Amiri Baraka

Everett LeRoi Jones was born on the seventh of October 1934 in Newark, New Jersey, to Coyt LeRoy Jones, a postal supervisor who also worked as a lift operator, and Anna Lois Russ Jones, a social worker. Raised in a striving Black working household, he was a gifted student who moved through Barringer High School and Rutgers University before transferring to the historically Black Howard University in Washington, D.C.

After service in the U.S. Air Force, he settled in Greenwich Village and the Lower East Side of Manhattan, where he emerged in the late 1950s among the era's boldest young writers. His 1964 play Dutchman, a searing allegory of race in America, won the Obie Award and announced a major and uncompromising new voice in American letters.

The assassination of Malcolm X in 1965 turned his course sharply. He left downtown for Harlem and founded the Black Arts Repertory Theatre/School, an act widely regarded as the founding gesture of the Black Arts Movement — the artistic companion to Black Power. Taking the name Amiri Baraka, he became the movement's principal theorist, poet, and organizer, later returning to Newark to build institutions of Black cultural and political life.

Across poetry, drama, essay, and music criticism, he insisted that art carry the weight of a people's freedom. He died in his native Newark on the ninth of January 2014. May the fire of his word, and the dignity of his people's struggle, be honored and remembered.