This interview intended to promote Black Classic Press and its important works, and to debunk the myth that the press promotes any literature that discriminates against race or religion.
FRASER: Good morning Paul, I really appreciate your time in talking to me about Black Classic Press and what it means to me. I am going to put this on my website, to let as many people know, to support you and your body of books, and to understand the value of your putting out there works that we don’t normally see in the mainstream nor in our bookstores, so thank you for your time. You said at the 75th National Book Awards, your acceptance speech, you said ‘my mission is recovery and making Black self-narrating voices known. You said you prefer to let those voices speak to new generations, like my own, for themselves.’ I remember meeting you, this is 2024 now, I think it was 2018 when Black Classic Press had their 40th Anniversary Celebration.
And I still have books where you signed ‘40’ in it, and its such an important example, what you said at that speech to hear those voices through your books that we don’t normally get, and there are classics for me.
The first one is Blood in My Eye, one of the most important things that George Jackson writes in Blood in My Eye, he writes on page 125: “there is certainly no lack of evidence to prove the existence of an old and built in character assassination of programmed racism (what class controls the nation’s educational facilities, prints the newspapers and magazines that carry the little cartoons and omits or misrepresents us to death?) has always served to distract and defuse feelings of status deprivation suffered by the huge sectors just above the black one.” There are so many other ideas that I could get into, but I just chose that one. And my first question is can you speak to specifically, why is it important for you to reprint works like Blood in My Eye by George Jackson?
COATES: The quote that you just read by George, even though that quote is in his words, the idea and the notion of Black people being maligned, being misrepresented, and unrepresented in media, and that is forms of communication, all forms of communication, is a longstanding fact of awareness among Black people. We always had a sense of who we were, before our enslavement, through our enslavement, we understood our humanity, and we always have pushed back at people who attempted to depict us as other than humane. So what George is talking about there is the tool of media being used to project people falsely as less than human. Well, that’s the same tools that David Walker was talking about in 1829.
FRASER: David Walker.
COATES: In 1829, David Walker would have been saying the same thing. Whenever we think about Black books being published from that period, especially from that period, we will always see them pushing back on the narrative of Black people being less than. Its important for us to have that as a documented history. To be able to look back on it, to know that it exists, and to be able to set our course for the future, because thats what in front of us now. 2025 is the same thing.
FRASER: 2025 is another year where we will see a new relevance to David Walker, those ideas, like those in George Jackson’s Blood in My Eye that you’ve reprinted. A second of my most important Black Classic Press books include the two volume series about four years ago [actually five years ago] about the founder of African Studies at Howard University, Dr. William Leo Hansberry. I bought Africa & Africans as well as Pillars of Ethiopian History. What I find so important about Pillars of Ethiopian History as a Christian myself, is how Hansberry describes a Christian nation. America prides itself on the separation of church and state, but here in your printed work by Hansberry, he’s describing a Christian nation that practices Christianity, before the overwhelming Greco-Roman colonization that [produces] most Biblical origins in Greek mainly which is filled with its own cultural baggage about supremacy and cultural dominance. But Hansberry mentions Frumentius and Edesius. Can you speak to why reading Hansberry is important?
COATES: Hansberry is important for a number of reasons, not just for the history, but the historiography. That is our study, particularly of Black history. Hansberry is a bridge between our oldest storytellers who were non-degreed and all of them being self-taught. Hansberry comes along and he tutors under those folks, he tutors under people like Charles Seifert. He was a contemporary of people like J.A. Rogers, and so many more. All of these people were self-trained historians but Hansberry carries it into a another realm. Hansberry becomes the degreed professional among these historians, so he’s able to put a caché on many of the lessons that the self-trained historians have been teaching for years. So, he’s like a bridge and a link and a very very important link, because he goes on in academia, to develop so many African centered minds with the same line of thinking that the self-trained historians did. So what you got in an academic classroom is the lessons that were taught by people like John G. Jackson, another contemporary of Hansberry, and before, like J.A. Rogers, and so many others of our self-trained historians that we don’t look at, we don’t understand and we do not celebrate the importance of those people like George Wells Parker, who was academically trained, but he wasn’t trained in history academically. He actually taught himself. And so Hansberry is that bridge, Hansberry carries the baton forward, makes significant change, and of course he’s grounded in the importance of Ethiopia and particularly dynastic Ethiopia, pre-dynastic Ethiopia and Egypt. So he becomes very very important to our studies.
FRASER: Absolutely. You mention in a previous interview, I forget where that was that Chancellor Williams and John Henrik Clarke learned from William Leo Hansberry.
