6
Behold the Land: Regionalism, the Black Nation,
and the Black Arts Movement in the South

The Black Arts movement in the South was shaped largely by the region's unique
concentration of historically black colleges and universities and its identity as
ground zero of the civil rights movement of the i95os and ig6os. Of course,
a symbiotic relationship existed between the educational institutions and civil
rights-a a relationship that greatly affected the development of the movement
and changed the institutions. Though the administrations (and often the facul-
ties) of many historically black colleges and universities were initially cautious
or indifferent in their public relationship to the new civil rights activism, the stu-
dents of these schools comprised much of the core leadership and rank and file of
the movement in the South, especially of SNCC and the community-based efforts
of CORE. Students from southern black schools led local sit-ins, picket lines,
boycotts, and demonstrations, particularly in the 1960 sit-in movement that
swept the South (and much of the North) before coalescing into SNCC. Some-
times these young people organized under the auspices of established groups,
such as the Naacr Youth Council or S CLC, and sometimes they created their own
local organizations. As Amiri Baraka, Kalamu ya Salaam, and Askia Tour6 have
noted, the black student movement inspired young activists, artists, and intel-
lectuals outside the South (often themselves, like Baraka, A. B. Spellman, Larry
Neal, and Muhammad Ahmad, alumni of historically black schools) through
their boldness, their militancy, and their refusal to wait for established leaders.'
A tremendous number of Black Arts activists were politicized and introduced

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