The Black Arts Movement in Atlanta

Abstract

The Black Arts Movement in Atlanta had something of a paradoxical history. Given its enormous importance as a black educational center, the administrative heart (if not always the focus of grassroots activities) of the civil rights movement, and an enormously important locus of the Black Power Movement (from the Atlanta Project of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee [SNCC] to the founding convention of the Congress of African People [CAP] to the Institute of the Black World [IBW]), Atlanta had an enormous national impact on the new black politics and arts of the 1960s and 1970s. Many important African American artists, writers, and cultural critics worked at the historically black colleges and universities of University Center, producing work, like Stephen Henderson’s Understanding the New Black Poetry (an Institute of the Black World book), that had (and continues to have) a wide impact across the United States.