Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones) Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 500 words

Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones) - Essay Example Even after retirement, he remained active and productive. The assassination of Malcolm X became the turning point of his life where he changed his name to Amiri Baraka and dissolved his marriage to Hettie Cohen. He became a leader of Newark’s African-American community. Amiri Baraka was well known for his writing. He used his popularity as a way of defending the weak from social injustices (Koolish, 2001). Through poems, plays, fiction, and essays, he showed his leadership by condemning oppression and racial injustice of the African American community in the United States (Epstein, 2006). Through his works and words, Baraka was able to he was able to promote drama created by African American playwrights and performed for the African American audience that showed African American issues (Baraka, 1995). For example, his two plays The Toilet and The Slave which were both written in the year 1962 showed his mistrust and hostility towards the white society. His award winning production, Dutchman, showed the damage that America inflicts on African men (Baraka, 2000). In 1960s racial discrimination against African Americans was still high. Many black leaders started to rethink their goals, while dome embraced more militant ideologies of self-defense and separatism (Lie, 2006). The struggle for civil rights was high aimed at drawing the attention of the nation to the brutality and injustice that African Americans faced. Even though the economic situation was good in the country, many blacks lived under poverty which was evident in many black urban neighborhoods. Leadership is the ability of a person to lead a group of people or a team to achieve specific task (Northouse, 2012). After studying Amiri Baraka, it is clear that leadership is an in built quality. It can also be attained through an individual’s experience which inspires the leader (OSullivan, 2009). Leadership cannot be learnt by simply reading about it but it is something that someone gets