The Watts Poets 1968

Many fundamentals of Black History as we popularly celebrate it will probably come apart in the upcoming decade. Never again in history will the web be scraped as thoroughly as the frontier AI folks are doing as we speak, so there’s likely to be a hike in Woke content as millions of non-black, non-scholars bounced content across the university echo chambers for several years.

Even before that, most Americans considered the Black Nationalist movement to be primarily political and boiled it down to Martin vs Malcolm or Panthers and Police. But there was a Black Arts movement as well, and here on the west coast, my father was in the thick of it. Probably the most prominent of those members of the Watts Poets were Elaine Brown, Quincy Troupe and Stanley Crouch. My father was one of the elders, a bit more mature and of course with four children as well.

Some folks I respect have forwarded some interesting commentary on Crouch to whom I owe a debt of gratitude for existing. He, notably, was the only black writer I can recall, who publicly discounted the genius of Spike Lee. Since I was already convinced about the truth of black diversity way back then, I was glad to hear him say so. His Notes of a Hanging Judge was a brilliant signpost for me when I read it in 1991. I have mentioned before that I was aligned with the triumvirate of Crouch, Murray and Marsalis, but it bears repeating. At any rate, being the curator of my father’s papers, I have a treat for you all in the following archive. It’s a PDF with high quality photos, but without copyrighted material.

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I could use a collaborator to get these papers curated by a competent university. We’ll see what I can find, then maybe hundreds more of such books, plays, poetry and correspondence can see public light. Drop me an email if you know someplace good.