Ellen McLarney’s New Book Traces Islamic Influences in the Black Arts Movement

When people think about religion during the U.S. civil rights movement, Christianity is typically at the front of their minds. But according to Ellen McLarney, Professor of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies, that’s an incomplete picture.

Her new book, “Black Arts, Black Muslims: Islam in the Black Freedom Struggle,” looks at how artists associated with the Black Arts Movement (BAM) in the late 1960s and early 1970s drew inspiration from Islam as a source of cultural identity, spiritual expression and political vision. Through poetry, music, visual art and performance, McLarney argues, these artists helped shape a distinctive Black Muslim aesthetic that was connected to struggles for racial justice.

“When people think about the Civil Rights Movement, they think about Martin Luther King and the role of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference,” McLarney said. “But Muslims were important to that struggle as well, and their role is often unacknowledged, disparaged, or dismissed.”

The book examines how artists connected to the Black Arts Movement embraced Islam and used Islamic themes and imagery while challenging racism, colonialism and economic inequality. In the process, the movement also reshaped public understandings of both Islam and Black artistic expression.

“There was all this creative flourishing,” McLarney said. “And a spiritual identification with Islam that helped raise people’s consciousness at a really important time of struggle against injustice.”

Originally, McLarney planned for the book to focus primarily on poetry. But as her research unfolded, she realized that she could not ignore the manifold dimensions of BAM cultural expression.  

“Many of the poetry collections were illustrated,” she said. “Scholars like Margo Natalie Crawford talk about the multimedia aesthetics of the BAM. The visual art, the poetry and the music are intertwined.”

The book ultimately explores a wide range of artistic forms, including poetry, jazz, theater and visual art. These works presented Islam as a religious tradition, but also a cultural and historical inheritance within the African American community.

“The presence of Islam in the United States goes back centuries, because many enslaved Africans were Muslim,” McLarney said. “That history had largely been suppressed, and these artists were part of revitalizing that tradition in the context of the struggle for racial justice.”

McLarney’s interest in the subject developed gradually over many years. Before arriving at Duke, she served as a Peace Corps volunteer in Morocco, where she lived the daily rhythms of Muslim life for two years. Later, as a graduate student at Columbia University, she experienced the incredible diversity of Muslim life in New York City and in the broader United States, including her hometown, Kansas City.

Shortly after joining Duke’s faculty, she began teaching a project-based course called “Local Islams,” which introduced students to Muslim communities throughout the Triangle. The class involved visits to mosques, community organizations and service learning.

One early piece of research that shaped the book focused on writer James Baldwin’s 1963 visit to Durham, the same month his influential work The Fire Next Time was published. Baldwin visited civil rights leader Floyd McKissick and appeared in photographs at two symbolic sites: the Royal Ice Cream Parlor, where one of the city’s first sit-in protests took place, and Muhammad’s Mosque #34 which later became the ar-Razzaq community just off Duke’s campus. The photographs, taken by civil rights photographer Steve Schapiro, were published in Life magazine in 1963 and again in a 2017 reissue of The Fire Next Time.

“That moment captured visually what Baldwin was writing about,” McLarney said. “The Christian and the Muslim dimensions of the civil rights movement. It also depicted two important monuments that are now destroyed, although preserved in Schapiro’s images, Baldwin’s writing, and in the vibrant local Muslim community in Durham and at Duke."

As the project developed, McLarney traveled across the country to meet poets, artists and family members connected to the Black Arts Movement. She conducted interviews in cities like Oakland, Philadelphia, Newark and New York, gathering oral histories and archival materials.  

Among the figures she studied was the influential poet Sonia Sanchez, who converted to Islam in the early 1970s. McLarney spent time discussing Sanchez’s work with her in person.

“She has a book that’s essentially one long poem,” McLarney said, referring to Sanchez’s “Blues Book for Blue Black Magical Women”. “It’s a powerful expression of her commitments.”

McLarney also tracked down visual artists whose work helped define the era’s aesthetic. One illustration by Abdul Rahman depicts jazz saxophonist John Coltrane playing his tenor saxophone, with the Arabic phrase “Allahu Akbar” (God is great) written as if flowing from the horn's bell.  “It’s a visual interpretation of jazz music as a kind of call to Islam,” she said.  

The research process involved years of archival digging, interviews and detective work to locate artists and obtain permissions to reprint artwork and quote poetry in the book. In some cases, McLarney contacted curators, tracked down family members and traveled to interview them in person, including Abdul Rahman’s daughter Sultanah who happens to live in Charlotte.  

The result is a study that highlights a critical dimension of American cultural history. Beyond documenting artistic innovation, the book also challenges common misconceptions about Islam itself.  

“People often see Islam as anti-art or anti-music or anti-poetry,” McLarney said. “But there’s all of this homegrown Islamic art that’s very expressive—with roots in a longer tradition of Islamic art and literature.”  

By bringing together art history, literary analysis and oral history, “Black Arts, Black Muslims” shows readers how identification with Islam helped configure new forms of community, spirituality, and resistance during a pivotal era in American history.

“It’s a part of American Islam that the broader public doesn’t know much about,” McLarney said. “And it was critical to envisioning what full citizenship looks like, while insisting on the religious, cultural, and ethnic pluralism so central to American life.”