By Abayomi Azikiwe
On Sunday September 21, 2025, a capacity audience gathered at Trinosophes Hall on Gratiot Avenue near Detroit’s Eastern Market to honor six decades of publishing by an independent African American institution which began in Detroit during the mid-1960s.
This event was held under the theme: “Anniversary of Broadside Lotus Press, A Community Celebration, A Legacy of Literary Excellence, 1965-2025.”
Broadside Press was the brainchild of Dudley Randall (1914-2000), a poet and reference librarian, who began with the idea that it was essential for African Americans to create publishing houses which spoke directly to their plight during this period. His work inspired subsequent generations to engage in independent publishing derived from the African American experience.
Lotus Press was formed by Naomi Long Madgett (1923-2020) in 1972 with a similar mission to Broadside. The two publishing houses merged in 2015 during the 50th anniversary of Broadside Press.
The commemoration on September 21 included a salute to the ancestors with the Amen-Ra Drummers and Dancers. A welcoming message was delivered by Chris Rutherford, the Chairperson of the Broadside Lotus Press Board of Directors.
Later in the program presentations were made by Semaj Brown, the Flint Poet Laureate; Dr. Rosemary Weatherspoon, Director of the University of Detroit Mercy Dudley Randall Center for Print Culture; Jessica Care Moore, Poet Laureate of Detroit; along with poets One Single Rose; Joel Fluent Greene; Leslie Reese and Aurora Harris. Music was provided by The Marion Hayden Legacy Ensemble.
Later after the intermission, another round of poets and speakers included Bilal, Nzinga LeJeune, Triniti and closing remarks by Dr. Gloria Aneb House. There were also additional music contributions by The Marion Hayden Legacy Ensemble.
The Moratorium NOW! Coalition as part of the Detroit MLK Committee and the Anti-Fascist Organizing Coalition (AFOC) were invited to set up an informational table. There was tremendous interest among the participants in the literature circulated including pamphlets on the centenary of Malcolm X; the struggle against slavery and its links with women’s suffrage; modern China, the African Union and the Ukraine war, the history of the Palestinian question; among others.
Aurora Harris, a lecturer in African American Studies and Literature at the University of Michigan-Dearborn, also chairs the Annual MLK Day Rally & March held at the Historic St. Matthew’s-St. Joseph’s Episcopal Church. Harris read a poem on her experiences teaching juvenile inmates at a detention facility and the transformation of these students through poetry and cultural awareness.
The presentations praised the legacy of founder Randall and Madgett for their efforts over the decades. A review of some of their poetry was interspersed with contemporary works including a historical novel by Nzinga LeJeune on “The Detroit Housewives’ League”, which was founded in the early 1930s to address the problems faced by African Americans during the Great Depression. Utilizing the slogan “Don’t Shop Where You’re Not Hired”, the organization demanded employment opportunities for African Americans as well as engaging in self-help initiatives to combat racism in the labor market.
Pioneers in the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s and 1970s
The Black Arts Movement arose alongside the struggles for Civil Rights and Black Power during the 1960s and 1970s. The city of Detroit and its African American organizations played a pivotal role in launching this movement.
According to the brochure for the program:
“Randall said he created Broadside Press ‘by trial and error’, all the while continuing to work full-time as a reference librarian. The combination of his deeply rooted racial consciousness, instilled in him by his father, his intellectual breath as a librarian, and his own aesthetic sensibility as a poet made him perfectly suited for his roles as a mentor of writers, editor and publisher. The first published Broadside was ‘The Ballad of Birmingham,’ Randall’s own protest poem against the bombing of a Birmingham church and the murder of four little girls. In choosing to launch his company with the publication of that poem, Randall conjoined Broadside Press with the African American freedom fight—and by extension with the liberation struggles being waged during the period throughout Africa, Asia and Latin America.”
Randall was named as the poet laureate of Detroit in 1981 by the first African American Mayor of the city, Coleman A. Young, describing him as the “Father of the Black Poetry Movement”. During the tenure of Mayor Young (1974-1993), his administration sought to recognize the cultural and historical contributions of the African American people.
Lotus’s Legacy and the Importance of Independent Publishing
Naomi Long Madgett was born in 1923 in Norfolk, Virginia. She later migrated to New Jersey with her parents. She attended Virginia State University and received a Bachelor of Arts degree. She wrote her first poem at the age of seven. In later years she migrated to Detroit after her first marriage. She would attend Wayne State University where she earned a master’s degree in Education.
In an obituary published in the New York Times after her death in 2020, it said of her history that:
“She had met Langston Hughes when she was 15 and attended a reading of his in St. Louis. When Mr. Hughes later gave a reading at her college, Virginia State University, she gave him her work, and he read it along with his, after which he became a lifelong mentor. She earned a bachelor’s degree in English from Virginia State and a master’s of education from Wayne State University. She worked briefly at a newspaper and for the phone company while working toward her teaching degree — all while writing poetry and publishing two collections…. Ms. Madgett was also an educator. She taught high school English for over a decade, and she created her own curriculum in the 1960s to make up for the scarcity of African-American authors in the textbooks of the era — a bit of academic activism that inspired the Detroit public school system to make her own work required reading. She joined the English department at Eastern Michigan University in 1968 and retired as professor emerita in 1984.”
The legacy of Broadside Lotus Press represents the work of four generations of the best-known African American poets. The program from the 60th anniversary celebration mentions the peers of Randall and Madgett including Gwendolyn Brooks, Oliver LaGrone, Margaret Walker, Margaret Danner, Robert Hayden, Sterling Brown, along those writers who grew out of the Black Consciousness era such as Sonia Sanchez, W. Keorapetse Kgositsile, Nikki Giovanni, Don L. Lee (Haki Madhubuti), Etheridge Knight, Audre Lorde, Toi Derricotte, Nubia Kai, Michele Gibbs, Melba Boyd, Aneb Kgositsile, James Emmanuel, and Gayle Jones.
Subsequent generations of poets have emerged which have been published by Broadside Lotus namely Ray Waller, Leslie Reese, Aurora Harris, Albert Ward and Semaj Brown. These multi-generational artists are a testament to the continuing cultural viability of the artistic movement in Detroit and other municipalities.
As Randall wrote in an article fifty years ago in 1975:
“We (Africans in the United States) are a nation of twenty-two million souls, larger than Athens in the age of Pericles or England in the age of Elizabeth. There is no reason why we should not create and support literature which will be to our nation what those literatures were to theirs.”
These same words hold true today in the third decade of the 21st century. In light of the official governmental attempts to erase the historical and cultural legacy of African people in the U.S. and around the globe, the mission of Broadside Lotus Press remains indispensable in defining the struggle for total liberation and social emancipation.
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