Word: leroi
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...names, commonly in favor of names with an African or Islamic flavor, persists. Malcolm Little became Malcolm X and then Malik al-Shabazz. Cassius Clay transformed himself into Muhammad Ali. Lew Alcindor became Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. Civil rights activist Stokely Carmichael changed his name to Kwame Ture. The writer LeRoi Jones converted to Amiri Baraka...
...generation, was . . .what? To challenge authority. To change the world. To announce itself: Power to the imagination! Philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre declared the upheaval "the extension of the limits of the possible." At Columbia University, Mark Rudd, a scion of Corporate America, borrrowed an epigram from the street poet LeRoi Jones (now Amiri Baraka): "Up against the wall, motherf*****, this is a stickup...
...whole generation ((of black youths)) that has not learned to read," but offers neither sweeping solutions nor invective. He was not always so mellow. Drawn to the Black Power movement in the 1960s, he helped found a volunteer troupe in his native Pittsburgh that mounted the incendiary works of LeRoi Jones. "I tried to write myself, but I wasn't any good at dialogue," he says -- a surprising judgment for a playwright whose characters speak with color and dialectal authenticity. Within a few years Wilson was hatching the idea for a whole cycle of dramas, reflecting black life in each...
...University began occupying five buildings on the campus and held them for almost a week. Mark Rudd, a Columbia junior with a gift for confrontational theater, led an "action faction" of S.D.S. He wrote an open letter to University President Grayson Kirk, which he closed with a line from LeRoi Jones: "Up against the wall, m, this is a stickup." With some of the student movement's talent for converting disrespect to symbolic desecration, the occupation forces moved into Kirk's office, smoked his cigars (one student with his feet perched on Kirk's desk, an act of smirking...
...that a question to which minorities reply automatically, "As much mine as yours." No one really believes that, there being too much painful evidence to the contrary. Still, many members of minorities wholeheartedly enjoy then" status because it gives them a useful relationship to the mainstream. Imamu Amiri Baraka (Leroi Jones) remarked that a black writer has an advantage because, being black, he has been forced to live in an isolated room in the nation's house, thus when he emerges from that room into the rest of the house, he knows the entire structure...