the City University of New York. He has held teach-
ing positions at various universities, including the
New School for Social Research, the University of
Buffalo, Columbia University, Yale University, and
San Francisco State University. Most recently, he
served as the Poet Laureate of New Jersey until he
was removed for writing poetry that some critics
considered anti-Semitic.
Like W. E. B. DUBOIS, JAMES BALDWIN, and
RICHARD WRIGHT, Amiri Baraka is one of the most
important writers and cultural critics of 20th-cen-
tury America. He has striven, with the same force
of his rejection of European-American society and
cultural norms, to create a more didactic art that
reflects clearly the values of African-American cul-
ture, the richness of its history, and the complexity
of its multifaceted community.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Baraka. Amiri. The Autobiography of Le Roi Jones /
Amiri Baraka. New York: Freundlich Books, 1984.
Bentson, Kimberly. Baraka: The Renegade and the
Mask. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1976.
Jones, Leroi. The Baptism: the Toilet. Evergreen Play-
script. New York: Grove Press, 1967.
Neal, Larry. “The Black Arts Movement.” In The Black
Aesthetics, edited by Addison Gayle, 257–274. Gar-
den City, N.Y.: Anchor Books, 1972.
Redmond, Eugene. Drumvoices: The Mission of
Afro-American Poetry, Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor
Books, 1976.
Turner, Darwin T., ed. Black Drama in America.
Greenwich, Conn.: Fawcett Publications, 1971.
Raymond E. Jannifer
Barksdale, Richard K. (1915–1993)
Richard K. Barksdale, the son of Simon and Sarah
Brooks Barksdale, the brother of Phillips, Mason,
and Clement, was born October 31, 1915, in Win-
chester, Massachusetts. A Phi Beta Kappa graduate
of Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine (1937),
Barksdale received two master’s degrees in En-
glish, one from Syracuse University (1938) and the
other from Harvard University (1947). In 1951,
he became the second African American to earn
a Ph.D. degree in English from Harvard. Bowdoin
awarded him an honorary doctor of humane let-
ters degree in 1972.
Barksdale began his illustrious teaching and
administrative career in the Deep South at sev-
eral historically black colleges and universities
(HBCUs), including Southern University, Touga-
loo College, North Carolina Central University,
and Morehouse College. The culmination of these
HBCU achievements was his appointment as pro-
fessor of English and dean of the graduate school
at Atlanta University. In 1971, Barksdale joined the
faculty of the University of Illinois at Champaign-
Urbana as professor of English and graduate dean.
He remained there until his retirement as professor
emeritus in English in 1986. After retiring, Barks-
dale became distinguished visiting professor at nu-
merous colleges and universities, his appointments
including the Langston Hughes Visiting Profes-
sorship in American and African-American Lit-
erature at the University of Kansas (spring 1986),
Tallman Visiting Professor of English Literature at
Bowdoin College (fall 1986), visiting professor in
African-American Literature at Grinnell College
(April 1987), the United Negro College Fund Dis-
tinguished Scholar at Rust College (spring 1988),
and visiting professor in African-American Litera-
ture at the University of Missouri, Columbia (fall
1988).
The author of many articles on the African-
American literary tradition, Barksdale’s work
appeared in numerous scholarly journals, includ-
ing the COLLEGE LANGUAGE ASSOCIATION JOURNAL,
Phylon, Black American Literature Forum, and the
Western Humanities Review. Coeditor, with Keneth
Kinnamon, of the first BLACK AESTHETICS anthol-
og y, BLACK WRITERS OF AMERICA: A COMPREHEN-
SIVE ANTHOLOGY (Macmillan, 1972), Barksdale is
credited with having greatly influenced the Black
Aesthetics perspective of CALL AND RESPONSE: THE
RIVERSIDE ANTHOLOGY OF THE AFRICAN AMERICAN
LITERARY TRADITION (Houghton Mifflin, 1997),
edited by Patricia Liggins Hill, Bernard W. Bell,
Trudier Harris, William Harris, R. Baxter Miller,
and Sondra A. O’Neale, with Horace A. Porter.Barksdale, Richard K. 35