity for an about face? What
angle of vision can show them all the forces of modem society
in process, all the lines of economic development converging
toward a distant point of hope? Must they believe in some
ism ?
They may feel that only dupes believe in isms"; they feel
with some measure of justification that another commitment
means only another disillusionment. But anyone destitute of a
theory about the meaning, structure and direction of modem
society is a lost victim in a world he cannot imderstand or
control.
But even if Negro writers found themselves through some
ism," how would that influence their writing? Are they being
called upon to preach"? To be salesmen"? To prostitute their
writing? Must they sully" themselves? Must they write propa
ganda"?
No; it is a question of awareness, of consciousness; it is,
above all, a question of perspective.
Perspective is that part of a poem, novel, or play which a
writer never puts directly upon paper. It is that fixed point in
intellectual space where a writer stands to view the stmggles,
hopes, and sufferings of his people. There are times when he
may stand too close and the result is a blurred vision. Or he
may stand too far away and the result is a neglect of important
things.
Of all the problems faced by writers who as a whole have
never allied themselves with world movements, perspective is
the most difficult of achievement. At its best, perspective is a

pre-conscious assumption, something which a writer takes for
granted, something which he wins through his living.
A Spanish writer recently spoke of living in the heights of ones
time. Surely, perspective means just that.
It means that a Negro writer must learn to view the life of a
Negro living in New Yorks Harlem or Chicagos South Side with
the consciousness that one-sixth of the earth surface belongs to
the working class. It means that a Negro writer must create in
his readers minds a relationship between a Negro woman hoeing
cotton in the South and the men who loll in swivel chairs in
Wall Street and take the fruits of her toil.
Perspective for Negro writers wiU come when they have
looked and brooded so hard and long upon the harsh lot of
their race and compared it with the hopes and struggles of
minority peoples everywhere that the cold facts have begun
to tell them something.
8) The Problem of Theme
This does not mean that a Negro writers sole concern must
be with rendering the social scene; but if his conception of the
life of his people is broad and deep enough, if the sense of
the whole life he is seeking is vivid and strong in him, then
his writing will embrace all those social, political, and economic
forms imder which the life of his people is manifest.
In speaking of theme one must necessarily be general and ab
stract; the temperament of each writer moulds and colors the
world he sees. Negro life may be approached from a thousand
angles, with no limit to technical and stylistic freedom.
Negro vmters spring from a family, a dan, a dass, and a
nation; and the social miits in which they are bound have a
story, a record. Sense of theme will emerge in Negro writing
when Negro writers try to fix this story about some pole of
meaning, remembering as they do so that in the creative process
meaning proceeds equally as much from the contemplation of
Blueprint for 'Negro Writing 343
the subject matter as from the hopes and apprehensions that
rage in the heart of the writer.
Reduced to its simplest and most general terms, theme for
Negro writers will rise from understanding the meaning of their
being transplanted from a 'savage to a "civilized culture in
all of its social, political, economic, and emotional implications.
It means that Negro writers must have in their consciousness
the foreshortened picture of the whole, nourishing culture from
which they were tom in Africa, and of the long, complex
(and for the most part, imconscious) struggle to regain in some
form and under alien conditions of hfe a whole culture again.
It is not only this picture they must have, but also a knowledge
of the social and emotional milieu that gives it tone and sohdity
of detail. Theme for Negro writers will emerge when they
have begun to feel the meaning of the history of their race as
though they in one life time had lived it themselves throughout
all the long centuries.
9) Autonomy of Craft
For the Negro writer to depict this new reality requires a

greater discipline and consciousness than was necessary for the
so-called Harlem school of expression. Not only is the subject
matter dealt with far more meaningful and complex, but the
new role of the writer is qualitatively different. The Negro
writers' new position demands a sharper definition of the status
of his craft, and a sharper emphasis upon its functional
autonomy.
Negro writers should seek through the medium of their craft
to play as meaningful a role in the affairs of men as do other
professionals. But if their writing is demanded to perfonn the
social ofiBce of other professions, then the autonomy of craft is
lost and writing detrimentally fused with other interests. The
limitations of the craft constitute some of its greatest virtues.
If the sensory vehicle of imaginative writing is required to
cany too great a load of didactic material, the artistic sense is

submerged.
The relationship between reality and the artistic image is not
always direct and simple. The imaginative conception of a histor
ical period will not be a carbon copy of reality. Image and
emotion possess a logic of their own. A vulgarized simplicity
constitutes the greatest danger in tracing the reciprocal interplay
between the writer and his environment.
Writing has its professional autonomy; it should complement
other professions, but it should not supplant them or be swamped
by them.
10 ) The 'Necessity for Collective Work
It goes without saying that these things cannot be gained by

Negro writers if their present mode of isolated writing and
living continues. This isolation exists among Negro writers as
well as between Negro and white writers. The Negro writers*
lack of tliorough integration with the American scene, their lack
of a clear realization among themselves of their possible role,
have bred generation after generation of embittered and de
feated literati.
Barred for decades from the theater and publishing houses,
Negro writers have been made to feel a sense of difference. So
deep has this white-hot ii'on of exclusion been burnt into their
hearts that thousands have all but lost the desire to become
identified with American civilization. The Negro writers* ac
ceptance of this enforced isolation and their attempt to justify
it is but a defense-reflex of the whole special way of life
which has been rammed down their throats.
This problem, by its very nature, is one which must be
approached contemporaneously from two points of view. The
ideological unity of Negro writei*s and tlie alliance of tliat
unity with all tlie progressive ideas of oiu* day is the primaiy
prerequisite for collective work. On tlie shoulders of white
writers and Negro writers alike rest the responsibility of ending
this mistrust and isolation.
By placing cultural health above narrow sectional prejudices,
liberal wTiters of all races can help to break the stony soil of
aggrandizement out of which the stunted plants of Negro na
tionalism grow. And, simultaneously, Negro writers can help
to weed out these choking growths of reactionary nationalism
and replace them with hardier and sturdier types.
These tasks are imperative in light of the fact that we live
in a time when the majority of the most basic assumptions
of life can no longer be taken for granted. Tradition is no
longer a guide. The world has grown huge and cold. Surely
this is the moment to ask questions, to theorize, to speculate, to
wonder out of what materials can a human world be built.
Each step along this imknown path should be taken with
thought, care, self-consciousness, and deliberation. When Negro
writers think they have arrived at something which smacks of
truth, humanity, they should want to test it with others, feel
it with a degree of passion and strength that will enable them
to communicate it to millions who are groping like themselves.
Writers faced with such tasks can have no possible time for
malice or jealousy. The conditions for the growth of each writer
depend too much upon the good work of other writers. Every
first rate novel, poem, or play lifts the level of consciousness
Iiigher.
TH E NEW BLA C K L IT E R A T U R E :
PRO TEST OR A FFIRM A TIO N
Hoyt W. Fuller
There is a revolution in black literature in America. It is

nationalist in direction, and it is pro-black. That means, in
effect, that it is deliberately moving outside the sphere of
traditional Western forms, limitations, and presumptions. It is
seeking new forms, new limits, new shapes, and much of it
now admittedly is crude, reflecting the uncertainty, the search
ing quality of its movement. But, though troubled and seeking,
it is very, very vital.
The creators of the new black literature are deeply con
cerned with image and myth. They are about the business of
destroying those images and myths that have crippled and
degraded black people, and the institution of new images and
myths that will liberate them. In the article The Black Writer
and His Role (Negro Digest, January 1969), critic Carolyn
Fowler Gerald explains that image is important to black Ameri
cans because . . image is central to a mans self-definition.
Says Mrs. Gerald: Because all images, and especially created
images, represent a certain way of focusing on tlie world out
side . . . they represent a certain point of view. Now, if we
hold a certain point of view, we have automatically emphasized
some aspects of reality, blocked out otliers, and glossed over
The New Black Literature: Protest or Affirmation 347
the rest, and the image which we project or which we perceive
is not objective reality but our ownor someone else sreshaping
of reality. If it is someone elses reshaping of reality which
we perceive, then we are within that other person's sphere of
influence and can be led to believe whatever he wishes us
to believe: that a rose bush is pleasant because it has a
fragrant smell, or that it is unpleasant because it has thorns.
If these two images of the rose bush are combined into a
metaphor, we have created images which lead us to make an
association between the reality of the rose bush and anotlier
level of reality, and we can be influenced, for instance, on a
moral level: Tleasant-smeUing roses have unpleasant thorns;
therefore, beware the sweet fragrance of pleasure for under
neath it lie hidden the thorns of destruction.' In tliis way, the
association made in the mind of the hearer or reader is con
trolled. By guiding, by controlling our associations, the image-
maker can, and usually does, shape our view of reality, because
the images the words conjure up when they are put together
artistically provoke an immediate emotional response in us, and
dim out of our consciousness aU the untold other points of view
at our disposal.
Black Americans grow up in a world where white people
have projected white images everywhere, leaving black people
with what Mrs. Gerald calls "a zero image of themselves. The
black child grovvong into adulthood through a series of weekend
movies, seeing white protagonists constantly before him project
ing the whole gamut of human experience, is, in extreme cases,
persuaded that he too must be white, or (what is more likely)
he experiences manhood by proxy and in someone else's image.
He sees, in other words, a zero image of himself. If there are
black people on the screen, they are subservient to, uncom
fortably diiBierent from, or busy emulating the larger, all-inclusive
white culture. In that case, our young person sees a negative
image of himself . .
Mrs. Gerald points out that Western cultures projection of
white images upon the universe, conditioning those within its
sphere to . . accept white as the symbol of goodness and

purity; black as the symbol of evil and impurity has been
very deliberate in design. The white man has developed a
myth of superiority based on images which compare him sym
bolically with the black man, she says. The very fact of this
interconnectton is at once a holdover from previous bondage
and the most effective means of perpetuating that bondage.
We realize now that we are involved in a black-white war
over the control of image. For to manipulate an image is to
control a peoplehood. Zero image has for a long time meant
the repression of our peoplehood.
In the recently published anthology Black Fire, James T.
Stewart, another of the new black critics, talks about the im
portance of imageor modelsin the creative process. The
dilemma of the Negro" artist is that he makes assumptions
based on the wrong models, Mr. Stewart says. He makes
assumptions based on white models. These assumptions are not
only wrong, they are even antithetical to his existence. The
black artist must construct models which correspond to his own
reality. The models must be non-white. Our models must be
consistent with a black style, our natural aesthetic styles, and
our moral and spiritual styles. In doing so, we will be merely
following the natural demands of our culture. These demands
. . . are found in our music and and in our spiritual and moral
philosophy. Particularly in music, which happens to be the
purest expression of the black man in America. . . .
Larry Neal, co-editor of Black Fire and one of the strongest
of the new poet-critics, feels that the new black literature aims
at nullifying the influence of the white image by destroying the
double consciousness of black peoplethe dilemma of being
both black and American. In his classic book The Souls of
Black Folk, the great W. E. B. DuBois described this dilemma
as . . . two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two
warring ideas in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone
keeps it from being tom asunder. But Neal feels tliat the
black revolutionaries of today are no longer concerned about
The 'New Black Literature: Protest or Affirmation 349
that part of their identity which is American/' that is, of
European derivation, because It is almost axiomatic that most
of what the West considers important endangers the more
humane world we feel ours to be." The new black writers
are concerned with consolidating the African-American per
sonality, and they look upon the West . as a dying creature,
totally bereft of spirituality. This being the case, the only hope
is some kind of psychic withdrawal from its values and as
sumptions.
Mr. Neal emphasizes that the new black literature, which is
primarily directed at the consciences of black people, is not
essentially a literature of protest. It is, to be sure, a hterature
of aflirmation.
The trouble with black literature in America isand always
has beenthe white literary establishment. If that idea seems
shocking at first, then consider it for a moment. Literature,
after all, is not separate from life, although many white critics
seem to want to separate black hterature from the reahties
of black life. The hterature of any people grows organically out
of the experiences of that people, informed by imagination
and witthe gift, in short, of artistry. Black literature in
America is, and always has been, handicapped by hterary
coloniahsm. The rules of hterature and the criteria for hterary
achievement are established by white critics and scholars who
share a general experience and perspective; these rules and
criteria are then imposed on the works of black writers, who
have quahtatively diSerent experiences and who approach these
experiences from an essentially different angle of vision. If,
theoretically, the values underlying both white and black ex
periences are the same, then the area between the white and
black interpretations of those values is vast, perhaps beyond
bridging.
Consider: America is a racist society. That is, opportunities
and rewards are apportioned, for the most part, according to
race and color. The preferred and the privileged are white;
the rejected and the degraded are non-white. The whites, who
are in the majority and hold the power, proceed under the
very natural assumption that the nation's vaunted principles,
creeds, and institutions are both valid and operative. The non
whites understand that much of the good life" for white
Americans is bought at the price of their continued subjugation.
In Chicago, for example, hundreds of thousands of ordinary white
people have access to high-paying jobs because they do not
have to compete for those jobs with the milhon black people
who live in the city. Those million black people know they
are being debased and cheated, and that knowledge shapes
their attitude toward both the people who cheat and debase
them and the society that condones it. The white boy who
grows up as writer might fashion prose or poetry that strikes
at the fabric of the social structure that insures injustice against
his non-white fellow citizens, but he does not, at the same
time, remove himself from his position in tlie society that
brings him the benefits of that very injustice. His, then, is a
moral stance, and though he may be serious enough to take
certain real risks to his person or to his position in defense
of it, he cannot reject the privileged status that is tlie gift of
his whiteness. On the other hand, the black boy who grows up
to be a writer is fighting for his life both hterally and literarily,
and while he certainly feels that morahty is on his side in the
struggle, his stance can never be merely moral. Choice in that
matter is a luxury forever denied him. The white boy can
approach the great question of racism with a certain detach
ment; his conscience is luider siege, not his very being; he
could, at some conceivable point, reverse his attitude toward
the whole question of racism and injustice \vithout serious con
sequence to his image of his o\vn humanity. But the black
boy who manages to divest himself of his outrage must, in the
process, diminish liis own humanity, to say nothing of his man
hood; his detachment must be achieved at considerable cost to
his sense of self.
Conscious and unconscious white racism is everywhere, in
fecting all tlie vital areas of national life. But the revolutionary
black writer, like the new breed of militant activist, has decided
tliat white racism will no longer exercise its insidious control
over his work. If the tag of racist is one the white critic will
hang on him in dismissing him, then he is more than willing to
bear that. He is not going to separate literature from life.
When the novel The Confessions of Nat Turner was published,
tlie black intellectual community exploded in a fury of outrage.
A white author, William Styron, had taken a black man who is
a hero to black people, filtered the man s life through a white
sensibility, and produced a book that black people feel slanders
and diminishes their hero. The white critical community lavished
praise upon the book; and when black intellectuals expressed
their anger, resorting finally to the device of publishing a
counterbook. Ten Black Writers Respond, the white critical
community dismissed the black reaction as so much black
racism and liysteria. One of the more highly regarded of
the white critics, Philip Rahv, writing in The New York Review
of Books, acclaimed the book a masterpiece and said, . . . only
a v/hite Southern writer could have brought it off. Then, in
credibly, this writer of Jewish extraction, forgetting his own
people s history of repression and their long struggle for dignity
and self-expression, wrote the follovring: A Negro writer, be
cause of a very complex anxiety . . . would have probably
stacked the cards, producing in a mood of unnerving rage and
indignation, a melodrama of saints and sinners.* Would have
probably stacked the cardsi One wondered if Mr. Rahv would
have looked back on the Diary of Anne Frank, or on all that
library of volumes by Jews describing in fact and fiction the
horrors of pogroms through which they have passed, and con
cluded that the Jewish writers stacked the cards. But it was a
black critic, June Meyer, writing in The Nation, who got to
the core of the problem. The white critical establishment pre
ferred William Styrons version of Nat Turner and his revolt
because white America has never been willing to listen to the
authentic voice of black America. The definitely preferred
form of communication, black to white, is through a white
intermediarybe he sociologist or William Styron, Miss Meyer

wrote. The authentic black voice is not wanted: it is too harsh,
too accusing, too haunting, too full of unnerving rage and indig
nation.
Black literature, as written literatures go, is not very old.
Prior to the Civil War, a few novels by black writers were
published, and so were some poems, the best known of which
were works of Phillis Wheatley, the celebrated house slave.
There were some newspapers published by blacks, including
one in New Orleans that was bilingual (French and English),
and a number of journals. The writings of Frederick Douglass
were rather well known, and his autobiography remains a work
of distinction. There were some notable histories, slave narratives,
and a few novels. However, it was not until the advent of Paul
Laurence Dunbar and Charles W. Chesnutt, toward the end of
the nineteenth century, that works that qualified as literature
according to those whose prerogative it is to make such judg
ments, were published. Each man produced several novels, and
Dunbar, of cornse, gained considerable eminence for his poetry,
especially for that written in dialect. In the years between 1900
and the early twenties, a number of black novelists and poets
were published, with even the great scholar W. E. B. DuBois
trying his hand at creative writing {The Quest of the Silver
Fleece, 19 1 1) . Robert A. Bone, the white professor whose book
The Negro Novel in America has long been considered the
definitive work on the subject, wrote, . . . most Negro novelists
will produce only one or two novels in any case, backing up
that declaration with the observation, Of 62 novelists writing
between 1853 and 1952, 40, or two-thirds, have published only
one novel. Eleven more have published only two novels; only
1 1 have published more than two. Tliis information is offered
in Mr. Bones book with no qualifications, and it is rather typical
of the critical approach to black writers and writing tliat has
proven so damaging over the ycais. Now, apart from tlie fact
that Mr. Bone offered no comparable statistics of the productivity
of most white writers, wliich might have made liis stiitistics
on black productivity irrelevant in any case, the implications
of his statements are rather insidious. The suggestion is that
some defect in the nature or character or industry of black
writers prevented tliem from producing more novels. But the
truth is that Mr. Bone has simply compiled his statistics without
reference to his own data on the socioeconomic conditions under
which black people lived between 1853 and 1952. And those
conditions explain everything.
To begin with, the hundred-year period covered by Mr. Bones
statistics included the Civil War, Reconstruction, the post-Recon-
struction era during which the South virtually stripped black
people of all their Constitutional rights, the rise of the Ku Klux
Klan, the two great migrations of blacks from the rural South
to tlie urban North, the two world wars, and the Depression.
During much of this time, middle-class black communities of
some size and importance existed in only a few centers, such as
Atlanta, Georgia, and Washington, D.C., and the audience for
books by black authors was small indeed. There were no black-
owned trade-book publishing firms, and those books that black
authors produced had to be acceptable to white publishers, few
of whom were known for their sympathy for black people.
When it is realized that even today, in this relatively enlightened
era of broadly expressed liberal sentiments, many publishers are
less than ecstatic over the prospect of publishing certain books
by black writers, it is not difficult to understand how novels
dealing with black life were not welcomed, say, in the early
1900s, when lynchings were a kind of grim pastime in the South
and black people were confined systematically to clearly defined
enclaves in northern cities. The novels of Dunbar and Chesnutt
reflected very dramatically tlie pressures under which the authors
were published. Dunbar, though bom and brought up in Ohio,
deliberately chose to write in dialect partly because dialect
storic's about black people were more readily accepted by both
publishers and readers. Chesnutt, who was a well-educated
man with skin so pale that he easily passed for white, often
wrote of black people with the same kind of condescension
that was routine for white writers at the time. Neither Dunbar
nor Chesnutt created black characters who smoldered with the
repressed rage tliat black men have always felt, for there is
little likelihood that such novels would ever have been published
at that time.
Despite those concessions that black writers were forced
to make in order to see their works in print, they did not
attempt to totally exclude from their work the natural sentiments
of black people. The poems and novels of black writers reflected
the anguish and bitterness black people felt within a society
that would not leave them free to pursue their lives; the poems
and stories also expressed the hope, tenaciously held, that the
nation would live up to its laws, which promised equality of
opportunity and treatment to all its citizens; and black literature
faithfully recorded the experiences of black people who, no
matter how accomplished or distinguished, inevitably found
themselves at some point or time frustrated by a racial wall
that no power on earth could obliterate. This refusal of black
writers to withhold from their works the harsh reality of race
or their failure to soften its impact by glossing it over, did
not serve to endear black writing to the critics. In his highly
praised little book Black on White: A Critical Survey of Writing
by American Negroes, David Littlejohn used a great deal of
space describing the "pain a white reader is likely to feel
upon reading black writing. A white reader is saddened, then
burdened, then numbed by the deadly sameness, the bleak
wooden round of ugly emotions and ugly situations; tlie same
small frustrated dreams, the same issues and charges and
formulas and events repeated over and over, in book after
book, he writes. Mr. Littlejohn reluctantly admits that tlie
white readerand criticis likely to try to evade the pain of
black writing by a number of "escapes, and he lists tlie follow
ing as the most "sopliisticated of many: the escape of literary
judgment. "T ts poorly done, tlie critic \vill say of the poem
or the story or the novel. "Amen. End of problem. One tends
to fall back on tliis last evasion (if it is an evasion) quite
frequently in the case of the more mihtant Negro literature: It

