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(NewsNation) — Though he was sometimes considered controversial, poet Amiri Baraka made his mark on history through his provocative and thought-provoking pieces of writing.
Baraka, whose real name was Everett LeRoi Jones, was born in 1934 in Newark New Jersey. After attending Rutgers and Howard University Baraka joined the Air Force, though was dishonorably discharged because he was wrongly accused of having communist views (which he would later adopt.)
After this, he returned to New York City to attend Columbia University.
According to The Poetry Foundation, it was Baraka’s strident criticism and “incendiary writing style” that made his work so powerful.
“For decades, Baraka was one of the most prominent voices in the world of American literature,” the Poetry Foundation wrote. “He was praised for speaking out against oppression as well as accused of fostering hate.”
However, his own political stance changed throughout his life. Baraka was associated with beat poets Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac in the 1950’s, publishing their poetry in a magazine he founded called Yugen. After Malcolm X was assassinated, he became a Black Nationalist after moving to Harlem in 1965.
While in Harlem, Baraka founded the Black Arts Repertory Theatre, though this closed in the late 60s. His first “significant” play, according to Encyclopedia Britannica, was called “Dutchman” (1964) and is about a Black intellectual and the white woman who killed him. It won the 1964 Obie Award for best Off-Broadway American play.
The New York Times described Baraka in their obituary of him as one of the “major forces in the Black Arts movement of the 1960s and ’70s, which sought to duplicate in fiction, poetry, drama and other mediums the aims of the Black power movement in the political arena.”
Along with Phyllis Wheatley, Frederick Douglass, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Richard Wright and Ralph Ellison, Baraka was considered “one of the eight figures… who have significantly affected the course of African American literary culture” in the “American Book Review.”
After 1968, though, Baraka’s writings became more “divisive,” according to Britannica, and in the mid-1970s became a Marxist.
“I (still) see art as a weapon and a weapon of revolution,” he said. “It’s just now that I define revolution in Marxist terms.”
However, his work became seen as increasingly homophobic and antisemitic, Britannica said.
Though he became poet laureate for New Jersey in 2002, Baraka gave a public reading of a poem called “Somebody Blew Up America,” which suggested Israel knew about the Sept. 11 attacks before they happened, leading to the state’s governor urged him to step down. Baraka didn’t, but New Jersey ultimately ended up abolishing the position altogether.
“His champions and detractors agreed that at his finest he was a powerful voice on the printed page, a riveting orator in person and an enduring presence on the international literary scene whom — whether one loved or hated him — it was seldom possible to ignore,” the New York Times said.