Julius E. Thompson. Dudley Randall, Broadside Press, and the Black Arts Movement in Detroit, 1960-1995. Jefferson: McFarland, 1999. 344 pp

The Black Poets. Edited by Dudley Randall. A Bantam Book 1971.

The Poetry of Black America, Edited by by Arnold Adoff (1973)

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Bio- Sketches of Dudley Randall (1914-2000)

Randall, a librarian by training and trade . . . figures prominently prominently in the development of an audience for the new black poetry. Randall also served in World War II and writes poems about the war, love, violence, art, and the black presence. His well known "Booker T. and W.E.B.," digesting the Washington-Du Bois controversy, was seen by Du Bois, and this pleased Randall. The poem first appeared in Midwest Journal, 1952. Randall has also written about and translated Russian poetry.

With Margaret Danner he coauthored Poem Counterpoem (1966), and his Cities Burning appeared in 1968. More to Remember (1971) pulls together Randall's poems from "four decades." His work has been published in Umbra, Beloit Poetry Journal, and other places. He initiated the Broadside (posters) in 1965 with his own "Ballad of Birmingham." The series grew quickly, laying the foundation for Broadside Press, the most significant black poetry press in America.

Randall's work of this period has the stamp of formality. He writes in ballad and free-verse forms, but he had a tightness that would be relaxed in the late sixties. "Legacy" chronicles the hurt, physical and mental, of a land "Lit by a bloody moon." But the one who is "moulded from this clay" vows

      My tears redeem my tears.

"Perspectives" recasts the time-immemorial theme of we only pass this way once. There is no need to complain about discomfort, the poems says, because even the mountains--in their hugeness--are dissolved "away" by the seas. Randall's Pacific Epitaphs are recollections of the war. The short pieces are epigrammatic and haiku-like. Here is a poignant one ("Iwo Jima"):

     Like oil of Texas

     My blood gushed here.

Prominent in a group of Detroit poets (Margaret Danner, Oliver La Grone, Naomi Long Madgett, James Thompson, and others), Randall often enmeshes himself in a sense of personal injury over his people's history. This tendency, and a debt to the black poetic tradition (especially Sterling Brown), can be seen in "The Southern Road," in which the "black river" serves as a "boundary to hell." The country is "haughty as a star,"

     And I set forth upon the southern road.  [329-330]

. . . . The poetry hub for the late sixties and seventies, of course, is Randall's Broadside Press. Randall has changed as a poet and person, he says, in ways that perhaps parallel the changes in Gwendolyn Brooks. A "father" figure among some new black poets, he publishes dozens of them (over one hundred, at this writing), releases new books of his own poetry, serves as distributor of Breman's Heritage Series and travels widely as lecturer, teacher, librarian, and translator of Russian poetry.

A formalist by training and temperament, Randall described his new poetic stance in a statement in modern and Contemporary Afro-American Poetry (Bell, 1972):

—Eugene Redmond. Drumvoices: The Mission of Afro-American Poetry: A Critical History. Doubleday,1976.

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An accomplished poet himself and chair of the Black Studies program at the University of Missouri-Columbia, Thompson possesses the skills and sensibility required for this multifaceted project. His narrative employs the neutral tone of a standard reference work, yet he chooses biographical details that deftly and almost imperceptibly guide the reader's attention.

Dudley Randall was born in 1914 to a middle-class family, but--as the family moved from Washington, D.C., to East St. Louis and, finally, to Detroit--his father's employment status steadily declined. A full-scale biography might explore this development at length, speculating on its effect on the young Randall. Thompson's format, however, only allows him to supply enough data so that the perceptive reader will be aware of this aspect of Randall's formative years. As a poet, Dudley Randall got off to a slow start. Encouraged by his parents, he developed a serious interest in poetry and began to write while still in high school, but his only literary contact was a casual friendship with Robert Hayden in the 1930s. Secure in a clerk's job at the Post Office, Randall did not participate in the Depression-era Federal Writers Project that set Hayden and many others on the road to later success.

After Army service in the South Pacific in World War II, Randall used his GI Bill benefits to attend Wayne State University. When he graduated in 1948 he was more confident about his poetry, but, unfortunately, it was at just that moment that the Urban League's Opportunity magazine and the NAACP's The Crisis—the nation's major outlets for black poets since the 1920s--were no longer viable publishing venues. Randall did manage to publish a few poems in Midwest Journal, Russell Atkins's FreeLance, and other small magazines as he continued to juggle the duties of a full-time job and graduate school, earning a degree in library science at the University of Michigan. As a professional librarian with literary interests, he joined the ranks of figures such as Arna Bontemps, Dorothy Porter, Ernest Kaiser, Casper Leroy Jordan, and Ann Allen Shockley.

