Eugene Redmond, Black Poet - CARLI Digital Collections Featured Image

What I like about this image is it is a snapshot – literally and figuratively – of the beginning of an enormously influential and vibrant professional life. It is also so 1970s: Redmond’s billing is “Black Poet”; his reading is accompanied by interpretative dance and percussion. The drawing at the top of the flyer is fantastic.

This digital resource represents a small portion of Eugene Redmond’s personal collection of manuscripts, photographs, and ephemera, which he donated to Lovejoy Library. Full disclosure: I participated in selecting and researching these images in addition to supplying the metadata.

Redmond’s career can broadly be described as having three phases, which overlap. In the first phase, depicted beautifully in this poster, Redmond is poet/poetry scholar. At this time, Redmond was working on his critical history of African American poetry, which would be published in 1976. He simultaneously began phase 2, Black Studies professor/mentor. His third phase, concomitant with the others but fully realized later, is East St. Louis cultural activist/leader.

Redmond appears to be speaking in this picture, which reminds me of the collection’s photo of the historic 1994 Furious Flower Conference. In this posed group portrait of notable participants, Redmond is caught mid-sentence.

On the homepage, you can search by featured individual – including important and iconic African Americans like Amiri Baraka and Oprah Winfrey – and other search indexes and predefined searches.

Written by Mary Rose, Metadata Librarian, Southern Illinois University Edwardsville

For more information about this and other CARLI Digital Collections, visit http://collections.carli.illinois.edu

To learn more about becoming part of CARLI Digital Collections and using CONTENTdm, see http://www.carli.illinois.edu/products-services/contentdm and http://wiki.carli.illinois.edu/index.php/Portal:CONTENTdm.