The Black Arts Repertory Theater/School (Keith) by X.

The Black Arts Repertory Theatre/School (BART/S) was founded in Harlem by Amiri Baraka to take music, poetry, art and performance out of the academy and into the street. As Baraka put it in a poem “we want poems that wrestle cops into alleyways and take their guns away.” BARTS is a great example of an alternative revolutionary institution that builds dual power and provides a material foundation for revolutionary ideas and culture.

LeRoi Jones (Amiri Baraka) leads the Black Arts parade down 125th Street toward the Black Arts Theater Repertory/School on 130th Street, New York City. (Source: Liberator 5.6 [June 1965], 27)

In 1965 Baraka, with Charles and William Patterson, Askia Toure, Clarence Reed, Johnny Moore and others to open the school. The school received funds from the a Johnson-era anti-poverty program. The funding source did nothing to change the revolutionary character of the school. The mission of BARTS was to build "a repertory theatre in Harlem, as well as a school. As a school it will set up and continue to provide instruction, both practical and theoretical, in all new aspects of the dramatic arts." The school held classes on creative writing, acting and other arts, philosophy, reading, math, and so forth.

While the BARTS itself didn’t last because of financial problems and internal political problems, it launched the Black Arts Movement which became the cultural wing of the Black Power Movement, and it remains one of the most important literary movements in US cultural history.