[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
Some were dry-eyed and some said never a mumbalin word

There were also white American students in the group, but perhaps they were not so deeply affected. Perhaps they reflected on man's inhumanity to man, but doubtless none of them thought, “I was a slave here, long ago.” As all of us looked over the parapets at the cold gray Atlantic and thought of America far away, our thoughts of our ancestors who crossed those waters had to be different. The ancestors of the white students probably had some foreboding of a strange land, of physical hardships, of natives who might resent having their land taken from them, but mostly they had a sense of freedom—freedom from religious and political persecution, freedom from famine, from debt, from jail, freedom to achieve a new and prosperous life. On the other hand, the ancestors of the black students were kidnapped from their traditional culture to a land which they could consider only with horror and fright.

This qualitative difference of emotion and experience is what strikes one in black American literature. Not only was there a difference in the way blacks came here; there is also a difference in the way blacks regard American myths and heroes. Whites revere George Washington of the cherry tree incident. Black poet June Jordan says,

George Washington he think he big
he trade my father for a pig

Some people are shocked and disturbed, especially by the younger writers of today. “Why the propaganda, the obscenity, the violence, the hate, the rage?”

One white critic, David Littlejohn, in his book Black on White, describes black literature as a race war. Hoyt W. Fuller, editor of Black World, advised readers not to touch the book, although Littlejohn's evaluations of many of the writers are similar to Fuller's own judgments of their work. What Fuller objects to is Littlejohn's characterization of black writers as mean-spirited if they show anger and resentment instead of philosophical benignity. Fuller maintains that the anger is justified, and that Littlejohn's objections only show the critic's guilt and his inability to handle it.

Nevertheless, in order to understand the black experience, one must read such works. For, works of literature such as poems, plays, stories, essays, and biographies force one to feel intense emotions and thus get inside the experience, whereas factual books of history, sociology, and economics afford a merely intellectual approach.

I won't attempt to cram the history of black American literature into a few pages, or to chronicle the first, or even the best, work or works in different genres. I'll select a few works in which one can relive portions of the black experience in America, and will list anthologies and bibliographies that one can explore for further reading.

Only a minority of the works are of the type that disturb some readers. Early black writers had to please white editors and readers or remain unpublished and unread. Besides, the black experience is not one, but many. There is W. E. B. Du Bois, born in Massachusetts and educated at Fisk, Harvard, and the University of Berlin. There is Richard Wright, born in Mississippi, who started drinking as a child, with little formal education, but dying, like Du Bois, in exile. There is the sharecropper in Georgia, there is the porter in Harlem, there is the factory worker in Detroit. But through all these varied experiences, violence, suffering, and injustice, mammoth to petty, run like a red thread.

It is evident in the earliest compositions, the folk poetry. Du Bois called the spirituals the “Sorrow Songs” and praised their music while calling much of their verse doggerel. But the poetry was refined as well as debased by passing through the oral tradition. Even the titles are poetry—“Deep River,” “I Got a Home in Dat Rock,” “Gamblin Man, Get Off Yo Knees,” and there are many startlingly fine lines—“Dark midnight was my cry;” stanzas of monumental dignity in “Crucifixion” and “Were You There When They Crucified My Lord”; and almost perfect Lyrics in “I Know de Moonlight” and “No More Auction Block.” James Weldon Johnson and J. Rosamond Johnson's The Books of American Negro Spirituals contain both texts and music of many spirituals, with an introduction on their dialect, music, and origins. Both religious and secular folk poetry can be found in Sterling Brown's Negro Caravan and Dudley Randall's The Black Poets.

A good collection of secular folk poetry containing blues, ballads, work songs, and humorous lyrics is Thomas Washington Talley's Negro Folk Rhymes. A. Xavier Nicholas has collected the songs of some of the singers of our own day—Chuck Berry, James Brown, Curtis Mayfield, Nina Simone, and others, in The Poetry of Soul.

A poet whose Collected Poems has never been out of print is Paul Laurence Dunbar. He is best known for his dialect verse which presents a rose-tinted picture of plantation life with pathos and humor. His standard English verse, which he himself preferred, is by no means negligible. His rondeau “We Wear the Mask” sounds a theme which often recurs in black poetry. His largely white audience preferred his dialect verse, however. James Weldon Johnson's God's Trombones: Seven Negro Sermons in Verse suggests the eloquence of the old-time black preachers, not with misspelled words, but through syntax, diction, and rural images.

