his nonracial, more traditional themes, as seen in
its last stanza:
And with these blazing triumphs spoke one
voice
Whose wistful speech no vaunting did em-
ploy:
‘I know not if ’twere by Fate’s chance or
choice
I hold the lowly birth of an English boy;
I only know he made man’s heart rejoice
Because he played with Beauty for a joy!”Perhaps Braithwaite, winner of the Spingarn
Medal in 1918, would have readily applied to him-
self his critique of Toomer in his “The Negro in
American Literature,” which Locke included in his
anthology The NEW NEGRO: “He would write just
as well, just as poignantly, just as transmutingly,
about the peasants of Russia, or the peasants of
Ireland, had experience brought him in touch with
their existence.... Jean Toomer is a bright and
morning star of a new day of race in literature.”
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Bone, Robert. The Negro Novel in America. Rev. ed.
New Haven: Yale University Press, 1958.
Braithwaite, Benjamin Stanley. “The Negro in Ameri-
can Literature.” In The New Negro, edited by Alain
Locke, 29–53. New York: Atheneum, 1968.
Wilfred D. Samuels
Broadside Press
Founded by the poet DUDLEY F. RANDALL, the edi-
tor and publisher, in Detroit, Michigan, in 1965,
Broadside Press, most critics agree, was vital to the
success the BLACK ARTS MOVEMENT and its major
poets during the 1960s and 1970s. A librarian
who was aware of the importance of copyright-
ing as a means of protecting intellectual property,
Randall founded Broadside to protect his first
published work, “Ballad of Birmingham,” which
Jerry Moore, a folk singer, had also set to music as
“Dressed All in Pink.” The two poems formed the
beginning of the Broadside Series and the genesis
of Broadside Press. Although for the first five years
Broadside Press was a one-man operation, housed
in Randall’s basement and study, Broadside Press
would become a company that kept outgrowing
its space.
In many ways, For Malcolm: Poems on the Life
and Death of Malcolm X (1967), which Randall
coedited with visual artist Margaret Burroughs
and which was inspired by MARGARET WALKER’s
poem “For Malcolm,” witnessed the true genesis of
Broadside Press as a viable and valuable publishing
vehicle. For Malcolm was the outcome of the radi-
cal and contentious debate among black writers
about the functional role of art and propaganda
that took place during the 1966 Fisk Writers Con-
ference at Fisk University, during which the more
traditionalist ROBERT HAYDEN (who described
himself as a poet first and foremost) and the sup-
porters of a black aesthetics clashed head on. The
symbolic importance of the life and death of MAL-
COLM X was the sole space in which the various
camps found common ground.
The response to Randall and Burroughs’s call
for works on Malcolm X, which would be pub-
lished in an anthology, was electric and eclectic.
Even Hayden submitted an entry, “El Hajj Malik,
El Shabazz.” The list of those who responded reads
like a “Who’s Who” list among black writers of the
1960s and 1970s: GWENDOLYN BROOKS, LeRoi Jones
(AMIRI BARAKA), Margaret Walker, OSSIE DAVIS,
CLARENCE MAJOR, TED JOANS, MARI EVANS, Julia
Fields, SONIA SANCHEZ, DAVID HENDERSON, and
LARRY NEAL, among many others. As MELBA JOYCE
BOYD notes, “The divergent political perspectives
and broad range of literary styles that character-
ized the anthology foreshadowed the profiles of
future Broadside Press authors” (144).
For Malcolm would also be instrumental in at-
tracting many of the poets who became the major
architects of the BLACK ARTS MOVEMENT, par-
ticularly Don L. Lee (HAKI MADHUBUTI), NIKKI
GIOVANNI, James Emmanuel, and ETHERIDGE
KNIGHT, who was in Indiana State Prison when
he first contacted Randall. Madhubuti’s early
best-selling books were published by Broadside
Press, including Black Pride (1968), Think Black
(1968), and Don’t Cry, Scream (1969), which has72 Broadside Press