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African American literature is traditionally polemical and thus indicative of the political and social concerns of black people. This is evident in African American literature at the height of the Civil Rights Movement in the 1950s and 1960s, a time characterized by a rising consciousness of identity and self-affirmation. Beginning in the 1950s, writings by African Americans increasingly shifted from integrationist literature directed toward a primarily white audience to a literature that was reflective of intra-communal issues and the validation of black experiences. Gwendolyn Brooks’s Annie Allen (1949), James Baldwin’s Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953), Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952), and Lorraine Hans-berry’s A Raisin in the Sun (1959) are among the most prominent works of the decade. These works are reflective of the concerns of the Civil Rights Movement. Unlike the naturalistic and social realist writings of the 1940s, this literature celebrated life in the black community, sometimes in relation to the white community, but more often not. These works revealed the humanity of black people, thus suggesting that the political and social rights of African Americans are an obvious extension of that humanity.

The 1960s marked a decidedly more pronounced shift in the literature. Like literature of the 1950s that focused on interpersonal and intra-communal issues of black people, the 1960s literature emphasized political and social awareness and black pride. The New York City literary organization called the Umbra Society held meetings in 1962 and 1963 that served as precursor to the Black Art Movement. Black writers Tom Dent, Askia Toure, David Henderson, and Calvin Hernton were among the writers who developed and attended Umbra meetings. At these meetings writers discussed their work, as well as social and political issues. Despite the efforts of the Umbra writers, the assassination of Malcolm X, and Amiri Baraka’s establishment of the Black Arts Repertory Theatre School (BARTS) in 1965 are generally considered the beginning of the Blacks Arts Movement. Under the leadership of Amiri Baraka and Larry Neal, black writers sought to promote an aesthetic that was truly reflective of African artistic values and that celebrated the lives of black people. Amiri Baraka’s essay “Black Art” and his poem “Black Art,” and Larry Neal’s essay “The Black Arts Movement,” all provide insights into the radical black aesthetic espoused by the most prominent writers of this period.

The movement largely produced poetry and drama. Some of the other dominant writers of the period included Sonia Sanchez, Etheridge Knight, Haki Mutabuti (Don Lee), Nikki Giovanni, Ishmael Reed, Alice Childress, Adrienne Kennedy, Ed Bullins, and Douglas Turner Ward. Larry Neal considered the literary movement the sister to the Black Power Movement because of its radical nature. Despite the empowering nature of the black aesthetic promoted by the writers of the Black Arts Movement, the efforts of the writers were marred by concerns of artistry being overshadowed by the didactic nature of the writing and problems of misogyny, vulgarity, violence, and a glamorization of an impoverished mindset and lifestyle. With the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. and the decline of the Civil Rights Movement, the Black Arts Movement ended in the early 1970s.

Rebecca S. Dixon