Born Everett LeRoi Jones in Newark, New Jersey, in 1934, Imamu Amiri Baraka was raised in the urban middle-class environment against which he has since rebelled. His father, Coyette (Coyt) LeRoi, was a postal employee, and his mother, Anna Lois Russ Jones, a social worker. Educated in the Newark public schools, Baraka began cartooning in junior high school and writing science fiction for the school publication in high school before graduating at the age of sixteen.

Although he had once considered the ministry as a career, Baraka accepted a science scholarship to Rutgers University. His experiences at Rutgers for one year, at Howard University where he did not complete his studies, and as an enlisted gunner in the Air Force (from 1954 to 1957) catalyzed his awareness of what he believed to be the illness of assimilation—that is, of black acquiescence and adaptation to white oppression. Consequently, after his discharge from the armed services, Baraka sought the supportive countercultural atmosphere of Greenwich Village in New York.

There, Baraka founded Totem Press and co-founded the avant-garde magazine Yugen with Hettie Cohen, a Jewish woman who would be his wife for seven years, from 1958 to 1965. In those years, he achieved recognition as a jazz and blues critic, worked as a poetry and small-press magazine editor, and took graduate courses in philosophy and comparative literature at Columbia University. Under the influence of such bohemian experimental poets as Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso, and William Carlos Williams (as well as Ezra Pound), Baraka established his early poetic voice with his first volume of poetry, Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note (1961). This collection reflected his resistance to the debilitating effects of white stereotyping and black assimilation, suggesting his eventual movement to a separatist philosophy.

Throughout his literary career, Baraka has served as a role model of his philosophy that art must lead to greater awareness and stimulate its audience to action. A small sampling of his activities from 1959 to 1967 includes the following: 1959, compiling and publishing a pro-Castro anthology; 1960, touring Cuba with other artists at Fidel Castro’s invitation; 1961, cofounding an experimental poetry group and magazine; 1963, seeing The Toilet, his first play, produced Off-Broadway and publishing Blues People, a book of music criticism; 1964, founding Black Arts Repertory Theatre and School; 1966, founding Spirit House, a black community theater with ongoing student workshops; and 1967, founding Jihad Publications for black nationalist writers.

Baraka’s nationalism was fostered by repeated arrests in which charges were dropped or, as in one case, a judge’s decision was reversed by the United States Supreme Court on appeal. At the same time, recognition of Baraka’s literary achievements was both national and international. The author was awarded a John Hay Whitney Foundation Fellowship for fiction and poetry in 1962, the Obie Award for best Off-Broadway play (Dutchman) in 1964, a Yoruba Academy Fellowship in 1965, a Guggenheim Fellowship for 1965-1966, and second prize at the Dakar International Arts Festival as well as a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts in 1966. Certainly, the dichotomy between the positive responses of the literary community and the negative responses of the legal professions served to fuel his anti-assimilationist beliefs.

In 1965, his marriage was dissolved; in 1967, he married Sylvia Robinson, a black woman. The following year, LeRoi Jones became Imamu Amiri Baraka, thereby erasing his white heritage with Muslim and African words meaning “blessed poet/philosopher warrior”; his wife became Bibi Amina Baraka. For the next seven years, Baraka was to become increasingly active in nationalistic ventures and more fervid in his...