Amiri Baraka, formerly known as LeRoi Jones, died on Thursday at the Newark Beth Israel Medical Center after a month of being hospitalized, the Associated Press reported.
Baraka was 79-years-old and considered a fearless writer by his fans, colleagues and critics, the AP reported.
He has been compared alongside Frederick Douglass and Richard Wright by the scholar Arnold Rampersad due to the nature of his politically and socially motivated poems, essays, novels and plays, and for what they contributed to the civil rights movement, according to the AP.
"Blues Peoples," released in 1963, was the first book to by written by a black man about the history of black music and gained massive acclaim, the AP reported.
He was named New Jersey's poet laureate in 2002 and gained some negative feedback when he recited his poem "Somebody Blew Up America," the AP reported.
"Who knew the World Trade Center was gonna get bombed. Who told 4,000 Israeli workers at the Twin Towers to stay home that day?" goes the poem which received enough negative feedback the governor of New Jersey at the time wanted to strip him off his title, according to the AP.
Throughout his life span, Baraka considered himself a black nationalist, then a Marxist-Leninist. He held many different views and beliefs and was part of various movements, but throughout his career he remained committed to "struggle, change, struggle, unity, change, movement," according to the AP.
"All of the oaths I swore were sincere reflections of what I felt - what I thought I knew and understood," Baraka wrote in a 1990 essay, the AP reported. "But those beliefs change, and the work shows this, too."
At one point, the FBI even labeled him as "the person who will probably emerge as the leader of the Pan-African movement in the United States," the AP reported.
Amiri Baraka was born Everett LeRoy Jones in 1934 in Newark before going to Rutgers University, then Howard University and finally ending up in New York City among the Beat poets and writers in 1958, according to the AP.
He had an early talent and interest in sports and music and did well enough in high school to graduate with honors and a scholarship to Rutgers University, the AP reported. He attended Rutgers for a short time before he transferred to Howard University where he thought he would feel more at home.
Baraka ended up despising Howard, writing later on in life: "Howard University shocked me into realizing how desperately sick the Negro could be," the AP reported. He left and joined the Air Force, which he was later kicked out of.
He landed in Greenwich Village in the late 1950s and linked up with Allen Ginsberg, among other Beats, and married his first wife, Hettie Cohen, the AP reported.
He became the leader of the Black Arts Movement and worked with the Black Power Movement, the AP reported. He adopted the philosophy which called for more black art education and history and aimed for art that "called for a revolution."
"We want 'poems that kill, assassin poems. Poems that shoot guns/Poems that wrestle cops into alleys/and take their weapons leaving them dead/with tongues pulled out and sent to Ireland," says one of the lines from "Black Art," a manifesto Baraka published in 1965, according to the AP.
"He opened tightly guarded doors for not only Blacks but poor whites as well and, of course, Native Americans, Latinos and Asian Americans," Maurice Kenny, an American Indian author, said of Baraka, according to the AP. "We'd all still be waiting for the invitation from The New Yorker without him. He taught us all how to claim it and take it."
His play "Dutchman," which was first published in the 1950s and opened at the Cherry Lane Theater in the Village, made history on its opening night and was deemed the "best play in America" at the height of the civil rights movement by Norman Mailer, the AP reported.
"From Amiri Baraka, I learned that all art is political, although I don't write political plays," August Wilson, the Pulitzer Prize-winning dramatist, once said, the AP reported.
Philip Roth, who was writing for the The New York Review of Books at the time, critisized the character development throughout "Dutchman" only to have Baraka inform him he was "feeble-minded," according to the AP.
"Sir, it is not my fault that you are so feeble-minded you refuse to see any Negro as a man, but rather as the narrow product of your own sterile response," was Baraka's response to the critic, a trademark answer depicting his steadfast belief of the black struggle, the AP reported.
The murder of Malcolm X and the Newark riots of 1967 changed his path to a more radical one, the AP reported. After being jailed during the riots, he divorced his first wife, Cohen, moved out of the Village and into Harlem, changed his name and began expressing his views of Martin Luther King Jr. as a "brainwashed negro."
In the later years of his life, Baraka returned to Newark where he started community groups and retired some of his more intense statements, the AP reported. He remarried Sylvia Robinson, who later changed her name to Bibi Amina, a year after his divorce from Cohen. He had a total of seven children; two with Cohen and five with Amina.
Before passing, Baraka taught at Yale and George Washington Universities, as well as spending 20 years on the faculty at the State University of New York in Stonybrook, according to the AP.