The predicament of Dunbar is one in which most black authors have found themselves. Until the 1960s, with the emergence of black publishers, black magazines, black bookstores, and a black audience, black writers have had to address themselves to a largely white audience, through white magazines and white editors and publishers. If white editors thought a book was too militant, or would not interest white readers, the author was told to tone down his message, or the book was rejected. Also, black books were regarded as a special category, like detective stories. If the publisher had his quota of black books, he would accept no more.

The decade of the 1920s, the Harlem Renaissance, saw a group of talented writers with a heightened race pride and awareness of their African heritage. Claude McKay was the forerunner with his famous sonnet “If We Must Die,” which was widely read and declaimed during the post-World War I riots, quoted by Winston Churchill to the United States Congress in World War II, and in 1971 passed around among the prisoners before the Attica prison riot. A Time magazine correspondent called it “a poem written by an unknown prisoner, crude but touching in its would-be heroic style.” This put-down of the famous, classic sonnet provoked an avalanche of letters to Time magazine. Langston Hughes, called the poet laureate of Harlem, presented the night clubs, the streets, the men and women of Harlem with humor and sympathy in many verses which can be found in his Selected Poems. Jean Toomer's Cane was one of the most important books to come out of the Harlem Renaissance. It is a collection of sketches, short stories, poems, and a play, in language whose images and symbols are richly evocative. Countee Cullen's verse was traditional but polished. Sterling Brown's dramatic and humorous ballads and blues are a rural counterpart to Hughes's urban poetry.

Like Hughes, Gwendolyn Brooks writes about the blacks of the city. She presents the people of Chicago's South Side in richly textured verse. She is a pleasure to read not only for the humanity of her poems but for their skilled craftsmanship. Her books of poetry and her novel Maud Martha have been collected in The World of Gwendolyn Brooks. Another skilled and sensitive poet is Robert Hayden whose Selected Poems was published in 1966.

One of the most influential poets today is Imamu Amiri Baraka (formerly LeRoi Jones). Originally a poet of the Greenwich Village school, he left New York and settled in his birthplace, Newark, established Spirit House and a black theatre, and engaged in local politics and recently helped to form the National Black Political Convention. He is one of the founders of the Black Arts movement and his famous poem, “Black Art,” is a manifesto of the ideology that art should be functional and should effect social change. It appears in his Black Magic Poems.

During the sixties small black publishing firms sprang up, joining the older Associated Publishers and Johnson Publishing Company. They found a wide black audience, stimulated by the civil rights struggle intensified in the fifties. Many of the readers were young—college students or even high school students. Most of the publishers were writers themselves. Poet Amiri Baraka founded Jihad Productions in Newark. Poet Dudley Randall founded Broadside Press in Detroit. Poet Don L. Lee established Third World Press in Chicago. Nigerian writer Joseph Okpaku founded the Third Press in New York. Drum and Spear Press was established in Washington, D.C. Editor Alfred Prettyman founded Emerson Hall Press in New York. Far from censoring black authors, the new publishers encouraged them to speak to and for black people, to express their fury and frustration, their love and longing.

A remarkable group of poets was published by Broadside Press. Most of them can be found in Gwendolyn Brooks's A Broadside Treasury 1965-1970. Don L. Lee in Think Black asserted, “I was born into slavery in February of 1942. In the spring of that same year 110,000 persons of Japanese descent were placed in protective custody by the white people of the United States. … World War II, the war against racism; yet no Germans or other enemy aliens were placed in protective custody. There should have been Japanese writers directing their writings toward Japanese audiences. Black. Poet. Black poet am I. This should leave little doubt in the minds of anyone as to which is first.” Lee exhorted his audiences to “change,” and to “know your enemy, the real enemy.” Nikki Giovanni asked, in Black Feeling Black Talk,

Nigger
Can you kill …
Can you piss on a blond head
Can you cut it off …
Can you lure them to bed to kill them

Sonia Sanchez wrote in “Malcolm”

yet this man
this dreamer,
thick-lipped with words
will never speak again
and in each winter
when the cold air cracks
with frost, I'll breathe
his breath and mourn
my gun-filled nights.

