Amiri Baraka

Poet, playwright, and critic

1934-10-07 – 2014-01-09

Amiri Baraka was an American poet, playwright, essayist, and critic associated with the Black Arts Movement.

Books by Amiri Baraka

Blues people
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Dutchman and The Slave
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The United States in Literature [with three long stories] -- Seventh Edition
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Spike Lee is part of a retrograde movement in this country.
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Alas, we have not yet the power to render completely sterile or make impossible the errors and lies which will merely be America being itself rather than its unconvincing promise.
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You have to get an individual who's willing to actually struggle with the system to change it. As long as you have people who - to make substantive changes, to make infrastructure changes.
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I had a little portable typewriter. I call it my Harlem Literary Fellowship.
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When I was saying, 'White people go to hell,' I never had trouble finding a publisher. But when I say, 'Black and white unite and fight, destroy capitalism,' then you suddenly become unreasonable.
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You have to start with slavery because those abuses have never been eradicated. You know, people are not living in slums because they voted to. You know, their children are not in jail because they wanted them to. You know, these are the results of a people who have been oppressed and suffer national oppression, you know.
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The man who buried Malcolm X - my Muslim imam, priest - he, after I got beat up by police... came to me, and he said, 'You don't need this American name.' And I was susceptible to it at the time because, God knows, I had just gotten whipped near to death. So he gave me an Arab name; he gave me the name Amir Barakat.
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