Bambara was active in the 1960s Black Arts Movement and the emergence of black feminism. In her writings, she was inspired by New York's streets and its culture, where the culture influenced her due to her experience of the teachings of "Garveyites, Muslims, Pan-Africanists and Communists against the backdrop and the culture of jazz music".[5] Her anthology The Black Woman (1970), including poetry, short stories, and essays by Nikki Giovanni, Audre Lorde, Alice Walker, Paule Marshall and herself, as well as work by Bambara's students from the SEEK program, was the first feminist collection to focus on African-American women. Tales and Stories for Black Folk (1971) contained work by Langston Hughes, Ernest J. Gaines, Pearl Crayton, Alice Walker and students. She wrote the introduction for another groundbreaking feminist anthology by women of color, This Bridge Called My Back (1981), edited by Gloria Anzaldúa and Cherríe Moraga. While Bambara is often described as a "feminist", in her chapter entitled "On the Issue of Roles", she writes: "Perhaps we need to let go of all notions of manhood and femininity and concentrate on Blackhood."[14]
Bambara's 1972 book, Gorilla, My Love, collected 15 of her short stories, written between 1960 and 1970. Most of these stories are told from a first-person point of view and are "written in rhythmic urban black English."[13] The narrator is often a sassy young girl who is tough, brave, and caring and who "challenge[s] the role of the female black victim".[13] Bambara called her writing "upbeat" fiction. Among the stories included were "Blues Ain't No Mockin Bird" as well as "Raymond's Run" and "The Lesson". This collection of short stories mirrored the behavior of Bambara, in which was described as "dramatic, often flamboyant, with a penchant for authentic emotion".[15]
Her novel The Salt Eaters (1980) centers on a healing event that coincides with a community festival in a fictional city of Claybourne, Georgia. In the novel, minor characters use a blend of modern medical techniques alongside traditional folk medicines and remedies to help the central character, Velma, heal after a suicide attempt. Through the struggle of Velma and the other characters surrounding her, Bambara chronicles the deep psychological toll that African-American political and community organizers can suffer, especially women.[13] Bambara continues to investigate ideas of illness and wellness in the black community with a call to action through her characters. "Velma (and by extension black women) must re-affirm healthy relationships with one another that create and sustain pathways towards wholeness and reprioritize black women's health in the larger domain of social justice movements."[16] While The Salt Eaters was her first novel, she won the American Book Award. In 1981, she also won the Langston Hughes Society Award.[5]
After the publication and success of The Salt Eaters, she focused on film and television production throughout the 1980s. From 1980 to 1988, she produced at least one film per year.[4] Bambara wrote the script for Louis Massiah's 1986 film The Bombing of Osage Avenue, which dealt with the massive police assault on the Philadelphia headquarters of the black liberation group MOVE on May 13, 1985.[8] The film was a success, viewed at film festivals and airing on national public broadcasting channels.[6]
Bambara's novel Those Bones Are Not My Child (whose manuscript she titled "If Blessings Come") was published posthumously in 1999. It deals with the disappearance and murder of 40 black children in Atlanta between 1979 and 1981. It was called her masterpiece by Toni Morrison, who edited it and also gathered some of Bambara's short stories, essays, and interviews in the volume Deep Sightings & Rescue Missions: Fiction, Essays & Conversations (Vintage, 1996).[17]
Bambara's work was explicitly political, concerned with injustice and oppression in general and with the fate of African-American communities and grassroots political organizations in particular.
Female protagonists and narrators dominate her writing, which was informed by radical feminism and firmly placed inside African-American culture, with its dialect, oral traditions and jazz techniques. Like other members of the Black Arts Movement, Bambara was heavily influenced by "Garveyites, Muslims, Pan-Africanists, and Communists"[1] in addition to modern jazz artists such as Sun Ra and John Coltrane, whose music served not only as inspiration but provided a structural and aesthetic model for written forms as well.[13] This is evident in her work through her development of non-linear "situations that build like improvisations to a melody" to focus on character and building a sense of place and atmosphere.[4] Bambara also credited her strong-willed mother, Helen Bent Henderson Cade Brehon, who urged her and her brother Walter Cade (an established painter) to be proud of African-American culture and history.
Bambara contributed to PBS's American Experience documentary series with Midnight Ramble: Oscar Micheaux and the Story of Race Movies. She also was one of four filmmakers who made the collaborative 1995 documentary W. E. B. Du Bois: A Biography in Four Voices.
