This chapter addresses the flowering of African American poetry that occurs from 1945 to 1970 against the backdrop of the Civil Rights Movement and in the context of a period of tumultuous change in the history of race relations in America. The chapter discusses how poets such as Robert Hayden, Gwendolyn Brooks, and Amiri Baraka grapple in various ways with fraught questions about aesthetics, race, identity, and politics. The chapter examines the emergence of the influential and controversial movement known as the Black Arts Movement (led by poets including Baraka, Sonia Sanchez, and Nikki Giovanni) in the context of the turbulent racial violence and social justice movements of the 1960s.