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northby
northeast
COMMUNITY HEALTH CENTER
We honor the legacy of
Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
North by Northeast Community Health Center
provides high quality health care to neighborhood
adults who have Oregon Health Plan or are
uninsured.
If you're uninsured,
we can help you get covered!
\Ne are providing appointments for Cover Oregon
enrollment assistance. If you are a community
member needing to get health insurance coverage,
please call us at (503) 287-4932 to make an
appointment.
3030 NE Martin Luther King, Jr. Blvd. | Portland Oregon 97212
503-287-4932 | nxneclinic.org
M
a r t in
2014
L u t h e r K in g J r .
s p e c i a l e d it io n
January 15. 2014
Agitator was a Tireless
Force in American Culture
c o n t i n u e d f r o m page 7
against the wall m other f-— " — becam e a
counterculture slogan for everyone from stu
dent protesters to the rock band Jefferson
Airplane. A 2002 poem he wrote alleging that
some Israelis had advance know ledge o f the
Sept. 11 attacks led to w idespread outrage.
He was denounced by critics as buffoonish,
homophobic, anti-Semitic, a demagogue. He
was called by others a genius, a prophet, the
M alcolm X o f literature. E ldridge C leaver
hailed him as the bard o f the "funky facts."
Ishmael Reed credited the Black Arts M ove
ment for encouraging artists of all backgrounds
and enabling the rise o f multiculturalism. The
scholar Arnold Rampersad placed him along
side Frederick Douglass and Richard W right
in the pantheon o f black cultural influences.
"From Amiri Baraka, I learned that all art is
political, although I don't write political plays,"
the Pulitzer Prize-w inning dram atist A ugust
W ilson once said.
First published in the 1950s, Baraka crashed
the literary party in 1964, at the Cherry Lane
Theater in Greenwich Village, when "Dutch
man" opened and made instant history at the
height o f the civil rights movement. Baraka's
play was a one-act show dow n betw een a
middle class black man, Clay, and a sexually
daring white woman, Lula, ending in a brawl
of m urderous taunts and confessions.
Baraka was still LeRoi Jones when he
wrote "Dutchman." But the Cuban revolution,
the assassination in 1965 o f M alcolm X and
the N ew ark riots o f 1967, when the poet was
jailed and photographed looking dazed and
bloodied, radicalized him. Jones left his white
wife (Hettie Cohen), cut off his white friends
and moved from Greenwich Village to Harlem.
He renam ed him self Im am u A m eer Baraka,
"spiritual leader blessed prince," and d is
m issed the Rev. M artin L uther King Jr. as a
brainw ashed N egro." He helped organize
the 1972 National Black Political Convention
and founded the Congress o f African People.
He also founded community groups in Harlem
and N ew ark, the hom etow n to w hich he
eventually returned.
The Black Arts M ovem ent was essentially
over by the m id-1970s, and B araka d is
tanced him self from some of his harsher com
m ents — about Dr. King, about gays and
about whites in general.
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