Encyclopedia of the Black Arts Movement

The Black Arts Movement combined innovative approaches to literature, film, music, visual arts, and theatre with a heightened consciousness of black agency and autonomy, along with the radical politics of the Civil Rights Movement, the Black Muslims, and the Black Panthers.Between the late 1950s and the end of the 1970s, the movement produced some of America’s most original and controversial artists and intellectuals, including Amiri Baraka, James Baldwin, Larry Neal, Maya Angelou, Nikki Giovanni, Sonia Sanchez, Ntozake Shange, June Jordan, Audre Lorde, John Coltrane, and Archie Shepp.Although the movement began in New York City, with the Umbra Poets Workshop and the Negro Ensemble Company on the Lower East Side, and Baraka’s Black Arts Repertory Theatre in Harlem, it quickly spread to Chicago, Detroit, and San Francisco.In Chicago, the movement was disseminated by Hoyt Fuller and John Johnson who edited and published Negro Digest (later Black World), an important venue for the new art