The Great Black Debate in Verse—National Poetry Month 2025

Two leaders if a great debate--W.E.D.  Du Boise and George Washington Carver.

Detroit like big cities across the U.S. was on fire with rage in 1968 after the assassination of the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. when Dudley Randall looked back on a historic conflict in Black leadership. 

 

Booker T. Washington was a respected educator the founder and principal of the Tuskegee Institute. His laser-like focus was educating a cadre of young Black leaders, training them with marketable skills, and molding their characters. To accomplish that he made many accommodations to Jim Crow Democratic leadership in Alabama and across the South. He promised not to rock the boat or support immediate demands for the restoration of the franchise, integration on one hand and Marcus Garvey-style Black nationalism. He was rewarded with state support for his school and the system of segregated education which Tuskeegee’s graduates staffed as teachers. The White establishment, North and South hailed him as a “credit to his race.” 

 

Not all Blacks agreed. Many smelled a sell out and what would later come to be called an Uncle Tom. 

 

Sharpest of those critics was W.E.B. Du Boise, a proud intellectual, writer, speaker, editor, an activist founder of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), and eventually a Marxist. He advocated a much more aggressive assertion of a broad social agenda in the press, the courtroom, and in the streets. Historians recognized him as the most significant figure in shaping the Civil Rights movement of the 20th Century while Washington’s reputation was significantly tainted. 

 

Fifty years after the original controversy raged, Randall saw significant parallels to his own time. Traditional leadership in older established organizations like the National Urban League and the NAACP and political parties, particularly the Democratic Party, was seen as out of touch and accommodationist to a rising militant generation. Even the gospel of non-violence and civil disobedience of Dr. King, the Southern Christian Leadership Council (SCLC) and others in the Civil Rights movement was challenged by calls for armed self-defense, and a separatist or nationalist agenda. Black Power, Stokely Carmichael and SNCC, the Nation of Islam, Black Panthers, and others were taking the stage. 

 

These same issues echo again in 2025 against a background of backlash, repression, and looming racist totalitarianism. 

 

Detroit poetry maven Dudley Randall.

 

Dudley Randall on January 14, 1914 was born in Washington D.C. the son of a Congregationalist minister father who eventually settled in Detroit, Michigan. As an African-American poet and poetry publisher and influential librarian he founded a pioneering publishing company Broadside Press in 1965, which published many leading Black writers including Melvin Tolson, Sonia Sanchez, Audre Lorde, Gwendolyn Brooks, Etheridge Knight, Margaret Walker, and others. He was the cornerstone of a lively Black poetry and literary scene based in the Motor City.

 

Randall’s most famous poem is The Ballad of Birmingham, written in response to the 1963 bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, in which four girls were killed. His verse has been characterized by simplicity, realism, and what one critic has called the “liberation aesthetic.” Other well-known poems of his include A Poet is not a Jukebox, Booker T. and W.E.B.. and The Profile on the Pillow. 

 

Randall died in in 20 

 

 Booker T. and W.E.B..

 

 “It seems to me,” said Booker T., 

“It shows a mighty lot of cheek 

To study chemistry and Greek 

When Mister Charlie needs a hand 

To hoe the cotton on his land, 

And when Miss Ann looks for a cook, 

Why stick your nose inside a book?” 

 

“I don’t agree,” said W.E.B., 

“If I should have the drive to seek 

Knowledge of chemistry or Greek, 

I’ll do it. Charles and Miss can look 

Another place for hand or cook. 

Some men rejoice in skill of hand, 

And some in cultivating land, 

But there are others who maintain 

The right to cultivate the brain.” 

 

“It seems to me,” said Booker T., 

“That all you folks have missed the boat 

Who shout about the right to vote, 

And spend vain days and sleepless nights 

In uproar over civil rights. 

Just keep your mouths shut, do not grouse,

 But work, and save, and buy a house.” 

 

“I don’t agree,” said W.E.B., 

“For what can property avail If dignity and justice fail. 

Unless you help to make the laws,

 They’ll steal your house with trumped-up clause. 

A rope’s as tight, a fire as hot, 

No matter how much cash you’ve got. 

Speak soft, and try your little plan, 

But as for me, I’ll be a man.”

 

 “It seems to me,” said Booker T.— 

“I don’t agree,”

 Said W.E.B. 

 

 —Dudley Randall

Copyright:  Dudley Randall, Booker T. and W.E.B. (1969). Reprinted with the permission of the Estate of Dudley Randall. Source: Cities Burning (Broadside Press, 2004)