A visit to Cuba in 1959 pushed him deeper into more radical politics, which showed up in his writing such as Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note (1961) Blues People: Negro Music in White America (1963) and his play “The Dutchman” a year later.

The assassination of Malcolm X in 1965 led him to start the Black Arts Repertory Theatre in Harlem, which helped birth the Black Arts Movement, and his poems like “Black Art.” He soon after returned to Newark with a deeper Black cultural nationalist identity and founded A Community for a Unified New Ark, a full service community center that included a school, publishing company, theatre and more.

Baraka translated his activist influence leading up to the 1967 Newark Rebellion into electing the city’s first Black mayor Kenneth Gibson in 1970. He took that same energy into the formation of the national Black Power organization Congress of African People (also in 1970) and later into the leadership role he played in the 1972 Black Political Convention in Gary Indiana, which ushered in the largest age of Black elected officials since the Reconstruction Era.

By the mid 1970s and beyond his approach to political engagement as his political thinking evolved, including at times shifts between Black Nationalism and Marxism-Leninism.

Although he is most popularly remembered as an award-winning poet, playwright and writer (Guggenheim, Obie, National Endowment for the Arts, Poet Laureate of New Jersey, American Book Award, Pen/Faulkner Award), his equally im