Black Arts Movement

The Black Arts Movement was a radical arts movement that, while aesthetically and ideologically diverse, was connected by the belief that a major part of its work was promoting revolutionary social transformation. If, as a number of scholars have commented over the years, the Black Arts Movement was the cultural wing of Black Power, one might also say that Black Power was the political action wing of the Black Arts Movement. In truth, the Black Arts Movement and Black Power were not so much separate entities, but rather, as black theater scholar Larry Neal put it, both were “concepts” of, or ways of coming at, the freedom movement. In that way of thinking, art was (or could be) political action just as those activities usually considered to be political were a sort of art.

The Black Arts Movement changed how people felt that art should be circulated. The Black Arts Movement imperatives of art for, by, of black people in the communities in which they lived as opposed to in elite museums, theaters, or concert halls in which they often felt unwelcome, opened up the cultural landscape for art and arts institutions supported by public money and other resources and aimed at grassroots communities. Not only did the Black Arts Movement reach millions of people through its journals, presses, theaters, murals, festivals, and television shows during the 1960s and 1970s, but it left a lasting imprint on our sense of what art is, what it can do, and who it is for, that remains with us to this day.

James Smethurst, University of Massachusetts Amherst