By 1960 Randall was enjoying a comfortable professional career, but it was the early stirrings of the Black Arts Movement that provided the catalyst for his most productive period as a writer, as well as his establishment of Broadside Press. During the decade, Randall developed mutually energizing associations with Detroit writers such as Margaret Danner, Woodie King, Ron Milner, Oliver La Grone, and James W. Thompson. For Randall and his peers, the establishment of independent African American media began to seem an indispensable element of Civil Rights goals such as "self-determination" or community political empowerment. As a result, Thompson writes, Randall assumed an effective role as "an active participant both in the Black Arts Movement and in the ongoing struggles of the Civil Rights Movement. Randall and the writers and artists who published under the Broadside Press label became major shapers of the cultural and intellectual developments fostered by the Black Arts Movement" (29). The project definitely reflected the movement's emphasis on "grass roots" political engagement.

Randall's first publications in 1965 were literally broadsides—single poems printed on large sheets of paper that sold for fifty cents. The next year the press produced a small book, Poem Counterpoem, a collaboration by Randall and Margaret Danner that resembled a conversation in verse. For Malcolm X, an anthology edited by Randall and Margaret Burroughs, appeared in 1967 and immediately sold more than 8,000 copies.

Unlike most small literary presses, Broadside seemed to have an audience avidly—almost impatiently—awaiting its publications. Certainly, Randall's editorial acumen was impressive. The poets published by Broadside would eventually include major voices of the 1940s such as Melvin B. Tolson, Margaret Walker, and Gwendolyn Brooks as well as newcomers Nikki Giovanni, Audre Lorde, Haki R. Madhubuti (Don L. Lee), Mae Jackson, James A. Emanuel, Etheridge Knight, Sonia Sanchez, and Keorapetse Kgositsile. Randall's press also introduced important yet still underrated poets such as Sterling D. Plumpp, Melba Joyce Boyd, and the late Lance Jeffers.

—Lorenzo Thomas, Book Review, African American Review,  Fall, 2000.

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In the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s, when Detroit was the "Arsenal of Democracy" and the "Automobile Capital of the World," industrial wealth embellished the city's industrial identity. In tandem with the city's educational institutions, poets emerged from a myriad of ethnicities.

Literary relationships of historic note, such as the friendship between Dudley Randall (1914-2000) and Robert Hayden (1913-1980), demonstrated how the automobile industry and the labor struggle stimulated artistic expression and aesthetic exchange in the working-class and the African American community.

During the Great Depression in 1937, Randall and Hayden met and provided aesthetic sustenance for each other and their artistic pursuits. By day, Randall labored in the Ford foundry, while Hayden worked for the WPA. By night, Randall and Hayden met at the YMCA to discuss literary techniques and their own writings. In fact, Randall typed Hayden's first manuscript, Heart-Shape in the Dust, for submission to a poetry contest. Although it did not win the prize, Falcon Press, founded by a group of union organizers, published the manuscript. Randall and Hayden struggled to be published in national magazines because of the limited outlets and opportunities for black poets. . . .

Dudley Randall was a member of Boone House when he composed "Ballad of Birmingham," following the 1963 Ku Klux Klan bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, for Correspondence Magazine in Detroit. In 1965 folksinger Jerry Moore asked for permission to record the poem as a song. In order to protect his rights as the author, Randall printed the poem as a broadside, a single sheet of paper, and founded the Broadside Press. Shortly thereafter, he began the Broadside Series and published poems by such prominent black poets as Robert Hayden, Margaret Walker, Naomi Long Madgett, Gwendolyn Books, LeRoi Jones (Amiri Baraka), Melvin Tolson, Jean Toomer, and Langston Hughes. He called the first set of poems "Poems of the Negro Revolt." As the press grew, it began to publish books by these same broadside authors, and it also introduced new black voices of the 1960s, including Don L. Lee (Haki Madhubuti), Etheridge Knight, James Emanuel, Nikki Giovanni, Sonia Sanchez, and Audre Lord. According to poet and scholar Eugene Redmond, Broadside Press became "the hub of black poetry publishing."

Under Randall's auspices, Broadside also published emerging Detroit-based poets: Jill Witherspoon Boyer, who was also the editor of the Broadside Annual; Melba Joyce Boyd, who was Randall's assistant editor (1972-77); Aneb Kgositsile, who served as an editor for the press (1977-80); John Sinclair; and Michelle Gibbs. Broadside Press was the most successful small poetry press at the time. More than five hundred thousand books were distributed between 1965-77. It served as inspiration for other aspiring, small presses.

Randall's colleague Naomi Long Madgett founded Lotus Press in 1972. Its first publication was Madgett's Pink Ladies in the Afternoon. Like Randall, Madgett realized that only through independent presses could black poets ensure that their works would be made public. She extended her resources and skills to other poets and published the works of noted Detroit poets Toi Derricotte, Paulette Childress, and Bill Harris. Since 1972 the press has grown significantly, claiming 76 titles.

—Melba Joyce Boyd and M. L. Liebler, eds. Abandon Automobile: Detroit City Poetry 2001. (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2001), pages 23-28. Internet source: http://www.lib.wayne.edu

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Book Review

Julius E. Thompson's carefully crafted Dudley Randall, Broadside Press, and the Black Arts Movement in Detroit, 1960-1 995, is a valuable and somewhat unusual book that delivers everything the title promises, though not necessarily in the proportions a reader might expect. Part biography, part literary history, the book is primarily a flawlessly detailed study of an important publishing enterprise. McFarland is a publishing house that specializes in reference works and books intended for the use of librarians, and that fact surely has influenced Thompson's approach.

