Centennial 2014
Dudley Randall (1914-2000), Daisy Bates (1914-1999),
Kenneth Bancroft Clark (1914 – 2005), Billy Eckstine [William Clarence Eckstine
1914-1993] Ralph Ellison (1914-1994), Joe Lewis [Joseph Louis Barrow
1914-1981], Sun Ra [Herman Poole Blount 1914-1993], Woody Strode [Woodrow
Wilson Woodwine Strode 1914-1994], Sonny Boy Williamson I [John Lee Curtis
Williamson 1914-1948], and Emmett Ashford (1914-1980) are all candidates for
centennial celebration
It shall be edifying to chronicle how remembering will be
divided among interest groups----- literary and social historians, patriotic
warmongers, the musicologists, political analysts, sports experts, film critics, transnational theorists and civil rights scholars. The year 2014 presents
an opportunity to think again about 1714, 1814 and World War I. Can we adequately assess the role of time and
circumstance in the making of Americans if we segregate those listed above from
Jiang Qing, William Westmoreland, Jonas Stalk, Joe DiMaggio, Daniel Boorstin,
Clayton Moore, William S. Burroughs, Octavio Paz, Dylan Thomas, Lester Flatt,
Bernard Malamud, and Ernest Tubb? What do we gain from selective celebration
that is predicated on use of the social construction named “race”?
In ideal situations, it would be easy to have collective
centennials. We live, however, in reality and amoral actuality. Our cultural
studies and remembering thrive on interdisciplinarity which is governed more by
ideology than by reason. Viewed comparatively, remembering the achievements and
life histories of Dudley Randall and Joe Lewis or of Billy Eckstine and Sonny
Boy Williamson might illuminate similar comparisons of William Westmoreland and
Daisy Bates or of Sun Ra and Lester Flatt. We talk multiculturalism and the Omni-American. We talk, make hot air, and put with Z “in conversation “A, but we do not
have critical absorption that minimizes cultural amnesia.
In my work as one of the “little people” from
Mississippi, the commitment of Dudley Randall as a poet and founder of
Broadside Press is a stronger candidate for memory than Ralph Ellison and the novel
Invisible Man. Putting Randall’s life
and accomplishments under the microscope of 2014 does not minimize the need to
attend to other writers born in 2014. It accelerates my interest in looking at
the Black Arts Movement from the perspective of the Chinese Cultural
Revolution, in hearing Sonny Boy Williamson from the angle of Octavio Paz’s The Labyrinth of Solitude, in asking
whether Daisy Bates made a more substantial contribution to the moral
dimensions of the American mind than did William Westmoreland or William
Burroughs.
For my centennial rituals in 2014, I shall examine again
Boyd, Melba Joyce. Wrestling
with the Muse: Dudley Randall and the Broadside Press. New York: Columbia University Press, 2003.
Miller, R. Baxter. “ ‘Endowing the World and Time’: The
Life and Work of Dudley Randall.” Black
American Poets Between Worlds, 1940-1960. Ed. R. Baxter Miller. Knoxville:
University of Tennessee Press, 1986.
Thompson, Julius E.
Dudley Randall, Broadside Press,
and the Black Arts Movement in Detroit, 1960-1995. Jefferson, NC:
McFarland, 1999.
Jerry W. Ward,
Jr. September 14, 2013