Etheridge Knight wrote Poems from Prison while an inmate in Indiana State Prison. He does not pose as self-righteous, but admits his vulnerability like ours, and his poems about black prisoners and himself are powerful and moving. He has edited a book of prison writings, Black Voices from Prison, which is one of the earliest of the prison anthologies.

There were so many poets in the 1960s that they have been said to constitute another Harlem Renaissance. It would be tedious to list them all, but they and earlier poets can be found in the anthologies which proliferated in the sixties, some of which are listed, with previous anthologies, in roughly chronological order: Robert Thomas Kerlin's Negro Poets and Their Poems, Countee Cullen's Caroling Dusk, James Weldon Johnson's The Book of American Negro Poetry, Arna Bontemps and Langston Hughes's Poetry of the Negro, Paul Breman's Sixes and Sevens, Rosey E. Pool's Beyond the Blues and Ik Ben die Nieuwe Neger, Arna Bontemps's American Negro Poetry, Langston Hughes's New Negro Poets: U.S.A., Dudley Randall and Margaret G. Burroughs's For Malcolm, Robert Hayden's Kaleidoscope, Clarence Major's The New Black Poetry, Adam Miller's Dice or Black Bones, Dudley Randall's Black Poetry and The Black Poets, Orde Coombs's We Speak as Liberators, June Jordan's Soul Script, Ted Wilentz and Tom Weatherly's Natural Process, Jill Witherspoon's A Broadside Annual 1972, Bernard Bell's Modern and Contemporary Afro-American Poetry.

The anthology Black Fire, edited by LeRoi Jones and Larry Neal, is a collection similar in its importance for the sixties to Brown, Davis, and Lee's Negro Caravan, for its importance to the period up to 1940. It presents poems, stories, essays, and plays of the revolutionary young black writers of the sixties. Ahmed Alhamisi and Harun Kofi Wangara's Black Arts: An Anthology of Black Creations, is a collection of similar intent to that of Black Fire, but in addition to writings it also contains graphics.

Poetry, because of its brevity and expressiveness, and the speed and inexpensiveness with which it can be composed and published in contrast to the slowness and cost of novels and plays, has been the most popular literary art among black Americans. I'll name a few works in the other forms, however, by which one can feel his way into the black experience.

Similar to poetry in their brevity, immediacy, and impact are essays, of which there have been many fine writers. W. E. B. Du Bois's Souls of Black Folk is influential for its insights and prophecies, dissecting the Booker Washington fallacy, expressing the double consciousness of the Negro, pinpointing the colorline as the problem of the twentieth century, recommending federal aid for education. James Baldwin's sensitive essays trace the growth of his black consciousness from Notes of a Native Son, Nobody Knows My Name, and The Fire Next Time to No Name in the Street. The same kind of growth is seen in Amiri Baraka's Home, culminating in Raise Race Rays Raze: Essays since 1965. Eldridge Cleaver's Soul on Ice has eloquent essays on his prison experiences and introspections. George Jackson's letters in Soledad Brother reveal prison conditions and his indomitable reaction to them. Ralph Ellison's Shadow and Act contains his reflections on music and literature. Poet Don L. Lee's first book of essays, From Plan to Planet, is concerned with Pan-Africanism and black literature.

A special Negro form of biography is the slave narrative, often written as Abolitionist propaganda. Outstanding among these for its clear, direct style and its insight into the effects of slavery on slave and slaveholder alike is Frederick Douglass's Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass. In sharp contrast is Booker T. Washington's Up from Slavery, which is an Horatio Alger type of biography with homilies and many reports of compliments paid him by prominent whites. Richard Wright's Black Boy also concerns growing up in the South, but it presents a much harsher picture.

The Autobiography of Malcolm X, as told to Alex Haley, has profoundly influenced the attitudes of blacks. It is epic, as it describes Malcolm's transformation from small-town boy, big-city hustler, and prisoner to minister, leader, and martyr. Chester Himes's The Quality of Hurt is valuable for its account of the black expatriate writer's life in Europe and his relations with Richard Wright and other expatriates. It does not satisfy our curiosity about his craft of writing, but it intrigues us with his intensity of living. Many blacks have been angered by refusal of service in a restaurant, but it was Chester Himes who jumped on the counter and pistol whipped the proprietor on the head. Gwendolyn Brooks's Report from Part One is a writer's autobiography which tells us much about her art. There are explications of her novel and of some of her poems, and two interviews about writing.

