Fifty years from now when negroes and others take "English,"… they'll read: LeRoi Jones (aka Amiri Baraka) was at the cutting edge of mid-twentieth century American literature. Black Arts and Black Consciousness and Black Liberation will be explained away in a footnote like Harlem (a Negro area in New York) in the Norton Anthology of Literature. The process of cultural cannibalism, until now confined to black music, speech and dress, will have been extended to Afro-American literature.
Baraka's early association with the Beat poets, the finality with which, in his poetry, he shook off the dry husks of Pound, Williams, etc., and his political conversion to Marxist-Leninist-Maoist thought do place him within the tradition of Western literary radicalism. But cannibalism has become such an ingrained part of the American Way, that to say this seems … to exclude Baraka from an equal place in Afro-American experience. That is, the literary achievement of Baraka the radical, the black militant, is used to glorify what Stevie Wonder aptly calls "That Bad Luck Way." (pp. 435-36)
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