Black activist, poet-playwright Amiri Baraka dies at 79

Amiri Baraka died Thursday, January 9, 2014, at Newark Beth Israel Medical Center in Newark, NJ at age 79. He was noted for being a militant individual and tireless agitator whose blues-based, fist-shaking poems, plays and criticism made him a provocative and groundbreaking force in American culture. Perhaps no writer of the 1960s and ’70s was more radical or polarizing than the former LeRoi Jones, and no one did more to extend the political debates of the civil rights era to the world of the arts.