Amiri Baraka

In 1958, he married a Jewish woman, Hettie Roberta Cohen and the couple had to two children. They got divorced after he left for Harlem, following the assassination of Malcolm-X.

In 1966, he met his second wife, Sylvia Robinson, a black woman who changed her name to Bibi Amina Baraka. The couple got married in same year and remained together till his death in 2014.

He died on January 9, 2014 due to complications from a recent surgery.

Amiri Baraka, earlier known as Everett LeRoi Jones, was born in Newark, New Jersey to Coyt Leverette Jones, a postal supervisor and Anna Lois, a social worker.

In 1951, he went to Rutgers University on a scholarship but moved to Howard University in 1952. He later graduated from Howard University (c.1954) and served the U.S. Air force from 1954-1957.

In 1957, after leaving the Air force, he moved to Manhattan where he joined the avant-garde ‘Beat Generation’, a group of American writers who shot to fame during the 1950s for their unconventional writing style.

It was after moving to Greenwich Village in Manhattan, that his passion for jazz aroused, which later led him to pursue a parallel career as a music critic.

He has also studied philosophy at Columbia University and attended the ‘New School for Social Research’ without obtaining a degree.

In 1958, after marrying Hettie Cohen, the co-founder of ‘Yugen’, a literary magazine, he became the magazine’s editor. Later, they founded the ‘Totem Press’ that went on to publish works of famous ‘Beat writers’ like Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac.

In 1961, his first volume of poetry, ‘Preface to a Twenty-Volume Suicide Note’ got published.

From 1961-1963, he worked alongside Diane Di Prima as an editor of ‘The Floating Bear’, a literary newsletter. During this period, he also joined the ‘Umbra Poets Workshop’, a group of African-American writers from Manhattan.

In 1963, his criticisms on African-American music, ‘Blues People: Negro Music in White America’, was published.

From 1963-1965, he taught creative writing at the Columbia University. During this time, he became a playwright and came to limelight with the production of the highly-acclaimed and controversial play, ‘Dutchman’. Ever since, he has written several plays like ‘The Slave-1964’ and ‘The Death of Malcolm X-1969’.

‘Dutchman’ is a highly controversial yet critically-acclaimed play, written at a time when Baraka embraced ‘Black Nationalism’, a group that advocated ‘separatism’ for the African-Americans. This play narrates the story of a chance-meeting of a white woman with a black man on a subway. On March 24, 1964, it was staged at the Cherry Lane Theatre in New York and was adapted into a film in 1967.