isnt literature. Propaganda with a plot (or in rhyme, or in acts).
Unconvincing; lifeless, unearned; unfelt; uncrafted. Such criti
cisms are often only illicit self-defenses against pain, Mr. Little-
jolin continues; a reader slips on the rubber gloves of criticism
to avoid the sting. But has he, the white reader, then, no right
to make literary judgmentsin wartime, as it were? Many of
these critiques, interior or in print, are of the nature of moral
evasions; but many of the wounds being evaded are illicit
and unfair. Is the white reader simply to sit there, turning
pages and squirming?
Well, what the white critic has done, providing a convenient
evasion for the white reader, is to characterize as "protest
all writing by black authors which deals honestly and passionately
with the black experience. As "protest, this literature can be
dismissed, placed in a special category somewhere on the far
periphery of art. And in not confronting the literature as art,
it is then somehow possible to take less seriously what it says
and means. Black literature accuses, and its charges must be
denied. Jean Paul Sartre, the French philosopher-novelist, has
posed in general terms the question black literature asks white
America: How can our century possess a conscience and yet
hve with the monstrous crimes it commits?
Countless black writers have foundered and failed in an
effort to please the criticsand, of course, the publishersby
shielding their work from the abrasiveness that the critics de
scribe as "protest The critics for a long while advised black
writers to choose "universal subjects, to write about characters
and situations with whom readers (meaning white readers)
could identify, and because black writers have egos as large
as any other writers', and because they want to eat, some of
the best of them did the critics' bidding. Ann Petry, Zora Neale
Hurston, William Attaway, and even Richard Wright wrote
books in the forties and fifties that had no black characters,
and Willard Motley and Frank Yerby built literary careers
writing about whites. This was in the wake of World War II,
when many blacks, having helped to win the struggle against

fascistic tyranny in Europe, truly believed that a new era of
brotherhood and unity had been ushered in at home. The
philosophy abroad in the land taught that all men were really
the same under the skin, and black people wanted to believe.
Even James Baldwin, one of the best writers of this generation,
bought the assimilationist philosophy and proceeded to launch
a brilliant literary attack against the works of Richard Wright
in particular and all protest literature in general. He lived
to regret it. He soon discovered, as he found fame, that the
same critics who had lavished praise on him for his assault on
protest literature now lumped his own works under that label.
Mr. Baldwin doesn't talk about protest any more.
It was in the early twenties, at the beginning of the so-called
Harlem Renaissance, that black writers first made their declara
tion of independence from both the dictatorial literary establish
ment and the latent urge to whiteness. The credo was stated
by a young Langston Hughes, the best-known writer of that
movement. To my mind, it is the duty of the younger Negro
artist . . . to change through the force of his art that old
whispering T want to be white,' liidden in the aspirations of
his people, to W hy should I want to be white? I am a Negro
and beautifull' So I am ashamed for the black poet who says,
T want to be a poet, not a Negro poet,' as though his own
racial world were not as interesting as any otlier world. I am
ashamed, too, for the colored artist who nms from the painting
of Negro faces to the painting of sunsets after the manner of
academicians because he fears the strange unwhiteness of his
own features. An artist must be free to do what he does,
certainly, but he must also never be afraid to do what he
might choose. . . . We younger Negro artists who create now
intend to express our individual dark-skinned selves witliout
fear or shame. If white people are pleased, we are glad. If
tliey are not, it doesn't matter either. We build our temples for
tomorrow, strong as we know how, and we stand on top of the
mountain, free witliin ourselves.
Langston Hughes kept to that creed all his life, although

he watched writers younger than himself abandon or reject
it; and it must have been gratifying to him in his final years
when he saw a new crop of black artists emerging upon the
scene who, though ignorant of the credo, began to speak out
in words very similar to his own. The young writers of tlie
black revolution, at last, are able to do what the militant young
writers of Langston Hughes s generation merely dreamed of
doing. The most important element of difference between 1920
and i960 is geopolitical: The white world no longer holds
unlimited hegemony over the hundreds of millions of black
and brown and yellow peoples of the world. The voices and
opinions of non-white people must be heard in the chambers
of world councils of nations, and their wishes must be respected.
As the leading nation of the West, the white world, the United
States is, in effect, on exhibit, and it must pay, in terms of
influence and investments, when its practices at home conflict
too sharply with the principles with which it persuades the
rest of the world of its worthiness to lead. And the political
freedom of India, Pakistan, the rest of Asia, and most of
Africa, has taught black writers in America that they now have
prospects and possibilities. To begin with, they have an audience;
books by black writers sell very well in the growing number
of black-owned bookshops in cities across the nation, and a
number of lively black journals publish the poems and stories
they produce; black theater companies are organized in the
ghettos to produce the plays; and writers conferences are held
periodically so that the writers can come together and exchange
ideas and reinforce one another in the drive toward literary
independence. Where the writers of another generation were
persuaded to seek universal subjects and themes, the new
black writers are deliberately delving into their own folk culture
and traditions, exploring their own history, creating their own
myths. The new poetry is a poetry of exhortation and celebration,
and the new prose is a prose of affirmation. The new literature
is characterized by a spirit of rejectionrejection of values that
have proven useless or destructive or debasingbut there is no
'protest,'' as protest, in it. And the new poetry is a celebration
of blackness and the spirit of pan-Africanism, as in the works
of Willie Kgositsile, the brilliant young South African writer:
I, The Elegance of Memory

Distances separate bodies not people. Ask
Those who have known sadness or joy
The bone of feeling is priced open
By a song, the elegance
Of color, a familiar smell, this
Flower or the approach of an evening . .
AU this is NOW
I used to wonder
Was her grave warm enough,
Madikeledi, my grandmother,
As big-spirited as she was big-legged,
She would talk to me. She would . .
How could I know her sadness then
Or who broke my father s back?
But now . . .
The elegance of memory,
Deeper than the grave
Where she went before I could
Know her sadness, is larger
Than the distance betw'een
My country and I. Things more solid
Than the rocks with which those sinister
Thieves tried to break our back
I hear her now. And I wonder
Now does she know the strength of the fabric
She wove in my heart for us? . . . Her
Voice clearer now than then; Boylde,
Don't ever take any nonsense from them.
You hearl'
There are memories between us
Deeper than grief. There are
Feelings between us much stronger
Than the cold enemy machine that breaks
Tlie back. Sister, tliere are places between us
Deeper than the ocean, no distances.
Pry your heart open, Brother, mine too.
Learn to love the clear voice
The music in tlie memory pried
Open to tlie bone of feeling, no distances
Like Langston Hughes, who was a true blues and jazz poet,
some of the new poets are obsessed with the idea of unifying
their poetry with basic black musical forms. . . If one is
to judge poetry on the basis of meters and music, we must
decide which music we're talking about," says California poet
Stanley Crouch. That is, the high floating sound from Bach,
Brahms, Mozart, etc., is fine for Yeats, Pound, Williams, et. oi.,
but we Black People season our ears on different sound-rhythm
arrangements. That is, if a song like [Charlie] Parker's Ornithol
ogy' is considered flat,' then poetry sprung from that sound is,
also, flat,' flat as be-bop which, we all know by now I hope, was
and is beautiful. . .
Mr. Crouch says that the above is why a new poet, Jayne
Cortez, is so exciting. Here is a poem by Miss Cortez that he
feels illustrates his thesis:
Lonely Woman
A wasted flow of water hiding
Sliding
down the face
of a lone-ly one
This black woman's

oblong tears
render
softly felt wetness
The Black Aesthetic
warm like sperm
to melt
the calling-calling
flesh
Is there any reason
for this not so
Dry-dry season
Cutting tongue of fear
please-
won't you hear
the stretch marks
of Loneliness
bent-in this
cold woman's tear
Night Raining
in
The Woman's Quarters
listening to
crickets
small-weak
dark like me
-sit-
StrippedNude
from the trembling cadence of fire
Lit
in Ornette's horn
Crickets that cry
Como-weep-with-us
come-weep with us
come weep with us
Lonely wo-man
Lonely Woman
come weep with us
Says Mr. Crouch of Miss Cortez's poetry: "She's got bop, boogie,
blues, and the new Black Music flowing tliroiigh her lines
she achieves tliose sounds and rhytluns and, tliereby, comes
up with a prismatic, swinging sound as varied in color as
the everglades. She, as far as I can see, is our new blues
singer, our new Aretha. In verse. Stories piled high as sky
scrapers, foot tappers, swinging cymbals. Bells. . . "
And, in Too Late Blues {aint no ambulances for no nigguhs
tonite), Mr. Crouch demonstrates his own poetic oneness with
the blues;
TOO LATE BLUES

{aint no ambulances for no nigguhs tonite)
The jitterbug ditty bops thought
they was off in the boogie
but it was another
dance altogether
to the devil
so as Bo Dola, Bo Pette & the others
grinded against their women
they fell perforated
under the flames of
BABY! BABYI BABY!
Homs as tall as cornstalks
had sprung from the head of the beast
his tail made a tmmel
through his striped pants
and flapped through the vent
of his frock coat
his fangs came forward
and he french-tongued
his dogs before coming
down in lead rain
on the rest of dark
town
Monkey Junior was ready
when it went down, but,
couldn't get nobody to go
with him
tlie sun shone across the
livid face of white america

was when the torture took off
came out of the blocks of gun barrels
runnin fast
didn't stop for nobody
swept all the nigguhs in Watts
out of Will Rogers Park
hummed their sirens
and came down too cold on the boulevard
100 & 3rd Street
blowing people away
and they, the wooly-headed
would-be lovers
would-be warriors
bit concrete
under the fast creepin
bullets
for goddam sure
out to kill every nigguh they could
and they carried a victim

dripping red up the steps
of the police station
asking only for an ambulance
but the beast manning the valiant Watts Station said
No Ambulances For No Niggulis Tonite
No one went wild

they had been too busy getting high
they could not see the pink face
of the oppressor sitting on the buU's eye
of the black night
therefore, whatever guns
the dumb and high had, did
uli uh:
No good,
merely helped pave tlie way
for tombstones)
The Devil Ages were the days now that we were in
never too cool to kill a brother
but always
dropping the gun
when the beasts with the badges arrived
(and they shot little Fats all of nine times
after having made him get down on liis knees
and raise his arms in prayer)
Fashion plate nationalists were too busy
making money selling clothes
to notice.
They died in their bright African colors,
swâhili curses dripping from their mouths
Many revolutionaries
got theirs in the ass
another bourgeois bitch.
Preparing her for the revolution.
Many who shpped in college
and skated out with degrees
were huff puffing their way
up the Mt. Everest
of the middle class
when the tongue rope
red up the honkies ass was cut
and they landed on sabres.
OWI
But it wasn't bebop.
And Monkey Junior found himself
almost alone
but the nigguh did
get on his job-
straight out Mau Mau
Nat Turner madness;
The red that passed for blood
in the devils* veins
laid out everywhere:
He caught them
in kitchens grinning at the massacre
over the radio
the housewives, the daughters, the babies
ALL THEIR H EA D S-YEA -
set up in their windows like pumpkins
Their bodies stuffed in their washing machines,
piled in their bathtubs.
And he masqueraded:
White men stabbed in
the belly by the shoe shine boy
he pretended to be
or spikes run through their mouths
nailing their heads to the floor
by elevator boys
with bloody gloves
running up the alley.
He dismembered babies
and shitted on their bodies
Monkey Junior was a wild
madman, a black hurricane
carrying knives and dancing
through the white cities.
He, alone, and no others,
was the only one to survive.
And tlie sun
which had grasped its hght
reflected from the eyes of Black Women
and its heat from the love of their
men, the sun went skinny
and fell wheezing into the sea
warming it to a pallid soup of dead fish & melted pearls.
The beasts did not adapt to darkness
starved
finding no one else to kill.
And Monkey Junior, on his knees,
the only man left,
prayed.
While the new black literature is, where it is most dynamic,
informed by a spirit of nationalism, some of the best of the
current novelists manage to bridge rather effectively the genera
tion of Langston Hughes and that of the exciting young writers
who, for the most part, have been published only in the new
black joumak and a few anthologies. Outstanding among tliis
group are William Melvin Kelley, Kristin Hunter, and Ronald
Fair. Mr. Kelley and Miss Hunter, while increasingly "nationalis
tic in their personal outlook, have not yet moved to the point
where their characters do not react directly to the overwhelming
presence of whites. Mr. Kelleys latest novel, Dem, is a satirical
look at middle-class white America, and Miss Hunters latest
novel for adults. The Landlord, deak with the adventures of a
liberal white man who chooses to involve his life with the
lives of some denizens of a black-occupied apartment house.
However, Miss Hunter s newest book is a novel for juveniles,
The Soul Brothers and Sister Lou, for which she won the
1968 award of the Council on Interracial Books for Children.
This book is important in that it represents Miss Hunters
concrete break from being "just a writer, not a Negro writer.
Like so many intellectuals of her age (middle thirties). Miss
Hunter has "come back home. In a special article published in
Publishers" Weekly in connection with her new book and the
award, Miss Hunter dkcusses her personal "identity crisis.
". . . My generation was the last to make an all-out effort
to be white, she says, "and as the last in line of this thrust,
we traveled the farthest and suffered the most when we were
eventually, inevitably, brought up short. We went to Ivy League
schook; we spoke almost too-perfect English as well as French;
we traveled in Europe; we socialized with whites; some of us
even married them. Then came the inevitable day when we
realized, individually and collectively, that it had all been to no
avail. Miss Hunter wrote her book for young blacks because she
feek thatunlike her generation"the youngest black people
have already gone through thk crisis and come out whole. In
his second novel, Hog Butcher, Ronald Fairs hero is a young
black boy who is thrown into the mire of political sordidness
in the Chicago ghetto, but who emerges both whole and strong.
All these books have characters who fit the mold of the new
image of black manhood that the militant black public is
demanding.
Perhaps the best of the current non-nationalist black novelists
is Ernest J. Gaines of San Francisco, author of two excellent
novels {Catherine Carmier and Of Love and Dust) and a
collection of short stories {Bloodline). The protagonists in Mr.
Gainess two novels are very different lands of men, but they
share a fiber and strength that, though always present in black
men of their backgrounds, have rarely been portrayed in fiction.
The one is college-bred, assured, reflective, returned to his
native Louisiana to reassess his past in order to determine his
future; the other is a hard-bitten rebel, but a man sure of his
personal magnetism and of his manhood and determined to
diminish neither. Mr. Gainess themes are love, endurance, and
the tragedy inherent in the human resistance to inevitable
change. His style is lucid; his technique, quiet and sure.
Some of the more talented of the writers spawned by the
black revolution are women. Outstanding among these are Nikki
Giovanni, Alice Walker, Jean Wheeler Smith, Jane Stembridge,
and Carolyn Rodgers. Several of them have novels in progress.
Four (all but Miss Stembridge) have published short stories,
and four (all but Mrs. Smith) have published volumes of
poetry. Mrs. Smith, a veteran of the SNCC campaigns in
Mississippi, has written movingly of the struggle for manliood
among the young SNCC workers mider siege in the South
and of the women whose spirits are bent on the altar of that
manhood. Miss Rodgers, a member of a writers group con
cerned with the articulation of a black aesthetic (O BAC), con
centrates on capturing in her stories and short plays tlie soulful
essence of the black experience.
Writing of Richard Wright, young Cecil M. Brown, one of
the new black novelist-critics, states that tlie famed novelist
. . wrote about Chicago in tlie maimer tliat he did because
that was what white America was ready to accept (in terms
of literary fashion and social imagery), or, more accurately,
needed to accept White America branded Wright the Official
Negro Protester, the genuine article,'' Mr. Brown says; to
reject him was to reject ofBcial, genuine Negro protest, no matter
what yoiu: own experience as a Negro might have been. . . ."
But Mr. Brown is not opposed to protest, he is opposed to
what he terms negative protest." He rejects the white man's
concept of protest, which is that of a raging, ferocious, uncool,
demoralized black boy banging on the immaculate door of
White Society, begging, not so much for political justice as
for his own identity, and in the process consuming himself, so
that in the final analysis, his destiny is at the mercy of the
White Man."
The new black writers have decided that their destiny is
not at the mercy of the white man, that they live in a world
with options. This does not mean that they have ceased to
protest the indignities they still experience. Every black person
who realizes how sick American white society is, by the logic
of this awareness, makes a protest, a positive protest," Mr.
Brown says. TTiis is a delicate point which the oversimplification
of Wright's social reality has obscured. Positive protest that
creates as it eliminates: it deals with the opposition's ugliness
by concentrating on its own beauty. LeRoi Jones' prose is
positive protest because it is witty and beautiful to black people
which means simply that white people can't understand
it. . . ."
And former Ebony magazine writer David Llorens says the
following:
The contemporary black writer understands that, as white
people lose control over our lives, their last recourse, their final
imposition, will perhaps be an attempt to insure that our deaths
are in accordance with their will. A love poem to a man who is
being choked is a poem that teaches him how to get the
damned hands from around his neck, and, moreover, teaches
him how to create an order in which he will never again be
choked. Drawing from an experience that is far wider than
that of the white American, and understandably beset with an
ambivalence more painful than artists anywhere have known, the
black writer is about his work.
There is a great deal of literary excitement in the black
communities of America, and out of it will come a fresh and
mature literature that can only expand the dimensions of art
and consciousness in America. The plays of LeRoi Jones, the
poems of Sonia Sanchez and Don L. Lee, the novels of Ishmael
Reed and Sam Greenlee, and the prose of Julius Lester are
strong and viable works that speak directly to the revolutionary
black sensibility. And now, of course, the white critics, having
failed to destroy the buds of this new literature, are beginning
to find a slot in which to isolate it and thus avoid the pain
it gives them. In an extraordinary series of essays published
recently in the N ew Republic, critic Richard Gilman all but
admitted that Eldridge Cleavers book Soul on Ice had forced
him to consider if, perhaps, black writing is not, after aU,
beyond his competence to judge. A few years earlier, as drama
critic of Newsweek magazine, Mr. Gilman had told a group of
black writers that they were incapable of creating mature drama.
What he meant, of course, was that black drama did not speak
to him with the cadence, substance, and style by which he
measured the worth of plays. Now Mr. Gilman is willing to
admit that, just possibly, this forceful and disturbing black
literature requires a different yardstick. The revolutionary black
writers will be the first to agree that the traditional Western
criteria are not always relevant to their work, but they wall
also resist tlie efforts of the Richard Gilmans of this world
ever again to establish criteria for them.
For tlie simple fact is this: The black writer can only further
demean himself and reinforce the arrogiince and presmnption
of the critics by seeking to bend liis vision and his art to the
shape the critics hold up as example. Tlie critics coimtry is
not the black writers country, and tlie goals of tlie two separate
and essentially antagonistic territories are far from identical.
The New Black Literature: Protest or Affimiation 369
Writing of the anthology Soon, One Morning in the September
1963 issue of Midstream, Cynthia Orick, one of the few white
critics with real insight into the American racial mire, stated
the proposition with unusual eloquence; It is a commonplace
but curious law of the Outsider that the more he strives to
fashion himself emotionally after the Insider, the more he
proves himself Outsideand without benefiting his real con
dition, she said, The Negro is not yet inside Americawhich
is what the shouting is all about [Tliat is, in 1963, that was
what the shouting was all about.] Until he is, his good manners
will be bad manners, his decency will be an indecency, and his
sense of the proprieties will be the most shocking impropriety
it is possible for him to commit against himself and against the
idea of a human being.
The best of the young black writers know this to be true.
It is time that the criticsand the professorsalso understood it.
TH E BLA C K W R ITER AND HIS RO LE
Carolyn F. Gerald
**What is new {in black literature) is the deliberate desecration

