In the early 1970s some of the most iconic Black writers in literary history began making an annual pilgrimage to Baton Rouge. The national momentum of the Black Arts Movement, fusing politics with visual art, music, literature, theatre, and dance, had found its way to Southern University’s campus, in the form of a trailblazing poetry festival.  

The city was fertile ground for creative Black resistance; after all, the first organized bus boycott of the Civil Rights Movement took place in Baton Rouge, in 1953. Southern University, a historically Black university, boasted an English department that championed spaces for Black creative writing alongside scholarly work. Dr. Melvin A. Butler, who became department chair in 1969, believed poetry was the best genre to articulate Black life and translate the human conditions of Black people. The Southern Black Poetry Festival was born.  

The inaugural festival took place on May 3, 1972, and featured poets Haki R. Madhubuti (Don L. Lee), Margaret Danner, Jerry Ward, Pinkie Gordon Lane, Kalamu ya Salaam, and Ahmos Zu-Bolton. Panels, themed readings, a local youth poetry competition, and a performance by the Alvin Batiste Jazz Ensemble rounded out the single-day event, according to the original bulletin.   

The festival aimed to “define and legitimize the realities of Black people.” In the festival’s first program, the organizers noted: “At a time when Black universities and colleges are being asked by forces, mainly political, to justify their existence, all segments of Black schools must engage in cooperative ventures in an effort to vitiate the naïve assumptions that the divisive effects of slavery and second-class citizenship can be cavalierly wiped away.” 

The impact of the festival was felt across the country. If you were a Black poet in the 1970s, hoping to connect with other Black poets, Southern University’s Black Poetry Festival was a trip you had to make. Of course, the festival didn’t occur in a vacuum. Free Southern Theater, based at the time in New Orleans, was influencing the region artistically and politically. BLKARTSOUTH, led by Tom Dent and Kalamu ya Salaam, had been providing writing and acting workshops for Black writers in New Orleans since 1968. The festival provided a new way for Black academics and Black grassroots poets and artists to activate a collective voice and stir the fire of Black activism. 

 “It created a writing community across the country when there was no internet,” Salaam told me in a 2023 interview. “We had real writer relationships then.” 

In 1973, the second year of the festival, the event extended to two days. According to the program, poets scheduled included Tom Dent, Etheridge Knight, Margaret Walker, and Carolyn Rodgers, along with Charles Rowell, who directed an evening performance called “A Ritual of Black Poetry.” A music group called the Voices of Zion anchored the fest. 

Dr. Butler, the festival’s visionary founder, was gruesomely murdered in 1973, but the festival endured and, in 1974, was renamed the Melvin A. Butler Poetry Festival. Dr. Pinkie Gordon Lane took the helm as director. Dudley Randall, who founded Broadside Press, was a scheduled speaker that year. In 1975 Hoyt Fuller, then editor of Black World, gave the keynote address; Mari Evans, Naomi Long Madgett, Michael S. Harper, and Jayne Cortez were among the featured guests. 

In the following years, the festival’s popularity skyrocketed. Poet Gwendolyn Brooks, the first Black person to win the Pulitzer Prize, attended as one of the featured poets of the festival in 1976. Toni Morrison gave the keynote in 1977—decades before she won the Nobel Prize in Literature. Southern University students majoring in English and other related disciplines served as volunteers and sometimes participants, giving them direct access to Black writers and artists headlining the fest. Lane explained in an 1999 interview with C. K. Tower, published in Perihelion, that the organizers sought out nationally renowned artists and critics despite the festival’s limited budget—and “out of their generosity, they came for the meager honoraria we had to offer. I think, because it was an opportunity for a special kind of camaraderie that we enjoyed just from being together. This is how I came to know many of the poets who have become major voices today . . . And, of course, all of this kept me fueled in my own work.” Larry Neal, Audre Lorde, Lucille Clifton, Nikki Giovanni, Lorenzo Thomas, Julia Fields, Electa Wiley, Lance Jeffers, and Julius E. Thompson were among the celebrated Black writers and scholars who were scheduled at least once during the festival’s nine-year span.  

