Dr. Rashidah Ismaili says her age is between 85 and 90, “depending on whose calendar you use.” Her apartment in Harlem reflects that of a Pan-African museum, with decor including artifacts, sculptures, paintings, and literature all connected to the diaspora. What her home slowly reveals is a life that tells the story of Black culture in New York over the course of many important years. Ismaili is revered for her work in poetry, essays, and fiction writing, which stretches back to her involvement in the Black Arts Movement, centered in the Lower East Side in the 1950s to 1970s.
Since the beginning of Kwanzaa, Ismaili has hosted house gatherings in celebration of the holiday, usually on January 1, Imani, the final day. Several guests have come to her Harlem apartment for the event since she and her son, Daoud, moved there in the early 1980s. Ismaili appreciates the Pan-African ritual aspect of the celebration.
Over the years, the gathering has become something that friends of Ismaili and others look forward to annually. The rituals remain the same: reciting of the principles of Kwanzaa; lighting the candles representing each of the seven days; ending with Imani, meaning “faith” and pouring libations. Books are also provided for children as gifts. She hopes the ceremony is both communal and intergenerational.
“I think that rituals are very important in socializing and the development of a community,” Ismaili said about the Kwanzaa rituals she shares with guests each year.
Ismaili was born in Contonou, Benin, which was then known as Dahomey, in West Africa, and raised primarily by her grandmother in her early years. Living her whole life in the Muslim faith, she said the experience of going to a Catholic missionary school and dealing with physical and mental abuse had a deep impact on her as a child.
“They were horrible,” Ismaili said of the Catholic missionaries who she recalls enforced the idea that Africans were inferior and meant to be slaves, “saved” by white Christians. “The whole notion of a missionary is very colonial, and by its very existence, is, to me, not religious.”
Around this time, Ismaili was introduced to Italian opera singing by one nun, which stuck with her. Her uncle had introduced her to jazz music from African Americans, which became a lifelong love, with admiration of artists like Nat King Cole, Duke Ellington, and Jimmie Lunceford.
“The love of both opera and jazz has always been very prominent in my life,” Ismaili said.
She also remembers visiting the bioscope, where films would play that inspired her to go home and write about what she saw, beginning her connection to writing.
After moving to New York in 1957 at age 17 with her then-husband, Imsaili grew to learn the ways of the big city. “Everything was so different,” Ismaili said. “If someone said something to me, I assumed that it was true.”
Ismaili attended New York College of Music, earning a BFA in singing. One of her classmates was Cecil Taylor. She later studied musical theater at the Mannes School of Music. She said it was a magical time, being immersed in arts and culture. She recalled the vibrant theater scene, including the Negro Ensemble when it was originally on the Lower East Side, and attending off-Broadway shows.
She also received her master’s from New School for Social Research and finally her PhD in psychology from SUNY.
Ismaili said this period was self-defining as she was raising her son. She also got involved in other forms of art, such as dancing at the Sylvia Fort studio, where she connected with figures like Alvin Ailey, Max Roach, and Abbey Lincoln.
In the early 1960s, Isamili was inspired to find her voice and began writing poetry. “Literature was very alive,“ she said. “I guess there was something that drew me to writing.”
Through a friend, artist and cartoonist Tom Feelings, Ismaili was able to get one of her first poems published in The Liberator, a Black consciousness magazine popular in the ’60s. In 1962, he connected her to the Umbra Collective, made up of several Black writers and visual artists who produced Black avant-garde poetry, and she became a member. Prominent members included Amiri Baraka, Ishmael Reed, Steve Canon, Joe Johnson, and Quincy Troupe, among others. She recalled in-depth group meetings and discussions, sharing each other’s works featuring James Baldwin, Sonia Sanchez, and more. Sometimes the group would have street theater, one of the things she said young artists should engage in these days. They would often have gatherings at poet Tom Dent’s apartment.
“It was so tight and smoky,” Ismaili said. “I had to stay by the window.”
Ismaili has been publishing her poetry for up to five decades, either in anthologies or collective books. By the late 1970s, she was transforming some of her poetry into plays, including “Elegies for the Fallen,” which was adapted as an opera in 2005 with composer Joyce Solomon-Morman.
Ismaili became a lecturer in African and African American literature at various colleges, including Rutgers, Pratt, and Drew universities, and has also worked in administration at Essex County College. Since the ’70s, she has authored several books and plays. In 2014, she published “Autobiography of the Lower East Side,” the first in a series. She is finishing the second book in the trilogy and expects to publish soon.
Looking back on the Black Arts Movement, Ismaili said many of the artists were focused on creating and not necessarily on what would come of it years later.
“I don’t know that I was thinking about longevity,” Ismaili said. “I don’t know if I even appreciated my own artistic value at one time. I think that I was so impressed by the work of other people.”
“I would like to believe … that whatever we all did during that time was of value and significance — that it can be relevant and useful,” she continued.
For 2026, Ismaili is proud to be one of the few still carrying the torch from the Black Arts Movement. She is also looking toward new projects, including holding a salon (a gathering) with other figures like her to discuss the Black experience in the Lower East Side from the movement, because she said not enough is known or documented about their history.