Daniel Matlin

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Daniel Matlin | "Lift Up Yr Self!" Reinterpreting Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones), Black Power, and the Uplift Tradition | The Journal of American History, 93.1 | The History Cooperative

"Lift Up Yr Self!" Reinterpreting Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones), Black Power, and the Uplift Tradition

In March 1965, LeRoi Jones defected from bohemian Greenwich Village to Harlem. As the principal voice of the black arts movement, "the aesthetic and spiritual sister of the Black Power concept," the former beat poet would be named America's most important black writer in a poll carried by Negro Digest in January 1968. A year before he had left the Village, his Jewish wife, and their two mixed-race daughters, Jones had written a poem entitled "Black Dada Nihilismus": ... A cult of death, need of the simple striking arm under the street lamp. The cutters, from under their rented earth. Come up, black dada nihilismus. Rape the white girls. Rape their fathers. Cut the mothers' throats. Black dada nihilismus, choke my friends in their bedrooms with their drinks spilling and restless or tilting hips or dark liver lips sucking splinters from the master's thigh ... At the height of the black power movement, Eldridge Cleaver's Soul on Ice (1967) darkly declared: "I have lived those lines." Recalling the period leading up to his imprisonment from 1958 to 1966, Cleaver described how he had become a rapist, "practicing on black girls in the ghetto" before he "crossed the tracks and sought out white prey," as a deliberate, methodical repudiation of "the white man's law." CNN's obituary of Cleaver in 1998 stated that Soul on Ice "became the philosophical foundation of the Black Power movement. In one essay, Cleaver described his rape of white women as 'an insurrectionary act.'"¹	1
Academic and popular characterizations of black power have tended to privilege a small number of iconic literary and visual texts that reinforce the movement's sensational image as a wild outburst of criminality and sexual violence: footage of wasted urban landscapes with buildings reduced to smoldering rubble by rioters in Harlem, Watts, and Detroit; Black Panthers clad in black leather, stone-faced behind dark glasses, flaunting shotguns; graphic expressions of sexual rage in prose, verse, and drama. Historians have discerned a delinquent "anarchist impulse" in "the machismo of leather-jacketed young men, armed to the teeth, rising out of the urban ghetto." In such accounts, black power figures as a spontaneous aberration from the dominant traditions of African American ideology and activism and as a manifestation of a renegade masculinity. In 1978, Michele Wallace unleashed the first major black feminist attack on black power, which she denounced as a "vehicle for black macho": Black males who stressed a traditionally patriarchal responsibility to their women and children, to their communities—to black people—were to be considered almost sissified. The black man's sexuality and the physical fact of his penis were the major evidence of his manhood and the purpose of it. Male black power activists have often been depicted as nihilistic, armed poseurs, oblivious to the welfare of their communities but spurred to action by their genitals, which pointed unfailingly at white women.²	2
Understood only as black macho, the black power movement could scarcely have been further removed from the paradigm of social and moral uplift through which Booker T. Washington, W. E. B. Du Bois, Ida B. Wells, and Martin Luther King Jr. had conceived of race progress. As Kevin K. Gaines has convincingly shown, black champions of uplift, from nineteenth-century Jim Crow accommodationists to desegregation campaigners in the 1950s, envisaged liberation not only as the dismantling of de jure and de facto mechanisms of racial discrimination but also as the realization of full citizenship through the cultivation of black respectability, evidenced in godliness, service, and sexual restraint. Even as they contested racism, black elites often lapsed into hegemonic white supremacist indictments of black immorality and urban vice, rather than slavery and its persistent effects, as root causes of disenfranchisement and deprivation. Since American citizenship was historically constituted as a patriarchal responsibility, fulfilled by a wage-earning (white) male on behalf of his dependent wife and children, the perceived disorganization of lower-class black families was considered a serious obstacle to race progress. Through church, club, and press, uplift conflated the attainment of black respectability with an ideal of masculinity grounded in the stable, patriarchal family.³	. . .

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