As a child, Bambara spent a lot of time in the New York Public Library, and was inspired by poems from Gwendolyn Brooks and Langston Hughes there.

Bambara also wanted to see a creation of an academy that generated an environment in which students could become more involved in learning more about political and social problems in the community as well as their culture.

[7] Bambara participated in several community and activist organizations, and her work was influenced by the Civil Rights and Black Nationalist movements of the 1960s.

In the early to mid-1970s, she traveled to Cuba along with Robert Cole, Hattie Gossett, Barbara Webb, and Suzanne Ross to study how women's political organizations operated there.

[7] She put these experiences into practice in the late 1970s after moving with her daughter Karma Bene to Atlanta, Georgia, where Bambara co-founded the Southern Collective of African American Writers.

[6] 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.

"[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".

[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.

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.

[5] 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.

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.

Bambara contributed to PBS's American Experience documentary series with Midnight Ramble: Oscar Micheaux and the Story of Race Movies.

[19] In 1959, the year she graduated from college, Bambara earned the Long Island Star's Pauper Press Award for nonfiction.