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In the same way that the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s was launched to insure that black Americans received their rights as citizens, the Black Arts Movement, sometimes referred to as the Black Aesthetic Movement that operated alongside it, sought to define black Americans and the black experience on their own terms. The images that America had sanctioned as representative of black Americans were degrading, inaccurate, and racist. As long as these images were based on European criteria and racist notions, black Americans would never truly be able to enjoy their full rights as citizens.

The Black Arts Movement set out to create and promote a sensibility that embraced the beauty and truth of the black community, as well as the traditions and cultural ideas that enabled black Americans to survive in an environment that legally and socially relegated them to second-class citizenship. The Black Arts Movement created academic standards of analysis and criticism that had direct relationships to the black cultural experience. Acknowledging contributions and sacrifices in the creation of America while at the same time recognizing and respecting the traditions and culture of black Americans became paramount to the transformation of American society.

Artists of the Black Arts Movement offered works that were key in creating images which supported the manifesto that “black is beautiful.” Black artists offered their own life experiences of struggle, survival, and accomplishment, as well as images of other members of the black community that had previously been denigrated or ignored. All artistic media were used to rail against white cultural perspectives, including art, music, poetry, fiction, drama, and literature in general. Many of the artists were also active in the Civil Rights Movement in various ways, including marches.

Leading artists of the movement included Amiri Baraka (also known as LeRoi Jones), Nikki Giovanni, Haki Madhubuti (also known as Don L. Lee), and Sonia Sanchez. Theorists and essayists included Larry Neal, Etheridge Knight, Addison Gayle Jr., and Maulana Karenga. Although the artists’ works were often seen as anti-white, anti-middle class, and anti-American, their goal was to create a true image of black Americans in a social system that had either made blacks invisible or had promoted negative stereotypes of them. These artists’ works changed the image of black Americans on a national and even global scale. Without the Black Arts Movement, the Civil Rights Movement would have lacked the framework to transform images and attitudes in order to bring about fundamental social change.

Lean’tin L. Bracks