The Black Arts Movement, a Black nationalist moment in the representation of African American culture and the arts, emerged during the 1960s Civil Rights Movement era and culminated in the 1970s. James Baldwin’s If Beale Street Could Talk reflects the impact of the Black Art’s aesthetic in its cultural representation, characters, and setting.

Prior to the 1960s, the most recent flowering of African American literature and the arts was in the 1920s with the Harlem Renaissance, a period during which African American writers sought to prove to white onlookers that there was beauty and much worthy of celebration in African American culture. Writers and thinkers such as W.E.B. DuBois, Langston Hughes, and Zora Neale Hurston seized control over the representation of African Americans from people intent on portraying African Americans as subordinate, cardboard figures who did not merit full citizenship and recognition of their humanity. The arrival of the Great Depression, the Cold War, and the sense that the movement had not delivered on the promise of greater access to civil rights eventually ended the Harlem Renaissance.

With the Black Arts Movement, writers and artists once again intervened in the representation of African American culture, but this time they were more focused on speaking directly to Black audiences, calling for an end for systems of oppression (especially in cities), and more realistically representing the lives of African Americans.