Amiri Baraka Founded the Black Arts Movement In Poetry

Everett LeRoy Jones is better known as Amiri Baraka. Born in Newark, New Jersey on October 7, 1934, he had a relatively uneventful childhood despite growing up with overt racism and discrimination. He attended Rutgers University on a science scholarship, but later he gave that up to attend Howard University. In 1954, he enlisted in the U.S. Air Force without a degree.

While in the Air Force, Jones started writing while stationed at Puerto Rico. He was dishonorably discharged from the Air Force in 1957 when a fellow soldier found some communist-leaning writings of his.

After leaving the Air Force, LeRoi Jones moved to Greenwich Village and joined the Beat movement. He found some friends who were supportive and was published alongside Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg. He married Hettie Cohen, a white woman, in 1958.

Jones matured as a poet and soon outgrew the Beats. He founded a community theater called Black Arts Repertory Theater/School in New York City. He went on to be influenced by Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams then developed his own unique style of poetics that fused Beat movements with free verse and Dadaism. He also became increasingly political and controversial during this time. He severed ties completely with the Beats and founded the Black Arts Movement.

In 1965, Jones divorced Hettie and left behind two daughters. A year later he married Sylvia Robinson, an African-American woman. She gave him five children. They both changed their names in 1968 to reflect their Muslim faith and Jones called himself Imamu Amiri Baraka. He later, upon becoming a Marxist, changed his name to Amiri Baraka.

Amiri Baraka has served as professor at Yale, George Washington University, and the State University of New York. He served as poet laureate of New Jersey and after September 11, 2001 he wrote a controversial poem titled "Somebody Blew Up America" that criticized racial prejudice in America and questioned Israeli involvement in the attacks. Labelled as anti-Semitic, he was removed from the position by former New Jersey Governor Jim McGreevey.

Besides being a well known poet, Amiri Baraka is the author of numerous plays and fiction, a large body of nonfiction and prose, and he has edited several volumes of literature. He is still writing today.

Allen Taylor has been writing poetry for 20 years and has been published in a variety of journals online and in print. He is the webmaster of World Class Poetry and writes the daily blog at http://www.worldclasspoetryblog.com. Learn more about famous poets at the World Class Poetry Hall of Fame at http://www.world-class-poetry.com.

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