2022 Theses Master's

Free the Land: Radical Creative Placemaking in the Time of Black Power

Shabazz, Al-Tariq

Free the Land: Radical Creative Placemaking in the Time of Black Power investigates the role that land, property and the arts have played in marginalized communities’ struggle for greater democracy, specifically in Newark, NJ during the Civil Rights and Black Power eras. In 1960’s Newark we take a look at how land and property were used to perpetuate state violence against its Black and Brown communities and how advocates, artists and grassroots organizations responded to state repression and dispossession. Certain projects of the Black Power Era in particular, such as radical creative place making, were created in an attempt to develop networks of ideological and spatial resistance. Free the land shows how members of these movements and communities saw land/property and the idea of place when crafting and realizing what they saw as liberation.

Keywords: Urban Planning, Creative Placemaking, Urbanism, Black Politics, Radical Politics, Activism, Black Protest, Black Arts Movement, Housing, Resistance, Grassroots Organizing, Amiri Baraka, Malcolm X