Nikki Giovanni, Loved and Remembered

Kim D. Hunter

Nikki Giovanni was a product of the Black Arts Movement.

NIKKI GIOVANNI WAS among the most influential figures of the very influential Black Arts Movement from which she rose to international prominence. Few writers and even fewer contemporary poets attained her audience and profile.

Not many poets have their lives documented on film, to say nothing of having that film take the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance. A public intellectual since the late 1960s, she is still who many think of when they think of poetry. Many readers, like myself, revere the likes of Nobel Laureate Toni Morrison, but they love Nikki Giovanni.

People come to her work seeking affirmation which she supplies with great imagination:

ever think what Harlem would be
like if our herbs and roots and elephant ears
grew sending
a cacophony of sound to us
the parrot parroting black is beautiful
black is beautiful
owls sending out whooooo’s making love…
and me and you just sitting in the sun trying
to find a way to get a banana tree from one of the monkeys
koala bears in the trees laughing at our
listlessness

ever think it’s possible
for us to be
happy.
–excerpt from “Walking Down Park”

Black love is Black wealth and they’ll
probably talk about my hard childhood
and never understand that
all the while I was quite happy
–excerpt from “Nikki-Rosa”

One of her children’s books Rosa made it to three on the New York Times Bestseller list and garnered both a Caldecott Award and Coretta Scott King Award. The book, based in part on her decades long friendship with Rosa Parks and, along with her many university teaching positions, clearly demonstrated her dedication to youth.

Giovanni worked to pass on the legacy of the Black Liberation Movement, including her part in it. She also praised and supported the Movement for Black Lives, the Me Too movement and kept abreast of youth culture. I heard her speak in defense of hip-hop culture and of no less a gangsta rapper than the late Tupac Shakur.

Giovanni’s work ethic was part of the reason for her prominence. Her publications and awards run into the dozens including an NEA, National Book Award nomination and numerous NAACP image awards. She was nominated for a Grammy for one of her ten recordings. Indications of her reach include her being selected “Woman of the Year” by Ebony, Mademoiselle and even Ladies Home Journal magazines in 1970, ’71 and ’72 respectively.

Those awards in general and the last one in particular speak to the reach of the Black Power/Black Arts movements at the time and Giovanni’s place of prominence in them.

Another reason for her popularity is her plainspoken aesthetic. In that regard, no award fit her better than the Carl Sandburg award, as Sandburg famously strived for all his work to be accessible to the working class and push the struggles of the working class. Giovanni came from and spoke to the Black working class as few others did.

Her poems from praising 1960s soul musicians to her praise of the Million Man March, which was organized by the pro-Black but homophobic, sexist Nation of Islam, surface how Giovanni grappled with foibles and fault lines in Black America and movements for Black Liberation that must include all genders.

In 1971, before (as far as I know) coming out as Queer, Giovanni had a two-hour, televised conversation with James Baldwin, who was openly gay.

Aired in segments on the PBS program “Soul,” it is one of the great conversations of American letters and politics between generations. She was 28 and he was 47. Media-savvy and quick-witted, their conversation is genial, unsparingly honest and to this day insightful for us as it was for them.

At one point, Giovanni displays an almost playful cynicism when she eschews the need for Black men to be “honest” in relationships with Black women but does ask them to be present and willing to carry their part of the relationship.

Baldwin eschews her romanticism about Black folks being better able to maneuver by being “on the bottom.” But when Giovanni seems perplexed about surviving America, he tells her “Sweetheart, our ancestors have taught us that for years.”

Giovanni had quite the trajectory. It ran from being kicked out of Fisk for leaving campus without permission, to returning to the school to reestablish its branch of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, to openly calling for revolutionary violence…

We ain’t got to prove we can die
We got to prove we can kill
–“The True Import of Present Dialogue Black vs. Negro”

…to openly embracing Christianity, albeit with the same caustic humor (a trait she shared with Amiri Baraka, another leading light of the Black Arts Movement) she uses in the best of her early poems.

That side of her is on display in a 2019 video clip from the New York State Writers Institute that also proves she could have done stand-up comedy if she wanted.

Her Christianity and her general empathy for humans and nature are also on display in her Foreward to “Beginning Again, Stories of Movement and Migration in Appalachia.”

She quotes the Bible and traces the plight of dispossession of Indigenous people as well as Black and white abolitionists, and the role of white Appalachian women in quilting maps with routes to the North.

Giovanni clearly leaned left, but didn’t embrace socialism. In a 2010 interview with the she espoused the need for universal health care and stated that because the United States is supposed to be a commonwealth, “We have an agreement to take care of one another.”

She even tagged billionaires as practicing socialism for the rich, but it’s unclear if she thought socialism per se was a good thing. She did endorse Biden for president, a long way from calling for armed insurrection.

Giovanni, who witnessed her father repeatedly attacking her mother, would later write that she was uncertain if men and women could do anything besides procreate, and whose students at Virginia Tech included the school’s mass shooter, managed through all her trials to be a happy warrior.

She married her long-term partner and artistic collaborator Virginia Flowers in 2016 and had retired from a long, illustrious academic career at the time of her death from lung cancer in 2024. She proved that a “life of the mind” can be one led with folks on the ground struggling for justice.

July-August 2025, ATC 237