Amiri Baraka was born Everett LeRoi Jones in 1934 in Newark, NJ. He attended Rutgers University in 1951 and graduated from Howard University in 1954. After a three-year military stint, Baraka began his career as a poet, eventually aligning himself with the tenets of Black Nationalist and Marxist philosophy. Throughout his career, he wrote numerous books, essays, poems, and plays, and became one of the most important and controversial figures of his generation. He was named Poet Laureate of New Jersey and won the American Book Award and Langston Hughes Award, among many other honors. Baraka was also professor emeritus of Africana Studies at the State University of New York at Stony Brook where he taught for 20 years. He died in Newark in 2014.
K-5 Center, The Source of History, 1962