Contemporary Literary Criticism | Randall, Dudley (Vol. 135) - Dudley Randall (essay date February 1973)

Dudley Randall (essay date February 1973)

SOURCE: “Black Emotion and Experience: The Literature of Understanding,” in American Libraries, Vol. 4, No. 2, February, 1973, pp. 86-90.

[In the following essay, Randall sketches the history of African-American poetry and literature, highlighting key authors, important works, and literary movements such as the Harlem Renaissance and the wellspring of black literature in the 1960s, which is often called a “new” Harlem Renaissance.]

In 1970 I took movies of black American students coming out of the dungeons of the former slave castle in Elmina, Ghana. The tour of the castle was a profoundly moving experience for us. Probably all of us thought, “Long ago our mothers and fathers passed through just such a place as this. People like us suffered and died here.” Our emotional upheaval was evident in facial expressions, gestures, words, tears.

Some were crying and some were cursing...

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