Amiri Baraka (1989)

Poet, playwright, essayist, teacher, and political activist Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones) is the delineator of what Du Bois called the great problem of the 20^th century: the color line. His art – in its essential idealism, its anger and outrage at racial and social injustice, its leaps of the imagination, its wit and violent denunciation – holds up a mirror to contemporary America, wherein we see our harshest images in revealing focus. Baraka’s search for healing and supportive traditions and ideologies has charted our collective journey through the last half of the 20^th century in America. As Arnold Rampersad reminds us, Baraka, like Langston Hughes, “has placed the greatest value on the consciousness, the expressive style, and the destiny of the common people.”