The Black Arts Movement (BAM) was an African-American-led art movement that was active during the 1960s and 1970s. Through activism and art, BAM created new cultural institutions and conveyed a message of black pride. The movement expanded from the incredible accomplishments of artists of the Harlem Renaissance.
Zami: A New Spelling of My Name is a 1982 biomythography by American poet Audre Lorde. It started a new genre that the author calls biomythography, which combines history, biography, and myth. In the text, Lorde writes that "Zami" is "a Carriacou name for women who work together as friends and lovers", noting that Carriacou is the Caribbean island from which her mother immigrated. The name proves fitting: Lorde begins Zami writing that she owes her power and strength to the women in her life, and much of the book is devoted to detailed portraits of other women.
John Henrik Clarke was an African-American historian, professor, prominent Afrocentrist, and pioneer in the creation of Pan-African and Africana studies and professional institutions in academia starting in the late 1960s.
Robert Hooks is an American actor, producer, and activist. Along with Douglas Turner Ward and Gerald S. Krone, he founded The Negro Ensemble Company. The Negro Ensemble Company is credited with the launch of the careers of many major black artists of all disciplines, while creating a body of performance literature over the last thirty years, providing the backbone of African-American theatrical classics. Additionally, Hooks is the sole founder of two significant black theatre companies: the D.C. Black Repertory Company, and New York's Group Theatre Workshop.
The Langston Hughes Medal has been awarded annually by the Langston Hughes Festival of the City College of New York since 1978. The medal "is awarded to highly distinguished writers from throughout the African American diaspora for their impressive works of poetry, fiction, drama, autobiography and critical essays that help to celebrate the memory and tradition of Langston Hughes. Each year, the LHF’s Advisory Committee reviews the work of major black writers from Africa to America whose work is accessed as likely having a lasting impact on world literature.".
The Amsterdam News is a weekly Black-owned newspaper serving New York City. It is one of the oldest newspapers geared toward African Americans in the United States and has published columns by such figures as W. E. B. Du Bois, Roy Wilkins, and Adam Clayton Powell Jr., and was the first to recognize and publish Malcolm X. It operated from the New York Amsterdam News Building on Seventh Avenue in Harlem from 1916-1938. The building is a National Landmark.
Lonne Elder III was an American actor, playwright and screenwriter. Elder was one of the leading African-American figures who informed the New York theater world with social and political consciousness. He also wrote scripts for television and film. His best known play, Ceremonies in Dark Old Men, won him a Drama Desk Award for Most Promising Playwright and was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. The play, which was about a Harlem barber and his family, was produced by the Negro Ensemble Company in 1969.
Rosa Cuthbert Guy was a Trinidad-born American writer who grew up in the New York metropolitan area. Her family had immigrated and she was orphaned when young. Raised in foster homes, she later was acclaimed for her books of fiction for adults and young people that stressed supportive relationships.
John Oliver Killens was an American fiction writer from Georgia. His novels featured elements of African-American life. In his debut novel, Youngblood (1954), Killens coined the phrase "kicking ass and taking names". He also wrote plays, short stories and essays, and published articles in a range of outlets.
Keith Gilyard is a writer and American professor of English and African American Studies. He has passionately embraced African American expressive culture over the course of his career as a poet, scholar, and educator. Beyond his own literary output, he has pursued – and in some instances merged - two main lines of humanistic inquiry: literary studies, with its concern for beauty and significant form, and rhetorical studies, with its emphasis on the effect of trope and argument in culture. Moreover, his interests branch out into popular culture, civic discourse, and educational praxis. A critical perspective concerning these areas is, in his view, integral to the development of discerning and productive publics both on and beyond campuses and therefore crucial to the optimal practice of democracy.
The National Black Writers Conference (NBWC) is presented by the Center for Black Literature (CBL) at Medgar Evers College of The City University of New York. Founded by Dr. Brenda M. Greene, the Center for Black Literature was officially approved by the College Council of Medgar Evers College and by the board of trustees in October 2002. Its mission is to expand, broaden, and enrich the public's knowledge and aesthetic appreciation of literature produced by people of the African diaspora. It accomplishes its mission through a variety of programs and partnerships and by serving as a forum for the discussion, reading, research, study, and critical analysis of Black literature. It is the only center devoted to this mission in the country.
Pat Parker was an African American poet and activist. Both her poetry and her activism drew from her experiences as a Black lesbian feminist. Her poetry spoke about her tough childhood growing up in poverty, dealing with sexual assault, and the murder of a sister. At eighteen, Parker was in an abusive relationship and had a miscarriage after being pushed down a flight of stairs. After two divorces, she came out as a lesbian, "embracing her sexuality" and said she was liberated and "knew no limits when it came to expressing the innermost parts of herself".
Julian Hudson Mayfield was an American actor, director, writer, lecturer and civil rights activist.
Freedomways was the leading African-American theoretical, political and cultural journal of the 1960s–1980s. It began publishing in 1961 and ceased in 1985.
Cathy J. Cohen is an American political scientist, author, feminist, and social activist, whose work has focused on the African-American experience in politics from a perspective which is underlined by intersectionality. She is currently the David and Mary Winton Green Professor in Political Science and the College at the University of Chicago, and is the former Director of the Center for the Study of Race (2002–05).
Louise Meriwether was an American novelist, essayist, journalist and activist, as well as a writer of biographies of historically important African Americans for children. She is best known for her first novel, Daddy Was a Number Runner (1970), which draws on autobiographical elements about growing up in Harlem, New York City, during the Depression and in the era after the Harlem Renaissance.
Daddy Was a Number Runner is the first novel by American writer Louise Meriwether. It was published by Prentice Hall, with a foreword by James Baldwin, in 1970, and is now considered a modern classic. It depicts a poor black family in Harlem during the Great Depression in the first half of the 20th century, as seen through the eyes of a 12-year-old African-American girl who has one brother who wants to be a chemist and another who is a gang member.
Freedom was a monthly newspaper focused on African-American issues published from 1950 to 1955. The publication was associated primarily with the internationally renowned singer, actor and then officially disfavored activist Paul Robeson, whose column, with his photograph, ran on most of its front pages. Freedom's motto was: "Where one is enslaved, all are in chains!" The newspaper has been described as "the most visible African American Left cultural institution during the early 1950s." In another characterization, "Freedom paper was basically an attempt by a small group of black activists, most of them Communists, to provide Robeson with a base in Harlem and a means of reaching his public... The paper offered more coverage of the labor movement than nearly any other publication, particularly of the left-led unions that were expelled from the CIO in the late 1940s... [It] encouraged its African American readership to identify its struggles with anti-colonial movements in Africa, Asia, and the Caribbean. Freedom gave extensive publicity to... the struggle against apartheid."
Arthur R. Flowers, Jr. is an American novelist, memoirist, and performance poet. His work is known for its focus on the African-American experience, particularly folklore, blues music, and hoodoo spiritualism.