I've just noticed that most of these books are autobiographies, except perhaps the “as-told-to” Malcolm X book. It's curious that those biographies which convey a special flavor of the black experience are mostly autobiographies. As I think of additional books, it is still autobiographies that come to mind, like The Autobiography of W. E. B. Du Bois, Claude Brown's Manchild in the Promised Land, or Piri Thomas's Down These Mean Streets. Perhaps black poets and novelists should write biographies also, to impart to them their special insight and skill which would make the story of a life memorable.

The outstanding works of fiction are easy to identify. The two that tower over all the rest are Richard Wright's Native Son and Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man. Native Son liberated succeeding writers by portraying Bigger Thomas who hated and feared whites and who gained a sense of self only when he took responsibility for an act of violence. After Wright, black novelists no longer hesitated to portray violent emotions. Invisible Man is rich in language, incident, irony, humor, symbols, levels of meaning. It adumbrates the black experience in education, industry, labor unions, the Communist Party, black nationalism. William Demby in Beetlecreek, the story of a white recluse and black adolescents in a Southern town, has used images and symbols to suggest added emotional dimensions. Ishmael Reed in Mumbo Jumbo makes a surrealist mixture of fantasy, history, satire, and voodoo. But most of the successors of Wright and Ellison have followed Wright in the path of realism. John A. Williams's The Man Who Cried I Am is a panoramic novel which follows a writer from America to Europe and involves characters in the black expatriate scene and in American and European plans of concentration camps and genocide for blacks. Williams's most recent book, Captain Black-man, follows the memories of a wounded soldier in Vietnam through all the wars since the Revolutionary War in which black soldiers have been involved, with all the irony and disillusionment of fighting for others’ freedom but not for their own. Another historical novel, a black counterpart to Gone with the Wind, is Margaret Walker's Jubilee, based on the life of her grandmother during the Civil War and Reconstruction. Cyrus Colter's short stories in The Beach Umbrella probe the lives of a wide range of characters in Chicago's black South Side. James Alan MacPherson in Hue and Cry has also shown mastery of the short story. His story “A Solo Song: for Doc” brings to vivid life again the almost forgotten ambience of the railroad dining car and the working conditions of the black dining car waiter.

There have been many good black actors, but black playwrights have been scarce. In the sixties, however, there appeared a profusion of playwrights like that of poets. Joining the older dramatists like Langston Hughes, Alice Childress, Loften Mitchell, William Branch, there appeared Lorraine Hansberry, Ossie Davis, Amiri Baraka, James Baldwin, Ed Bullins, Charles Gordone, Marvin X, Jimmy Garrett, Sonia Sanchez, Lonne Elder III, Ronald Milner, Melvin Van Peebles, Ben Caldwell.

Promoting the rise of theatre was the Black Arts movement fostered by Amiri Baraka and others, which stimulated the growth of local theatres throughout the country.

Lorraine Hansberry's Raisin in the Sun was a well-made play of black family life. Ossie Davis's Purlie Victorious was a farce satirizing obvious racial stereotypes in the South. Amiri Baraka's The Dutchman was a tense one-act play showing a confrontation between a white woman and a young middle-class black man in a subway car. These and other plays can be found in single volumes or in the collections Black Theater, by Lindsay Patterson, Black Drama Anthology, by Woodie King and Ronald Milner, New Black Playwrights, by William Couch, or Ed Bullins's New Plays from the Black Theatre.

Much of the literature of the 1960s was first published in black magazines, and they are useful for discerning trends. The Journal of Black Poetry is a leading poetry magazine. Freedomways is distinguished by its long annotated booklists prepared by librarian Ernest Kaiser. Dasein, Liberator, Soulbook, Black Dialogue, and Umbra were literary magazines that flourished in the sixties, but they seem to be dormant now. Recent magazines of quality are Black Scholar; Black Creation, which carries articles and interviews on new trends and persons in the arts; Essence, a woman's magazine which features good poetry; and Encore, a monthly of worldwide news of interest to blacks, which recently featured a story on black soldiers in the Ulster troubles and a conversation between poets Nikki Giovanni and Yevgeny Yevtushenko. Black World has published many young writers whose contributions appeared later in books. The magazine has annual poetry, drama, and fiction numbers, and has had special issues on the Harlem Renaissance, Richard Wright, and the Black Aesthetic.

