Everyone knows Motown, right. Probably the greatest label in the history of music. We all have our favourite songs, from Martha Reeves & The Vandellas’ ‘Nowhere to Run’ to Smokey Robinson & The Miracles’ ‘Tears of a Clown’.

But Hitsville didn’t just produce pretty pop music for the masses, as Marvin Gaye and Stevie Wonder’s introspective early 70’s output demonstrate. What you might not know is that Berry Gordy’s groundbreaking label went even further. With black consciousness on the rise and America in crisis, Motown decided to make a space for poetic political statements and militant soul.

Their Black Forum imprint would be “a permanent record of the sound of struggle and the sound of the new era”. Between 1970 and 1973, this radical sub-label released and archived words and music from the likes of Martin Luther King, Amiri Baraka, Elaine Brown, Ossie Davis, Stokely Carmichael, Langston Hughes and Margaret Denner.

Much of it is extraordinary – particularly this dispatch of “black fighting men recorded live in Vietnam” – and continues to resonate to this day amid the resurgence of nationalism (infused with racism) and in the wake of the Black Lives Matter protests.

That’s why Motown, in partnership with the Motown Museum, has decided to reactivate Black Forum, “to extend and expound on the original principles and purpose,” says Ethiopia Habtemariam, President of Motown Records. Building on the Museum’s Motown Mic: The Spoken Word competition (inspired by Black Forum), there will also be podcasts, forums and events to support the next generation of poets and artists.

In 2018 I wrote a guide to the label for issue 99 of Straight No Chaser magazine. You can read it here.