—Lorenzo Thomas, Book Review, African American Review,  Fall, 2000.

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The Black Poets edited by Dudley Randall

The claim of The Black Poets [1971] to being a partially definitive anthology is that it  presents the full range of Black-American poetry,  from the slave songs to the present day. It is important that folk poetry be included because it is  the root and inspiration of later, literary  poetry. Folk and ballad poetry influence is seen in Haydn's  "The Ballad of Nat Turner," Melvin B. Tolson's "The Birth of John Henry," and in Etheridge Knight's version of the legend of Shine, the stoker on the Titanic. In Black Fire, Larry Neal gives as different version of the legend. It is important that the reader, as well as young black poets, be familiar with these roots of black poetry, so that he  can recognize them as they recur in Tolson, Sterling A. Brown, Margaret Walker, or in some new young poet of today, and so that the poets can utilize them in their own poetry

Not only does this book present the full range of Black poetry, but it presents most poets in depths, and in some cases presents aspects of a poet  neglected or overlooked before. Claude McKay is well-known for his poetry of defiance and rebellion, but some of his later introspective, self-questioning poems, after he was converted from atheism to Catholicism, are included here. Haydn is often characterized (wrongly) as an art for art's sake poet, but some of his poems in this book are the most powerful presentations of the black experience. Frank Horne is best known for his "Letters Found Near a Suicide." Students in my class were so fond of them that I asked them whether they were death-wish oriented. But his later poetry, when he was struggling for strength after paralysis, is include here. Gwendolyn Brooks  is represented not only by poems on racial and  domestic themes, but is revealed as a writer of  superb love lyrics.

In addition new poets, or poets seldom anthologized before, are included, such as Everett Hoagland, James Randall, Jr., Stephany, Carolyn M. Rodgers, Doughtry Long, and Johari Amini.

The first literary black poets tried to write as whites for a white audience. Phillis Wheatley imitated Pope and Dryden. their models were likely to be genteel or to antedate the current poetic practices. In the Harlem Renaissance, Countee Cullen wrote under the influence of Keats and Housman, and Claude McKay wrote sonnets in the tradition of Wordsworth and Milton. It took the impingement of racism on Cullen's life, and McKay's belligerent personality, to give their poetry distinction. Only Langston Hughes and Jean Toomer, one by his use of colloquial black speech and blues form, and the other by his employment of new images and symbolism, were abreast of the poetic practices of the day.

In the post Renaissance generation, Sterling A Brown and Margaret Walker, continued Hughes's use of folk materials, and Robert Haydn, Gwendolyn Brooks, Melvin B. Tolson, and Margaret Danner brought black poetry abreast of its time by absorbing and mastering the techniques of T.S. Eliot, Hart Crane, Ezra Pound.

The poets of the sixties and seventies have gone further than the poets of the post-Renaissance. the best of them have absorbed the techniques of the masters, have rejected them, and have gone in new directions. perhaps this rejection had its roots in the movement of the fifties and sixties. when the poets saw the contorted faces of the mobs, saw officers of the law commit murder, and "respectable" people scheme to break the law (there was no cry for law and order then), perhaps they asked themselves, Why should we seek to be integrated with such a society? perhaps they resolved to work toward a more civilized, a more humane society.

This alienation from white society initiated a turning away from its values and its poetry. poets turned to poetry of the folk, of the streets, to jazz musicians, to the language of black people for their models. their first impulse was no longer to send a poem to Poetry Magazine or Harper's, but to think of Black World, Journal of Black Poetry, Black Dialogue, Soulbook, Freedomways, or Liberator. This emancipation from white literary models and critics freed them to create a new black poetry of their own. such freedom was necessary if they were to create a truly original poetry. This is not to say that they remain ignorant of the currents of contemporary poetry, but that their attitude toward it was different. What they could use, they took, but they wrote as black men, not as black writers trying to be white. they tried to change language, to turn it around, to give new meanings and connotations to words. One example of this is the word black, which no longer connotes evil or dirt, but pride and beauty.

Examples of their success in "blackening the language" are phrases that have passed into common speech and that one repeats without knowing the originator, such as Imamu Baraka's (LeRoi Jones's) "upa aginst the wall" and "black art," and Don lee's "think black," black pride," "the unpeople," "therealpeople," "the world runners,' "Iunder/overstand," "blackwriting," "integration of negroes with black people,' and "talking black and sleeping white."

This turning away from White models and returning to their roots has freed Black poets to  create a new poetry. This book records their  progress. they no longer imitate white models, strain toward white magazines, defer to white critics, or court white readers. they are in the process of creating a new literature. Whatever the outcome, they are taking care of business.

—from the Introduction  of  The Black Poets [1971] dited by Dudley  Randall

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Contents

Source: The Black Poets. Edited by Dudley Randall. A Bantam Book 1971. / posted 22 January 2007

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updated 1 October 2007