There has been much discussion of the Black Aesthetic. In Black World's symposium on the Black Aesthetic in 1968, some writers had never heard of it. On the other hand, Margaret Walker said, “The ‘black aesthetic’ has a rich if undiscovered past. This goes back in time to the beginnings of civilization in Egypt, Babylonia, India, China, Persia, and all the Islamic world that precedes the Renaissance of the Europeans.” The following points may give some idea of what is generally agreed on by its proponents:

1. It is not wise to try to define the Black Aesthetic too narrowly at this time, as too rigid definition may restrict its development. After further development of black literature, it may be described, not prescribed, by observing the literature created under its influence.

2. Black art should be functional, not decorative.

3. The function of black art is to unify and liberate black people all over the world.

4. Black art should create positive concepts, images, and symbols for black folk, and destroy negative ones, i. e., black is beautiful, not ugly or filthy.

5. In creating new images and concepts, writers may change or reverse the language of the oppressor, using black idioms. When Sonia Sanchez says, “We a baddDDD people,” she means, “We a great people.”

6. Black art should be directed to black people for black people. The reactions of white critics and readers are irrelevant.

Addison Gayle's The Black Aesthetic is an anthology of critical essays on the Black Aesthetic in the various arts. His earlier anthology, Black Expression, is a collection of essays on black literature, written from the 1920s to the 1960s. Alain Locke's The New Negro is an anthology which helped to launch the Harlem Renaissance. Nathan Irving Huggins's Harlem Renaissance is a recent in-depth study of the period. Sterling Brown's The Negro in American Fiction: Negro Poetry and Drama and Jay Saunders Redding's To Make a Poet Black are two works of criticism of both prose and poetry. Widening its scope from poetry to prose, Broadside Press has started a Broadside Critics Series, featuring black critics on black poets. The first volume is Dynamite Voices: Black Poets of the 1960s, by Don L. Lee. The second is Claude McKay: The Black Poet At War, by Addison Gayle. The Militant Black Writer in Africa and the United States, by Mercer Book and Stephen E. Henderson, discusses the younger African and Afro-American writers. Ezekiel Mphalele's Voices in the Whirlwind examines both Afro-American and African poets, and analyzes the Black Aesthetic to see what is in it which is not covered by other aesthetic canons. Harold Cruse's The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual blames Negro artists for not building a solid foundation for their art by creating black institutions. A book which is not criticism, but which may help readers to understand some of the language which they will encounter, especially in the new black poetry, is J. L. Dillard's Black English. Dillard shows that black English is not incorrect English, but a dialect of English, with its roots in West African languages and with its own syntax and grammar.

Poetry has been perhaps the most popular literary form, not only because it is the fastest and least expensive to create and to reproduce, but also because it is in the black oral tradition. The jazz musician, for instance, is a contemporary culture hero of black poets. Perhaps more poems have been written about John Coltrane than about any other black figure except Malcolm X. Collaboration between the poet and the musician has been abrogated. Imagine James Brown performing a lyric of Don Lee. Nina Simone has already set to music and recorded Langston Hughes's “Backlash Blues.”

Because of the prevalence of the oral tradition, Amiri Baraka in the April 1972 Black World advised young poets to write plays and skits, and to perform them in theatres, churches, and schools. Most black people, however, have not formed the habit of going to the theatre at 8:30 p.m. Blacks do attend movies, however, and their interest in the new black films has revivified a dying movie industry. But most of the new films, except for a few like Buck and the Preacher, have exploited sex and dope, and have been vehemently criticized by segments of the black community. If the many good poets and playwrights now working, instead of commercial hacks, were to write movie scripts, perhaps fine work might be produced. Financing is the greatest obstacle. But just imagine a movie produced by Motown, starring Sidney Poitier and Ruby Dee, directed by Gordon Parks, with a script by Amiri Baraka, out of a story by Ralph Ellison. It might even be rerun on television!