COATES: I don’t think its possible to look at anyone after Hansberry and say that they didn’t learn from Hansberry. I don’t think its possible. At the same time, we’ve got to connect and keep Hansberry connected to those self trained historians that were before him because that’s who he used to hang out with in New York. When he quit school, that was his crew. And that becomes fertile ground for someone to do work on, and to do study on. I know that was the case because he spent time with these people. So this was crew. And I know what their conversations were and I can see his conversations. But the details of that relationship is still uncovered, and remains a realm for someone to explore.
FRASER: Certainly and one of those individuals who kind of suggested to me to explore is Gail Hansberry, his daughter. And she’s been working with a more or less ad hoc readers group of Hansberry, the William Leo Hansberry Society. They had met…this year, earlier. You hear the storks at my grandma’s house. I’m at my grandma’s house. You can hear the storks, and they are calling to each other. Its the cranes, rather. Hansberry for me theoretically, is very important. He makes me interested in history because the frames that we use today are just so much divided from spirituality, divided from politics. And Hansberry reminds us, look, this whole world was shaped by a government that followed spiritual law, that believed in it. And so, lets not forget where we come from. His editor Joseph Harris made an important point in the Introduction to Africa & Africans about Hansberry’s theoretical approach, I just wanted to read. Joseph Harris wrote that Hansberry believed that Black people should pursue a Pan-Africanist approach to the writing of history. Can you speak to this and Black Classic Press? [You can purchase works by William Leo Hansberry printed by Black Classic Press here and here].
COATES: And that’s another reason why Hansberry would be so interesting to us. Because his look at history is an embracing look at history. It is not a matter of looking at, even though, he may have specialized in particular aspects of history, he understood that African history is a global history. And that to understand that history, it has to be approached as a global history, and embraced as a global history. Its altogether important and from a Pan African perspective, that’s the only way you can see history, you have to see it as all African, you have to see it as another, thought of it as Diasporic History, and that is seeing Black people all over the world. This is what lends to our strength, as opposed to the way some folks want to see us, and want us to see ourselves, for example, as African Americans divorced from Africa. They want to see us as natives of the Caribbean, divorced from Africa, divorced from African Americans. They want to see us as Africans, West Africans, or Ghanaians, divorced from all African history except that in Ghana. Well it works in their history for us to be divorced and separate: it works in our interest to be united. And that’s why the great thinkers again would reach out to all African history. Our great thinkers like David Walker [I own a copy of David Walker’s Appeal to the Colored Citizens of the World printed by Black Classic Press. You can buy a copy of that here], like George Wells Parker, these folks understood the importance of history. It wasn’t that they only understood history, but they understood history as that lens to view the modern context through. And they would use it intently, and insist that we be grounded in it, and this is the same thing with Marcus Garvey. When you think about Marcus Garvey, you have to think about someone who is philosophically and historically placed, well centered, in our past. In our history. He has a good grip on it. When we think about people like Malcolm X. These people had good grips on our history, and consequently, they can talk about what’s happened in contemporary settings, and I think Hansberry falls into that category.
FRASER: The third of my most important books is Hubert Harrison’s 1917 When Africa Awakes. I remember buying it at Black and Nobel Bookstore in Philadelphia. Now its on South Street but when I got it, it was on Broad and Erie Streets. And he really breaks down class consciousness, he was Garvey’s former editor, he really showed Garvey that you can own your own press and make money from it. And he was an example to so many afterwards. Can you speak to the significance of Hubert Harrison?
COATES: You know I am not the best Hubert Harrison person. What I would say about Hubert Harrison is that he’s a leading character in that period. When we talk about Garvey and Hubert Harrison, Garvey shares Hubert Harrison’s platform when he first spoke in Harlem. That was one of the platforms that he shared. That meant that Hubert Harrison was already established to so many other people before Garvey came. Hubert Harrison would continue to be the model African scholar that people can still learn from today. He taught classes at Columbia, even though he, this is what I’m told, had to be listed as a janitor for the classes he taught. I know his importance to that same crew of people that I was talking about, the crew, as they evolved and as they existed when Hansberry would come along, as John Clarke would come along. You see, [Arthur] Schomburg was a part of that crew early, early on. Schomburg and people like John E. Bruce [Tony Martin provides a brief bio of John E. Bruce in African Fundamentalism]. That self-thinking, and self-defining knowledge crew continued up to the time that Dr. Ben [Yosef Ben-Jochannan] would come along and become one of the street scholars. So, Harrison was always revered among those people.