and smashing of idols, the turning inside-out of symbols . . .
Bitterness is being replaced by wrath; a sense of frustration
giving way before a sense of power"
Image is a tenn which we are using more and more in the

black community because we are discovering that the image
we have of ourselves controls what we are capable of doing.
Image, in this sense, has the meaning of self-concept. We are
giving eause and eflFect the same name. But tlie word image
is properly speaking a concrete term meaning the projection or
representation of an object; the image is the mirror of some
aspect of reality.
At this point, we should draw a distinction between real
and created images. Both are projections of reality, but tlie
created image is projected by the imagination of man, and by
the recall and associative power of his five senses. For instance,
I can hold out a rose before you; the image of that rose is
mirrored in your eye; it is a real image. Or I can describe
a rose to you, and my words will create an image which
you can visualize mentally. Perliaps you will even imagine tlie
smell and the feel; tlie words I choose and the way I build
tliem into the image will detenniiie tliis. Usually a whole complex
of associations builds up around an image, secondary images are
evoked, imtil well-defined patterns of associations based upon
sensory perceptions pervade in a very vague way the whole
area of a man s experience.
Why is image so central to a man s self-definition? Because all
images, and especially created images, represent a certain way
of focusing on the world outside, and therefore they represent a
certain point of view. Now, if we hold a certain point of view,
we have automatically emphasized some aspects of reality,
blocked out others, and glossed over the rest, and the image
which we project or which we perceive is not objective reality
but our ownor someone elsesreshaping of reality. If it is
someone else s reshaping of reality which we perceive, then we
are v/ithin that other persons sphere of influence and can be
led to believe whatever he wishes us to believe: that a rosebush
is pleasant because it has a fragrant smell, or that it is un
pleasant because it has thorns. If these two images of the rose
bush are combined into a metaphor, we have created images
which lead us to make an association between the reality of the
rosebush and another level of reality, and we can be influenced,
for instance, on a moral level: Pleasant-smelling roses have
unpleasant thorns; therefore, beware the sweet fragrance of
pleasure for underneath it lie hidden the thorns of destruction.
In this way, the association made in the mind of the hearer or
reader is controlled. By guiding, by controlling our associations,
the image-maker can, and usually does, shape our view of
reality, because the images the words conjure up when they
are put together artistically provoke an immediate emotional
response in us, and dim out of our consciousness all the untold
other points of view at our disposal.
Image-making is part of all human experience. However, we
are speaking here of the image created by the magic of words.
We are considering image not so much as life but as literary
art. Art reshapes the raw materials of nature and of human
interaction and, in so doing, interprets reality in a non-analyti-
cal, non-intellectual way. Art thus makes a direct appeal to
the senses and calls forth a spontaneous emotional identification
with other men and with the imiverse. Therefore, the effects
of the literary image are most often intuitive, deep beyond
the threshold of reason and common sense. When we spoke of the
sweet fragrance of pleasure and the thorns of destruction, we
made an appeal not to reason but to the emotional attractiveness
of the images. In this way, we develop, quite aside from our
rational perception, an intuitive view of nature and of the
cosmos, and our own relation to it. The rose is an old, familiar
example of how our attitude toward the surrounding environ
ment takes form and grows. The body of imagery surrounding
the rose is rooted historically deep in Western cultural patterns
of looking at the world. The rose symbolizes beauty on the
physical level, and purity and freshness on the moral level.
Because this imagery is traditional the associations are un
questioned, and because they are unquestioned, they take on
the quality of myth. In the case of the rose, the imagery
may seem harmless but we will see in a moment how such
myth-building images can be the very death of self-concept.
Notice too, in the case of the rose, that man has projected
himself into his imagery. The purity, beauty and freshness of
the rose are usually compared to an idealized womankind. This
is because the natural impetus of man is to impart to the whole
cosmos the qualities which he possesses. Man s imagery is thus
anthropomorphic; he sees himself or his behavior in every pro
jection he makes. Thus, a flower dances in the breeze; the
thimder rushes angrily through the skies; the sun smiles down
on the sleepy noontime village; Mother earth provides for us.
It follows that mans self-concept must inevitably be tied to
his view of the universe, since he sees his own reflection in
it at every moment. And a reflection of ourselves camiot be
neutral; it cannot be objective; it is either positive or negative.
How we regard the phenomena of nature is an indication of
what we think of ourselves. The howling wind, for example,
is not the same image as the whining wind. If our literary
tradition stresses the howling wind, then we feel emotively tliat
a mysterious prowling creature stalks through our universe. If
the whining wind is stressed, we feel the presence of a weak
but persistent creature following us constantly around.
WeVe said that man projects his image upon the universe.
But man does not exist in isolation. It is far more accurate
to say that man projects his cultural and racial images upon
the universe and he derives a sense of personal worth from
the reflection he sees gazing back at him. For he defines himself
and the world in terms of others like him. He discovers his
identity within a group.
And now we come to the heart of the matter, for we
cannot judge ourselves unless we see a continuity of ourselves
in other people and in things and concepts. We question our
very right to exist vrithout other existences like our own. This
is why image is so important to African Americans. We are
black people living in a white world. When we consider that
the black man sees white cultural and racial images projected
upon the whole extent of his universe, we cannot help but
realize that a very great deal of the time the black man sees
a zero image of himself. The black child growing into adulthood
through a series of week-end movies, seeing white protagonists
constantly before him projecting the whole gamut of human
experience, is, in extreme cases, persuaded that he too must
be white, or (what is more likely), he experiences manhood
by proxy and in someone eh es image. He sees, in other words,
a zero image of himself. If there are black people on the
screen, they are subservient to, uncomfortably different from,
or busy emulating the larger, all-inclusive white culture. In
that case, our young person sees a negative image of himself.
Nor are the images which control personal worth always so
direct or obvious. The very same image-myth process which
we discovered through the example of the rose is present in
the extensive body of color imagery in Western cultmre. Those
associations with black and white have conditioned us to accept
white as the symbol of goodness and purity; black as the symbol
of evil and impurity.
This did not just happen. It is the result of white racial
projection of its own best image upon the universe. Concomitant
with that projection for several hundred yearsever since the
black man has come within the sphere of influence of the white
the moral and aesthetic associations of black and white have
been mixed up witli race. Thus, the negative reflection of
ourselves is, in the white mans system, the reverse side of his
positive projection of himself. The white man has developed a
myth of superiority based on images which compare him sym
bolically with the black man. The very fact of this inter
connection is at once a holdover from previous bondage and
the most effective means of perpetuating that bondage. We
realize now that we are involved in a black-white war over the
control of image. For to manipulate an image is to control a
peoplehood. Zero image has for a long time meant the re
pression of our peoplehood.
Of course, the black American has not relied totally on the

image projected by white culture. He has developed a literature,
and that literature gives him a certain sense of self. We have,
however, in spite of ourselves, not been successful in destroying
zero image, for we have not been able to convince ourselves
that our image is projected on any but a small and segregated
strip of the universe. When a self-definition has proceeded
spontaneously, the literature will reflect not only a group con
sciousness, shared points of view, common ancestry, common
destiny and aspirations, but it reflects these in spiritual one
ness ^vith whatever natural and/or supernatural powers preside
over and guide that destiny. For the black writer, the only
possibility for spiritual oneness has been non-race or religious
literature. But non-race or religious literature takes on insidiously
the image projected by what is called the larger culture, and
so takes on a white image. Black writers have also attempted
to reflect spiritual oneness by writing witliin a totally black
framework. But wliite images are implanted at the core of
black life, the most obvious example being tliat of the Church,
where God is white. Moreover, tlie black community is not
self-sustaining, and a literature which would circumvent this

essential feature of peoplehood cannot cope with the forces
that shape us. For the most part though, black writers have
avoided these two pitfalls, and our literature has been, as we
have, slowly, painfully coming out of bondage and has been
contributing to our growing sense of peoplehood. If black writers
have historically concentrated on white-black animosity, it is
because that animosity is an everyday fact of life and functional
part of our universe.
The artist then, is the guardian of image; the writer is the
myth-maker of his people. We still at times are not sure as
to how much of our image is us; to what extent we are the
sole authors of our myth, our peoplehood. There are those white
people who would nullify any argument we advance on the
basis that it is advanced in a white language. And it is true
that languages project a specific cultiu*al image. But I believe
that we have arrived at a stage of self-awareness in our writing
which sees this type of argument as irrelevant. Our very plain
answer to this sophisticated argument is simply that we will not
let white men define our peoplehood by telling us we re still
using white tools to create it. Similarly, we must reject white
attempts at portraying black reality. They are valid only in
terms of the white man s projection of himself. They have no
place in the definition of blackness, for they reveal the white
writer s attempt to work through his own cultural guilt, fascina
tion with blackness, or sense of spiritual emptiness. This includes
all latterday Harriet Beecher Stowes. No one can hand us a
peoplehood, complete with prefabricated images.
Even the word black is a translation from the Portuguese
slave term negro, gone into the English language as Negro.
But black is also the generalized term which we use to symbolize
unity of origin, whether we are called Anglophone, Francophone,
coloured, mulatto. West Indian or American Negro by the white
image-makers. Black is the highly imagistic term we use to do
away with all such divisionary euphemisms. It is the term we
use to destroy the myth based on the complex of images which
polarize black and white. These images must be mythically tom
down, ritually destroyed. We camiot bury our heads before
the existing body of myth, nor before our own Europeanization.
Therefore, we cannot return nostalgically to a past heritage
and pretend that historical continuity exists in anything but
fragmentary form. We cannot block out the black-white struggle
for control of image and create a utopianized world of all-black
reflections. Our work at this stage is clearly to destroy the zero
and the negative image-myths of ourselves by turning them
inside out. To do this, we reverse the symbolism, and we use
that reverse symbolism as the tool for projecting our own image
upon the universe.
Zero image, and the need to work through it, is not a new
concept. Many black writers have understood the importance
of image, and Ralph EUison in the early fifties stated the same
intent metaphorically in the title and outer stmcture of his
novel. Invisible Man, What is new, I believe, is the deliberate
desecration and smashing of idols, the turning inside-out of
symbols, to which black writers are now proceeding with a
vengeance. Bitterness, which runs through the whole of black
literature, is being replaced by wrath; a sense of frustration is
giving way before a sense of power. It is the sense of power
which proceeds from a mythic consciousness based on a peoples
positive view of themselves and their destiny.
Perhaps we can best conclude with an illustration of the
processes weVe been discussing. The following poem attempts
to desecrate the mytliical and beautiful figure of the muse,
entrenched in white culture since the time of its earliest flower
ing, Greco-Roman antiquity.
Dress the muse in black . . .

Nol
KiU her!
Make her jump
Burning bright white bitch
From the pitched peaks of our houses
Let her shriek

Pale old faded biddy . .
Hear her?
Stomping her feet romid
On our rooftops all these years?
And we, inside. Yassuh meek
Warming our hands by the fire (like sheep)
Phony Yay
Look at her
Ruiming past
Blond flames waving in the wind
Blow on her
Grab a torch up in yoiu: hand and come outside
And watch her burn
And crackle
And topple
And lie
Fallen
Off our rooftops
Into the flame
Look up
And gather round
And shake your torch up at her
Tease her like a yellow cat
Crouching on the roof
Make her jump
Make her howl
Make her yowl
Falling in the fire
Make it hot . . .
Make it hate.
Clap and stomp round the fire
And shout the spirit out of her.
And draw yoin circle close
For we'll kill us a devil tonight.
Come on away, now!
Nowl
We'll find our own saint
(or another name for her)
No need for hell s fire now
The fire s weak
And burned out
The universe is black again.
Carolyn F. Gerald, the perceptive critic and author of "The Black Writer
and His Role," lives and works in Philadelphia, Pa.
TH E BLAC K W RITER
VIS--VIS HIS COUNTRY
John Oliver Killens
I believe it was George Bernard Shaw who once said that

