Motown has announced the relaunch of its famed Black Forum Label to provide “a platform to a new generation of writers, thinkers and poets,” reports Variety.
Black Forum was inspired by founder Berry Gordy’s work with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., who had released several speeches on Motown subsidiary Gordy Records. Gordy and the Motown Corporation founded Black Forum in 1971 with Dr. King’s landmark 1967 speech “Why I Oppose The War In Vietnam” as its first release. In three years, the label went on to release albums by Stokely Carmichael, Langston Hughes & Margaret Danner, Wallace Terry, Ossie Davis & Bill Cosby and others.