Newark Mayor Ras Baraka leads polls in New Jersey’s Democratic gubernatorial primary. He could become the state’s first Black governor.

Writer-director Andre Gaines takes Amiri Baraka's 1964 play about the encounter between a reserved Black man and a roguish white woman into the modern age.

The two were born 19 months apart, Roth on March 19, 1933, and Baraka on Oct. 7, 1934. And while Roth went to Weequahic High School and Baraka to Barringer, they both enrolled at Rutgers-Newark.

NEW YORK — Hettie Jones, an award-winning author, publisher and educator who was the first wife and early muse of the author-poet-activist Amiri Baraka and one of the few women in the Beat ...