SOURCE: "The Revolutionary Theatre," in Home: Social Essays, William Morrow & Co., Inc., 1966, pp. 210-15.

In the following essay, a reprint of the original which appeared in Liberator in 1965, Baraka outlines the goals and responsibilities of Black Revolutionary Theatre.

The Revolutionary Theatre should force change; it should be change. (All their faces turned into the lights and you work on them black nigger magic, and cleanse them at having seen the ugliness. And if the beautiful see themselves, they will love themselves.) We are preaching virtue again, but by that to mean NOW, toward what seems the most constructive use of the world.

The Revolutionary Theatre must EXPOSE! Show up the insides of these humans, look into black skulls. White men will cower before this theatre because it hates them. Because they themselves have been trained to hate. The Revolutionary Theatre must hate them for hating. For presuming with...