Harlem Writers Guild at 75 and still kicking

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For a combined 175 years, two institutions have been lodestones in preserving, presenting, and promoting African American history and culture: the Schomburg Center for 100 years and the Harlem Writers Guild for 75 years. On Saturday, they combined their celebrations, so to speak, with the Schomburg, its staff, and leadership, hosting several noted writers and members of the HWG, including its executive director, Diane Richards. In her opening remarks, after being introduced by the emcee of the ceremony, Rev. Venida C. Rodman Jenkins, she set a tone of reverence for the event, noting that “When We Write, We Free the World,” and at the same time acknowledging the influence of keynote speaker Kevin Powell.

“Our voices must be heard,” Richards charged, asking the crowded auditorium to repeat those words after her, which they did resoundingly. She closed by invoking the memories of three founders of the Guild: Dr. John Oliver Killens, Dr. John Henrik Clarke, and Maya Angelou, who, in an earlier clip, said, “What I pray for is humility that there is something greater than I.” 

Richards set the stage for Kendall D. Glaspie, a startup market researcher and technology specialist, and published poet. In his recollection of the Guild’s history, he added the author Rosa Guy as a founding member, and after a relatively slow beginning, by the 1960s, there were more than 300 members.

Terrell Belin photos

Following Glaspie to the stage was an illustrious crop of current members, including Marc Polite, the author of five books and a prominent figure around the campus of City College of New York. It was his responsibility to open the author’s portion of the evening, and he did so by recounting an essay written by Arturo A. Schomburg in 1925 in a special edition of Survey Graphic magazine. The article was entitled “The Negro Digs up his Past,” one that had a powerful influence on Dr. Clarke. “The American Negro must remake his past in order to make his future,” Schomburg wrote, and Polite recited. “…History must restore what slavery took away,” the essay continued, “for it is the social damage of slavery that the present generation must repair and offset.”

And the evening’s succession of writers admirably fulfilled Schomburg’s prophecy with Dr. Robert Woodbine, Jade Soares do Nascimento, Eartha Watts Hicks, and poet Judy Andrews. Dr. Woodbine offered a telling prologue with a sentence that declared, “Words come from and form memory, and memory is the root of legacy.”  

All the comments from previous speakers were fodder for Kevin Powell’s address, and he cited several of them as he delivered a plateau of personal reflections, particularly the role his mother played in developing the visionary perspective he unfolded. To the retinue, he added the poet Louis Reyes Rivera, Killen’s son-in-law, as he sped through a gallery of great thinkers and sheroes. Among the memorable strokes was to include the event’s theme, which he summarized by stating that Black Americans were a “miracle people,” and he certainly fits notably in that context.

Powell’s prose and praise are a hard act to follow, but John Robinson Jr. and Minnette Coleman were more than equal to the task, with presentations made even more enthralling by Wali Ali’s guitar licks. When she recalled her father’s journalistic odyssey and how, in 10 tiny pages, he captured vital aspects of his travail in the South, Ali made his instrument sing a bluesy lament.

It took a coterie of esteemed writers to conclude the program and compose a brief bio of Dr. Brenda Greene’s literary contributions, and a consummate builder of an institution, as Dr. Farah Jasmine Griffin noted. No one is more deserving of the Inaugural John Oliver Killens Literary Leadership Award than Dr. Greene. She has lived up to all the promises she proposed years ago to carry on the tradition established by Dr. Killens’s and, in fact, expanded its reach and inclusionary dreams.

Upon accepting the award, Dr. Greene took a moment to recount a portion of her 44 years at Medgar Evers College and her role at the helm of the Black Writers Conference since 2002, and this writer was stunned to hear my name listed among her remembrances of the past honorees, but that is the kind of woman Dr. Greene is as a sharer.
Eartha Watts Hicks, editor of the Harlem World magazine, closed out the event with a bouquet of flowers for Ms. Richards, and when they embraced, it brought everything full circle, as the screen behind them darkened but still illuminated the words “When We Write, We Free the World.”