The Black Arts Movement in Cleveland

The Black Arts movement was not only influenced by the political and social turmoil of the day, but also by the rise of Communism that took place in the United States by the late 1920's.  The Communist Left, as James Edward Smethurst refers to it, has two paradigms that effectively influenced the radical artists inside the Black Arts movement.  The first paradigm is the notion “. . . of an oppositional culture that was both avant-garde . . . and rooted in working-class or (in the case of African Americans) a proletarian-peasant national tradition that would exist outside of mass culture.” [1] The paradigm, although an unrealistic utopian cultural vision, did produce a growth in alternative social groups that focused on a new consciousness of African American self-interest. [2]  The second paradigm, or what Smethurst calls the Popular Front, was the idea that artists should battle and confront mass culture, instead of existing outside of it.  Individuals who used this approach “. . . did not see themselves as simply using popular culture but often celebrated what they saw as its progressive aspects as expressions of the American democratic spirit.” [3] Nevertheless, the basic ideological differences taken from the Communist Left and the Popular Front of the 1930s and 1940s did not allow the Black Arts movement to unify in the coming years.  They did however coexist together and were influential in establishing the overarching ideology of the Black Arts movement in the 1960s.As with the Harlem Renaissance, Harlem served as the incubator for Black Arts ideologies. [4] In 1965 Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones) and other African American artists established the Black Arts Repository Theater and School.  Although it only lasted a year, BARTS spurred other African American artists around the nation.

[1] James Edward Smethurst, Literary Nationalism in the 1960s and 1970s:The Black Arts Movement, (Chapel Hill and London: The University of North Carolina Press), 24.  (Hereafter cited as Smethurst).

[2] Ibid, 24-25.

[3] Ibid, 27.

[4] Ibid, 12,100.