America was the first country in history to move from barbarism
to decadence without going through civilization. I construe the
statement of this estimable British gentleman of letters to mean
that our country has been in such a hurry becoming the wealth
iest and the most powerful nation in the world, it has hardly
had the time or stomach for the niceties of culture and civiliza
tion. Indeed, it has been in such unseemly haste, it has not
even taken the time to bring into reality some of the most
magnificent literature ever written about the rights of men. I
refer, of course, to the Bill of Rights, the Declaration of In
dependence, and the Constitution of the United States.
So a cultural revolution is desperately needed, here and now,
to un-brainwash the entire American people, black and white.
For the people of this land have been the victims of a mighty
brainwash that has continued unabated for the last four hundred
years. Perhaps Negro artists mu5t assume an uneven load in
this cultural revolution because, as black folk, they know
America better than she knows herself. The laws of survival
dictate that the slave must know the many tunis and twists
and quirks of his master. Moreover, the Negro remembers better
than anybody else the American dream, deferred and forgotten
by most Americans. He remembers, because he lives constantly
the dreams negation, yet lives for the day when the dream
will become a reality. He could never take for granted the
Declaration of Independence, the Bill of Rights, the Constitution
of these United States. He could never become blas about the
dream. In a word, your humble servant, the black American, has
borne the brunt of the millions of little white lies America has
told the world about herself and about the Negro.
Since the so-called American Indian is practically extinct, it
is highly probable that the only indigenous American culture
is that of the American Negro. The Negro was invented in
America. Only in America. In the main, his has been a culture
of revolt, of protest and revolution; a culture that is expressed
very clearly in the Negro spirituals. More often than not, they
are still interpreted as songs of a happy, childlike people,
satisfied with their lot in this world and looking forward to the
Hereafter, where the streets would be paved with gold and
overflow with milk and honey. Why do Americans still hang
on in desperation to the image of the happy and contented
slave? D ID N 'T MY LO RD D E L IV E R D A N IEL? WHY NOT
E V E R Y MAN? is not exactly a happy and contented lyricl
From all sides pressure is put upon the Negro artist to deny
his culture, his roots, his selfliood. How many black writers
have you heard engage in this abject self-denial: I am not a
Negro writer. I am a writer who happens to be a Negro. But
the truth of the matter is that we black Americans are all
Negroes (African-Americans, if you prefer) who happen to
have become vmters, painters, lawyers, subway motormen,
doctors, teachers, ditch-diggers, pickpockets, hustlers, or what
ever. We see life from the vantage point of being Negro. A cre
ative writer svrites out of his particular frame of reference, wliich
is the sum total of his life's experience, and he had better
come to terms with it as hurriedly as possible.
Yet from Hollywood to Broadway to Madison Avenue, I hear
variations of tlie same refrain: John, why do you insist upon
The Bhck Writer Vis-a-Vis His Country 381
writing about Negroes? Why dont you write about people?
As often as IVe heard that one, it never fails to jar me,
laboring, as I always have, under the illusion that Negroes are
people. Anotlier goes like this: The tiling I liked about your
stoiy, John, it was universal. It could have been about anybody.
WellI submit that a story that could have been about
anybody is probably about precisely nobody at all. Negroes
are the only people in this world who are set apart because
of who they are, and at the same time told to forget who they
are by the same people who set them apart in the first place.
Now, then, how could I, John Killens, write a valid story
about a Chinese peasant in the hinterlands of China? No matter
how universal my literary approach, I would never be able to
get close to the Chinese peasants specifics, the cultural and
the idiomatic meanings of his life, the unique Chineseness of
him, which are his and only his. Besides, I could never muster
up that much racial arrogance.
I am convinced tliat when Western man speaks of universality,
he is referring to an Anglo-Saxon universality, which includes
a very meager sector of this young and aging universe. Every
line of Sean OCaseys works exudes a sense of Irishness. Dostoev
ski bared the Russian soul. No critic ever questioned their
universality. But to write out of the frame of reference of an
American Negro is ipso facto anti-universal.
Herbert Hill, newly blossoming literary expert on Negro
affairs, in his introduction to Soon, One Morning, an anthology
of New Writing by American Negroes, acclaimed Ralph Ellison
for all the wrong reasons, because Ellisons work, according to
Hill, transcends the traditional preoccupations of the Negro
writer. . . . Today the Negro artist, as he enters into the main
stream of contemporary literature, feels a new strength and
refuses to be limited to racial protest. . . . As tlie Negro writer
moves beyond his anger, he develops a new concern for literary
discipline and control . .
Well, Mr. Hill, the American mainstream contains some rather
sickly fish; if Ellison did indeed enter the mainstream, tlie
The Black Aesthetic
mainstream got more than it gave. It is a pretty puny achieve
ment to join the mainstream, and a puny achievement is pre
cisely what Ellison s novel was not.
The mainstream is jammed with writers like Updike and
Salinger, who write page after page of precious prose about
absolutely nothing. With the whole Western world as their
potential canvas, and swiftly going to pot and trying desperately
to take the rest of civilization with it, such writers flee in
panic because the New World is becoming too much for them.
They escape into minutiae of tight little islands of personal in
significance and Oedipus complexes. The American mainstream
has come up with a crop of literary nitpickers, most of them
entirely without testicles. So now they want to castrate the
Negro vmter, too. Is this the stream Herb Hill would lead
black writers into?
But the motley crew of little white fathers are saying nothing
new. They merely repeat the old refrains pontifically, as if
they're saying something startling and fresh. You say to yourself,
IVe heard that song before, for imdemeath there is always
this veiled admonition to black writers: "Youll never win the
prizes or the critics adulation unless you cool your anger and
lay that pistol down. Keep criticizing society and youll continue
to incur the wrath of us white reviewers, who are not bad
fellows at all and would really like to bring you into the fold.
Oh yes, in spite of the fact that you are a Negro, you too
can join the club if youll just play down your Negro-ness.
But a writer who writes to get into the mainstream and win
National Book Awards and plaudits from the critics is in
trouble with his muse. A creative writer is not a statesman.
He must tell as much of the tmth as he knows the painful
truth to be, and let the flak fall where it may. Writing is a hazard
ous pursuit. The flak might very well fall back on the writer
and put a large hole in his head. It has sometliing to do
witli the law of gravity. What goes up must come down. Artists
are forever at war witli society, and if the artist is a black man
in the Free World he is doubly at war and the wars con
The Black Writer Vi^~d~Vis His Country 383
sequences are especially dangerous for him. But he must fight
in any event, for the consequences of his temporizing are
fraught with even greater danger.
When Ernest Hemingway was interviewed by the Baris Re
view a few years before he died and asked what kind of
advice he would give yomig writers, he answered that a writer
needed two thingsa sense of justice and a built-in, shockproof
shit detector. Obviously a writer also needs artistic talent, but
granting his talent, he desperately needs these two attributes
Mr. Hemingway so graphically described.
As a writer, I must believe with all my mind and heart
and soul in the ancient adage Tou shall know the truth and
the truth shall set you free.'* In a far deeper sense even than
men of the cloth, writers must be searchers for the truth; men
and women whose lifes mission is to explore the truth of man s
relationship to man. And I, for one, believe the basic truth of
what my grandmother used to say. "Aah Lord, honey, the half
aint never been told. There is nothing in the world that I
believe more than the wisdom of that statement. If I believed,
as some Western men continually assert, that everything has
already been said and its just a question now of how differently
you say it, that all is semantics from now on, I would put the
cover on my typewriter and never imcover it again. As a
writer, I must believe that most of what has already been said
is a pack of lies, or, in some instances, mistakes, to be more
charitable to makers of the myths. It is up to the writer to
create a new vision for mankind. He must be forever asking
questions. He must ask the unaskable. Was Platos Republic a
Republic? Was Jefferson democrat or slaveholder? This world
cant possibly be mans best effort, or were all doomed to
destruction or the madhouse. Life must make more sense than
it has up to this point.
Did Shakespeares Macbeth utter an everlasting truth? Have
all our yesteryears lighted fools the way to dusty death? Out,
out, brief candlel Macbeth shouts. Lifes but a walking shadow;
a poor player, that struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
and then is heard no more: it is a tale told by an idiot, full
of sound and fury, signifying nothing. Or did Langston Hughes
come closer to our truth when he asked: W hat happens to a
dream too long deferred?
I am a writer, first of all, and precisely because the world
stinks and I want to change it. Yes, I mean it, and any writer
worth his salt is up to the same subversive business. This is the
w ay things always were, the eternal confrontation between the
artist and society. Every time I sit down to the typewriter,
with every line I put on paper, I am out to change the
world, to capture reality, to melt it down and forge it into
something entirely different. The portrait of the artist as a
human being is one of profound frustration, because although he
knows that change is one of tlie inevitable laws of the universe
in the context of time and space, change in human nature is
imperceptible. That is why die French have a saying: The
more things change the more they remain the same. But the
earth does move. And tilings do change.
Since everybody knows the artist is the maladjusted one,
I plead guilty to the charge. To be perfectly adjusted in a crazy,
impractical, unreasonable society hellbent for its own annihilation
seems tantamount to remaining blissful in a raging booby hatch.
This is what drove Van Gogh to suicide. He was nave enough
to want to make sense in a crazy world. His sin was that he
took life seriously and he loved mankind. Ergo, he was an idiot
before his peers. He wanted to make sense out of a senseless
society, and therefore he was a damn fool. But what is the
verdict a century after he departed? Whom does the world
remember. Van Gogh or his contemporaries?
But despite the current Negro Revolt, which is not yet a
revolution, rumors to the contrary, the American Negro remains
a cultural nonentity as far as books, television, mories, and
Broadway are concerned. It is as if twenty million Americans
did not exist; as if twenty million people were committed to
oblivion. A Negro child can read at home or go to school
and look into his school books, come home and watch television
The Black Writer Vw-d-Vw His Country 385
or maybe go to an occasional movie, and follow this routine
from day to day, month to month, year to year, and hardly, if
ever, see a reflection of himself in the mass-communications
media. This has a tremendously negative impact on a child,
who must have a sense of belonging and not of being here
by toleration. A child must have a sense of selfhood, a knowledge
that he is not here by sufferance, that his forebears contributed
to the country and to the world down through the years.
America knows that the blood, sweat, tears, and muscles of
black folk helped to build this mighty country. You wouldnt
be so high and mighty if it werent for me. You built this
country on the black backs of my forefathers. Slave labor,
thats what it really was, slave labor at a time when slavery
was already obsolete throughout much of the earth. Thats how
you constructed your great temples and stored them with riches.
Thats how you got so far ahead of the rest of man in treasures
stored up here on earth. You cruelly exploited my forebears.
And now you deny my children a cultural existence. You pre
tend they are invisible.
I know the impact. I was a black boy once in Georgia.
I remember. And I know the impact now, because I am the
father of two African-Americans in New York City. I remember
when my son was nine or ten years old, my great friend Langston
Hughes came to dinner and brought my son a book he had
written called Famous American Negroes, In it Langston had
written, for children, stories about the Negro heroes of American
history. Of Harriet Tubman, Frederick Douglass, Crispus At-
tucks, and Benjamin Banneker. This book opened many doors
for my son. Chuck. He was so thrilled he took it to school
the next day and showed it to the teacher, then asked, de
manded really, that she read it to the class.
We lived at the time in the now infamous Bedford-Stuyve-
sant area in Brooklyn and the school was about fifty-fifty in its
composition (meaning Negro-white, not co-educational). This
was just before the great white exodus from the community
had developed into full-scale, panic-stricken, disorderly retreat.
38 TJie Black Aesthetic
The teacher read passages of the book to my son s class and
that night at the dinner table I asked him how it had gone.
"It was wonderful, Daddy! Everybody enjoyed the book.
Then Chuck frowned and said, "But you know. Daddy, nobody
at that school knows anything about Negro culture or Negro
history.
T suppose its understandable that the white children dont
know, I said.
"Oh no. Daddy, I mean the Negro children, too. Not even
the teacher knows. And then he poked out his chest and said
very proudly, "Tm the only one in that school that knows
anything about Negro history or culture.
I looked at him and wanted to laugh and shout for the joy
and pride he felt. At the same time I wanted to cry for all
the black kids all over America caught up in what playwright
Ted Ward has called the Big White Fog, never knowing that
they have ever been anything and therefore never believing
theyll ever amount to anything.
My daughter, Barbara, was then six years old. We lived
in a brownstonc on Lafayette Avenue, the parlor floor and base
ment. She would sit in the living room on the parlor floor and
stare at the idiot box for hour upon hour. What program didnt
matter, she even watched tlie commercials. We figured this
was rather precocious for one of her tender age, for some of
the commercials were better than the programs. Ultimately the
fog lifted (for us, I mean), and we realized that our daughter
was watching to see herself reflected on the television screen,
a black man or woman presented with dignity, for she already
knew the difference between dignity and Amos n Andy. When
once or twice during a long and arduous vigil she saw a black
face on the white screen, she would run downstairs where we
usually were, shouting, "Daddy! Mommy! Negro on T\M But
by the time we got upstairs he or she would be gone.
Wlien we first moved to the neighborhood where we now
live, Barbara was the only Negro in her class. She came home
from school one day in tears. Tlic liistory teacher had told
TJie Black Writer Vis-d-Vis His Country 387
the class that the Civil War was fought too soon, that the
slaves werent ready for freedom, and were happy and con
tented on the old plantation. Barbara took on the entire class
and the teacher. 1 dont know if I said the right things. Daddy.
But I knew that what that teacher was saying didnt sound
like anytliing Id heard at home.
She burst into tears again as if her heart would surely
break. Barbara was a happy girl most of the time. She rarely
cried. She ran headlong into life, smiling, laughing, tripping,
falling, getting up and running smack dab into life again, with
hardly ever a thought about the very high cost of living. How
could a teacher be so vicious to such a tender-hearted child?
Or was the lady just plain ignorant?
I know a young black artist whose art is a monument to
black life in America. He renders a toast to life in every stroke
of his talented brush. Yet when I saw Tom Feelings at a meeting
a few months ago, he was disheartened and told me he was
leaving America. He had been going to the public schools of
Bedford-Stuyvesant and giving chalk talks to black children on
Negro and African history. But he explained that he could no
longer do so because he realized more and more that the Negro
Idds thought themselves ugly. Because they were black. He
said it was just too much for him. He thought they were beauti
ful; they thought they were ugly. Obviously their parents agreed
with them. How else can one interpret stocking caps and
straightening combs and bleaching cream?
John, Ive got to get to Africa. Ive got to go to a place
where black children know who they are and what they are
and know that theyre beautiful and that tliey are somebody.
Ive got to go some damn place where black folk dont think of
themselves as niggers.
He was almost in tears. I knew the desperate feeling. From
generation to generation the nigger feeling is handed down
from parent to child. The feeling that what is white is right,
and what is black is wrong. White is the symbol of purity and
virginity and everything else that is good and powerful and
eternal. Oh, how many times in the days of my youth did
I sit in the humble pews of black churches and hear the
wonderful, soulful, beautiful, hard-working black sisters, young
and old, shout supplications of utter futility: Wash me. Heav
enly Father, And I will be as white as snowl
The Western world deliberately made black the symbol of
all that was evil and ugly. Black Friday, blacklist. Black Plague,
black look, blackmail. Oh, the way the white Establishment
made us hate ourselves. A nigger ain't shitl is a black pass
word, a common utterance of black folks. You took a great
people from a great continent and turned them into niggers.
That is the job you accomplished in the name of civilizing the
natives and Christianizing the pagans. That is the essence
of what America is, from the black mans point of view. The
land of the niggermakers.
This distorted image of the Negro has its negative effect
on your children too. It gives them a distorted picture of this
earth and of human potential and ill-equips them to live in a
world, three-quarters of which is colored and fast becoming free
and independent.
That is why my friends from the African embassies run into
diflBculties Down South in Atlanta and New Orleans and
even Up South in New York City. To the average American,
they arc simply niggei*s. In a way, I cannot truthfully say
that I am sorry. As long as indignities are commonplace for
black Americans, it is all to the good for black brothers from
across the seas to labor under no illusions as to the (universal)
American attitude toward men and women of color. I am not
sadistic. Neither am I masochistic. I just don't want Ameriar
to hoodwink black folk tliroughout the world. Let us set tilings
straight at home first.
Along with tlie fight to desegregate the schools, we must
desegregate the entire cultiual statement of America; we must
desegregate tlic minds of the American people. If we merely
succeed in desegregating the school buildings, we may very well
find tliat we have won the battle and lost the war. Integration
The Black Writer Vis--Vis His Country 389
begins the day after the minds of the American people are
desegregated. This is the great challenge to all American writers,
but especially to the black writer. Wlio will tell the real story
of America if the black writer doesn t? Certainly not the gentle
men of the "mainstream who still believe in Gunga Din and
Uncle Tom and Aunt Jemima, or the "avant-garde, the rebels
who are really anti-revolutionary. Jean Genet and his genre, the
"theater of the absurd, the ^beatnik, the new wave, would
appear to be merely Johnny-come-lately Kiplings. Apologists
for white supremacy die hard and recur in varying disguises.
Behind the "avant-gardes beards and dark glasses, they
rationalize, apologize, as they strut and posture. The under
lying statements of The Blacks and The Balcony are the same,
that all civilization stinks, period, "When the have-nots over
throw the haves, nothing will really change except the relative
positions of the adversaries. It will be the same thing all over
again. There is no revolution ever. It s the same merry-go-round,
so stop the world, I want to get off. Well, pardon me, fellows,
I don't want to get off. The world never looked so good to me
before.
"Suredont worry how you treat the blacks. The blacks will
do the same to you when they seize power. This is Gents
message, as far as Tm concerned. The Blacks was excellent
therapy for many guilt-ridden white folk, which probably ex
plains the long New York run it enjoyed, so much so that many
whites went back to see it time and time again. Actually, the
so-called "avant-garde is really a rear-guard action in disguise.
It is neither revolutionary, anti-bourgeois, as it sometimes makes
pretensions of being, nor anti-white supremacy; it is not even
anti-Estabhshment. It is essentially anti-people. "The West is
humanity, humanity is the West, w ere all sick to the guts,
so lets, man, hke all of us get into this here Western style
pigsty, and have one final everlasting orgy,
There seems to be a growing tendency in the literature about
black and white relationships to give the impression that
everything could be solved on the analytical couch. I imagine
tliis approach is a part of the so-called sexual re v o lu tio n T h e
whole color tiling is merely a deeply rooted psychological
sexual complexity and if we could only gather together 190 mil
lion black and white Americans into one gargantuan orgiastic
group therapy, or perhaps one gigantic therapeutic orgy, all the
problems would be solved. I submit that though we might have
a ball, after the smoke and funk cleared away, the Great
American Problem would still be with us; the Black Mans
Burden would not have disappeared. Because the Problem and
the Burden are historical, economic, cultural, and social, as well
as psychological and sexual. The root of the problem is the
Negro Invention.
So now comes the question: Who will uninvent the Negro?
For nearly four hundred years the black mans personality has
been under attack, his selfhood devastated. Ever since he was
brought to this country in chains he has constantly been given
the ultimatum: Deny your humanity or perishl Where are the
artists and prophets who will undo this white destniction? Who
will write the songs for us to sing of our black heroes? Wlio will
tell our children of valiant Chaika? Who wiU re-create the
ancient glory that was Timbuktu and Kush and Ghana and
Songhay? It is important for us to know that our history on
this earth did not begin with slavery's scars.
In order for a people to develop a highly political and
revolutionary consciousness, they must hold a high regard for
themselves. They must know that they came from some where,
in order to believe themselves capable of going somewhere;
they must have a past before they can create a future for
themselves. A people needs legends, heroes, mytlis. Deny them
these and you have wôn half the battle against them.
The French needed legendary figures like Joan of Arc in
order to develop a national consciousness, without which any
revolution is impossible. So wx' black folk need Saint Harriet
of the Eastern Shore. We must build a literature of heroes,
myths, and legends. The lives of Harriet Tubman, Frederick
Douglass, Nat Tunier, Sojounier Tnith, are as fonnidable as
The Block Writer Vis-dWis H is Country 391
George Washington s, and are based on a much more substantial
reality. Our people, young and old, need such heroes desperately.
Slavemasters Washington and Jefferson do not belong to our
children. We need our own myths and legends to regain our
lost self-esteem, our regard for each other as a people capable
of working together to move the mountains that stand before us.
We need such a heritage in order to really believe that we shall
prevail.
Tm reminded of a story. A little boy had read numerous
stories in his childrens books about various hfe-and-death strug
gles between a man and lion. But no matter how ferociously
the lion fought, each time the man emerged victorious. This
puzzled the boy, so he asked his father, W hy is it. Daddy,
that in all these stories the man always beats the lion, when
everybody knows that the lion is the toughest cat in all the
jungle?
The father answered, Son, those stories will always end
like that until the lion learns how to write.
Few white American writers care enough about the country
to criticize it fundamentally. Compared with the ambivalent
lot who clutter up the mainstream, they make up a pitifully
small pool of courageous talent. Mention James Jones, Norman
Mailer, Warren Miller, Lillian Smith, Arthur Miller, Harvey
Swados, Ginzburg, Buckmaster, Rosten, Williams, and you have
very nearly run out of names. Regardless of how one feels
about their views of this society, one must concede that they
are writers who care about things deeply. One hopes that
one day at least one of them will care deeply enough to
dramatize or novelize the white folk who are completely taken
in by the righteous cause of white supremacy, explain them
to us and particularly to themselves in all their myriad con
tradictions. What is the metamorphosis of a racial bigot? Are
they bom retarded? Is it fed to them with their mothers
milk? The public schools? The press? The church? The mass-
communications media? How? Why? When? Where?
America needs to understand what goes into the making
of a man who will go out on a Sunday morning in Birming

ham, Alabama, and participate in the strange ritual of throwing
bombs into a church and killing innocent little Negro children
as they are being taught about Jesus, the same Jesus of Nazareth
whom the killers profess to worship. And what about the sickness
of men who will stand on the sidelines and watch such bloody
rituals enacted, without daring to speak? What sort of un
speakable fear has locked their jaws? What is the true anat
omy of racial prejudice? Here is a challenge for some writer
who cares.
What happens to the dream too long deferred? What white
writer will ask America Langston Hughes s question, and come
up with some answers? For the dream has been deferred for
all the country, black and white. But who will help convince
white America that the dream is important to them also?
Or have you, too, stopped dreaming? Come on, white brothers.
Or don't you really give a damn?
Historically, white America put words in the black mans
mouth and bade him sing improbable lyrics like:
All the darkies am a-weepiri

Masses in de cold, cold ground.
But my great-grandmother told me difiFerently. We wept

all right, honey! Great God A'mighty! We cried for joy and
shouted halleluyah!"
Even long after slavery, white America continued the black
man singing such banalities as:
I got plenty of nuthin

And nuthin s plenty fo* me.
or
Summertime and the livin is easy.
Certainly tlic American Negro knows, more profoundly than

anyone else, that tlie living is never easy.
The Black Writer Vis-d-Vis His Country 393
Even a short while ago, you had us singing;
It aint no sin to dance and grin

That*s why darkies were born.
Yet a black poet once wrote:
Carry me hack to oT Virginia^-

Thafs the only way youU get me there.
And in our own songs we sang:
Sometimes I feel like a motherless child,

A long ways from home.
We sang:
Nobody knows the trouble I see.
Happy, contented people, we sang:
Before I be a slave
m be buried in my grave
And go home to my Lord
And be free.
How did all this begin, this billion-dollar misunderstanding?

