Amiri Baraka, a native of Newark, N.J., had claimed his First Amendment rights were violated when he lost the post and its $10,000 honorarium.
Former New Jersey Gov. James E. McGreevey repealed the post in July 2003 after Amiri Baraka wrote a poem suggesting that Israel had advance knowledge of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.
Baraka, a native of Newark, N.J., had claimed his First Amendment rights were violated when he lost the post and its $10,000 honorarium.
The 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, in a 2-1 ruling, said the action was legislative and not political in nature and therefore qualified for immunity.
The move came after Baraka read the 60-stanza poem "Somebody Blew Up America" in public. It includes the lines: "Who knew the World Trade Center was gonna get bombed/Who told 4,000 Israeli workers at the Twin Towers to stay home that day?/Why did Sharon stay away?"
Baraka refused to resign amid the uproar that followed. The governor and Legislature were barred from firing the poet laureate, so McGreevey eliminated the post.
The court also found that the officials did not withhold the money over Baraka's views because the Legislature had not yet appropriated it.
Baraka did not immediately return a phone message left at his home Wednesday. Assistant Attorney General Lewis A. Scheindlin did not immediately return a message left at his office.
Amiri Baraka, New Jersey's poet laureate, stands on podium at literary festival in Newark to say he would not heed Gov James E McGreevey's demand that he step down for writing poem that implies that Israel knew in advance about attack on World Trade Center; says his critics want to 'repress and stigmatize independent thinkers'; says he will not apologize and will not step down; denies there is anti-Semitism in his poem, which he goes over line by line....
STATEMENT BY AMIRI BARAKA, NEW JERSEY POET LAUREATE 10/2/2002
I WILL NOT “APOLOGIZE”, I WILL NOT “RESIGN!”
10/2/2002 Excerpt:
NO, I WILL NOT APOLOGIZE, I WILL NOT RESIGN. In fact I will continue to do what I have appointed to do but still have not been paid to do. Publicize and Popularize poetry and poets throughout this state. To set up new venues and new networks for poetry reading and workshops, in the state’s libraries and schools and other institutions. Hopefully initiated and given paradigm right here in the Newark Public Library, its branches and throughout the school system. Therefore giving more of our citizens access to poetry, involving poets of all nationalities, both male and female, of diverse experience and styles. I have already begun to enlist coordinators of poetry programs throughout the state, so that we can network a tour of poets, hopefully beginning in January, throughout the state.
To do this I will be approaching local, county, state, federal and private funding. And expand our budget with the cooperation of these other existing programs. We will ask that poets POET-ON! That they begin to produce at least one poem or publish a poem monthly, in the most modest forms, Kinko style, and give them away if they have to. That they begin to set up readings not only in the places we mentioned but also in parks and restaurants and in neighborhoods.
We say this because we feel thatthis state and indeed this nation and this world is desperately in need of the deepest and most profound human values that poetry can teach. That is what Keats and Du Bois called for the poet to do, to bring Truth and Beauty. To be like the most ancient paradigmythic image of the poet. To be like Osiris and Orpheus, whose job it was to raise the Sun each morning with song and story. To illuminate the human mind, and bring light into the world. POET ON!
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