Dudley Randall, Broadside Press, and the Black Arts Movement in Detroit, 1960-1995. - Review - book review

African American Review, Fall, 2000 by Lorenzo Thomas

The press consumed enough of Randall's time to require that he resign his post in the Detroit public library system and assume more flexible academic appointments. By the end of its first decade in 1975, Broadside Press (with its offices in Randall's home) was a major outlet for African American poetry with sales of individual volumes that exceeded the usual figures for university or trade publishers. As early as 1969, Broadside had sold 80,000 copies of Madhubuti's books--a figure that surely places him among the nation's best-selling poets since Longfellow. The true impact of Broadside Press was not economic but cultural; despite his sales figures Randall still had to struggle to obtain grant funding for some projects, and to devise budgets that could provide necessary staff and effective in-house management systems. It is in this area that Thompson's book offers important insights and data not usually found in discussions of literary publishing. This focus does not, however, prevent an informed assessment of cultural issues; Thompson's thorough chronological account of the press's development is balanced by useful critical comments on the poetry, profiles of the poets (illustrated with photographs), and intelligent suggestions regarding how the activities of these artists might have contributed to the rise of Black Studies in the academy or significant changes in the African American public's outlook.

Nevertheless, Thompson has an odd fondness for charts and statistics of all kinds; one can learn here, for example, not only how many copies of Nikki Giovanni's Black Judgement were sold in 1972 but also--in a footnote--how many black students attended the University of Detroit in 1947, and--elsewhere in the main text--how many black men and black women were employed at the Detroit Post Office in 1926. Fifty pages of footnotes, some of them presenting quite lengthy bibliographies, suggest that very few pertinent sources have eluded Thompson's search. Moreover, the text makes it clear that his examination of these sources has been exhaustive. This astonishing level of attention to detail will not be useful to all readers but will be welcomed by those--including undergraduates--conducting serious scholarly research concerning the 1970s and '80s.

Particularly valuable is Thompson's study of the careers of Broadside Press's "Big Four"--Giovanni, Madhubuti, Etheridge Knight, and Sonia Sanchez. For many readers, then and now, these poets epitomized the Black Arts Movement; in 1968 Giovanni's Black Judgement sold an average of 2,000 copies a month, and Madhubuti's three volumes sold better than 100,000 copies in less than five years. "Broadside's royalty payments at 10 percent of sales did not make any of the writers rich," Thompson notes, but Randall's dependable distribution of their work opened up opportunities for well-paid lecture tours and university teaching appointments. The 1980s, however, brought important changes. Those years, Thompson writes, "were a dangerous period for black publishing and writers in America. Generally, in the contemporary world of American culture during this period, black writers had fallen on 'hard times.' Black poets, as well as black writers in fiction and nonfiction, found themselves isolated in the publishing busines s of this nation." it is beyond the scope of his book, but it seems certain that Thompson would view the appearance of black women novelists, inspirational counselors, and Affirmative Action memorists on the best-seller lists of the late 1990s as a trend that raises more serious questions about cultural regression than it does about the decade's rampant "commodification."