Almost since its inception to the United States black history has been becoming fully and completely free from one thing or another. Post-Civil War that narrative for a majority of African-Americans was to be brought onto a level playing field as the Other, White World. No longer slaves, the next step was to become acclimated to this new sense of freedom and everything that it meant. Through over several decades of Jim Crow segregation, degradation, and defamation, these lack of freedoms African Americans took their apex in the 1960s. The Civil Rights movement takes off after the 1954 victory over “Separate, but Equal,” via Brown v. Board of Education. Over the span of 10 years and two assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and John F. Kennedy
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But one of the best examples for what the Black Arts Movement was supposed to be about is Dutchman ¬a play written by Amiri Baraka. The Black Arts Movement to gain any traction was to first and foremost reject white culture all together. The writings of its peoples should be for its peoples only and no one else, rejecting the notion of black art for white understanding and viewership. This first and foremost is what Amiri Baraka is speaking to in The Myth of “Negro Literature” when he writes “this is the only way for The Negro artist to provide his version of America – from that no-man’s-land outside the mainstream. A no-man’s-land, a black county, completely invisible to white America, but so essentially part of it as to stain its whole being an ominous gray.” Effectively to shake up preconceived notions of what Blackness is, and should be about as had been so reverberated throughout American history. This thinking is performed on numerous occasions throughout Baraka’s play. The protagonist Clay, is on his way to a friend’s house for a party. Traveling through an underground train system he is met by Lula, a white woman who catches an eye for Clay, and Clay to her. In this story Lula can be seen as the eyes of white society; she is addicted to Clay, or simply just his type, who we later find out is a poet, an artist of sorts. “I bet your name is, something like, Gerald or Walter Huh?” Lula
But one of the best examples for what the Black Arts Movement was supposed to be about is Dutchman ¬a play written by Amiri Baraka. The Black Arts Movement to gain any traction was to first and foremost reject white culture all together. The writings of its peoples should be for its peoples only and no one else, rejecting the notion of black art for white understanding and viewership. This first and foremost is what Amiri Baraka is speaking to in The Myth of “Negro Literature” when he writes “this is the only way for The Negro artist to provide his version of America – from that no-man’s-land outside the mainstream. A no-man’s-land, a black county, completely invisible to white America, but so essentially part of it as to stain its whole being an ominous gray.” Effectively to shake up preconceived notions of what Blackness is, and should be about as had been so reverberated throughout American history. This thinking is performed on numerous occasions throughout Baraka’s play. The protagonist Clay, is on his way to a friend’s house for a party. Traveling through an underground train system he is met by Lula, a white woman who catches an eye for Clay, and Clay to her. In this story Lula can be seen as the eyes of white society; she is addicted to Clay, or simply just his type, who we later find out is a poet, an artist of sorts. “I bet your name is, something like, Gerald or Walter Huh?” Lula