SOURCE: “Black Emotion and Experience: The Literature of Understanding,” in American Libraries, Vol. 4, No. 2, February, 1973, pp. 86-90.

In the following essay, Randall sketches the history of African-American poetry and literature, highlighting key authors, important works, and literary movements such as the Harlem Renaissance and the wellspring of black literature in the 1960s, which is often called a “new” Harlem Renaissance.

In 1970 I took movies of black American students coming out of the dungeons of the former slave castle in Elmina, Ghana. The tour of the castle was a profoundly moving experience for us. Probably all of us thought, “Long ago our mothers and fathers passed through just such a place as this. People like us suffered and died here.” Our emotional upheaval was evident in facial expressions, gestures, words, tears.

Some were crying and some were cursing 

Some were dry-eyed and some said never a mumbalin word 

There...