Amiri Baraka talking with the audience, 1977 at New College of California -The Poetry Center

Full-program video with downloadable audio option at Poetry Center Digital Archive: diva.sfsu.edu/...
Amiri Baraka, talking with the audience following his reading of new poems on March 22, 1977, at New College of California, San Francisco, presented in collaboration with The Poetry Center, San Francisco State University. An audience member states his disappointment, as he'd wanted to regard Baraka as "the foremost American Black intellectual," yet he seems to advocate violence. This leads Baraka into a rejection of empathy without commitment and of Buddhism as a peaceable path. The Soviet Union and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn as Soviet dissident are each in turn rejected, with Stalin's crimes set alongside historic US capitalist imperialism.
This is the second of two programs featuring Baraka on the same day, with a talk and reading taking place earlier with students at San Francisco State also available.
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A la muerte de Malcolm X, acaecida en 1965, se convirtió a la Nación del Islam, se separó de su primera esposa y se trasladó a Harlem. En 1967 cambió su nombre por el de Imamu Amear Baraka, cambiado más tarde por el de Amiri Baraka. Ese mismo año se casa con la poeta afrodescendiente Sylvia Robinson (Amina Baraka), con la que tuvo cinco hijos. Fue líder de la organización musulmana Kawaida hasta que esta pasó a ser marxista, en los años 1960.