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Poetry is a liberatory act, writes Audre Lorde in "Poetry Is Not a Luxury," that "lays the foundations for a future of change" (38). Thinking specifically about women and freedom, Lorde writes, "it is our dreams that point the way to freedom. Those dreams are made realizable through our poems that give us the strength and courage to see, to feel, to speak, and to dare" (39). How did young Black poets during the 1960s envision their own poetic dreams "that point[ed] the way to freedom"? Where do young poets figure in what Meta DuEwa Jones has referred to in African American literature as the "long line of historical and contemporary poets who have crafted a poetics that turns toward the fight, or flight, for freedom" (150)? What can we learn from how young African American poets in the 1960s imaginatively invoked freedom on their own terms and through their own conceptions of history?
For children growing up in Black communities in the United States during the 1960s and 1970s, writes Robin D. G. Kelley, the word "freedom" had particular meaning. As Kelley notes, "Freedom was the goal our people were trying to achieve; free was a verb, an act, a wish, a militant demand" (14). The "freedom dreams" Kelley explores could be found in poetry and also in "the poetry of social movements" (10), particularly Black radical movements of the twentieth century, for their imaginative constructions of freedom and "dreams of a new world," since "any serious motion toward freedom must begin in the mind" (5). Black young people played pivotal roles, individually and collectively, in twentieth-century struggles for Black liberation in the United States, and particularly so during the 1950s and 1960s, as Rebecca de Schweinitz has chronicled. Charles Mauldin, elected youth leader of the Dallas County, Alabama, Youth League involved in efforts leading to the 1965 Voting Rights Act (Mauldin), described (as an adult looking back) that the "movement was spearheaded by people between the ages of 9 and 21 years old … the young people were the ones who changed the nation primarily" ("Selma"). Young people's determined, planful, and courageous political acts were fueled by their sense of their rights and capabilities to work toward and realize freedom, and young...