It started with your determination to have my labor without
pay.
In order to justify slavery in a courageous New World spout
ing slogans of freedom and equality and brotherhood, the en
slavers had to create the fiction that the enslaved were sub
human and undeserving of human rights and sympathies. The
first job was to convince the outside world of the inherent
inferiority of the enslaved. The second job was to convince the
American people. And the third job, which was the crudest
hoax of all, was to convince the slaves themselves that they

deserved to be the slaves. The propagandists for American
slavery (the creative writers'' of that time) tackled their tasks
with alacrity and a great measure of success, the effects of
which still remain with us today, a hundred years after the
Emancipation Proclamation, almost two hundred years after the
Declaration of Independence. Thus was the Negro invented
and the American Revolution thwarted. To this day, supposedly
bom in revolution, America is embarrassed by that word. Ameri
cans shy away from the word revolution" like the plague, as
if tlie American Revolution had never happened. Well, did it
happen? Knock on any door in Harlem; in all the Harlems
of tile U.S.A. Ask any black man or woman in Alabama or
Mississippi: Was 1776 for real? We black folk are the living
proof of whetlier your revolution was a fake or not.
I attended a party some years ago near the Northwestern
University campus, given by some university instructors to cele
brate the publication of my first novel, Youngblood. One of
them told me how much she had enjoyed Youngblood, but
then asked, Mr. Killens, do you think you could ever write
about people, I mean, not just about Negroes? I mean about
people." Tlie nice lady was a trifle flustered.
You mean, white people, don't you?"
She answered, Wellyes. I suppose that is what I mean."
Yes, I believe I could if I wanted to. In fact there are
white folk in Youngblood. Actually, I believe that a black
writer would find it easier writing about white folk than the
white writer writing about black folk. The black man has had
to know you in order to live in your world. I had to know
what questions you were going to ask before you asked them,
and I had to have the answers ready. But you've always taken
me for granted. You come to me with all kinds of preconceptions
about my iimate inferiority. You never get past tlie myth to
tlie real me."
My rejection slips reveal so much. IVe gotten many a Dear
Jolm" in my day, and I still get them.
Tlie Black Writer Vis-d-Vis His Country 395
Dear John:
Thank you for submitting your story to us. It is a powerful and
beautiful job. Unfortunately the subject matter is not for us.
Frankly, we are not a controversial house.
However, do keep us in mind when you write something else,
especially if it has no racial overtones.
Sincerely,
Meaning of course: J^hn, why do you insist on WTiting about

Negroes? Why don't you write about people? Why this pres
sure on the Negro writer to deny his roots? Because the Negro
experience in this country is tlie most fundamental criticism
of the American way of life. This reality America has refused
to face. It always was and always will be, so long as black
remains the symbol of human dispossession. As long as we
black folk are D.P.'s in our native land, the controversy will
continue to rage. It will always remain a stumbling block in
our attempts to win friends and influence people among the
African and Asian populations. Africans are concerned with the
welfare of their American brothers, and the American brother
is becoming more and more concerned with Mother Africa.
Don't write about the Negro, write about Americans. But
surely the American Negro is the most uniquely American of
all Americans, because he was created here, in this place,
physically, psychologically, sociologically, culturally, economi
cally. He is an American product. The Negro, in his black
presence, is the barometer of this nation's Constitution, and
all its democratic traditions yet unrealized. Still deferred. The
black man's sojourn in this country is the universal story of
man's inhumanity to man, capable of being understood in any
language in any nation on the earth. Here is the place for the
literary prophets! But maybe Western man is right "Every
thing to be said has already been said by Western man. I
mean, it may be true that Western man has said all he has
to say. It may be that he has run out of meaningful dialogue.
God knows, he has talked long enough.
But colored people throughout the world have been sen

tenced by Western man to centuries of silence. And now in
the middle of the twentieth century, it is time for them to
speak. Western man wrote his own history as if it were the
history of the entire human race. I hope that colored men
have watched Western men too long to commit the fatal folly
of writing history with a colored pencil. For there is a great
wisdom in the old Ghana proverb that says; No one rules
forever on the throne of time. Notwithstanding, in this cultural
revolution, we must reconstruct the history of the last four
hundred years and this time tell How the West Was Really
Won.
There is much inhumanity, violence, and brutality in our
countrys history. We must face that. For neither a people nor
a nation can free itself from its past by denying or distorting
it. White Americans have been sheltered from their history.
History is a peoples memory, and people have a habit of
remembering the very best about themselves. It is an all too
human trait. But in the final analysis, a people must face
its history squarely in order to transcend it.
SOME OBSERVATIONS ON A BLA C K A ESTH ETIC
Adam David Miller
Just as for the past hundred years blacks have provided the
most creative force for dance and music in this country, that
is, as the senses of sound and movement in this country have
been the creation of Afros, many now feel, I among them,
that the seventies will see this Afro creative force ascendant
in the other arts. Few can ignore the effects of the cake walk,
fox trot, lindy hop, the twist on the movement habits of people
in the States. Few, except the issuers of Pulitzer prizes, will
doubt that the American sense of music is of Afro origin.
A catalogue of names would overrun the page. Today we
are seeing fine black filmmakers, painters, sculptors, graphic
artists, and craftsmen. And in aU fields of literature, the
writing aimed at the heart and life of the country is coming
increasingly from Afros.
I would like to think of aesthetics as a way of viewing
and sensing and the results of what is view ed and sensed*
Through such thinking, I would like to move the question
of aesthetics from the contemplation of the beautiful to tliat
of knowing, perception, and feeling. If we take this working
definition and apply it to U.S. blacks, we will have to ask how
Copyright, Adam David Miller, 1970.
have we blacks seen ourselves, through whose eyes, how do we

see ourselves now, and how may we see ourselves? By so doing,
we may at least put the question of a black aesthetic in some
perspective.
To examine the question of how we have seen ourselves, it
would be useful to be reminded of the definitions our former
legal slavemasters made of us and some of our early responses
to them. As early as 1847, Alexis de Tocqueville noted in
Democracy in America: "To induce the whites to abandon the
opinion they have of the moral and intellectual inferiority of
their former slaves, the negroes must change, but as long as
this opinion subsists, to change is impossible."' Note that De
Tocqueville states that a change in blacks, not whites, is needed.
Being European, De Tocqueville could not see that the masters
had no way into the minds of their slaves. The slaves had
not only a different language from that of their masters, but
also an entirely different view of the world. Thus, having
no tools to measure their intellect, most masters found it both
convenient and profitable to suppose they had none. Having
made this supposition, they proceeded to set up and enforce
systems of denial and restriction that had the effect of sup
pressing the slaves" intellect and directing it so that it was
hidden from the masters. And again, as a European, De
Tocqueville himself was of such a limited moral sense that he
could not understand how preposterous it was tliat the master
should presume to judge the moral condition of his enslaved.
Lawrence Gellert summed it up this way:
Me an my captain don't agree,

But he don't know, 'cause he don't ask me;
He don't know, he don't know my mind.
When he see me laugliing
Just laughing to keep from crying.
Got one mind for white folks to see,
'Notlier for what I know is me; . . .
For generations, then, as slaves and former slaves in this

country, we were thought to be morally and intellectually in
ferior beings. As writers, our responses varied. There was often
a discrepancy between what we ai*gued om-selves to be and
how we characterized ourselves. For example, see Leon R.
Harris:
. . . When ever)things put to the test,

In spite of our color and features,
The Negro's the same as the rest.
Meanwhile, Afro writers often used the same stereotypes as

white writers when portraying Afros.
What had happened was that the job of conditioning had
been so thorough, the intimidation, forced breeding, dispersal,
waq:)ing, brutalization, so complete, that the values of our former
legal owners had become our own, so complete that we saw
ourselves as our "masters" saw us; so that while the logic of
our lives was clear, the sense of it was not; so that wliile
we could say we were men and equals, we could not imagine
ourselves as such. Forced to accept an alien language, alien
and hostile gods, and an alien view of the world, our imagina
tions were shackled to those of our rulers, with the result that
we continued for a considerable time the work they had begun
in their manner.
Pai*tly because our early writers thought of themselves as
spokesmen for the race to outsiders rather than spokesmen to
the race, they allowed themselves to use the language of out
siders instead of tlieir own. They felt that if they accepted
the standards of white writing, its conventions of language and
correctness, its deconim, they and their race would be presented
in a better light. With these early writers, language had to he
correct, even to the point of stifiFness and woodenness; they
eschewed "barbarisms," meaning certain characteristic Afro im
ages and usages. Because their speech wiis "purified," many
slave narratives sound as though they could have been written
by anyone.
When black writers tried to use dialect to reproduce sounds
characteristic of our people, they were told that the only emo
tions dialect could convey were humor and pathos. We can
either laugh at you or be maudlin over you. Our early writers
accepted tliis two-valued orientation, apparently not realizing
that this judgment on the possible uses of dialect had nothing
to do with dialect, but rather with the only two feelings the
arbiters of culture were willing either to show toward us them
selves or to allow us to show.
Some writers of the twenties, especially those spoksmen for
the New Negro, attempted to stake out a space for black
writing, where black art and culture could flower. In a fore
ward to his 1925 anthology The New Negro, Alain Locke
states: Negro life is not only establishing new centers, it is
finding a new soul. There is fresh spiritual and cultural fo
cusing. We have, as the heralding sign, an unusual outburst
of creative expression. There is a renewed race-spirit that con
sciously and proudly sets itself apart.
Out of this renewed race-spirit some of the young writers
began to present black life as it was lived by the majority
of blacksits vitahty, its inventiveness, its strength, its fun, but
also its poverty, its bitterness, its squalor. They were misread
by both whites and blacks; praised by whites, who hailed them
for presenting a new primitive, and reviled by blacks for
presenting l)ad things. Anticipating what was to follow and
attempting to prepare the way for it, Langston Hughes issued
a manifesto, a declaration of freedom, in The Negro Artist
and tlie Racial Mountain. He declared liimself to be free to
write as he chose, for whoever cared to read him. As a writer,
he was going to be tnie to what he saw instead of to some
imagined something he ought to see.
Hughes, Wallace Thimnan, and others foimd themselves cas
tigated by tliat minuscule body of blacks who had successfully
copied what they thought were wliite mamiers and habits and
did not wish their shaky middle place to be disturbed by
an awareness of tliose blacks tliey knew were beneath them.
They were so put off by surfaces, that a few years later they
were to reject Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching
God as a story of black migrant workers, when what Miss
Hurston was doing was presenting at eye level two lovers who
dared to be happy in a society where happiness was sinful,
where work was a duty not a pleasure, and pleasure some
thing other.
Fortunately for us, Hughes, Miss Hurston, and Ama Bontemps
{Black Thunder) were not dissuaded by indifferent or negative
receptions, and as a result we have several works by writers
who took the lives of their characters seriously, and rendered
them with integrity, clarity, and precision.
In looking at our early writers, we can first see them at
tempting to shake off the stultifying yoke imposed by their
legal masters, then writing in the manner of their masters for
a time, hoping thereby to please the more book-educated blacks
and not offend whites, and a few of the more courageous
seeking to promote a race spirit and to recreate tliis spirit
for their fellows. The writers of the twenties began to feel
they should write for black audiences, even with the limitations
this task imposed. Many of their readers were still seeing art
as universal, as some of the writers themselves did, and alas
still do.
I would like to see the idea of universal laid to rest,
along with such outmoded usages as civilization, as applied to
the West; social protest, as applied to Afro literature; pagan
and fetish, when applied to non-Christian religions; primitive,
barbarian, and folk, as applied to life-styles or as judgments
of culture; and jungle, as applied to African space. These terms
are too-heavily weighted European culture judgments to be of
much use.
James Weldon Johnson, writing in 1928 on what was more
a dilemma for black writers then than now, that of the double
audienceone white, the other blacksaw a way out of that
dilemma if the black author could make one audience out of
what had been formerly two. He said; The equipped Negro
author working at his best in his best-known material can
achieve tliis end; but, standing on his racial foundation, he
must fashion something that rises above race, and reaches
out to the universal in truth and beauty" (emphasis mine),
(The Dilemma of tlie Negro Author, The American Mercury,
December 1928). When Johnson says the Afro writers work
must rise above race to be important, he anticipates the
attempted putdown of Gwendolyn Brooks's work by a white
poet: I am not sure it is possible for a Negro to write well
without making us aware he is a Negro; on the other hand,
if being a Negro is the only subject, the writing is not im
portant. Something is wrong with being only Negro?
Were someone to say to Johnson, A nigger is a nigger is
a nigger, he would probably be questioned about his sanity.
But this same man could say, "Beauty is truth, truth beauty,
that is all/Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know,'
and Johnson would probably say, How profoundl Now neither
statement says any more about experience than the other, yet
because of his cultural conditioning, Johnson imagines universal
in truth and beauty says something about a standard of aesthet
ics, when in reality he is talking about cultural judgments,
and ultimately the way power is exercised in our society.
Johnson said that we should not ignore whites, because they
made up 90 per cent of the population and we were surrounded
by them. He might have added, had he dared, that they also
control publishing, film, and broadcasting, and make up the
largest share of the market for oiu: wares.
Clearly, much of the koash-koash hinges on universal, and
the value some of us give to it as opposed to tlie idea of
black. Some of us keep feeling that to be black is not to be
universal, and to be black is to be limited. Why is black such
a limiting idea? Underlying much of the clever words and
prolonged agonies is the simple refusal, no matter how sophis
ticated and learned tlie attempt at concealment, no matter how
much *e\ddcnce is presented for the evasions, the by now
complex refusal, to accept the validity of our experience and
to give that experience the same credence as any otlier.
LeRoi Jones said that a man once said to him: But your
experience is weird. Jones replied: Yes, it is weird. Which
means its a weird place we live in. A 1 Young, black poet
and college professor, whites in Dancing: Life is more than
fun & games/The thought/after all/that eitlier of us is capable
of being assassinated/at any moment/for absolutely nothing/&
relatively httle/is of course unnerving.
At one point in oiu* history, many U.S. writers made a con
scious eflFort to break with the literatures of Europe. To the
extent of taking many of their themes from mainland North
America and developing local language, the language founded
by Mark Twain, they were successful. There were not suc
cessful, though, in eliminating a vertical structure for society,
the two-valued orientation, the Platonic ideal, monotheism, and
finance capitalism. These were as tlioroughly ingrained in the
new literature as in the old. What was omitted by the new
literature was an attempt to get inside the slave or freedman
and inquire: What is it like for me in this ahen place? Be
cause of this omission, Hughes was prompted to say: If any
bodys gonna write about me, I reckon itU be/Me myselfl
The black story has not been told. We have written about
ourselves neither enough nor well enough. Todays young writers
are again attempting to continue the work begun in the twen
ties, that is, to write out of a central experience of black life
in the United States and show that life from their particular
racial foundations. That the objectioas to such a path by our
book-educated have not changed much from the earlier time,
may be suggested by some reactions to tlie idea of a black
aesthetic.
In a questionnaire to black writci*s on writers and literary
values, Hoyt W. Fuller asked in the January 1969 Negro Digest
(now Black W orld): Do you see any future at all for the
school of black writers which seeks to estabhsh a black aes-
404 Tlie Black Aesthetic
theticT This questipn, partly because of the anxieties it raised,

drew some put-offs, some guffaws, and some considered replies.
Despite its form, Mr. Fuller has not asked an easy question,
as, I think, what follows will amply demonstrate.
Saunders Redding answered: No. Not in America. Besides,
aesthetics has no racial, national, or geographical boundaries.
Beauty and truth, the principal components of aesthetics, are
imiversal." Robert Hayden, through implication, shares a point
with Redding and asks a question of his own: It seems to
me that a black aesthetic would only be possible in a pre
dominately black culture. Yet not even black African writers
subscribe to such an aesthetic. And isn t the so-called black
aesthetic simply protest and racist progaganda in a new guise?''
An answer with very different implications was Addison Gayle,
Jr.'s: The black aesthetic' has always been a part of the lives
of black people. To investigate these lives, and the conditions
surrounding them, is to reveal an aesthetic inherent in the soul
of black people.
What I have been saying is more closely in keeping with
Professor Gayle's views. It may be that a black aesthetic is
inherent in the black experience, and is rendered when we
honestly recreate that experience. No writer tells it like it is.
If he did, we'd probably be bored to sleep. What a writer
tells is it like he needs it to be, in order to make sense
out of his experience and the experiences of those whose world
he recreates. When we write about ourselves from a point of
view that takes black life seriously, that views it in scale, witli
human dimensions, then we are creating a black aesthetic.
CAN A METRONOME KNOW TH E TH UND ER OR
SUMMON A GOD?
Ishmael Reed
The N ew Literary Neo-HooDooism
Dance and Drums preceded the word. Thousands of years

before the invention of the N over or the Short Story, Thoth,
the black Birdman of Egypt, invented letters and gave names
to things. Magic/Religion came before criticism, and words
(nommos) were the rappings of not one but thousands of
Spirits. Centuries before the literary capitals of London, Paris,
and New York, Ife, in Nigeria, was the home of the Necroman
cers, heavier than Solomon, conjurers of dread and joy.
Kidnapped by bandits to North America, they became Hoo-
Doo men, maintaining the faith of the old religion. A slave
told a whopper about a hurricane that went on about its
nevermind long before James Joyce thought of punning Homer.
The words, dmms, and wood sculptime mystified and frightened
the bandit who punished those slaves using them. The void
was filled by Christianity, whose straight mythological system
patrolled the drums of passion. Witness spirituals, in which
often the slave became his own enemy, or the hard time
black Pharaohs and Babylonians receive in D' Good Book. But
fragments of the old religion remained intact. The subversive
music of New Orleans Jazz, in which instruments substituted

for voices as vessels of the Loa (Spirits) and the blues ( Some
body done HooDooed the HooDoo manJunior Wells).
Some slaves excelled at Sonnets, Odes, and Couplets,
the feeble pluckings of musky Gentlemen and slaves of the
metronome. Others became polemicists/spokesmen, writing nar
ratives in which traces of the old faithAfricanisms, as they
were calledwere deleted by Christian abolitionist editors. But
there were always the prophetsnecromancers whose folk tales
and sermons defied the conventions of plot, conflict, causality,
and motivationnot elements of art forms as much as mere
habits chained to a Western way of seeing things, and thus
not universal. (Note the Western literary term epiphany.
Isnt that some kind of Christian rite?)
It all comes down to this; can a metronome know the thunder
or summon a God?
Milo Rigaud writes of the old religion: Unlike other es
tablished religions, there is no hierarchy of bishops, archbishops,
cardinals, or a pope in Voodoo. Each oum phor is a law imto
itself, following the traditions of Voodoo but modifying and
changing the ceremonies and rituals in various ways. This is
because the religious leaders of the oumphor speak directly
with the gods of Voodoo, and are not obliged to answer to
anyone else to interpret what the gods tell tliem.
Similarly, this individualism holds true for the writers in
19 Necromancers from Now (Doubleday, August 1970). Nine
teen Necromancers of two worlds do a speaking in tongues.
From the interplanetary way-out to a supranaturalism so pre
cise and fine that we know the brand of lipstick on the
filter-tipped cigarette dangling there from the blue triangular
ashtray. The poetypographer does liis rappings along with tlie
writer for whom meaning is all.
19 Necromancers from Now, Tlie new Literary Neo-Hoo-
Dooism. Some plant their flags on things; we plant our fllags
on the seventies.
TH E FUNCTIO N OF BLA C K LIT ER A T U R E AT
TH E PR ESEN T TIM E
Addison Gayle, Jr.
One of the most promising of the young Negro poets once

said to me, Langston Hughes related in The Negro Artist
and the Racial Mountain, I want to be a poetnot a Negro
poet, meaning, I believe, I want to write like a white poet;
meaning subconsciously, I would like to be a white poet; mean-
ning behind that, I would like to be white. . . . This is the
mountain standing in the way of any true Negro art in America
this urge within the race toward whiteness, the desire to pour
racial individuality into the mold of American standardization,
and to be as little Negro and as much American as possible.
We, too, have our literary assimilationists in the 1970s. More
sophisticated than their counterparts of yesteryear, they declaim
in the language of the academic scholars. The black writer,
they argue, must join the American mainstream; he must
make his work more universal, and, instead of writing about
Negroes all the time, he must write about people. Your book
(The Black Situation), remarked a black colleague, is interest
ing; but you shouldve included more universal experiences.
Black-WritingThe Other Side {Dissent, May-June 1968),
^ P y ^ g k t, 1970, Addison Gayle, Jr.
by Jervis Anderson, is a case in point One supposes that

