News & Video: Poet and playwright Amiri Baraka dies

Amiri Baraka, the poet and playwright who gave Black arts a capital B, died today. He was 79. He was also a novelist and activist and once known as LeRoi Jones.

When I die, the consciousness I carry I will to blackpeople. May they pick me apart and take the useful parts,
the sweet meat of my feelings. And leave the bitter bullshit
rotten white parts alone. — “leroy” (1969)

Baraka was a native of Newark, and was Poet Laureate of New Jersey from 2002-2003. He was as controversial as he was creative, and right or wrong, he was unquestionably integral to the black arts movement in America.

Here are some of the most insightful quotes from Baraka’s career.

1. “A man is either free, or he is not. There cannot be an apprenticeship for freedom.”

2. “Art is a weapon in the struggle of ideas, the class struggle.”

3. “There is no justice in America, but it is the fight for justice that sustains you.”

4. “God has been replaced, as he has all over the West, with respectability and air conditioning.”

5. “Thought is more important than art. To revere art and have no understanding of the process that forces it into existence, is finally not even to understand what art is.”

6. “If the flag of an armed enemy of the U.S. is allowed to fly over government buildings, then it implies that slavery, or at least the threat of slavery, is sanctioned by that government and can still legally exist.”

7. “Poetry is music, and nothing but music. Words with musical emphasis.”

8. “The attempt to divide art and politics is a bourgeois which says good poetry, art, cannot be political, but since everything is … political, even an artist or work that claims not to have any politics is making a political statement by that act.”

Watch Baraka perform one of his best known pieces, “The Way Of Things (In Town).”