Langston Hughes was a crucial “midwife” of the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s and 1970s. On a very practical level Hughes generously promoted, encouraged, published, and supportively criticized many of the younger (and not so young) Black artists who initiated Black Arts. He also provided a model of a Black poet and playwright who connected to a national grassroots African American audience in multiple ways, including regular reading tours, especially in the South and by publishing in the popular Black press. Finally, Hughes was a key progenitor of an aesthetic connecting Black literature, both poetry and fiction, to a continuum of Black music that was both an index and a shaper of Black consciousness, Black experience, and Black feeling that played an essential role in the growth of Black Arts poetics. In turn, the early Black Arts Movement had a marked impact on Hughes’s late work

Smethurst argues that the Autobiography of Malcolm X has deep roots in earlier African American autobiography, particularly the Christian conversion narrative and the slave narrative, notably the three life narratives of Frederick Douglass. For Smethurst, the defining chiasmus of Douglass’s first autobiographical narrative, “You have seen how a man was made a slave; you shall see how a slave was made a man,” structures The Autobiography, too — at least until Malcolm’s integration into the structure, theology, and ideology of the Nation of Islam. Smethurst argues that The Autobiography also follows Douglass’s three life narratives in that each of the latter not only retells the story chronicled in the first narrative but also unveils Douglass’s evolving positions, his developing political literacy, through later political moments, the Civil War, Reconstruction, and the early rise of Jim Crow. The Autobiography does not project an end of the development with Malcolm X’s conversion to the Nation of Islam, but a continuing transition, his grappling with the rapidly changing domestic and international political and cultural environments of the 1960s.

This chapater considers the interplay between black political and cultural activists in Britain and the USA during the New Negro era and the creation of black internationalist networks as a subset of what the author calls the Black Bolshevik Renaissance. These networks significantly inflected the trajectory of black radicalism in the USA and the UK (and the Caribbean and Africa) from the New Negro Renaissance through the Popular Front era to the Black Arts and Black Power moment of the 1960s and 1970s. A significant focus here will be how this internationalism decentered notions of what we might now call a “Black Atlantic” or the “Atlantic World,” emphasizing building and strengthening the relationships of Africa and African Diasporic communities to non-European peoples in European and North American colonies and semi-colonies of “the East,” anticipating what many US Black political and cultural radicals would later term the “Bandung World.”

During the late 1960s and early 1970s, black poets, literary critics, and theorists achieved an exceptional level of national visibility. Together, they produced a body of texts that exuded the spirit of Black Power self-determination and amplified the vibrant, versatile rhythms of African American expressive culture. Two books, Black Fire: An Anthology of Afro-American Writing (1968) edited by LeRoi Jones (Amiri Baraka) and Larry Neal (1937–81) and The Black Aesthetic (1971) edited by Addison Gayle (1932–91), exemplify the confluence of creative artists and intellectuals who committed themselves to generating a culturally distinct body of artistic productions for the benefit of black audiences. More broadly, considerations of the context in which Black Fire and The Black Aesthetic emerged confirm the degrees to which a militant, nationalist ethos, the development of a black-based evaluative system of arts, and the convergence of a variety of African American writers in common publishing outlets characterized the Black Arts era. On the one hand, poets, playwrights, fiction writers, and essayists composed works that celebrated African American culture, critiqued anti-black racism, and promoted black liberation. At the same time, anthologists, magazine editors, and publishers created or sustained venues for the wide transmission of black literary art.

Malcolm X exerted a profound and complex influence on the Black Arts Movement, the network of politically engaged African American artists and arts institutions during the 1960s and 1970s that poet, playwright, critic and activist Larry Neal termed the “aesthetic and spiritual sister of the Black Power concept.” Malcolm X served as inspiration, icon, model, polemicist, theorist, and adviser to the movement, especially in its formative years in the early and middle 1960s, despite the fact that he rarely discussed the arts in any great specificity in his public speeches - at least until his break from Elijah Muhammad and the Nation of Islam and the formation of the Organization of Afro-American Unity. For some Black Arts and Black Power activists, Malcolm X was a relatively distant, though commanding figure, often coming to them through the mass media, especially television and radio. However, for many others, especially in such early Black Arts Movement centers as New York, Philadelphia, Detroit, Boston, Chicago, and Oakland, he was a much more personal presence, a leader who always seemed to have time to talk to and take an interest in grassroots people. This engagement with the grassroots in turn strengthened Malcolm X's longstanding interest in African American culture, making it a central part of the program of the Organization of Afro-American Unity - which in turn further influenced radical black arts activists, such as Amiri Baraka, Gwendolyn Brooks, Etheridge Knight, Larry Neal, Sonia Sanchez, and Askia Touré and promoted the rise of cultural nationalism as a powerful, organized tendency within the Black Power movement.

Many people have considered the work of Countee Cullen and Langston Hughes to represent two antagonistic strands of Harlem Renaissance thinking about the role of the black artist, the nature of African American literature, and indeed whether something called “Negro Literature” existed. It is unquestionably true that the two poets themselves to some extent felt such an antagonism, as seen most famously in Hughes' 1926 essay “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain,” that began with a sort of racial syllogism attributed to an unnamed Negro poet in which the statement “I want to be a poet - not a Negro poet” becomes “I would like to be white.” While Hughes does not name the poet, the opening premise of this syllogism closely resembles a statement Cullen made during a 1924 interview in which he declared, “if I am going to be a poet at all, I am going to be POET and not NEGRO POET.”

Hughes, too, is well known as the progenitor of a new black vernacular lyric poetry, particularly the genre of blues poetry, while the statement “White folks is white” in the first line of Cullen's “Uncle Jim” represents practically the entirety of his published verse directly utilizing some version of a distinctly African American idiom.