| Zelda Beckford AMCS 398.01 April 30, 2002 |
| Introduction to the Black Arts Movement |
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| The idea of a Black Aesthetic as a central component of economic, political and cultural empowerment came about in the 1960s as the Black Arts Movement came into presence. Three of the major participants are Nikki Giovanni, Adrienne Kennedy, and June Jordan the most well known female writers commonly associated with the Black arts Movement. They, along with other African American women writers and artist helped to shape The Black Arts Movement, which was considered a loose network of Black Nationalist African American artists and intellectuals during the mid-1960s to the mid-1970s*. Black women writers of the twentieth century knew poverty and pain, and they continued to struggle in revolutionizing the word, in chronicling the status and history of people of African ancestry though powerful poetry, essays, novels, and plays. |
| In many respects, the Black Arts Movement was the cultural wing of the Black Power Movement. Like the Black Power Movement, its participants held a variety of political beliefs, ranging from revolutionary Marxism to versions of what was understood as the cultures and ideologies of traditional pre-colonial Africa. Despite the range of often conflicting political beliefs, there was a generally shared concept of African American liberation and the right of African Americans to determine their own destiny. There was also a common notion of the development or recovery of an authentic national black culture that was linked to an existing African American folk or popular culture. |
| Davis, Angela Y. Women, Culture, and Politics. New York, Random House, Inc., 1989, 6. |
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