First Major Anthology of African American Poetry "The Black Poets", 1971

Dudley Randall

First Edition

[African American][Literature][Poetry] Randall, Dudley, editor. The Black Poets: A New Anthology. New York: Bantam Books, 1971. First Bantam mass-market edition, later printing. 353pp.,in color pictorial wrappers with cover illustration of a multicolored, winged figure breaking chains. Edited by Dudley Randall, poet, publisher, and founder of Broadside Press.The Black Poets was the first major anthology to present a comprehensive survey of African American poetry from its earliest recorded works to the Black Arts Movement of the late 1960s. Randall’s editorial approach placed folk forms, spirituals, and early “Negro verse” alongside canonical Harlem Renaissance writers, midcentury modernists, and contemporary radical voices, creating a historical arc of Black poetic expression rooted in cultural resistance, political consciousness, and aesthetic innovation.

Contributors range from 18th-century poet Lucy Terry and early 20th-century voices like Paul Laurence Dunbar and Georgia Douglas Johnson to Harlem Renaissance figures such as Langston Hughes, Countee Cullen, Claude McKay, and Jean Toomer; from midcentury innovators Gwendolyn Brooks, Margaret Walker, and Robert Hayden to Black Arts-era poets including Amiri Baraka, Sonia Sanchez, Haki R. Madhubuti (then Don L. Lee), Nikki Giovanni, and June Jordan. Randall shows a deep commitment to representing the breadth of African American poetics, from traditional lyric to political manifesto, from folk ballad to experimental free verse.

Mild toning to textblock typical of 1970s mass-market format; light speckling, binding sound. Interior clean and unmarked. A foundational African American poetry anthology that remains in print five decades later, widely cited for its influence in cementing a Black literary canon and for its role in bringing voices of the Black Arts Movement to a mass readership.

Item #22498

Price: $150.00