Anderson is an honest man and should not be held accountable
for the unsavory company he keeps. Afro-Americans, however,
do not pubhsh in Dissent, edited by Irving Howea racist
par excellenceunless they are content to play the role of
Friday to Irving Howes Crusoe.
Apparently, Anderson has few compunctions about playing
such a role. As a prelude to his major thesis, he quotes William
Melvin Kelley: There's no basic reason why we should talk
to white people. Dostoyevsky did not talk to tlie Germans but
to the Russians. . . . And we have to talk to our ovm people."
The voice of the rebuttal is that of Anderson; the theme, tone,
and contempt belong to Father" Howe, who, one supposes,
smiles approvingly over the shoulder of his young protg:
Dostoyevsky's importance in the tradition of Western writing
rests as much on the fact that he made a great and universal art
(italics mine) out of Russian experiences as on the fact that
diverse peoples of diverse hfe styles were able to find in his
work images of their ovm situation. Obviously, black separatist
writing has not left itself open to such accomplishments.
The urge . . . toward whiteness in the race, as evidenced
by Fridays, past and present, has prevented the creation of a
nationalistic art. Moreover, because of it, black writers have
postulated an imaginary dichotomy between art and fimction
that has made much of the writing of black authors irrelevant
to the lives of black people. In an attempt to curry favor with
the Crusoes of America, such writers, like Anderson, negate the
idea of a miique group experience, and deny that black people,
but for the accident of history and geography, would con
stitute a separate nation.
When put forward by black people, the thesis of a separate
nation is dismissed as an absurdity. Yet, the same thesis, argued
by white men of the nineteenth century, is catalogued in Ameri
can history texts as sound, patriotic, ideahsm. The poet Philip
Freneau was one of the most vociferous advocates of a break
with tlie cultm*al traditions of Europehe was only sUghtly more
Function of Black Literature at the Present Time 409
militant than his contemporaries Ralph Waldo Emerson, John
Trumbull, and Noah Webster.
Another of his contemporaries was the black poetess Phillis
Wheatley. Like Freneau, she borrowed extensively from the
poetical forms of the English neoclassicists. However, unlike
Freneau, she failed to use these forms to call a new nation into
being. Oblivious of the lot of her fellow blacks, she sang not
of a separate nation, but of a Christian Eden. She wrote, as
Richard Wright so aptly put it, 'as a Negro reacting not as a
Negro.
In the main, black writers have traveled the road of Phillis
Wheatley. They have negated or falsified their racial experi
ences in an attempt to transform the pragmatics of their every
day lives into abstract formulas and theorems. They believe,
with Margaret Just Butcher and Hugh Gloster, that there is a
universal condition that transcends race and nationality, and
that this condition is relevant to men of all colors. In this
analysis, the function of the artist is to depict the unique
manner in which each man reacts to his condition. Therefore,
Eric Jones, of Another Country, is a more universal character
than Rufus Scott, because he copes with his condition (homo
sexuality) in a way in which Rufus cannot cope with his
(blackness).
The degree of similarity between the conditions under which
blacks and whites live has been exaggerated. This exaggeration
results from the tendency to regard American slavery as an eco
nomical, political, and legal institution, capable of being legis
lated out of existence by the thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth
amendments. However, under the creative aegis of the Ameri
cans, slavery assumed a uniqueness heretofore imsurpassed in
the annals of slave institutions. Men were separated, not only
in terms of laws and economics, but also in terms of basic
human qualities. For Quaker and southern plantation owner
alike, the black man was a subhuman being whose condition
could be alleviatedif at allonly by divine intervention.
He was not an American, nor was his condition analogous to
that of Americans. To be an American was not to be censured

with Benedict Spinoza: Let him be accursed by day, and
accursed by night; let him be accursed in his lying down, and
accursed in his rising up; accursed in going out and accursed
in coming in. May the lord never more pardon or acknowledge
him; may the wrath and displeasure of the lord bum hence
forth against this man, load him with all the curses written
in the book of the law, and blot his name from imder the
sky. . . The criteria for defining an American went beyond
accidents of birth, acts of immigration, or legal statutes erected
during periods of national frenzy.
Nevertheless, with more zeal than whites. Blacks continue
to flaunt their Americanism. Like Don Quixote, they insist that
this earthly hell can be transformed into a heavenly paradise
through the sheer efiFort of will power. No one is more cul
pable in this respect than the black writer. He attempts to gain
recognition as an American by arguing that there are no separate
cultural streams dividing the two races. There is, he supposes,
only one giant cultural ocean, in which white and black ex
periences have been churned into one. The result of such
assimilationism is the transformation of black men into carbon
copies of white men.
Nowhere is this attempt at cultural assimilation more readily
apparent than in the Afro-American novel, of which the works
of William W elk Brown are early examples. The first Afro-
American novelist and playwright as well as one of the first
historians. Brown was also an eloquent speaker, rankingwith
Frederick Douglass, Charles Remond, and Henry Highland Gar
netamong the giants of the Afro-American oratorical tradition.
Yet, Brown the abolitionist orator differs noticeably from Brown
the novelist.
The orator dealt with the American society in imcompromis-
ing terms, pointing out, in the vein of Douglass, the manifest
differences in a nation composed of masters and slaves. How
ever, in his novelsand the second, Miralda; or The Beautiful
Quadroon, is a better example than the first, Clotel, or The
Function of Bhck Literature at the Present Time 411
Presidents Daughter-^he attempted to convince his white read
ing audience that Blacks and whites, with few exceptions, were
indistinguishable in terms of cultiural artifacts. Miralda was
written to prove that Blacks were willing to deal with their
experience in terms of the American experience.
Tlie function of the novel as delineated by Brown has
survived the years. His ideas of cultural assimilation have been
adopted and refined by writers more sophisticatedif not more
talentedthan he, and his thesis is restated in the twentieth cen
tury in three works that are considered among the best literary
efforts by Afro-Americans: The Autobiography of an Ex-CoU
cured Man, by James Weldon Johnson; Go Tell It on the
Mountain, by James Baldwin; and Invisible Man, by Ralph
Ellison.
The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man presents a portrait
of the Afro-American artist as a young man. The child of a
white father and a black mother, the protagonist is forced to
choose between two worldsone black, the other white. A man
with no ethnic ties, he symbohzes what James Baldwin has
called the blood relationship that exists between Blacks and
whites in the American society.
The world of art is also delineated in terms of black and
white. Black art is to be found in the spirituals, in the surviving
African cultural artifacts, and in jazz. White art is depicted
in Bach and Beethoven, the paintings of Michelangelo, and the
Chartres Cathedral. The protagonist, a concert pianist, makes
a pilgrimage to Europe, where he plays tlie works of European
composers.
His objective is to merge the two worlds into one, to saturate
the white artistic world with the black idiom. Like Dvofk,
who synthesized symphonic music, spirituals, and jazz in the
N ew World Symphony, the narrator will also attempt to as
similate the two in the hope of producing a new American
product. How far we are from Stephen in Joyce s Portrait of the
Artist as a Young Man Stephen wanted to cultivate and hold
on to the artifacts of his Irish heritage; Johnsons narrator wants
to debase his by fusing it with another. After spending time

in both worlds, the protagonist finds his identity in the white
world. In so doing, he fails as artist and as man; for although
he realizes the richness of his African heritage, he cannot allow
himself to think of his culture as unique and distincthe can
accept it only as a submerged entity within a larger cultural
sphere.
The theme of identity, so prevalent in the works of Brown,
Baldwin, and Ellison, is presented in The Autobiography of an
Ex Coloured Man in terms of its varied dimensions. Forced to
choose between a white world and a black world, between a
white culture and a black culture, the narrator opts for the
former. With the exception of Ellisons protagonist, who, by
the end of the novel, is content to remain faceless, formless, and
rootless as he hangs midway between heaven and hell, each
protagonist chooses cultural sameness instead of cultural diver
sity, and surrenders his racial identity to the American Mephis
topheles for a pittance that Faust would have labeled demean-
mg.
One writes out of one thing onlyone^s own experiences,
notes James Baldwin in Notes of a Native Son. For the serious
black writer, this means writing from a group experience, for,
in the American society, the individual experiences of the Afro-
American, unless he is quite fair or quite lucky, is indistinguish
able from that of the group.
John Grimes of Go Tell It on the Mountain, however, is
ashamed of his group (read racial) experiences and attempts
to transcend them by negating his racial identity. On two
occasions in the novel, he is confronted with the problem of
choosing between tlie two worlds offered him by his creator.
The initial, and most important, confrontation takes place on
tlie moiintaintopa hill in Central Park overlooking New York
City. Young Grimes is tempted by Satan, who offers him tlie
pottage of the world in exchange for his biitliright: . . the
gigantic towers, the j>eople in tlicir dark grey clothes: and
Broadway. The way that led to death was broad, and many
could be found thereon; but narrow was the way that led to
life eternal; and few there were who found it.
There is this difference between the worlds: the white leads
to death and decay; the black, to life and vitality. Nevertheless,
Grimes . . did not long for the narrow way, where all his
people walked; where the houses did not rise, piercing, as it
seemed, the unchanging clouds, . . . where the streets and the
hallways and rooms were dark.
Baldwin prefers hght to darkness, life to death. The dilemma
confronting his protagonist is the same as that confronting
Johnsons: to what world am I morally and culturally bound?
Like Johnsons narrator, John Grimes has also been do\^Ti to
the valley and received the message of the anointed: . . they
move with an authority which I shall never have; . . they
have made the modem world, in effect, even if they do not
know it. The most illiterate among them is related in a way
that I am not to Dante, Shakespeare, Michaelangelo, Aeschylus,
Da Vinci, Rembrandt and Racine. . . . Out of their hymns
and dances come Beethoven and Bach. Go back a few centuries
and they are in their full glorybut I am in Africa, watching
the conquerors arrive.
These are the words of Johns creator in the essay Stranger
in the Village. The tone of assimilation, the obsession with
fusing the black and white cultureseven at the risk of destroy
ing the blackis as pervasive in the novel as it is in the essay.
At the outset, John will settle for nothing less than a colorless
world. Unable to bring this about, eventually he will sell Tiis
birthright for a mess of pottage.
On the first reading. Invisible Man, by Ralph EUison, does
not appear to be a novel in the assimilationist tradition. Ellison
is a student of black literature and history, and his novel il
lustrates a remarkable grasp of the Afro-Americans historical
past. No other writer has presented so well, in fiction, the
vicissitudes of The Age of Booker T. Washingtonan age that
is fundamental to an understanding of black nationalism.
Ellison s knowledge of black culture might have enabled him.
with Joyce, to forge in the smithy of [his] soul the uncreated

conscious of [his] race " However, the assimilationist aspirations
are as strong in Ralph Ellison as in black writers of the past:
When I began writing in earnest, he relates in Shadow and
Acty I was forced, thus, to relate myself consciously and imagi
natively to my mixed background as American, as Negro Ameri
can, and as Negro from what in its own belated way was a
pioneer background. In addition, there was the necessity of
determining my true relationship to that body of American
literatiu-e to which I was most attracted and through which,
aided by what I could learn from the literatures of Europe,
I would find my own voice, and to which I was challenged
by way of achieving, myself, to make some small contribution,
and to whose composite picture of reality I was obliged to offer
some necessary modification.
We arc again with James Baldwin, and the Chartres Cathedral
stands before us, dazzling in its ancient beauty, striking in its
reminder of the genius, mastery, and artistic superiority of
white. Western man. Although Ellison s journey was only spirit
ual, like Baldwin, after the pilgrimage to Gethsemane, he, too,
was able to stare down the deadly and hypnotic temptation
to interpret the world and all its devices in terms of race.
It is quite possible, he writes after the baptism, that much
potential fiction by Negro Americans fails precisely at tliis
point: through the writers' refusal (often tlirough provincialism
or lack of courage or opportunism) to achieve a vision of life
and a resourcefulness of craft commensurate with the complexity
of their actual situation. Too often they fear to leave the uneasy
sanctuary of race to take tlieir chances in the world of art.
Such statements do litde justice to Brown, Johnson, and
Baldwin, who, like Ellison, have not only refused to use race as
a sanctuary, but instead have attempted to negate race either
by integrating the racial idiom with tliat of wliitt's, or by
obliterating racial characteristics altogetlier. The narrator of
Invisible Man is a good example. He isto be surea Rinehart,
tlie identity he assumes near the end of tlie novel. A m;m
without a distinctive identity, he is all tilings to all men, and
after the excursion thiough the black world, he retreats to
his dungeon to await the coming millennium, when race will
have become irrelevant.
"Dr. Johnson,'^ T. S. Eliot wrote of Samuel Johnson, "is a
dangerous man to disagree with. The same may be said of
Ralph Ellison. For this reason, among others, academic critics
have been reluctant to meet the author of Invisible Man on his
own terms. Ellison traces his literary lineage to tlie "comic
tradition inherent in American literatureone critic has called
him "the Negro Mark Twainirrespective of the fact that there
is no comic tradition in American literature. There is what can
be labeled, at best, a tradition of minstrelsy, slapstick, and
buffoonery. In terms of the comic tradition, therefore, it is in
Europe, not in America, that Ellisons predecessors must be
found; and Invisible Man, to get a fair hearing in the court
of "mainstream criticism, must be evaluated in light of the
comic tradition handed down from Aristophanes through Cer
vantes to Fielding, Thackery, Dickens, and Meredith.
Dickens, Thackery, and Meredith, Englands nineteenth-cen
tury masters of the comic tradition, postulated no dichotomy
between art and fiction. The Preface to Joseph Andrews, by
Henry Fielding, is as nationalistic a tract as there is to be found
in literature, surpassed, perhaps, only by sections of The Re-
public, and the Preface to Lyrical Ballads, The English novelists
did not use the novel form to negate their identity as English
men. The pride in English cities, churches, and towns, the love
for Englands cultural past, and the sense of the Englishman
as different from other Europeans led Dickens to create his
people and his cities.
As a result of English nationalism, a comic tradition was
continued and a comic theory was enunciateda theory to
which American writers have only in part been attuned.
"Comedy, writes George Meredith, "is an interpretation of the
general mind. . . . The comic poet is in the narrow field, or
enclosed square of the society he depicts; and he addresses
4 i6 The Black Aesthetic
the still narrow enclosure of man's intellect, with references to
the operation of the social world upon their characters. . . . To
understand his work and value it, you must have a sober liking
of your kind, and a sober estimate of our civilized qualities.
The function of comedythe perceptive or governing spirit
is to awaken and give aim to the powers of laughter.
Laughter is, then, the cathartic instrument, capable of deflating
egos, of forcing the individual to laugh at himself, and by so
doing, force him to relate to others. On this level, comedy is
the saving gracethe deus ex machina for man and society
alike. Instead of laughing themselves to death, men will laugh
themselves into greater unity with their fellows.
Meredith, the Englishman, spoke to other Englishmen. His
faith in his countrymen led him to believe that they were en
dowed with that sensitiveness to the comic laugh [which] is
a step in civilization. . . . We know, he argues at one point,
the degree of refinement in men by the matter they will laugh
at; but we know likewise that the larger natures are distin
guished by the breadth of their laughter. . . . Such statements
have little relevance in America, where historical racism oc
casionsin the majority groupcontempt instead of imderstand-
ing, barbarity instead of refinement, and an animosity toward
the minority group that renders the term civilized obscure and
irrelevant.
The lack of an American comic tradition which feeds upon
civilized and sensitive natures makes Bret Harte so unreadable,
Joel Chandler Harris so contemptible, and Mark Twain such a
sentimentalist and buffoon. America is the last place to which
one would go to find laughter. For instead of being transfonned
by the comic spirit, Americans, when gazing at the reflection of
their egotistical selves, are more likely to be inflated dian de
flated. Richard Wright knew this very well, and thus tliere is no
laughter in his fiction.
If my work fails, writes Ellison, it fiiils on artistic grounds
alone. When Invisible Man, like its American mainstream pred
ecessors, is evaluated by the criteria established by England's
comic artists, the verdict tliat EUison demands can then be
rendered. There is, however, an Afro-American comic tradition,
as manifested in the works of George Moses Horton, the best
of Paul Laurence Dunbar, Langston Hughes, George Schuyler,
Wallace Thurman, and Ishmael Reed. In this tradition, despite
its assimilationist denouncement. Invisible Man ranks high in
deed. This will bring little satisfaction to Ellison, who, like
Brown, Johnson, and Baldwin, remains wedded to the concept
of assimilation at a time when such a concept has ceased to
be the preoccupation of the black writer.
Season it as you will, writes Saunders Redding, the thought
that the Negro American is difiFerent from other Americans is
stiU unpalatable to most Negroes. Nevertheless, the Negro is
difiFerent. An iron ring of historical circumstance has made him
so. This difiFerence is manifested in our cultural and social
institutions. Although most black institutions are photographic
copies of white ones, each has its own uniquenesswhite form
with black content. An example is the Afro-American church,
which though white in formMethodist, Episcopalian, Baptist
difiFers in ritual and message.
Black artists of the past expropriated and remodeled the
forms of white America to fit the needs of black people. Nowhere
is this more evident than in the letters, speeches, and essays
of David Walker, Henry Highland Garnet, Charles Remond, and
Frederick Douglass. But not all was expropriation! The earliest
Afro-American artiststhe creators of the spiritualsconstructed
new forms with which to deal with their racial experiences.
Not having been seduced by the scholastic Merlins, they were
free from the myth that black manhood was attainable only if
one transcended his race and group experiences. . . . the na
tionalistic character of the Negro people, wrote Richard Wright,
hi 1937 unmistakable. Psychologically, this nationalism is
reflected in the whole of Negro culture, and especially in folk
lore. Let those who shy at the nationalistic implications of Negro
life look at this body of folklore, living and powerful, which rose
out of a unified sense of common life and a common fate.
The black writer at the present time must forgo the as-
similationist tradition and redirect his art to the strivings within
the racethose strivings that have become so pronounced, here,
in the latter half of the twentieth century. To do so, he must
write for and speak to the majority of black people; not to a
sophisticated elite fashioned out of the programmed computers
of Americas largest universities.
For here we stand, acknowledging those truths we would not
admit at the beginning of the twentieth century: that the
problem of the color line is insoluble, that the idea of an
egalitarian America belongs to the trash basket of history, and
that the concept of an American melting pot is one to which
sane men no longer adhere. In light of such realities, the
literature of assimilationism belongs to the period of the dinosaur
and the mastodon.
To return to Richard Wright: "The Negro writer who seeks
to function within his race as a purposeful agent has a serious
responsibility. In order to do justice to his subject matter, in
order to depict Negro life in all of its manifold and intricate
relationships, a deep, informed, and complex consciousness is
necessary; a consciousness which draws for its strength upon
the fluid lore of a great people, and moulds this lore \Wth
the concepts that move and direct the forces of history today;
. . . a new role is devolving upon the Negro writer. He is being
called upon to do no less than create values by which his race
is to struggle, live and die. . . This is no easy task. To create
such values, the writer must undergo a baptism in tliought and
spirit. He must descend into the pit of the mountain and rise
to the top with a clearer vision than before; he must have a
greater imderstanding of the task that lies before liini; and
above all, if he is to function effectively as a black wTiter,
he must believe with Don L. Lee: "BlackI Poet. Black poet am
I. Tliis should leave httle doubt in the minds of anvone as to
which is first. Black art will elevate and enlighten our people
and lead them towards an awareness of self, i.e., their blackness.
It will show them mirrors. Beautiful symbols. And will aid in
the destruction of anything nasty and detrimental to our ad
vancement as a people.
BIO GRAPH IES
W ILLIAM E. BURGHARDT DUBOIS (1868-1963) was bom in Great Bar

