Amiri Baraka once wrote that Black music, “to retain its freshness, its originality, its specific expression of its own history and contemporary reality in each generation creates a “new music.” This was yet another articulation of what Baraka once called the “changing same”—the thing that links Black expressive culture to a commitment to innovation, while remaining wedded to the traditions that birthed it. No one understood that better than Nikki Giovanni, when she went into the studio in 40 years ago to record Truth is On Its Way.

In a poignant poem, Ed Garnes responds to the death of Oscar Grant, a recent victim of police brutality.