Fifty years from now when negroes and others take "English,"… they'll read: LeRoi Jones (aka Amiri Baraka) was at the cutting edge of mid-twentieth century American literature. Black Arts and Black Consciousness and Black Liberation will be explained away in a footnote like Harlem (a Negro area in New York) in the Norton Anthology of Literature. The process of cultural cannibalism, until now confined to black music, speech and dress, will have been extended to Afro-American literature.

Baraka's early association with the Beat poets, the finality with which, in his poetry, he shook off the dry husks of Pound, Williams, etc., and his political conversion to Marxist-Leninist-Maoist thought do place him within the tradition of Western literary radicalism. But cannibalism has become such an ingrained part of the American Way, that to say this seems … to exclude Baraka from an equal place in Afro-American experience. That is, the literary achievement of Baraka the radical, the black militant, is used to glorify what Stevie Wonder aptly calls "That Bad Luck Way." (pp. 435-36)

The major tension in Afro-American poetry has been the dialectic between the Euro-American literate tradition—the cultural assumptions as well as the body of texts which are based on those assumptions—and Afro-American oral culture—music, speech and the patterns of living out of which they are created. This tension is symbolized in the two "dialects" Afro-American poetry, the one based on standard English, the other on black vernacular speech…. [In] their drive toward technical excellence, Afro-American writers never really confronted the paradox that plain English and its literary traditions are vehicles of cultural domination. Thus, Afro-American writers were always in the position of unconsciously affirming their cultural inferiority even as they protested consciously and often vehemently against economic, political and social oppression. (p. 436)

If Baraka were ever haunted by the spectre of technical inferiority, it doesn't show up in his work. The classic volume of poetry, The Dead Lecturer, is a clear statement of his recognition that mastery of the standard English idiom has a political as well as an aesthetic dimension. In the "Crow Jane" sequence, the brilliant and biting attack on the decay of the West, his mastery of the idiom becomes a repudiation of the literary tradition as well. In "A Poem for Willie Best" and "An Agony. As Now.," he inverts the symbolism of the mask, for the persona looks out at a third world of sun and cool air, separate from his inner world (the world which the iron mask of white society puts on the black mind). Still, the persona is inside the white world, "inside someone who hates me," perhaps inextricably bound to it. The mask becomes a metaphor for the black situation in this country, and for the black who, steeped in Western culture, comes to hate his own blackness because it is not white.

All this, of course, is a part of the more comprehensive analysis which gave rise to the black political movements of the sixties. But Baraka's impact on our literature might have gone unnoticed amongst us had it not been for his political activities, his consciously militant actions and his articulation of the philosophical system behind them. In combining theory with action, Baraka became our Malcolm and our DuBois, the bad man and the intellectual, now made one as writer. As one of the founders and chief movers of the Black Arts Movement, the movement whose central thesis is that art by Afro-Americans ought to contribute to the cause of black liberation, he continues to influence a whole generation of writers.

Here is the man who liberated our language, getting down in the streets, coining the phrases that fired the cities. And this was thunder to us. His wasn't the only voice raised, nor the only voice we listened to. But we hung in there long after Malcolm's other brothers—Carmichael, Cleaver, Brown, et al.—had been driven or retreated into exile or murdered. And, as a writer, he came closest to articulating a necessary fusion of politics and aesthetics, making that fusion a potent political force. The cosmetic features of Black Consciousness—dress, hairstyle, catch phrases—were merely a reflection of deeper changes taking place within our collective psyche. Baraka now rightly repudiates the regressive excesses, the sheer lunacy of the extreme positions which he helped to dignify in the name of liberation and "Pan-African" morality, but his work remains a testament to our recognition that we exist as a people in our own literary and intellectual tradition. (pp. 436-37)