February 22, 2014 Hello! As promised, Esquisses reports on The Black Arts Movement or BAM. I’ve heard about the Harlem Renaissance, but not the Black Arts Movement. Described by Time magazine as the “single most controversial moment in the history of African-American literature-possibly in American literature as a whole.” If Harlem Renaissance was the tip of the iceberg, the Black Arts Movement was an explosion. It gave African-Americans even more power to fully express themselves and they began to get more creative in literature and art….creating their own magazines, journals, art institutions and publishing houses, literary and theatre groups. Black Arts is the artistic branch of the Black Power movement. After the assassination of Malcolm X in 1965, a man by the name of Everett LeRoi Jones, who later changed his name to Amiri Baraka in 1967, an activist, poet, and playwriter moved to Harlem. Jones became very critical of the of pacifist and integrationist attitudes of the  Civil Rights Movement.  His poem, 1965’s  “Black Art“, was considered to be the major poetic manifesto of …