rington, Massachusetts. He attended Fisk University, Harvard, and
the University of Berlin. He received a Ph.D. from Harvard. One of
the founders of the NAACP, his long list of accomplishments and
publications span over half a century. Among his works are: The
Souk of Black Folk (1903), John Brown (1909), Darkwater (1920),
Dusk of Dawn (1940), and The World and Africa (1947).
JA M E S A. EM ANUEL (19 2 1- ) was bom in Alliance, Nebraska,

and educated in the public schools. He received an M.A. from North
western University and a Ph.D. from Columbia University. An Asso
ciate Professor at the City College of New York, he has written for a
number of periodicals and magazines. He is author of Langston
Hughes (1967) and The Tree House and Other Poems (1968), and
coeditor of the anthology Dark Symphony: The Development of Ne
gro Literature in America (1968).
( 1928-
SARAH W E B ST E R F A B io ) was bom in Nashvillo, Tennessee.
She received her B.A. from Fisk University and her M.A. from San
Francisco State. Presently professor of Afro-American Literature at
the University of California at Berkeley, she has been widely published
in magazines and anthologies. She is currently working on a dictionary
of Black language.
HOYT w. FU LLER (1927- ) was bom in Atlanta, Georgia. He
studied at Wayne University and the University of Florence. Man
aging editor of Black World, he has been published in many journals
Biographies 421
and periodicals. He is one of the leading voices in the new black
literary movement.
ADDISON GAYLE, JR . (1932- ) was bom in Newport News, Vir
ginia, and educated in the public schools. He attended the City Col
lege of New York and the University of California. An Assistant Pro
fessor of English at the Bernard M. Baruch College, he has written
for magazines and periodicals. He is editor of: Black Expression: Es
says by and About Black Americans in the Creative Arts (1969) and
Bondage, Freedom and Beyond: The Prose of Black America (1970),
and is author of The Black Situation (1970).
CAROLYN F . GERALD was bom in Lafayette, Louisiana, and educated
in the public schools in California. She attended the University of
California at Berkeley, where she received a B.A. and an M.A. Her
critical essays have appeared in a number of journals.
LANGSTON HUGHES (1902-1967) was bom in Joplin, Missouri. He at
tended Columbia College and Lincoln University. A prolific writer,
among his books are: Not Without Laughter (1930), The Big Sea
(1940), The Dream Keeper (1932), and One-Way Ticket (1947).
LEROi JONES (Ameer Baraka) (1934- ) was bom in Newark,
New Jersey, and educated in the public schools. He received B.A.
and M.A. degrees from Howard University. One of the most re
spected black writers, he has written widely in all genres. Among
his works are: Blues People (1963), The Dead Lecturer (1964),
The System of Dante*s Hell { 1966), and Black Revolutionary Drama
(1970).
RON ZARENGA is a b la ck nationalist and fou n d er o f the m ilitant o rgani
zation U.S.
w. KEORAPETSE KGOSiTsiLE is in exile from Johannesburg, South
Africa, where he was bom. Winner of the Conrad Kent Rivers
Memorial Award, his poems and essays have appeared in various
journals. He is the author of a collection of poems. Spirits Unchained
(1970).
JOHN OLIVER KiLLENS (19 16 - ) was bom in Macon, Georgia. He
studied law at Columbia University and New York University, in
addition to serving m the Armed Forces and working with the Na
422 Biographies
tional Labor Relations Board in Washington, D.C. A prolific writer,
Mr. Killens has written novels, among which are And Then We
Heard the Thunder (1963) and Youngblood (1966); a collection
of essays. Black Mans Burden (1965); and the movie script for the
film Odds Against Tomorrow (1959).
DON L. L E Ewas bom into slavery in 1942. Poet, essayist, and critic,
he has been visiting lecturer and writer in residence at Cornell Uni
versity and Northeastern Illinois State College in Chicago. He has
written essays and poems for magazines and periodicals. Among his
books are: Think Black (1969), Black Pride (1968), and Dont Cry,
Scream (1969).
ALAIN LOCKE (1886-1954) was boHi in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania,
and educated in the public schools. A Rhodes scholar, he attended
Harvard College, Oxford University, and the University of Berlin.
He received a Ph.D. from Harvard. Professor of Philosophy at How
ard University from 19 12 to 192$, he was one of the leading intel
lectuals of the Harlem Renaissance. He is best known as editor of the
anthology The New Negro (1925).
JU LIAN M AYFIELD (1928- ) was bom in Greer, South Carolina,

and educated in the public schools. In addition to publishing numer
ous articles, teaching, and serving on the staffs of two journals, he is
author of three novels: The Hit (1957), The Long Night (1958),
and The Grand Parade (196 1).
ADAM DAVID M ILLER was bom in Orangeburg, South Carolina, and
educated in the public schools. He received an M.A. from the
University of California at Berkeley. A lecturer on Afro-American
drama and literature, he has been instrumental in founding several
black theater groups, among which The Aldridge Players are the best-
known. He has written widely for periodicals and magazines.
RONALD MILNER (1938- ) was bom in Detroit, Michigan, ed

ucated in the public schools, and attended "nearly every college in
the Detroit area . . . without graduating anywhere.'' He has received
grants from the Rockefeller and Whitney foimdations, taught at var
ious colleges, and, at present, directs The Spirit of Shango Theatre
Co. in Detroit. His best-known plays are: Who*s Got His Own
(1966) and The WarningA Theme for Linda,
Biographies 423
LOFTEN M ITCHELL was bom in Harlem and educated in the public
schools. He attended CCNY and Talladega College in Alabama. The
author of a history of the theater. Black Drama (1967), he is best
known as a playwright. Among his productions are: A Land Beyond
the River (1956) and The Ballad of the White Soldiers.
LAiiRY NEAL (1937- ) was bom in Atlanta, Georgia. A graduate
of Lincoln University, he received an M.A. from the University of
Pennsylvania. Poet, critic, and essayist, he has been represented in
anthologies as well as periodicals. He is coeditor of Black Fire
(1969).
JOHN (1940-
o 'n e a l ) was bom in Mound City, Illinois, where
he attended the public schools. He received a B.A. degree from
Southern Illinois University. In addition to working with SNCC, he
has published widely in such periodicals as Negro Digest, American
Dialogue, and Cavalier. He is author of the forthcoming book about
SNCC Will the Circle Be Broken?
DUDLEY RANDALL (19 14 - ) was bom in Washington, D.C. He
received a B.A. from Wayne University and an M.A. from the Uni
versity of Michigan. His poems and critical essays have appeared in
anthologies and journals. He is editor and publisher of the influential
Broadside Press, in Detroit, Michigan.
ISHMAEL REED (1938- ) was bom in Chattanooga, Tennessee,
and educated in the public schools. He attended the University of
BufFalo. Poet, novelist, and anthologist, he is the author of: The Free-
Lance Pallbearers (1967) and Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down
(1969).
CLAYTON RILEY (1935- ) was bom in New York City. He was
educated in the public schools and graduated from Iona College.
Drama critic for Liberator magazine, he has also written criticism for
various newspapers and journals, including the New York Times. He
is the author of two television plays: The Basis of Need and The
Record Is Twenty-one Minutes.
j. A. ROGERS (1880-1966) was bom in Jamaica, West Indies. He
became an American citizen in 1917. In addition to being a war cor
respondent and a member of the Academy of Political Scienc'es, he
424 Biographies
wrote articles for newspapers and magazines. Among his books are:
From Superman to Man (19 17), WorlcTs Greatest Men of African
Descent (19 3 1), and Sex and Race (1940-44).
LESLIE B. ROUT, JR . (1936- ) was bom in Chicago, Illinois, and
attended the public schools. He received his bachelor s degree from
Loyola, M.A. from the University of Chicago, and Ph.D, from the
University of Minnesota. A Professor of Latin American History, he
is author of The Politics of the Chaco Peace (1935-39).
JIM M Y STEWART is a poet, musician, and writer who makes his home
in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Besides the involvement with his mu
sical group. The Kuntu Quintet, he has published widely in a num
ber of periodicals and magazines. Among his articles are: ^Revolu
tionary Nationalism and the Black Artist, Black Dialogue Magazine
(Winter 1966), and The Development of the Black Revolutionary
Artist, Black Fire (1969). He is also contributing editor to The
Cricket magazine.
DARWIN T. TURNER (19 3 1- ) was bom in Cincinnati, Ohio. He
received a B.A. and an M.A. from the University of Connecticut and
a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago. He is editor of Black Amer
ican Literature-Fiction (1969) and Black American Literature
Poetry (1969).
ORTIZ M. WALTON is Currently completing work on a Ph.D. in sociol
ogy at the University of California at Berkeley. A teacher of music,
he has also played with the Boston Symphony and the BufiFalo
Philharmonic, and was principal bassist with the Cairo (U.A.R.)
Symphony.
RONALD WELLBURN (1944- ) was bom in Bryn Mawr, Pennsjd-
vania. He received a B.A. from Lincoln University and is currently
working on a Ph.D. He has written for a number of periodicals and
magazines.
RICHARD WRIGHT (1908-1960) was bom in Natchez, Mississippi. The
best-known black writer, he wrote in all genres. In 1947, he began
a self-imposed exile in France. Among his best-known works are:
Native Son (1940), Black Boy (1942), The Outsider (1953), and
The Long Dream (1958).
IN D EX
Abramson, Doris E., 329-30 216-17, 412

