The Black Arts Movement By Larry Neal And Amiri Baraka

The Black Arts Movement came about during a time when the Black Voice was trying to find a way to be heard. It was a struggle for the Black community to be able to find their nitch in a world that they were a minority. However, when this movement came along in the late 1960s, the voice that was often silenced now had found its own platform. In the Black Arts Movement essays written by both Larry Neal and Amiri Baraka they both discuss the impact of the Black Arts Movement on the African American community.

Although both essays discussed the Black Arts movement they each had their own take on what they did for the community. One thing that was evident in both their essays was the spring of 1964 and the summer of 1965 “But that one glorious summer of 1965, we did, even with all that internal warfare, bring advance Black Arts to Harlem” (Baraka, 16). In both of these essays, these dates stood as a pivotal point during
The movement encouraged young people to get involve and diffuse the society that white people were still in control of. The response to the movement was a generation of activist “That’s what the whole movement and essence of The Black Arts was raised and forwarded by, the desire by Black youth to make revolution in the US. To resist and finally destroy the slave system of racism and national oppression” ( Baraka 17). Through the arts, young people were able to see the oppression that their ancestors faced and they refused to not take apart in stopping it. The movement itself started a war amongst Black people “A war for self-determination, self respect and self defense. It is a war for equal rights and democracy”. Neal to looked at this movement through the lens of the Black aesthetic which the motive behind that is “the destruction of the white thing, the destruction of white ideas and white ways of looking in the world”