“I finally found out what it was like to be disconnected from family and friends. “It was the worst period of my life,” Mr. Losing interest in his classes, he was expelled before graduating. Though by all accounts a brilliant student, he came to regard the university’s emphasis on upward mobility for blacks as distastefully assimilationist - “an employment agency” where “they teach you to pretend to be white,” he later called it. During this period, partly in homage to the African-American journalist Roi Ottley (1906-60), he changed the spelling of his name to LeRoi, with the emphasis on the second syllable. Growing up, young Leroy, as he was known, took piano, drum and trumpet lessons - a background that would inform his later work as a jazz writer - and also studied drawing and painting.Īfter studying briefly at Rutgers University in Newark, he entered Howard University. His father, Coyette, was a postal supervisor his mother, the former Anna Russ, was a social worker. Baraka’s writings - his work also included essays and music criticism - were periodically accused of being anti-Semitic, misogynist, homophobic, racist, isolationist and dangerously militant.īut his champions and detractors agreed that at his finest he was a powerful voice on the printed page, a riveting orator in person and an enduring presence on the international literary scene whom - whether one loved or hated him - it was seldom possible to ignore.Įverett Leroy Jones was born in Newark on Oct. 11 attacks, which contained lines widely seen as anti-Semitic, touched off a firestorm that resulted in the elimination of his post as New Jersey’s poet laureate. He came to renewed, unfavorable attention in 2002, when a poem he wrote about the Sept. His shifting stance was seen as either an accurate mirror of the changing times or an accurate barometer of his own quicksilver mien. Baraka spent his early career as a beatnik, his middle years as a black nationalist and his later ones as a Marxist. In the series of alternating embraces and repudiations that would become an ideological hallmark, Mr. Here, too, critical opinion was divided: He was described variously as an indomitable champion of the disenfranchised, particularly in the racially charged political landscape of Newark, where he lived most of his life, or as a gadfly whose finest hour had come and gone by the end of the 1960s. Baraka, whose work was widely anthologized and who was heard often on the lecture circuit, was also long famous as a political firebrand.

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