The Black Arts Movement is radically opposed to any concept of the artist that alienates him from his community. Black Art is the aesthetic and spiritual sister of the Black Power concept. As such, it envisions an art that speaks directly to the needs and aspirations of Black America. In order to perform this task, the Black Arts Movement proposes a radical reordering of the western cultural aesthetic. It proposes a separate symbolism, mythology, critique, and iconology. The Black Arts and the Black Power concept both relate broadly to the Afro-American's desire for self-determination and nationhood. Both concepts are nationalistic. One is concerned with the relationship between art and politics; the other with the art of politics.

I remember thinking it strange, when I first started working in the Southern Student Movement in 1962, that there were so many people who, like me, thought of themselves as poets. I wrote a letter (to someone) describing them as poets who had come to the conclusion that the most profound poetry is the poetry of action and movement. When the problem becomes unspeakable then there is simply nothing to say—something must be done.

I was in the third wave of “students” who swept through the South with a dream in the early ‘60's. Sit-ins in ‘60, Freedom Rides in ‘61, and in ‘62 the forces gathered around the right to vote. After each wave there was a period of uncertainty while the new motion was in the making. That was a time to survey the damage and chaos which often seem to follow in the wake of dreams.

A black who works in the theatre, who cannot survive without it, can easily go out of his mind trying to write about it. It is even more difficult if he is a black writer writing in a white publication for a white majority. The white majority— who have unlimited access to the mass media—always expects a black writer to prove something about the black state of mind, something most blacks know exist, and that whites know exist—after four major riots. Yet these same1 whites are trying to deny that knowledge by pretending integration is just around the corner.