The Black and White Crew
(1970-1986 R.I.P.)
Definition:
The first seed of what would be the Black & White Crew was sewn after the Newark riots in 1967. A handful of poets and musicians from Newark, among them Leon Banks, created a sort of audio protest list - "Rise your voice!" - for which they recorded over 1000 different persons shouting "No!" to police brutality (although it's well witnessed that some of the early members were real ruffians). Three years later, the Black & White Crew were founded by Matthew Barrington, Gil Thomas Henderson and Leon and Geena Banks . The group would be hyper-productive for nearly 17 years as poets, dramatists, writers and performers. Their works were playful, satirical, political left wing (sometimes anarchistic) and as multi-cultural as Newark itself. As the Black & White Crew steadily grew in the first half of the seventies it was divided into two divisions, commonly called The Black Session and The White Session. This had nothing to do with nuance of skin (all nuances were seen in each division), it was all about what you did: The Black Session was the poets* and playwrighters´ part of the Black & White Crew, the White Session was the Prosaists' part. This dividing was necessary because of the differences in the way the poets and dramatists worked (literally in the streets). The Black Session of the Black & White Crew was divided into several sub divisions of "street observers": The Division of Traffic Activity Observation, Police Activity..., Sound, People, Scent, Fight, Liberty, among others. Each sub division had a different way to collect information about street life in Newark (although - of course - everything they did, they did with a similar political view).
The material was used for poetry and drama performances. The White Session also had several sub divisions of observers; but the prosaists mostly worked alone at different locations and their observations of everyday life was more of the personal/psychological/introvert kind. They were "white as the pillows, sheets and the cheap wallpapers of Newark's rental houses" while "the Blacks [were] like the asphalt, the ragged dogs' eyes, the smoke from exhaust pipes and the dark Newark nights" (from Gil Thomas Henderson's Asshole Strangers).
At its height in the late seventies, the Black & White Crew had more than one hundred members, though they weren*t writers and/or *observers* all of them. There were street performers such as actors, dancers, jokers and magicians, as well as the usual hang-arounds - and even groupies. Laura Carter and Joaquin Munoz were short time members of the Black Session during the seventies as actress (Laura, member between 1972-73) and poet/street observer (Joaquin, 1974, 1976-77). Most books from The Black & White Crew were published by One Dollar Books .