Abstractivity, tendency toward, 52 repudiation of, 59, 68
Adderley, Cannonball, 138, 160 Baraka, Ameer. S e e Jones
Aesthetic Basie, Count, 25, 92-93, 154
defined, 237 Bethune, Lebert, Ju ju o f M y O w n ,
S e e also Black aesthetic; White 248-49
aesthetic Black aesthetic, theory of, 3-77, 196
African art, 33, 85 as means of revolution, 31-34
African Grove Theatre (N Y C ), 296 37-38
motive of racial expression in, 18
African music, 100-2, 119-20, 132,
negative definition of, 24-27
136-37 opposition to, 39
Afro-Christian, 85-86, 120 outline of, 13-16
Western compared to, 161-72 problems of bbck critics, 59-63
African Studies Association, 199 role of peoplehood in, 47-50, 5 3 -
Aldridge, Ira, 296 56
Ammons, Gene, 9 3 - 9 5 sense of style in, 10-12
Anderson, Jervis, 407-8 Black Arts Movement, 272-90, 328
Antiphony, origin of, 169 dascribed, 272-77
Armstrong, Louis, 87, 93 Black Arts Theatre, 9, 277-78, 322
Asoob Akibas, N k o m b o , 49-50 B la ck F ir e (Jones and Neal), 39,
Ayler, Albert, 124, 130-31, 145, 285 61, 74, 348
Black Is beautifur* aestlietic, 8, 30,
Baldwin, James, 45, 238, 257, 3 ^^5 - 46, 180, 203, 225-26
26 Black nationalisTn, xv-xvii, 346, 365,
A n o th er C ou n try, 409 413, 417-18
as assimilationist, 411-14, 417 cultiual nationahsm, 32-38, 290,
as dramatist, 303 336-39
as literary critic, 61, 68, 70, 356 in music, 134, 141
'Notes o f a N a tiv e Son, xx, 70, Black Power, 30, 183, 272-73
426 Index
Black separatism, 408 N e g ro P oetry an d D ram a, 186-87
Black studies, 197, 220-21 poetic technique of, 231-33, 239
B la ck W o rld , The ( N e g r o D ig e st) Brown, William Wells, xviii, 66, 74,
(magazine), xxiv, 124, 191, 297
259, 346, 403 ^ as assimilationist, 410-12, 414,
on black authors function, 209 417
black criticism in, 67, 74-75 Bullins, Ed, 45, 238, 286, 303, 321,
editorship of, 196, 238-39 330
promotion of, 62 as literary critic, 75
symposium on black aesthetic in, prominence of, 323-25, 327-28
1 9 ^ 9 , 204-7, 209-23 Bush, Joseph Bevans, Nittygritty,
Blakey, Art, 136-37 89
Blues, 111, 115, 133, 137, 172, 177, Butcher, Margaret Just, 67, 409
180 Butcher, Philip, 65
invalidity of, 38
in poetry, 232 Caldwell, Ben, 289-90, 303, 328
Rhythm and Blues (R & B), 118- Csaire, Aim, 246, 250-51, 289
3 1 , 138 -39 , 14 7 Charles, Ray, 10, 128-29, 137-38
types of, 119-22 Chesnutt, Cnarles W ., xviii, 19, 178,
Bone, Robert A., xv, xx-xxi, 45 186, 352-54
T h e N e g ro N o v e l in A m e rica , 59, Clarke, John Henrik, 74, 220-21
352-53 Cleaver, Eldridge, 59, 188, 191, 286
Bontemps, Ama, 224, 237, 401 So u l on Ic e , 68, 368
as literaiy critic, 61, 70 Cole, Bob, 297
Bop music (bebop), 91, 140, 142- Coleman, Ornette, 87, 92, 124, 140,
44 , 359 142-43, 157-59, 238, 285
evolution of, 151-57 local origin of, 138, 142
religious basis of, 87 new jazz style of, 134, 157-58
Braithwaite, William Stanley, xvii, unearned leadership of, 94
19, 61, 186, 222 Collective art, 34-37, 344-45
as mainstream critic, 64 College Language Association, 6 2 -
Branch William, In S p le n d id E rror, 63
301, 304 Coltrane, John (Trane), 10, 25-26,
Brawley, Benjamin, 64-66, 71-72, 94-95, 124, 141, 158, 210, 220,
222 235, 238, 285, 314
as composer, 130, 143-46
Brooks, Gwendolyn, 4-5, 59, 201,
poetic allusions to, 244, 256
214, 224, 238, 402
RoUins' alleged contest with, 94
on Knight, 245
Commitment, 37-38, 47
poetic technique of, 228-29, 231, Consciousness, 58, 132-33, 185,
233-34 237, 335-36, 345, 390
Brooks, Shelton, 113 black, 207, 212-13, 220, 239
Brown, Cecil M., XX, 75, 366-67 double, 348
in symposimn on black aesthetic, musical, 125-26, 133, 135, 141-
197, 209, 211, 215-16, 219, 221 42, 146, 155
Brown, James (J.B .), 26, 123-25, social, 339-41
128, 130-31, 149, 238 Cook, Will Marion, 115, 297-98
back-up band of, 139-40 Cortez, Jayne, 244, 359-61
Brown, Jasbo, 113 Critical double standard, 6 -7
Brown, Oscar, Jr., 12 Crouch, Stanley, 189, 246, 359,
Brown, Sterling A., 61, 191, 237 360-64
as academic critic, 71-72 T oo L a te B lues, 361-64
Index 4^7
Cruse, Harold, 68, 73, 237-38 critical biography of, 71
Cullen, Countee, 69, 200-1, 231 white aesthetic absorbed by, 4 5 -
H eritage, 222 46
as new-generation artist, 20, 22
Ebon (poet), 242-44
Dance, 85, 115, 132, 135, 140, 156, Ellington, Duke, 11, 25
179, 397 Ellison, Ralph, 11, 39, 59, 221-22,
Charleston, 112-13 411-17
Latin American, 171 In visib le M an, 281, 376, 411,
Danner, Margaret, A n d T h ro u g h the 413-17
C a rib b e a n Sea, 241-42 labeled major novelist, 45
Dauer, Alfons, 147 as literary critic, 61, 70
Davis, Frank Marshall, 231, 233 as mainstream writer, 381-82,
Davis, Miles, 11, 137 1 4 4 1 4 9 3 1 4 4 1 6 - 17
prosperity of, 160 Emanuel, James A., 73-74
Defoe, Daniel, R obinson C ru soe, Blackness Can: A Quest for Aes
42-45 thetics, 192-223
De Leon, Dr. Charles A., 4 brief biography of, 420
De Tocqueville, Alexis, 398 Ethiopian Art Theatre (N YC), 265,
Dorsey, Thomas, 129 267
Douglass, Frederick, 304, 352, 385, Europe, Lieutenant, 114-15
390, 410, 417 Evans, Doc, 153
L i f e a n d T im es, 184-85 Evans, Mari, 238, 240-41
Drama, 9, 132, 179, 238, 263-330,
357 389 Fabio, Sarah Webster, 75, 204-5,
black communities served by, 211
310-12 brief biography of, 420
black critique of, 67, 73, 76 as dramatist, 303
history of black, 295-303 Tripping with Black Writing,"
most prominent contemporary 182-91
dramatists, 316-28 Fair, Ronald, 365-66
New Spirituality in, 288-89
F a ll of British T yran ny, The
potential of, 263-71
suggested themes for, 177 (drama), 295-96
white aesthetic of, 41, 45 Fanon, Frantz, 238, 242, 247, 273
white criticism of, 11-12, 199- revolutionary philosophy of, 9
200, 368 T h e W re tch e d o f the Earth , 281
of young blacks, 19-20 Fiirrison, W. Edward, 73-74, 202
DuBois, W. E. B., xvi-xvii, 19, 39, Feelings, Tom, 28, 209, 387
179 192, 296, 352 Ferdinand, Val, 56-57
as American expatriate, xxil Fernandez, Renaldo. S e e Asoob Aki-
B la ck Reconstruction, 292 bas
brief biography of, 420 Fiction, 132, 177-78, 333-419
influence of, 242, 250 assimilationist, 407-8, 410-14,
journal establisheil by, 63 4 1 7 - 18
as literary critic, 66 black attitude toward North in,
Of the Sorrow Songs, 97-109 xviii-xxi
T h e So n g of the Sm oke, 222 comic tradition of, 417
T h e Souls of B lack F o lk , 27-28, double-audience problem of, 401-
48-50, 185, 348 2
Dunbar, Paul Laurence, xviii, 19, folk tradition of, 3 3 5 - 3 7 341
178, 186, 297-98, 352-54 417 history of, 352-57
428 Index
role of image in, 346-48, 370-76 Goncalves, Joe, 221, 239
wliite aesthetic established in, 4 2 - Goophered Grapevine, The, 185-
45 86
of young blacks, 19-20, 23 Grace, Daddy, 131
Film, 56-57, 307, 315-16 Gross, Theodore, xix, xxi, 45
Fisher, Rudolph, 180, 301
as new-generation artist, 19-20, Halisi, Clyde, 34, 37
22 Hammon, Jupiter, 72, 183
Fisk Jubilee Singers, 98-99 Handy, W. C., 113
Franklin, Jolin Hope, 67 Hansberry, Lorraine, 68, 301-2, 330
Frazier, E. Franklin, 129 Harlem Renaissance ( Awakening,
Frazier, George, 10-11 Negro Renaissance), 17, 67,
Freedom to vs. freedom from, 3 6 - 187, 191, 208, 224, 231-32, 290
37 credo of, 356
Fuller, Hoyt W., xvii, xx, 74, 210, in drama, 300-1
236-39 restrictions of, 236-37
brief biography of, 421 Harris, Leon R., 399
The New Black Literature: Pro Hawkins, Coleman ( Hawk ), 9 3 -
test or AiEnnation, 346-69 94
questionnaire designed by, 403-4 Hayden, Robert, 203, 224, 227-29,
in symposium on black aesthetic, 404
196, 198-99, 210, 212-14, 218 poetic technique of, 227-28, 231,
Towards a Black Aesthetic, 3 - 233-34
12 Hayes, Roland, 19, 22
Helper, Hinton, xx, 43-44
Gaines, Ernest J., 366 Henderson, Fletcher, 115, 154
Garret, Jimmy, 189, 287-89 Herman, Woody, 152-54
Gayle, Addison, Jr., 61, 73-74, 215, Hernton, Calvin C., 222, 238
404 Higginson, Thomas Wentworth, 98,
brief biography of, 421 105
Cultural Strangulation: Black Hill, Herbert, xv, xxi, 45, 381-82
Literature and the Wlute Aes Soon, O n e M orn ing, 60-61, 369,
thetic, 39-46, 200 381
The Function of Black Litera Horton, George Moses, 183-84, 417
ture at the Present Time, 4 0 7 - House, Gloria, 249-50, 252-55
19 Hughes, Langston, xix, 20-22, 74,
Gellert, Lawrence, 398 189, 236-37, 250, 356-57 3 8 4 -
Genet, Jean, T h e Blacks, 86, 400-1, 403, 417
Gerald, Carolyn Fowler African tliemes of, 208
The Black Writer and His Role, A sk Y o u r M am a, 214
346-48, 370-78 Boston school contro\'ersy over, 6
brief biographies of, 378n, 421 brief biography of, 421
in symposium on black aesthetic, as dramatist, 301-2
198, 205, 209, 212, 215-16, F a m o u s A m e rica n N e g ro e s, 3 8 5 -
218-19, 221-22 86
Gillespie, Dizzy, 140, 151-53, i 55- I, Too, 49-50
56 as literary critic, 61, 69
Gihnan, Richard, xv, 199-200, 368 literary school of, 191, 356
Gilpin, Charles, 19, 178, 265, 300 The Negro Artist and tlie Racial
Giovanni, Nikki, 189, 217, 244, 366 Mountain, 175-81, 224-26,
Cluster, Hugli, 60-61, 72, 409 400, 407
Index 429
poetic technique of, 229-30, 2 3 3 - in symposium on black aesthetic,
3 4 , 239 209-10, 214
white critique of, 200-1
Hunter, Kristin, 365 Karenga, Ron, Black Cultural Na
Hurston, Zora Neale, 20, 187, 355 tionalism," 32-38
T h e ir E y e s W e r e W a tch in g G o d , brief biography of, 421
401 Kelley, William Melvin, 189, 238,
365, 408
Individuality vs. personality, 35-36 Kgositsile, William Keorapetse, 198,
206, 208, 213, 244
Jazz, 85-95, 110-19, 125-28, 234- brief biography of, 421
36, 244, 314 The Elegance of Memory, 358-
changing black aesthetic in, 133- 59
34, 136-46 Paths to the Future, 248-60
evolution of post-war, 150-60 Killens, John Oliver, 68, 187, 238,
new, 126-28, 130, 134, 157-56 257, 302
285 The Black Writer Vis-i-Vis His
New Orleans, 88, 90, 112, 406 Country, 379-96
origin of, 87, 110-14 brief biography of, 422
poetry related to, 177, 179-80 King, Martin Luther, Jr., 30, 191,
as Trippen, 36 195, 238
S e e aLw Blues; in d ivid u a l jazz Knight, Etheridge, 189, 273-74
m usicians poetic technique of, 244-46
azz at the Philharmonic, 93
bhnson, Fenton, 232-33 Lafayette Theatre (N YC), 299-300
bhnson, J. Rosamond, 297 L e a rn in g T ree, T h e (film), 56-57
bhnson, James Weldon, xviii, 239, Lee, Don L., xx, 62, 187, 189, 234,
297, 401-2, 417 273, 368, 416-19
T h e A u to b io g ra p h y o f an E x~ C o U brief biography of, 422
oured M an , 411-12 in symposium on black aesthetic,
God*s T rom bones, 185 197-99, 204-7, 209-13, 218-19,
as literary critic, 69 222
as new-generation artist, 19, 22 Toward a Definition: Black Po
Jones, LeRoi (Ameer Baraka), xx, etry of the Sixties (After LeRoi
6-10, 45, 158, 187-91, 234-36, Jones), 235-47
Littlejohn, David, 3 5 4 - 5 5
249, 256. 259, 316-23, 325 Llorens, David, 367-68
367-68, 403 Locke, Alain, 61, 66-67, 186, 193,
anthology edited by, 39, 61, 74
as Black Arts dramatist, 9, 2 7 5 -
195, 400
brief biography of, 422
86, 322 The Negro and the American
B la ck M u sic, 147-48, 235-36 Theatre (1 9 2 7 ), 263-71
brief biography of, 421 T h e N e g ro a n d Ilis M usic, 135,
The Changing Same (R&B and 146-19
the New Black M usic)," 118- Negro Youth Speaks, 17-23
31 Long, Richard A., 208, 2 1 H -2 0
criminal indictment of, 190-91
D u tch m an , 277, 280-81, 303, McKay, Claude, 191, 200-1, 205,
316-21, 327 208, 214, 237, 250
historical importance of, 238 as new-generation artist, 19-20,
T h e P eo p le B urning, 251 22
as revolutionary poet, 34, 37-36 T h e W h ite H ouse, 201, 223
430 Index
McWorter, Gerald A., 206-7, 210, new black, 118-31, 140-46
213, 218-20 of new generation, 19, 22
Malcolm X, 191, 220, 238, 247, 251, rationalization of, 161-63
255 290 soiil/funk movement in, 137-39
language used by, 29-30 ten master songs, 101-3
Maran, Ren, Batouala, 21 two traditions of, 81-82, 161-72
Marvin X, 207, 244, 303 S e e also Blues; Bop music; Jazz;
Masekela, Hugh, 166-67 in d iv id u a l m usicians
Mayfield, Julian, 301-2
brief biography of, 422 Neal, Larry, 238, 244, 303, 348-49
*You Touch My Black Aesthetic anthology edited by, 39, 61, 74,
and m Touch Yours," 24-31 . 348
Mereditli, George, 415-16 The Black Arts Movement," 2 7 2 -
Meyer, June, 244, 351-52 90
Miller, Adam David brief biography of, 423
brief biography of, 422 Some Reflections on the Black
Some Observations on a Black Aesthetic," 13-16
Aestlietic," 397-404 Ngritude, 135, 186, 208-9, 250-51
Milner, Ronald, 238, 303, 323, 3 2 5 - N e g ro D ig est, S e e B la ck W o r ld
28, 330 Negro Renaissance. Se e Harlem Ren
as Black Arts dramatist, 286-88, aissance
328 New Criticism, xxiii, 7 3 - 7 7 , 231
Black Theater Go Home," 3 0 6 - New Orleans, 50, 90, 112, 278, 388
12 bilingual black press of, 352
brief biographies of, 3i2n, 422 dual Negro society of, 88
Mingus, Charles, 91, 137, 1 4 5 29 N ecro m a n cers fro m N o w (R eed),
Minstrel shows, 297 189, 406
Minstrel songs, 98-99, 102, 105
Minton's Playhouse (N YC), 140, Oliver, King, 86-87, 93
151 155 O'Neal, John
Miracles, The, 126, 128 Black Arts: Notebook," 4 7-58
Mitchell, Loften brief biography of, 423
brief biography of, 423 O'Neill, Eugene, 307
I Work Here to Please You, T h e E m p e ro r Jones^ 265, 268, 300
291-305 Organization of Black American Cul
Monk, Thelonious, 140, 144, 151, ture (O BAC), 9-10, 12, 196,
235, 238 366
Muir, Edwin, T h e Animals^ 222 Ozick, Cyntliia, 369
Murray, Sunny, 130, 142, 144-45,
238 Page, Tliomas Nelson, xx, 21, 217
Music, 81-172, 177-80, 185, 28311, Painting and sculpture, 85, 132, 165,
314-15, 348, 359-81, 380, 3 9 2 - 179-80
93 , 4 11 black portraiture, 180
aesthetic succession in, 93-94 heritage of, 19
black aesthetic unrelated to, 2 5 - revolutionary, 34
26, 30-31 Pan-African Cultural FeshVal ( Al
exploitation of, 55, 133, 148-49 giers, 1969), 200, 212
instniinentation introiluced into, Parker, Charlie (Bird, Yardbird),
85-87, 89-91 10, 26, 93-94, 143, 235, 256,
musicians' sense of style, 10-11 314. 359
Negro folk songs, 97-109, 177, bop originating witli, 151-54, 156
179 Parks, Gordon, 56-58
Index 431
Perkins, Eugene, B la ck Patches, Rogers, J. A.
242-43 brief biography of, 423-24
Peterson, Louis, T a k e a G iant Step, Jazz at Home, 110-17
301-2, 32^-30 Rollins, Sonny, 94, 158
Phtjlon (journal), 63, 67, 72 Rout, Leslie B., Jr.
Plantation tradition, 217-18 brief biography of, 424
Platonism, 40-44, 134, 383, 403 Reflections on tlie Evolution of
Poetry, 8 -9 , 93, 1 3 ^ - 3 3 , 175-260, Post-War Jazz, 150-60
352, 3 5 4 , 357-64, 376-78
black critique of, 64, 67, 69-70, Sanchez, Sonia, 189, 223, 368
7 3 - 7 4 , 76 Short Poem , 244-45
contemporary (1960s), 235-47 Sanders, Pharaoh, 9 4 - 9 5 . 130, 138,
on coon trap,'' 49-50 149. 238
criteria for evaluating, 196-97 Coltrane influenced by, 145-46
folk tradition of, 232-34 Scott, Nathan, Jr., 59, 65
modern (1 9 3 0 -6 0 ), 224-34 Seale, Bobby, 29, 191
of Negro vs. black writers, 204-6 Senghor, Lopold, 33, 246, 250
revolutionary, 34 Sensibility, 237
as speaking in tongues, 182, 185- Sexuality, myth of, 26-27, 42
86 Shepp, Archie, 143, 238
ten main categories of, 214 Shipp, Jesse, 297-98
white aesthetic of, 40, 42, 44-45 Simmons, Barbara, 24, 255
white racist critique of, 4-^ Simpson, Louis, xxi, 5-6, 199
of young blacks, 19-20, 23 Slavery, 83-84, 120-22, 170-72,
Polyphony, origin of, 170-72 205, 218, 235, i^ 4-97, 335,
Popularization vs. elevation, 35 393-94, 398-400
religious synthesis of slaves, 86
Randall, Dudley, 238-39 slave literature, 182, 184, 352,
The Black Aesthetic in the Thir 399-400, 405-6
ties, Forties, and Fifties, 22 4 - slave songs, 97-98, 100-4, 122
34 as unique institution, 409-10
brief biography of, 423 white aesthetic related to, 42-43
Redding, Saimders, xxiii, 60, 72, 404, Soul, 24, 29, 133-35
Reed, Ishmael, xx, i88-8g , 368, 417 Soul music, 133-34, 137-39, 147
brief biography of, 423 Spellman, A. B., 95, 220-21, 238,
Can A Metronome Know the 255-56
Thunder or Summon a God?, Spriggs, Edward S., 246, 256-59
4 05-6 Stewart, Jimmy
Reinhardt, Max, 265-66 brief biography of, 424
Rhythm and Blues (R& B), 118-31, Introduction to Black Aesthetics
138-39, 147 in Music, 81-96
Richardson, Willis, 19, 21, 301 Stitt, Sonny, 93-95
Riley, Clayton Styron, William, xx, xxiii
On Black Theater, 313-30 The C onfessions o f N a t Turner,
brief biography of, 423 351-52
Robeson, Paul, 19, 179-80, 265 Sun Ra, 95, 124, 130, 134, 158,
Rock music, 133, 147-48 209, 238, 285
Rodgers, Carolyn M., 74-76, 188, avant-garde position of, 140-43
196, 244, 366 Swing, 151-52, 154-56
poetic categories named by, 214
Rodman, Selaen, xxi, 200-1 Taylor, Cecil, 134, 140, 142-43, 158,
Rogers, Alex, 297-98 238
43 ^ Index
Terry, Lucy, 182-83 A Comparative Analysis of the
Thurman, Wallace, 69, 301, 400, African and the Western Aes
417 thetics, 161-72
Timmons, Bobby, 137-38 Ward, Douglas Turner, 12, 303
Tolson, M. B., 229-31, 233 Webster, Ben, 93-94
Toomer, Jean, 19-22, 180 Wellbum, Ron, xx, 240, 246
Caney 138, 179, 241 The Black Aesthetic Imperative,
Torrence, Ridgeley, 19, 265, 268, 132-49
300 brief biography of, 424
Turner, Darwin T. Wheatley, Phillis, 66, 295, 352, 409
Afro-American Literary Critics; White aesthetic, 39-46
an Introduction, 59-77 history of, 4 0-45
brief biography of, 424 Williams, Bert, 297-98
Wright, Richard, xviii-xix, xxi, 191,
University press, 201-2 256.355.409.416-18
brief biography of, 424
Vaughn, Edward, 220-21 critical attack on, 215-17 356
Voodoo, 171-72, 405-6 critical evaluation of, 45 ^5 , 68,
366-67 ^
Waldron, Eric, 19, 21-22 Introduction: Blueprint for Ne
Walker, George, 297-98 gro Writing, 333-45
Walker, Margaret, 31, 191, 231-33 as literary critic, 69-70
F o r M y P e o p le , 27, 232 politics of, 226
Walton, Ortiz M.
brief biography of, 424 Young, Al, D a n cin g , 403

Gayle, Addison-The Black Aesthetic.-Doubleday (1971)

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The

D O U BLED AY & COMPANY, INC.

for his Blacloiess Can: A Quest for Aesthetics/

LOFTEN MITCHELL for his I Work Here to Please You. Copyright

CLAYTON RILEY for his On Black Theater. Copyright 19 71 by

Introduction: Towards a Black Aesthetic 3

Some Reflections on the Black Aesthetic 13

Negro Youth Speaks 17

You Touch M y Black Aesthetic and 111 Touch Yours 24

Black Cultural Nationalism 32

Cultural Strangulation: Black Literature and

Afro-American Literary Critics: An Introduction 59

Introduction to Black Aesthetics in Music 81

Jazz at Home 110

The Changing Same (R&B and New Black Music) 118

The Black Aesthetic Imperative 132

Reflections on the Evolution of Post-War Jazz 150

A Comparative Analysis of the African

Introduction: Tlie Negro Artist and the Racial Moimtain 175

Tripping \ritli Black Writing 182

The Black Aesthetic in the Thirties,

Toward a Definition: Black Poetry of the Sixties

Paths to the Future 248

Introduction: The Negro and

The Black Arts Movement 272

I Work Here to Please You 291

Black TheaterGo Home 306

Introduction: Blueprint for Negro Writing 333

A new note, discernible even to the most biased observer, was

*lf I had-a my way,

As old as Frances Ellen Watkins, who made one demand of

ask no monument, proud and high

Nowhere does anger reach more intensive expression than in

hate them, ohi

Neither is black nationalism a new element in black life or

T ve seen them come dark/wondering/wide-eyed/dreaming/

not the enemies of his people, but the niggers of American

The black revolt is as palpable in letters as it is in the streets,

There is a myth abroad in American literary criticism that

* . . W e all gonna com e from behind

1. RACE MEMORY (Africa, Middle Passage)

3. TRANSMUTATION AND SYNTHESIS

BLACK ARTS MOVEMENT/BLACK ART AESTHETIC

The Younger Generation conies, bringing its gifts. They are

Georgia opened me. And it may well be said that I re

The newer motive, then, in being racial is to be so purely for

In her poem Saul, Barbara Simmons says: ^Tell me about soul/

I no longer beheve that the gift of music has much to do

Intelligence alone ought to reject the notion that the Black

Those of us who dare to attempt the act of creation must

. . . Distressed and disturbed and deceived and

For those who must create, there is a Black Aesthetic which

"we discovered we were black and poor

Wiping it clean from the very beginning as though it never

Black art, like everything eke in the black community, must

to develop adequately here. Let it be enough to say that the

be collective, however, raises foiir questions. Number one, the