(This essay was published in Weiss/Manfredi’s monograph Drifting Symmetries (Park Books, 2024), 272. I want to thank the architects and the publishers for giving me permission to repost it on my personal website.)
Standard architectural histories of postwar Harlem are usually illustrated by the vast range of buildings produced by top-down urban renewal policies or private real estate speculation.[1] What these histories omit, however, is a vital and innovative history of artistic experiments that were implemented at the scale of the city to elicit social change.[2] One of these overlooked case studies is the street theater associated with Amiri Baraka’s Black Arts Repertory Theater School (BARTS).
After the assassination of Malcolm X in 1965, the poet LeRoi Jones decided that he would leave the cultural milieu of New York City’s Lower East Side for the political struggles of Harlem. This shift in location was preceded by a gradual change in political orientation. Jones, previously a prominent figure in the Beat poet scene, decided to adopt the politics of Black nationalism espoused by the Black Panther Party. He changed his name to Amiri Baraka and pursued the birth of a Black Arts movement, a genre of poetry that critic Larry Neal later summarized as the artistic wing of the Black Power movement.[3] In a recording of the poem “Black Art,” Baraka describes his poetry as an art that “kills” its opponents to defend its creators. As one listens to this aesthetic vision of weaponized art, it is clear that this new kind of poetry is meant to reshape the mind and heart—to displace its listeners from the complacent acceptance of racism and the disinterested contemplation of poetry to a poetics of space. The staccato pacing of his polyphonic voice enters the ear between the simulated sounds of urban helicopters and airplanes engaged in combat. The beat of the spoken word emulates the landing of bullets between the eyes.
In what would come to be known as an artistic offensive toward the anti-Black sentiments directed at Harlem’s minority residents, Baraka engaged in an agitprop urbanism that was designed to decolonize the settler colonial and capitalist influences of his new enclave. The first step was to establish a central hub for promoting his radically politicized form of art—the Black Arts Repertory Theater School, located at 190 West 130th Street. According to the “Challenger” newsletter published by the Progressive Labor Party,[4] the BARTS marked its opening with a three-day festival that included a parade up Lenox Avenue to great fanfare. According to declassified FBI files now released through the Freedom of Information Act, Baraka routinely used a portable stage to deliver his poems on street corners in Harlem; a pattern that emulates the publicly engaged strategies of Harlem’s street preachers, including Malcolm X before his promotion within the Nation of Islam. Through a coordinated scheduling of play openings, parades and street corner performances, Baraka established an institutional model for Black community theaters that quickly spread across the country. Even though the Black Arts movement was short lived, the relationship between local Ujima theaters and Juneteenth festivals across the nation testifies to the longstanding influence of this postwar model.
The spatial complexity of Baraka’s agitprop urbanism parallels more established precedents in architectural history, from the psychogeography of the Situationists and the nomadism of Archigram’s Instant City to the extended industrial network of Cedric Price’s Potteries Thinkbelt. While Baraka’s work was never articulated through measured architectural drawings, the spatial reach of his practice qualifies it as a bonafide example of radical urbanism.
Charles L. Davis II, University of Texas at Austin
[1] See for example, Robert Stern, Thomas Mellins, David Fishman (eds). New York, 1960: Architecture and Urbanism Between the Second World War and the Bicentennial (New York: Monacelli Press, 1997), 857-894.
[2] See for example, Eric Booker’s edited volume Smokehouse Associates (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2022); and Cheryl Fish, “Place, Emotion, and Environmental Justice in Harlem: June Jordan and Buckminster Fuller’s 1965 ‘Architextual’ Collaboration,” in Discourse Journal for Theoretical Studies in Media and Culture, vol.29, no.2/3 (Spring & Fall 2007): 330-345.
[3] Larry Neal, “The Black Arts Movement,” Drama Review, no.12 (Summer 1968): 29-39.
[4] Sparks, “Black Arts School Set,” Challenge, May 4, 1965, p.2
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