News of the festival spread not only by word of mouth but also through reports by Black newspapers and by magazines such as Negro Digest, Ebony, and Jet. The festival boasted large numbers of attendees, including visitors from all points of the country. Relationships formed and nurtured at the festival made writers eager to attend, and, of course, the South’s reputation for food, hospitality, and knowing how to have a good time also attracted travelers. The festival incorporated outdoor readings, jazz sets by Southern University’s Jazz Institute, theatrical and visual arts offerings, choir and dance performances, and a marketplace. In addition to the formal festival, there was also the allure of the off-campus party. At the 2016 Black Arts Movement Conference at Dillard University, Eugene Redmond recalled the festival parties hosted at Lane’s home. “We had a good time,” he said with a you-had-to-be-there-grin. 

Other HBCUs took note. Jackson State University’s Margaret Walker was the catalyst for launching the Phillis Wheatley Festival, which focused on Black women writers, in 1973. These festivals were possible partially because they were on HBCU campuses where Black people were not only heading English departments but also in administrative leadership roles. Black intellectuals and creatives had the agency and the space to create what they wanted in ways that were more challenging at predominately white institutions.  

By the 1980s some of the Black power vigor had waned. Perhaps there was burnout from fighting white supremacy on the front lines over the years. In some cases Black professional and artistic priorities supplanted political defiance. Some of the emerging poets that attended the festival in prior years had become nationally known or had secured salaried positions at universities and were building programs and careers of their own; they could lecture as protest writers even if they were not physically doing it on the front lines anymore, or as often. Meanwhile, Black literary arts and cultural festivals had multiplied throughout the nation. People no longer had to travel south to find a network of Black writers. Because the Southern University festival didn’t make money, it couldn’t demonstrate its bottom-line benefits to the administration. The festival’s run ended in 1980.  

However, out of the festival arose a journal called Callaloo.  

Inspired by their involvement in the festival and by a 1975 Southern Black Cultural Alliance meeting, Charles Rowell, who at the time was teaching at Southern; Tom Dent, who was based in New Orleans; and Jerry Ward, who was teaching at Tougaloo College in Jackson, Mississippi, decided to co-found and co-edit a Black literary journal published out of Baton Rouge. In the introduction of the first issue, published in December 1976, Dent wrote: “Writers from the Deep South have traditionally felt they had to go northward and eastward to pursue their literary careers and get published . . . For the first time now, there has developed a coterie of Black Southern writers who have sunk their anchors in the South.” Today Callaloo is a celebrated journal housed at Johns Hopkins University, publishing the work of emerging and esteemed Black writers in the South, the United States, and across the diaspora.  

The festival also lives on through the legacy of Pinkie Gordon Lane, who would go on to become the first African American poet laureate of Louisiana in 1989 and serve in that role until 1993. In 2022 the Louisiana State University Board of Directors voted to rename its comprehensive graduate education program the Pinkie Gordon Lane Graduate School after Lane, who was the first Black woman to receive a PhD from LSU. Southern University hosts an annual Pinkie Gordon Lane Poetry Contest in memory of her work as English department chair. 

Today new festivals, conferences, workshops, and retreats for Black writers have emerged and been institutionalized across the nation. This path was forged by the Melvin Butler Black Poetry Festival at Southern University, which created supportive space for Black artists years before it was trendy. The festival no longer exists, but there was a time when Black poetry’s fire burned brightest at Southern University—and its gift of Black writing and resistance continues. 

This article is an excerpt from an in-progress manuscript by Kelly Harris-DeBerry.  

Kelly Harris-DeBerry is a poet and the author of Freedom Knows My Name. Read and listen to more of her work at kellyhd.com.