Newark Mayor To Discuss Late Father’s ‘Blues People’

by Jeroslyn JoVonn

April 2, 2024

Newark Mayor Ras Baraka will be part of along with his sister to have a good time their late father’s seminal guide “Blues Folks: Negro Music in White America.”

Newark Mayor Ras Baraka will be part of his sister, historian Kellie Jones, to have a good time their late father’s seminal guide Blues Folks: Negro Music in White America.

In honor of famend writer and activist Amiri Baraka, Ras and Kellie will seem at Specific Newark on Wednesday, April 3, to have a good time the legendary standing of Blues Folks, Rutgers-Newark stories. Specific Newark serves as the varsity’s middle for artwork and design, which has been celebrating Blues Folks via an exhibition of the identical identify. 5 artists and a sequence of occasions have explored the guide’s themes and the problems it addresses.

The April 3 occasion will see Ras, the town’s mayor, and Kellie, a Columbia College professor, MacArthur “Genius” fellow, and curator sit down for a chat moderated by Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Salamishah Tillet, govt director of Specific Newark.

“Mayor Ras Baraka and Dr. Kellie Jones are two of an important and incisive voices on the function that artwork performs in making our society extra equitable and our world extra simply,” Tillet mentioned.

“Of their respective fields of politics and academia and their shared apply of writing and activating artwork in public areas, they’ve saved the extraordinary imaginative and prescient of ‘Blues Folks’ alive. Now we have a lot to study from their brilliance, and I’m honored to be in a dialog with them each.”

One in all 50 books Amiri Baraka wrote earlier than his 2014 loss of life, 1963’s Blues Folks was written when he glided by the identify LeRoi Jones. It helped create a cultural identification for Black Individuals by tracing the evolution of Black music within the U.S. to how enslaved Africans grew to become African Individuals.

Supported by the Andy Warhol Basis and Harborview Basis, the chat will discover the legacy of Baraka’s guide with a particular give attention to artwork and activism. It’s going to additionally deal with the importance of blues music and the way it addresses class, race, and politics.

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