The Social Protests of 2020: Visceral Responses to Police Brutality, COVID-19, and Circumscribed Sexuality collects voices from various Black intellectuals – university professors, a scientist, media communication specialist, poets, a visual artist, and political activists – to illustrate how the simultaneity of high-profile political events in the summer of 2020 manifest in our consciousness at one time. Reflecting the contributors’ honest visceral responses, the essays reveal the anguish, sadness, and motivation to act that each of them experienced in light of police brutality, COVID-19, and the Supreme Court's handling of employment discrimination against LGBTQIA+ communities. These voices address, in carefully reflected and theoretically formed ways, those universal feelings that level all human beings, regardless of race, ethnicity, gender identity, sexuality, economic status, and education.

Dudley Randall was one of the foremost voices in African American literature during the twentieth century, best known for his poetry and his work as the editor and publisher of Broadside Press in Detroit. While he published six books of poetry during his life, much of his work is currently out of print or fragmented among numerous anthologies. Roses and Revolutions: The Selected Writings of Dudley Randall brings together his most popular poems with his lesser-known short stories, first published in The Negro Digest during the 1960s, and several of his essays, which profoundly influenced the direction and attitude of the Black Arts movement. Roses and Revolutions: The Selected Writings of Dudley Randall is arranged in seven sections: "Images from Black Bottom," "Wars: At Home and Abroad," "The Civil Rights Era," "Poems on Miscellaneous Subjects," "Love Poems," "Dialectics of the Black Aesthetic," and "The Last Leap of the Muse." Poems and prose are mixed throughout the volume and are arranged roughly chronologically. Taken as a whole, Randall's writings showcase his skill as a wordsmith and his affinity for themes of love, human contradictions, and political action. His essays further contextualize his work by revealing his views on race and writing, aesthetic form, and literary and political history. Editor Melba Joyce Boyd introduces this collection with an overview of Randall's life and career. The collected writings in Roses and Revolutions not only confirm the talent and the creative intellect of Randall as an author and editor but also demonstrate why his voice remains relevant and impressive in the twenty-first century. Randall was named the first Poet Laureate of the City of Detroit and received numerous awards for his literary work, including the Life Achievement Award from the National Endowment of the Arts in 1986. Students and teachers of African American literature as well as readers of poetry will appreciate this landmark volume.

And as I groped in darkness

and felt the pain of millions,

gradually, like day driving night across the continent,

I saw dawn upon them like the sun a vision.

-- Dudley Randall, from "Roses and Revolutions"

In 1963, the African American poet Dudley Randall (1914--2000) wrote "The Ballad of Birmingham" in response to the bombing of a church in Alabama that killed four young black girls, and "Dressed All in Pink," about the assassination of President Kennedy. When both were set to music by folk singer Jerry Moore in 1965, Randall published them as broadsides. Thus was born the Broadside Press, whose popular chapbooks opened the canon of American literature to the works of African American writers.

Dudley Randall, one of the great success stories of American small-press history, was also poet laureate of Detroit, a civil-rights activist, and a force in the Black Arts Movement. Melba Joyce Boyd was an editor at Broadside, was Randall's friend and colleague for twenty-eight years, and became his authorized biographer. Her book is an account of the interconnections between urban and labor politics in Detroit and the broader struggles of black America before and during the Civil Rights era. But also, through Randall's poetry and sixteen years of interviews, the narrative is a multipart dialogue between poets, Randall, the author, and the history of American letters itself, and it affords unique insights into the life and work of this crucial figure.

A multicultural anthology of Detroit poetry from the 1930s to the present. Do poets' surroundings shape their viewpoint and work? Abandon Automobile seeks to address this question by bringing together the work of more than one hundred of Detroit's most acclaimed and accessible poets. Writing about location as if it were a living entity, these poets visualize Detroit as a variety of complex archetypes - the city becomes a savior, a beast, a nurturing mother, a seductress, a friend, an enemy. Like the city itself, the poetry represented is diverse and the poems are by turns tender, forceful, introspective, and vital. Detroit has given birth to an array of poets - and poetry magazines, artist collectives, workshops, and independent presses dedicated to publishing poetry. Detroit's rich poetic history includes such figures as Philip Levine, Dudley Randall, John Sinclair, W. D. Snodgrass, Naomi Long Madgett, and Robert Hayden. In the introduction to the volume, Melba Joyce Boyd and M. L. Liebler show how Detroit's poetry scene has changed over the years to embrace political movements and cultural transformations. Detroit poetry has flourished at poetry slams, at open mic readings, and through independent poetry presses. Readers will find that one doesn't need to be a Detroit native to enjoy the many themes of this anthology. The poems bring to life Detroit's history as a port city, life in the automobile factories, Detroit's checkered past and the race riots, the cultural experiences of Detroit's diverse population, Motown's music scene, and its urban and political struggles. The exciting range of voices represented in this collection will appeal to anyone interested in poetry, regional literature, and urban life.

Frances E. W. Harper is a central figure in the history of nineteenth- and twentieth-century African-American literature and intellectual thought. The foremost poet of the free colored community, she was also a lecturer, educator, essayist, and novelist. A prolific champion of the abolitionist and feminist causes, she has come to be recognized for the critical role she played in the rise of the women's movement, particularly in the development of the black women's movement. Yet neither her art nor her political insight was preserved by subsequent generations until recently. In this important study, poet Melba Joyce Boyd analyzes Harper not simply as a feminist and an activist, but as a writer. Boyd reads her in context, placing Harper's life, poetry, novels, and speeches within the nineteenth century African-American quest for freedom and literacy. Harper's genius is illuminated as Boyd traces her radicalism through her struggles with issues of race, gender, and class, and the other personal and social injustices she confronted. Discarded Legacy comprises three parts: The Abolitionist Years, The Pursuit of the Promised Land, and The Woman's Era. These divisions characterize the thrust of the historical periods which encompass Harper's lifetime and the thematic focus of her writings. Though Harper's primary political emphasis is on slavery and the Reconstruction, she sustains a strong feminist voice throughout these times and in all of her writings. Likewise, during the women's era, she maintains an anti-racist stance and strongly criticizes racism in white feminist politics. Boyd's response to Harper's work is interactive and improvisational, and whenever possible, she maintains Harper's voice, allowing her to speak about her own work. When analyzing Harper's language, Boyd provides insight into Harper's aesthetic by discussing the writings thematically and structurally within a biographical framework. Finally, by examining Harper's use of traditional poetic techniques, language, oral tradition forms, and other tools, Boyd demonstrates how Harper's art and politics are synthesized into a dynamic whole. This book weaves Harper's radical vision with the intuitive and analytical dimensions of her imagination and language. Through perceptive explication of Harper's writings and consideration of her thematic inclinations and political and social affiliations, Boyd is able to show how Harper crafted her subjects and how the literature and speeches interrelated in theme and historical experience. Boyd has successfully arranged Harper's work in a manner that connects our present to Harper's past and that re-envisions her consciousness.