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Transcription: {SPEAKER name="Brooks B. Robinson"}

[00:06:55]
Now, some people, and you expressed the, the, um the importance of the thirties, forties, and fifties
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as, uh, key decades for African American poets.

[00:07:07]
Some people consider that as a kind of calm before the storm, meaning the sixties.

{SPEAKER name="Eugene B. Redmond"}

[00:07:13]

You had a, you had a interesting kind of gestation period in the, in the fifties, where you had people like Lance Jeffers,
[00:07:18]
uh, Percy Johnston, uh, Jay Wright, Henry Dumas, uh, and many many others.
[00:07:25]
Uh, Leroy Jonas and Clarence Major. Ted Joans, J-O-A-N-S.

[00:07:31]
Uh, you had, uh, Bob Kaufman, the brilliant poet who helped make "the Beat" era.
[00:07:36]
He, uh, he wrote from San Francisco primarily, posing, citing a book called "Solitudes Crowded with Loneliness."
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You had Russell Atkins.

[00:07:46]
These were the germinating forces. As, as, the decade of the fifties made a turn into the sixties. Right.
[00:07:54]
And, then, of course you have the early sixties people. Uh, very important writers,
[00:07:59]
who, formed kind of a gestation base for, the later, writers of the later sixties.

[00:08:05]
People like Larry Neil and Liberator Magazine, Diana Clark and uh, Freedom Raid Magazine.
[00:08:12]
Again, Negro Digest before it became Black Royalty, 1970, with Hart Fuller and Hamilton Bems.
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Julia Fields was writing. Mario Evans was writing.
[00:08:20]
So you had this period, um, in the 9th, in the era of the 1960s, uh, where again, the literary expressions reflected the social turbulence of the time.

[00:08:31]
So, a lot, a lot of the ponds that were what- civil rights, freedom rides, you know, sit-ins, the march on Washington, jobs and freedom. Okay
[00:08:39]
black and white together we shall overcome.

[00:08:41]
But then of course, around 1965, with Watts and Newark and Harlem and St. Louis and Dallas.
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Detroit, something else occurred.
[00:08:51]
The writers who had been associated with Snake and Corps, and NAACP Youth Council, and so on,
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took to the streets. Literally, to the streets.
[00:09:00]
They been in the streets but then they started forming their own organi.....