Monday, Jun. 08, 2009

Eugene B. Redmond's photos donated to SIUE library

EDWARDSVILLE - Even as a cub reporter for The Alestle during the early 1960s, as it was becoming known as the student newspaper for Southern Illinois University Edwardsville, Eugene B. Redmond was taking photos.

Little did he know he would hone that keen photo sense and go on to amass some 200,000 images during his storied career as journalist, activist, author, poet, educator and scholar.

Redmond has donated the entire collection to SIUE's Elijah P. Lovejoy Memorial Library, where it is being catalogued for use by researchers. Eventually, portions of the collection will be displayed for the general public at Lovejoy and at SIUE's East St. Louis Higher Education Center, where Redmond's namesake Writers Club meets the first and third Tuesday of the Month, September through May.

"We will be seeking various grants, including one from the National Endowment for the Humanities, to help with preserving and displaying the collection," Redmond said.

The collection of photographs and other visual memorabilia depicts arts festivals, poetry readings, various gatherings, workshops, panels, activist meetings, school and family reunions, rallies, community forums, academic conferences, receptions and parties with some of the most incredible literary lights of the Black Arts Movement (BAM) in the United States, Europe, Africa and the West Indies, including publications and letters featuring these writers, educators, social leaders and cultural figures.

"The collection originally was in four different places," said Stephen Hansen, associate provost for research and dean of the SIUE Graduate School. "Many pieces were in Eugene's home, other pieces in storage lockers and more in his sister's basement. We also estimate we will spend eight hours of labor on each cubic foot of material," he pointed out.

The collection is considered a compendium of the black literary world - and its global, cross-cultural connections - as seen through Redmond's ubiquitous camera lens and in the letters, posters and flyers. Redmond, the poet laureate of East St. Louis, is a retired professor of English language and literature at SIUE, and also is considered a storyteller extraordinaire who came of age through the 60s and 70s, criss-crossing the United States as he chronicled the BAM in East St. Louis (and the wider Midwest), Sacramento and the San Francisco Bay area.

"This is an important collection for SIUE because of its regional importance, Eugene's long-time relationship with the University, and because of its national and international significance," Hansen said. "We're planning a reading room set aside at Lovejoy Library to give researchers opportunities to view this collection. It's quite unique for us to have this collection,"

Hansen added, "Emory University and the Missouri Historical Society were vying for these materials. We're happy to announce that Eugene chose Lovejoy Library."

Other venues that had sought the collection included the Amistad Research Center in New Orleans and the Schomburg Center for Research In Black Culture at the New York City Public Library.

Redmond himself calls the collection "a wonderful look at the people who made a difference in the Civil Rights Movement and the Black Arts Movement" as well as many other movements and causes that have been in the spotlight during the 20th and 21st centuries.

And, to look at them, the images and publications tell the tale. Eugene B.Redmond knew many of those literary lights and captured the rich, the famous, the poor and the virtually unknown in ways many will not forget.

There are Pulitzer Prize winners Alex Haley, Rita Dove, James Alan McPherson, Alice Walker and Gwendolyn Brooks; Nobel laureates Toni Morrison, Derek Walcott and Wole Soyinka; National Book Award-winner Charles Johnson and Pulitzer Prize nominee Maya Angelou.

In addition, there's a young writer, LeRoi Jones, considered to be the "father" of the BAM and who later became known as the distinguished playwright Amiri Baraka, as he reads from his work in his own basement in Newark, N.J.

The list goes on: blues legend B.B. King; jazz titan and East St. Louis native Miles Davis; activist-author Angela Davis; the godfather of soul music James Brown; filmmakers Melvin Van Peebles and Spike Lee; actors Ossie Davis, Ruby Dee, Avery Brooks and Samuel L. Jackson; National Book Award-winner Ralph Ellison; BAM leader Sonia Sanchez; prima ballerina and noted anthropologist Katherine Dunham; mega bookseller Terry McMillan; novelist-essayist James Baldwin; Paris Review founding editor George Plimpton; and Pulitzer Prize-winner/native American novelist N. Scott Momaday, to name several.