Jitterbugging in the Streets

The motif of black Harlem, reinvigorated as a significant Africana motif in the 1950s by the example of Langston Hughes, blossomed in the decade following the Harlem riot of 1964, when a generation of Afro-American poets, born in the 1930s and 1940s, began writing a new kind of black literature with a collective spirit and racial voice. In “The Black Arts Movement, 1965–1975: A Bibliography,” Vashti Lewis states that this new kind of writing was characterized by (1) a more nationalistic assertion of blackness than earlier Afro-American literature; (2) a heavy concentration on the present; (3) a conscious effort to motivate black Americans toward changing their condition; and (4) a style whose language is conversational and whose images are concrete. “In short, in 1965, Black American writing turns from Western tradition in concept, language, images, and structure and moves towards a literature which is both about and for the American of African descent.” The identification by this new generation of the riots as a theme for poetry, in the aftermath of the ghetto disturbances of the 1960s, constituted a major innovation in the patterns developed for the Harlem motif over two generations. The riots of 1919 and 1943 had affected the mood and attitude of poets, with consequences for the motif in its first and second phases, but the riots themselves had gone virtually unmentioned in poetry. Yet the Harlem insurrection of 1964 became apocalypse and revelation of the temper of the times in poetry.