The Black Arts Movement in Detroit
New York poet and playwright LeRoy Jones (later Amiri Baraka) started the Black Arts Movement (BAM) in 1965 following the assassination of Malcolm X. The BAM held that Black art should be about the African American experience, which, adherents felt, was categorically different from that of whites. These ideas premiered in Detroit in 1966 at First Black Arts Conference, organized by Rev. Cleage; bookseller and radical activist Edward Vaughn; and Neal’s friend Glanton Dowdell, who had been released from prison in 1962. The BAM was the artistic branch of the Black Power Movement, initiated in 1966 by Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) chair Stokely Carmichael.
On the visual arts panel of Detroit’s Second Black Arts Conference in 1967, Neal said:
"Artists must stop being a specialist [sic] and must be like any other black man fighting for his freedom. … [I] don’t go along with tired white boys who introduce a series of dots one year and are hailed by critics who have to find something new.”
Here Neal was referring to the abstract/non-objective art which then dominated the white art world.
In July 1967, shortly after the second conference, the Detroit uprising/rebellion took place and Neal responded.
Title Unknown, 1968
Harold Neal
oil or acrylic on board,
Leslie Atzmon, Ann Arbor, MI
During the 1967 uprising/rebellion, four year-old Tonya Blanding was shot by the National Guard, who mistakenly thought that a person lighting a cigarette was actually firing a gun from her home.
Title Unknown, Riot Series?, 1960s
Harold Neal
oil on board
Private Collection
In this image, the man appears to have been arrested. Neal also explored Black incarceration in his unlocated Attica, c. 1972, which refers to the 1971 uprising in New York’s Attica prison. This surrealistic work depicts a semi-nude white woman, probably an allegorical figure of Injustice, squeezing a Black man’s head and torso in a bizarre contraption.
Brother S.C., 1967
Harold Neal
oil on board
Private Collection
This unidentified man sports a beret of the type often worn by urban militants. It is likely to be a home-grown Detroit militant, of which there were many, because the Black Panthers did not come to Detroit until 1968.
Rag Doll, c. 1967-1969
Harold Neal
lamp black and oil on artist board
Patricia and Randall Reed, Fraser, MI
This work subverts sociological studies from the 1930s and 1940s that suggested, sadly, that African American children preferred white dolls. As noted, Black Nationalism called for Blacks to reject white culture and create their own. Accordingly, this child rips apart his white doll.
Other Black Arts Movement Detroiters
Like Neal, Jon Onye Lockard, Glanton Dowdell, and Neal’s younger friends, Aaron Ibn Pori Pitts and Allie McGhee asserted a Black Arts Movement agenda in their work.
If I Were Jehovah, 1970
Jon Onye Lockard
conte crayon on paper
Courtesy of the National Afro-American Museum and Cultural Center, Wilberforce, OH
As noted earlier, this drawing refers to Paul Laurence Dunbar’s poem “We Wear the Mask.” However, here the man does not wear, but furiously rips apart the concealing mask.
No More!, 1968-69
Jon Onye Lockard
offset lithograph
Jon Onye Lockard Foundation, Inc.
In No More! Lockard spoofs the cheery servant, Aunt Jemima, a pancake maker’s brand that offended many African Americans. He turns her into a Black militant, wearing the black, red, and green of the Black Nationalist flag. The figure bursts the Aunt Jemima stereotype by smashing a Black Power fist through the box. Lockard produced many of his works as multiples, in this case using commercial lithography, because he wanted them to be readily available to people who could not afford high-priced artworks, like oil paintings.
Untitled, 1975
Glanton Dowdell
oil on canvas
Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History, Detroit
In 1967 Dowdell painted the famous Black Madonna and Child in Rev. Cleage’s Central Congregational Church (later the Shrine of the Black Madonna). In this work, he depicts the lynching of three men. He, thus, calls for a reckoning for the endless atrocities inflicted on African Americans.
Road to Revolution III, 1967
Aaron Ibn Pori Pitts
woodcut, reprinted with hand-coloring, 1991
Linda and David Whitaker, Detroit
Pori Pitts was an early adherent of the Black Arts Movement and a member of the Black Panther party. From 1968 to 1976, he edited and contributed to Black Graphics International, a journal that featured the art and literary works of radical African American artists. Road to Revolution was published in the journal’s first issue. It apparently refers to the Detroit uprising/rebellion of 1967. It features the head of a man with bared teeth and a threatening gesture. Fire in the foreground seems to be his instrument of terror.
With the title Road to Revolution, Pori Pitts implies that the Detroit rebellion and other such urban uprisings of the 1960s were not just spontaneous expressions of rage at white oppression, but a prelude to the overthrow of racist, capitalist rule, a view shared by many Black militants nationally.
Cover of Black Graphics International, no. 3, 1969
Allie McGhee
offset lithography
Courtesy of Givens Collection of African American Literature
University of Minnesota Libraries, Minneapolis, MN
Allie McGhee, a friend of Aaron Ibn Pori Pitts, also contributed to Black Graphics International. This image depicts a skeleton, Death, wearing a military epaulette. Behind him, another figure tries to flee from Death, yet his hand rests on a large skull. The illustration protests both the Vietnam War and, in McGhee’s words, “the 1960s violence of white against black and black against white.”
All Times, 1968
Allie McGhee
collage
Collection of the artist, Detroit
This very complicated collage protests the centuries of oppression against Blacks. The central figure is President John F. Kennedy’s wife, Jackie. In the popular imagination, the Kennedy administration (1961-1963) was thought to resemble Camelot, the ideal mythical home of the King Arthur, which was the setting for a contemporary Broadway musical of the same title. But, according to McGhee, reality for most African Americans was at “all times” anything but Camelot. Surrounding Jackie are prominent historical and contemporary Black heroes including Malcolm X, LeRoi Jones [later Amiri Baraka], Aretha Franklin, jazz/blues singer Ethel Waters, and Martin Luther King, Jr. Above the Black Power sign are the letters KKK on a blue sleeve with a white epaulette, implying the known collusion between military/law enforcement and the Ku Klux Klan.
Last Oil, 1969
Allie McGhee
oil on canvas
Shirley and Darnell Kaigler, Detroit
At this painting’s lower right edge, one can see, in McGhee’s words, a “shrouded figure in black and mask [who] brings the cleansing of fire. A physical and spiritual rebirth.” Flames seem to engulf the rest of the picture. The work may refer to the 1967 Detroit rebellion/uprising with its cleansing fire leading to the birth of a Black City. Allie McGhee had a direct experience of the rebellion. A National Guardsman stuck a bayonet in his ribs when he was out after curfew.
In this work, McGhee melds the artistic approaches of his mentors, Harold Neal, Al Loving and Charles McGee. Neal favored a figural Black Arts Movement aesthetic, whereas, by 1969, McGee and Loving were working in abstract/non-objective styles. This is called Last Oil because later McGhee painted with acrylics.