“I Will Not Apologize”: Amiri Baraka, “Somebody Blew Up America,” and
American Poetry Since 1945
By William Nesbit, Beacon College
Amiri Baraka established his career through anti-establishment writing with which
he exposes and dismantles the various inequalities and hypocrisies of America. His
experiences with racism, his military service, and the censorship of his work—these
three areas often overlapping—all contribute to his radical and ever-developing
aesthetic that, at its core, seeks to identify and oppose oppressive systems. In The
Autobiography of LeRoi Jones, he states that “we saw ‘the man in the grey flannel suit’
as an enemy, an agent of Dwight Eisenhower whose baby-food mentality we made fun
of” (222).
His curriculum vitae suits both an academic and a revolutionary: Four college
scholarships (Baraka, Auto 95) and flunkouts/dropouts from Rutgers University (99) and
Howard University (137); 11 obtains the rank of sergeant in the United States Air Force
in 1954, but is “undesirably” discharged in 1957 (Chronology xxxi);; achieves full
professor at SUNY, Stony Brook in 1984, but is denied tenure at Rutgers University in
1990 (Chronology xxxii, xxxiii); and, most recently, after being named the poet laureate
of New Jersey, the state abolishes the post after Baraka reads “Somebody Blew Up
America,” at the Dodge Poetry Festival in September 2002.12
In a 1964 interview, Baraka presciently says, “American is not a white middleclass country in toto and that’s why we are getting ready to be blown up” (Conversations
11). Although his frustrations with America find voice in numerous works, one of the
most thorough examples is his extended poem “Somebody