Week #8 critical #3

Black Arts Movement!

While looking up research for our class project. I came across some good information about the Black Arts Movement. It was started in harlem by a writer by the writer Amira Baraka ( later changed his name to Le roi Jones.) He started this movement shortly after the death of Malcom X. This era was crucial to African American literature because it encourage blacks to start their own publishing house, art institutes, magazines, and journals. It encouraged blacks to write. It displayed a different type of literature, giving the minority people a voice.

Poetry was an important part of this movement. Most poems were written during this era to inform people of the issues within the community. It was a way for African Americans to spread knowledge with one another. The poems during the (BAM) were powerful. They had to be. This was a period of the civil right movement and the black panthers, poets wanted to engage their audience into political issues.

The Black arts Movement lasted about a decade but it can be said hat some of the most exciting poems came from this movement. I continue to research information from this era I continue to get excited. This era produced art this was feel with passion, desire, and strength. It had a fire to it, and that fire inspired other minorities to express themselves as well. Below is a poem from Nikki Giovvani. She was a major poet during this time

Nikki-Rosa

Childhood rememberances are
always a drag if you're Black
you always remember things like
living in Woodlawn with no inside toilet
and if you become famous or something

They never talk about how happy
you were to have your mother
all to yourself and how good the
water felt when you got your bath
from one of those

Big tubs that folk in chicago barbeque
in and somehow when you talk
about home
it never gets across how much you
understood their feelings as the
whole family attended meetings

About Hollydale and even though you
remember your biographers never
understand your father's pain as he
sells his stock and another
dream goes

And though your're poor it isn't
poverty that concerns you and
though they fought a lot
it isn't your father's drinking that
makes any difference but only that

Everybody is together and you
and your sister have happy birthdays
and very good Christmasses and I
really hope no white person ever has
cause to write about me
because they never understand

Black love is Black wealth and they'll
probably talk about my hard childhood
and never understand that
all the while I was quite happy