The artist and the political activist are one. They are both shapers of the future reality. Both understand and manipulate the collective myths of the race. Both are warriors, priests, lovers and destroyers. For the first violence will be internal—the destruction of a weak spiritual self for a more perfect self. But it will be a necessary violence. It is the only thing that will destroy the double-consciousness—the tension that is in the souls of the black folk.

As Larry Neal has said, both the artist and the political activist are manipulators of collective myths; and they are both destroyers whose violence turns first inward in a suicidal destruction of psychic doubleness, and then outward to a reshaping of the external world.1 The career of LeRoi Jones, from author of the Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note2 to political