Depression

The Black Arts Movement of the 1960s and 1970s was a response to the sociopolitical landscape of the United States. These artists were keenly aware of the oppression African American people faced due to Jim Crow Laws and the history of slavery in the United States. Artists in the Black Arts Movement created work centered on the identities and experiences of African Americans as an act of political resistance. The plays, books, poems, music, dances, and other forms of art created as part of the movement were meant to inspire a sense of pride in Black people for their culture, and to foster community that celebrated their lives instead of oppressing them.

All of Sonia Sanchez’s poetry is politically inflected to a degree. She has described her cultural influence as “the existence of us as black folk in a place that did not speak well of us, a country that not only had enslaved us but afterward had ignored us—had segregated us and conspired to keep us from learning even the simplest things” (Sanchez, Sonia and Susan Kelly. “Discipline and Craft: An Interview with Sonia Sanchez.” African American Review. 2017). Sanchez is frequently named alongside Amiri Baraka, Nikki Giovanni, and Toni Morrison as a leading figure of the Black Arts Movement.