After learning that Nikki Giovanni, a world-renowned Black poet and Black Arts Movement leader, passed away at 81, many naturally responded by sharing and discussing her work. Poems, lectures, interviews, and slivers of her prose, already staples in the black community, seemed to reverberate like an echo. “There’s always something to do. There are hungry people to feed naked people to clothe, sick people to comfort and make well. While I don’t expect you to save the world I do think it’s not asking too much for you to love those with whom you sleep, share the happiness of those whom you call friends, engage those among you who are visionary and remove from your life those who offer you depression, despair, and disrespect,” the poet once shared. Indeed, even though none of us can solve or even take on all the world’s problems, we can take care of ourselves and those within our reach—this is the radical, loving sentiment her work leaves behind.
While Nikki Giovanni was born on June 7, 1943, in Knoxville, Tennesee, she grew up in Cincinnati, Ohio, as the youngest of two daughters. She graduated from Fisk University in 1967 with a BA in history, launching her career as a world-renowned- poet, activist, educator, and social commentator. Some of her earliest publications, Black Feeling, Black Talk, & Black Judgement (1968) and Those Who Ride the Night Winds (1983), established her as a leader of the Black Arts Movement that emerged during the 1960s and 70s. Giovanni published over two dozen books, including poetry anthologies, memoirs, children’s literature, and nonfiction essays. Her early work covered the rage and disappointment of the black community at their mistreatment in American society. She earned the nickname “Princess of Black Poetry” for her contributions.
Her verse was fearless in discussing race, gender, intimacy, and family. For instance, in her 1968 poem, “Nikki-Rosa,” she shared, “I really hope no white person ever has cause / to write about me / because they never understand / Black love is Black wealth,” noting that they’d “probably talk about my hard childhood / and never understand that / all the while I was quite happy.” Nikki Giovanni’s poem spoke to Black people's cultural estrangement within the broader context of American society, explaining that a White person would not likely appreciate the nuances of her experience. Far too often, White storytellers miss subtle but significant details. As a result, they present Black life as nothing more than doom, gloom, and tragedy. Giovanni’s work presents a much-needed counter-narrative that Black love is a treasure that transcends financial or social status, sorely misunderstood, and yet a key ingredient to liberation.
During the 1960s, a theory popularized by the Moynihan Report dubiously claimed that there was a “tangle of pathology” within the Black family unit. It attributed the widespread poverty and social problems to the rise of single-parent households. This rhetoric is commonplace today as some conservatives claim lasting racial disparities in American society are the result of Black people lacking a strong work ethic and family values, a rich irony given that they’re the group paid the least for their efforts. Rather than acknowledging how the government hindered Black families for generations, such as states passing Jim Crow laws that enforced racial segregation and discrimination, restricting their access to housing, education, healthcare, and economic advancement, some would instead cast the blame on black people to portray them as inherently dysfunctional.
Gamble and Huff Rules, a poem published in Giovanni’s work, Love Poems, further exemplifies this point. “I like us for our faith and our energy and loving our mamas and ourselves and the world and all the chances we took in trying to make everything better which we did for some and definitely not for others and I dislike other people for taking our music our muse and our rap to sell their cars and bread and toothpaste and deodorant and sneakers but never seeming to have enough to give back to the people who created it and that’s not huff or a gamble but the awful truth of white america.” The poem, named after Kenny Gamble and Leon Huff, a songwriting duo who greatly influenced the Philadelphia soul music scene during the 1970s, reveals the bitter disappointment many Black people feel as a result of White Americans exploiting their culture for financial gain, all the while refusing to give back to the community they’ve taken from.
A video of the 1971 conversation between James Baldwin, the famed author and civil rights leader,r and Nikki Giovanni from the PBS television series SOUL went viral online, sparking conversations about black life in America, the lasting impact of racial injustice, the evolving nature of gender roles, and the responsibility bestowed upon each generations’ writers. This conversation seems to have struck a nerve in the black community. Even before her passing, it regularly made the rounds on social media, offering a rare glimpse at Black scholars engaged in an unstructured conversation.
Their discussion has taken on an evergreen quality, as we still emerge in the same level of discourse about our role as Black people, how we function together as a community, how Black women are, at times, given the short end of the stick. There’s a moment when Giovanni talks about how Black men smile at the White men they often work for but seem either unwilling or unable to offer that joy to the Black women in their lives. “I’ve caught the frowns and the anger.” “You come home, and I catch hell. I get the very minimum,” she tells Baldwin of the hypothetical relationship. Since society is harsh on Black men, and there is no official outlet for feeling wronged, Giovanni suggests that those difficulties are often passed on to Black women. The full text, covering various topics, was published in A Dialogue (1973).
Throughout her career, Giovanni supported other writers and artists. This began early on. For instance, in 1967, she organized the first Black Arts Festival in Cincinnati and cofounded Niktom Ltd. in 1970, a publishing co-operative highlighting Black women writers. She spent 35 years as a distinguished English professor at Virginia Tech and taught at Queens College, Rutgers University, and Ohio State. In addition to her literary contributions, Giovanni became an avid public speaker, engaging audiences from various backgrounds and touching the lives of many.
In Going to Mars: The Nikki Giovanni Project, a documentary released at the 2023 Sundance Film Festival, she explained, “I’m what they call a ‘personal poet.’ And I try to bring out the personality of my life, you know? That my family was a good family. Because they are Black people and Black people are good people. And from that goodness, we can create the revolution. So that the revolution isn’t a reaction to whiteness, but a forward thrust of Blackness.” To pursue black liberation, in that sense, meant for her to shine a light on the goodness of Black people and, in doing so, to counter the narratives that often serve as justification to perpetuate harm in the black community.
Nikki Giovanni's contributions were so vast that we can see the ripple effect of her passing. People are sharing her work, talking about the ideas she shared, the life she lived, and the liberation movement her work so heavily embodied. It seems only fitting that her fearless verse will continue to echo throughout the black community and beyond, inspiring artists of future generations to find their voice and realize the power of self-expression.