“He was a literary genius,” Dr. Cornel West, a professor at Union Theological Seminary and a longtime friend to Baraka, told Diverse. “He was a revolutionary who was always on fire and most importantly, he never sold out.”
Born Everett LeRoi Jones in 1934 in Newark, N.J, Baraka (who later changed his name several times) emerged as a powerful literary voice during the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s. A polymath of sorts, Baraka mastered poetry, essays and other works of non-fiction. His play Dutchman made its debut at the Cherry Lane Theater in Greenwich Village in 1964 and later won an Obie Award. He was lauded for his 1963 book Blues People, which chronicled the music of African-Americans from spirituals to blues and jazz. He was also a spoken-word artist who captivated audiences with his soul-stirring performances on college campuses and in nightclubs.
“He could just take words and make them into anything he wanted,” says John H. Bracey, Jr., the chairman of the W.E.B Du Bois Department of Afro-American Studies at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. “Whatever he did was good when he did it. He didn’t do hack work.”
Baraka wasn’t shy about embracing controversy either.
In 2002 he faced intense scrutiny as New Jersey’s Poet Laureate. His poem, “Somebody Blew Up America,” which was published shortly after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, was denounced by Jewish groups as anti-Semitic. They protested the line in the poem where Baraka claimed that thousands of Israelis knew of the attack on the World Trade Center and opted to stay home from work.
Former Gov. James E. McGreevey called for Baraka’s resignation, and when he refused, the state legislature eventually voted to abolish the poet laureate post altogether.
