Vie titlashington post Amiri Baraka, influential African American writer and firebrand, dies at 79 By Matt Schudel: January 9 Amiri Baraka, one of the most influential African American writers of his generation, who courted controversy as a poet, playwright and provocateur and who was a primary intellectual architect of the Black Arts movement of the 1960s, died Jan. 9 at a hospital in Newark. He was 79. Newark Mayor Luis Quintana and other public officials confirmed the death. The cause was not reported, but Mr. Baraka had been hospitalized in intensive care since December. Mr. Baraka began writing in the 1950s under his original name, LeRoi Jones, as a poet and jazz critic on the fringes of Beat Movement in Greenwich Village. He later became a disciple of Malcolm X and an advocate of a militant black separatist movement built around African American cultural traditions, racial pride and defiance. He courted controversy throughout his life, first with confrontational plays in the 1960s, including "Dutchman" and "The Toilet," that portrayed racial misunderstanding and violent encounters in explicit language. Closely identified with the rising black nationalist movement of the 1960s, he later moderated his views and became an indignation. avowed Marxist. Yet he remained an unrepentant and polarizing symbol of radical "We want poems that kill," he wrote in "Black Art," an influential 1965 poem that helped define the Black Arts movement. "Assassin poems. Poems that shoot guns. Poems that wrestle cops into alleys . .. setting fire and death to whities " In a 1984 review of Mr. Baraka's "The Autobiography of LeRoi Jones" in The Washington Post, novelist John Edgar Wideman summed up his protean place in American culture: "Savior, clown, artist who'd sold out to demagoguery, hero, menace." Wage of 3 EFTA01139739