Amiri Baraka (7 October 1934-9 January 2014), born Everett LeRoi Jones, was an African-American black nationalist poet and academic and the father of Mayor of Newark Ras Baraka.
Biography[]
Everett LeRoi Jones was born in Newark, New Jersey on 7 October 1934, and he served as a US Air Force sergeant in Puerto Rico in 1954; he was discharged after he was accused of being a communist, and Soviet writings were found among his possessions. He decided to move to Greenwich Village, New York City to work at a jazz record warehouse, and he became a literary critic and then a poet and writer himself, publishing his first work in 1961. That same year, he supported the rise of Fidel Castro's regime in Cuba, and he became a prominent black nationalist and renamed himself to "Amiri Baraka" following Malcolm X's assassination in 1965. He became an advocate of black art amid the Black Power movement, and he supported Kenneth A. Gibson's successful campaign to become the first Black Mayor of Newark in 1970. Baraka's shared views with the Nation of Islam led to him publishing several anti-Semitic works, advocating stabbing the "slimy bellies of the ownerjews" and cracking "steel knuckles in a jewlady's mouth". He was briefly Poet Laureate of New Jersey from 2002 to 2003, although this was met with backlash due to his anti-Semitic views. He died in 2014 at the age of 79.