The Black Arts Movement

Overview

The Black Arts Movement (BAM) was an African American-led movement in literature, theater, and visual art, active through the 1960s and 1970s, that built new Black cultural institutions while conveying an explicit message of Black pride — work the poet and critic Larry Neal famously called the “aesthetic and spiritual sister of Black Power,” applying that movement’s political ideas directly to art and literature. BAM writers and artists turned deliberately to African heritage as source material for presenting the Black American experience, continuing and extending a lineage this site traces directly back through the Harlem Renaissance to the pre-colonial African societies profiled elsewhere on this site.

Amiri Baraka and a Second Renaissance

Poet and playwright Amiri Baraka is widely credited as BAM’s founder, establishing the Black Arts Repertory Theatre School in Harlem in 1965, an example that inspired similar organizations across the United States — some short-lived, others, like Barbara Ann Teer’s National Black Theatre in Harlem, still active today. Scholars have drawn such a direct line between BAM and the earlier Harlem Renaissance that some refer to the Black Arts era as a “Second Renaissance”; Langston Hughes’s 1926 essay The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain, in which Hughes argued that Black artists should resist external control over their own art, is frequently cited as a direct intellectual forerunner of BAM’s own artistic philosophy decades later.

Building Black-Owned Media

BAM’s immediate predecessors emerged directly out of the Civil Rights Movement, as writers including James Baldwin and Chester Himes explored a new “black aesthetic” and groups like the Umbra Poets and the Spiral Arts Alliance began organizing Black artists collectively. Civil rights-era activists placed particular emphasis on building Black-owned media to carry these ideas forward — journals including Freedomways, Black Dialogue, The Liberator, and The Black Scholar, and publishing houses including Dudley Randall’s Broadside Press and Third World Press — infrastructure that gave BAM’s literature and political messages a distribution network independent of white-controlled publishing before the movement itself had fully formed.

Legacy

BAM emerged in explicit response to a long history of unrecognized Black artistic achievement — African Americans had always contributed significantly to American culture, this site’s sources note, but the brutalities of slavery and the systemic exclusion of Jim Crow routinely denied that work its due recognition. By building independent Black theaters, presses, and cultural organizations rather than seeking validation from white-controlled institutions, BAM permanently changed the landscape of African American arts, and institutions it inspired, including the National Black Theatre, continue that work into the present day.