History
The Black Arts Movement has roots in the Civil rights Movement, along with Malcolm X and the Nation of Islam, and the Black Power Movement. Black Arts usually dates from the 1960s to '70s. African american artists within it sought to create politically engaged work that would explore the African American cultural and historical experience. Amiri Baraka, formerly known as LeRoi Jones, is one of the most important figures in the Black Arts Movement. Following Malcolm X's 1965 assassination, Jones made a symbolic move from Manhattan's lower East Side to Harlem, which is where he founded the Black Arts Repertory Theatre and School. The Black Arts Movement is sometimes criticized as misogynist, homophobic, anti-Semetic, and racially exclusive. The movement is also credited with the motivation of a new generation of poets, artists, and writers. However, recent years mark the collaboration of acknowledged debt to the movement from writers such as Native Americans, Latinos and Latinas, lesbians and gays, and younger African American generations. Black Arts Movement poets include: Amiri Baraka, Gwendolyn Brooks, Gil-Scott Heron, and many others who worked hard at what they did and those who work hard at what they currently do.
Gwendolyn Brooks- A Song in the Front YardI’ve stayed in the front yard all my life.
I want a peek at the back Where it’s rough and untended and hungry weed grows. A girl gets sick of a rose. I want to go in the back yard now And maybe down the alley, To where the charity children play. I want a good time today. They do some wonderful things. They have some wonderful fun. My mother sneers, but I say it’s fine How they don’t have to go in at quarter to nine. My mother, she tells me that Johnnie Mae Will grow up to be a bad woman. That George’ll be taken to Jail soon or late (On account of last winter he sold our back gate). But I say it’s fine. Honest, I do. And I’d like to be a bad woman, too, And wear the brave stockings of night-black lace And strut down the streets with paint on my face. |
Poem AnalysisThe narrator wants to go to the back yard. She has been in the front her whole life. She knows whats in the back and that's where she wants to be. She wants to experiment with the back. The back seems like a wonderful place compared to the prison of a front yard.
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