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Amiri Baraka (born October 7, 1934) is a U.S. writer.
Born Everett LeRoi Jones in Newark, New Jersey to a postman and lift operator, Amiri Baraka has undergone many changes in his life and professional career as a writer and poet.
After studying philosophy and religion at Rutgers, Columbia, and Howard Universities, without successfully obtaining a degree, Baraka joined the US Air Force for three years. After an anonymous letter to his commanding officer accusing him of being a communist led to the discovery of Soviet agitprop, Baraka was put on gardening duty and given a dishonorable discharge for violation of his oath of duty.
Baraka came to New York's Greenwich Village from the Air Force in 1957 and rented a tenement on East Third Street. Baraka found a job in a record warehouse, which fueled his interest in black music and brought him into contact with writers such as Nat Hentoff, Martin Williams and Allen Ginsberg. The influences these individuals had on Baraka's early career is reflected in his Beat poetry and can be seen in his Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note poetry collection.
In 1958, Jones founded Totem Press, which published such Beat icons as Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg.
Baraka also spent time in Cuba in the early 1960s. Baraka married Hettie Cohen in 1960, a Jewish woman he had been working with while writing for Yugen magazine. By 1964, he had achieved some notoriety in the New York literary community. He wrote critically acclaimed off-Broadway plays, beginning with "The Dutchman" in 1964, followed by "The Slave" in 1965.
After the assassination of Malcolm X in 1965, Baraka became radicalized and dropped his Beat identity. He left Greenwich Village for Harlem and changed his name from Everett LeRoi Jones to Imamu Amiri Baraka, embracing the new black liberation ideology. In 1965 Baraka divorced Hettie Cohen.
From 1965 to 1974, Baraka devoted himself to the black nationalist cause and the Congress of Afrikan Peoples. After moving to Harlem, Baraka and several other associates began The Black Arts Repertory Theater.
After the murder of Martin Luther King Jr in 1968 Baraka was jailed during the riots that broke out in Newark. Baraka then became heavily involved in local electoral politics. Baraka was key member in the campaign to elect a black mayor, drawing people like Jesse Jackson and Harry Belafonte to the Newark. In 1970, Baraka's efforts bore fruit when Kenneth Gibson became Newark's first black mayor. Baraka commented on the election's revolutionary implications: "We will nationalize the city's institutions," he wrote before the vote, "as if it were liberated territory in Zimbabwe or Angola."
Gibson was later thrown out of office on fraud and conspiracy charges.
Around 1974, Baraka abandoned black nationalism and for Marxism and Third Worldism, dropping the Muslim Imamu from his name.
In September and October of 2001 Baraka composed a poem called "Somebody Blew Up America". The poem was read publicly and circulated, and later became the source of controversy when he was named Poet Laureate of New Jersey. The poem was written about the September 11, 2001 attacks.
Upon the controversy, Baraka stated that the poem was not anti-Semitic and stated further that "I do believe, as I stated about England, Germany, France, Russia, that the Israeli government, certainly its security force, SHABAK knew about the attack in advance."
Governor James McGreevey called for Baraka's resignation as poet laureate, and when he refused, asked the state legislature to abolish the post, which it did in 2003.
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