Amiri Baraka, polarizing poet and former NJ poet laureate, dies at 79

Amiri Baraka, a militant man of letters and tireless agitator whose blues-based, fist-shaking poems, plays and criticism made him a provocative and groundbreaking force in American culture, has died. He was 79.

His booking agent, Celeste Bateman, told The Associated Press that Baraka, who had been hospitalized since last month, died Thursday at Newark Beth Israel Medical Center.

Few writers were as provocative or polarizing in the 1960s and '70s than Baraka, formerly LeRoi Jones, and no one did more to extend the political debates of the civil rights era to the world of the arts.

He inspired generations of poets, playwrights and musicians, and his immersion in spoken word traditions and raw street language anticipated rap, hip-hop and slam poetry. The FBI feared him to the point of flattery, identifying Baraka as "the person who will probably emerge as the leader of the Pan-African movement in the United States."

Baraka transformed from one of the only African-Americans to join the Beat caravan of Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac to a leader of the Black Arts movement, an ally of the Black Power movement, which rejected the liberal optimism of the early '60s and intensified a divide over how and whether the black artist should take on social issues.

Scorning art for art's sake and the pursuit of black-white unity, Baraka was part of a philosophy that called for the teaching of black art and history and producing works that bluntly called for revolution.

"We want 'poems that kill,"' Baraka wrote in his landmark "Black Art," a manifesto published in 1965, the year he helped found the Black Arts movement. "Assassin poems. Poems that shoot guns/Poems that wrestle cops into alleys/and take their weapons leaving them dead/with tongues pulled out and sent to Ireland."

He was as eclectic as he was prolific: His influences ranged from Ray Bradbury and Mao Zedong to Ginsberg and John Coltrane. Baraka wrote poems, short stories, novels, essays, plays, musical and cultural criticism, and jazz operas. His 1963 book "Blues People" has been called the first major history of black music to be written by an African-American.

A line from his poem "Black People!" — "Up against the wall mother f-----" — became a counterculture slogan for everyone from student protesters to the rock band Jefferson Airplane. A 2002 poem he wrote alleging that some Israelis had advance knowledge of the Sept. 11 attacks led to widespread outrage.

He was denounced by critics as buffoonish, homophobic, anti-Semitic, a demagogue. He was called by others a genius, a prophet, the Malcolm X of literature. Eldridge Cleaver hailed him as the bard of the "funky facts." Ishmael Reed credited the Black Arts movement for encouraging artists of all backgrounds and enabling the rise of multiculturalism. The scholar Arnold Rampersad placed him alongside Frederick Douglass and Richard Wright in the pantheon of black cultural influences.

"From Amiri Baraka, I learned that all art is political, although I don't write political plays," the Pulitzer Prize–winning dramatist August Wilson once said.

First published in the 1950s, Baraka crashed the literary party in 1964, at the Cherry Lane Theater in Greenwich Village, when "Dutchman" opened and made instant history at the height of the civil rights movement.

Baraka's play was a one-act showdown between a middle-class black man, Clay, and a sexually daring white woman, Lula, ending in a brawl of murderous taunts and confessions.

Baraka was still LeRoi Jones when he wrote "Dutchman." But the Cuban revolution, the assassination in 1965 of Malcolm X and the Newark riots of 1967, when the poet was jailed and photographed looking dazed and bloodied, radicalized him. Jones left his white wife (Hettie Cohen), cut off his white friends and moved from Greenwich Village to Harlem.

He renamed himself Imamu Ameer Baraka, "spiritual leader blessed prince," and dismissed the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. as a "brainwashed Negro." He helped organize the 1972 National Black Political Convention and founded the Congress of African People. He also founded community groups in Harlem and Newark, the hometown to which he eventually returned.

The Black Arts movement was essentially over by the mid-1970s, and Baraka distanced himself from some of his harsher comments — about King, about gays and about whites in general. But he kept making news. In the early 1990s, as Spike Lee was filming a biography of Malcolm X, Baraka ridiculed the director as "a petit bourgeois Negro" unworthy of his subject. In 2002, respected enough to be named New Jersey's poet laureate, he shocked again with "Somebody Blew Up America," a Sept. 11 poem with a jarring twist.

"Who knew the World Trade Center was gonna get bombed," read a line from the poem. "Who told 4,000 Israeli workers at the Twin Towers to stay home that day?"

Then-Gov. James McGreevey and others demanded his resignation. Baraka refused, denying that "Somebody Blew Up America" was anti-Semitic (the poem also attacks Hitler and the Holocaust) and condemning the "dishonest, consciously distorted and insulting noninterpretation of my poem." Discovering he couldn't be fired, the state eliminated the position altogether, in 2003.

The Associated Press