ABSTRACT
One increasing trend among black Americans in the 1960s involved renaming, and this trend can be related to the desire for a black nationalist identity. The very term used to describe the race changed during this decade from “Negro” to “black.” (“African American” emerged in the final decade of the twentieth century, where it has remained alongside “black” or “Black” as the acceptable terms of racial identification). The Autobiography of Malcolm X (1965) details a series of renamings, as Malcolm Little became known by his street name Detroit Red, then renamed himself Malcolm X, and settled on El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz just before he was assassinated. The death of Malcolm X prompted a number of young black people to rename themselves, including the leading voices of the most influential black literary trend of the decade, the Black Arts Movement: LeRoi Jones, author of explosive poems, experimental plays, essays, and two books of sophisticated cultural/musical analysis, changed his name in 1967 to Imamu Amiri Baraka. Other writers associated with the movement – Roland Snellings and Don Lee – changed their names to Askia Muhammad Touré and Haki Madhubuti, respectively. With these changes, the Black Arts Movement was solidified. Although its heyday was very short-lived – shorter even than the Harlem Renaissance – it was extraordinarily influential in terms of setting a radical precedent that later black artists could either accept or reject, but one that they definitely couldn’t ignore.
