The Urban Legacy of Amiri Baraka

As I watched artists, activists, public intellectuals, and dignitaries from around the world converge on Newark this weekend for the funeral of poet and playwright Amiri Baraka, I was reminded just how much Baraka’s other life, that of an urban activist and advocate for the not-at-all-powerful, still offers instruction and inspiration to young, frustrated urban activists engaged in their own Sisyphean fights.

In 1969, long before terms like "multicultural" had become fixed and sometimes cloying parts of the political lexicon, Baraka helped to convene the Black and Puerto Rican Convention. The convention, a gathering of Newark’s most vocal black and Latino activists, heralded not just a new era of cross-ethnic political cooperation. It managed to make real the expansive landscape of the two group’s shared political needs. Their coalition contained the seeds of an utterly democratic but nonetheless unprecedented revolution in Newark.