The Other Side of Lumumba

Amiri Baraka is, in my opinion, a literary genius: He knew how to write, but he knew it so well that he could make a world of it. Certainly Baraka’s ideas prevail within the American literary community, however, from Amiri Baraka comes my contemporary emphasis on revolution and its power to mobilize a student’s struggles through liberation. Much of my observations of Baraka have to do with who Baraka is. An African American raised in Newark rather than urban. (He was born in Newark, NJ and moved to Harlem) East coast rather than west coast and he did not display, during our early years together, the dark complexity of Negro intellectuals in the Newark student protest of 1968. Baraka became a university professor, international published scholar, with many books and more than one hundred articles to his credit. It is my pleasure to encounter him again, to have access once more to his writings.” ~ Michael Tombs