FRASER: The fourth and last of my most important Black Classic Press books include Baltimorean poet Laini Mataka’s The Prince of Kokomo. Who told me, who pronounced her name properly; I mispronounced it when I first said it, was Ayanna Gregory, Dick Gregory’s daughter, and I met her in DC, but we had a deeper conversation about Laini in Sankofa. And one of her poems, Laini Mataka’s poems speaks to the use and misuse of printing which I’d like to read and get your thoughts on. Its called “the digitized colonization of information.”
“I will always have books
despite the fahrenheit 451
intentions of digital technology
when this brave, new world
is put into place, whose books
will be preserved & kept anew
julius lester’s “look out whitey
blk power’s gonna git yr momma?”
Please!”
Can you speak to that poem and Mataka’s body of work that you have printed besides this work?
COATES: Sure. I tell people all the time that we’re a historical press. We don’t print poetry. With the exception of Laini Mataka and E. Ethelbert Miller. Laini and I go way back to actually my days before the press was founded. The press grew out of a prison movement and in that prison movement we started a store called the Black book. Laini and I go back to that period, early 1972. I was so impressed by Laini when she was younger, that I promised when we did start the press that I would publish every book that she printed. But whatever book she completed, I would publish it. Its interesting because that’s almost fifty years ago, and I think we’ve managed to do about one book a decade. She still is not as well known as many of the poets who were her contemporaries. For example, Nikki Giovanni was a contemporary of Mataka’s, she is nowhere known near close to that. She’s a Baltimore–D.C. treasure, and very much loved in this area, and that’s why you would have been exposed to her. She’s one of the few poets whose voice has remained consistent throughout all of those decades. And whose wit is just as sharp as it was four or five decades ago. She’s someone who we love at Black Classic Press. [You can buy the books of Laini Mataka’s poetry here]. And someone who loves us. So her poetry is held highly for us.
FRASER: I was very struck by something you said about Black Classic Press coming out of a prison movement. Can you speak to that?
COATES: So you may be aware that our origins, my origins, my origin story goes back to the Black Panther Party. Coming out of the Black Panther Party, when I left the Black Panther Party, there were still a number of people in Baltimore who were under charges. Some of them had been already convicted and sentenced to life. I left the Black Panther Party and upon leaving California, I came back to Baltimore and I committed myself to those brothers who were in jail. And the commitment that I took was a commitment that I would never leave them. How that commitment expressed itself was me setting up a prison movement to support them and other people who were in jail, and that was the George Jackson Prison Movement. So you talk about George Jackson and your number one book. Well, George Jackson for that period and that time, he was absolutely one of the most forward thinking, liberated Black men even though he was in jail. He was killed by the time we set up the prison movement in his honor, but we couldn’t think of a better tribute than that. George believed in reading and that’s what we were focused on, and to bring it into the jail. We were able to do that for awhile because we had as I said a group of Panthers who were still in jail, we were outside the jail, we were the George Jackson Prison Movement. Our first expression was to set up a bookstore, which was the Black book, which we set up. From that we intended and planned to set up a publishing house, which we eventually did that became Black Classic Press. The third expression was to set up a printing company, which we were not able to do until 1995 by that time the George Jackson Prison Movement had had been literally wiped out or smashed by the efforts of COINTELPRO, the efforts of the state government here in Maryland and prison officials, but we were able to still keep operating. We’re still able to get books into the jails and even today, we have a strong presence in jails around the country.
FRASER: One of the concerns that scholars in Black studies like myself, um you mentioned Josh Myers, but a few other scholars I’ve talked to about this, is that weird collaboration between your very important press and Howard University Press. I just wrote a book review of the biography of Margaret Walker, written by Maryemma Graham, and while she doesn’t go into it, the reader definitely infers that Howard University dropped the ball on her [Walker’s] biography. She wrote a biography of Richard Wright. And just the way that and and it’s not only that book, it’s also How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, which, for a long time I know Howard University Press was publishing, but can you just speak to what happened with that collaboration with Howard University Press and why it couldn’t last?
COATES: I understand what you’re saying. And let me just say that I’m finishing up Maryemma Graham, I am into the part where Margaret Walker has taken up the writing of the biography. I’m enjoying the book immensely. I’m enjoying the fact that Maryemma Graham is bringing into focus, the importance of black independent publishers like Third World Press, for example. Broadside Press. She does dimensions of them and they have got to have their place and if not in general, American history. Black folks can’t afford to forget how black books sellers and black book publishers have been so important in moving us along. So I’m just glad that she’s taking that on. When you speak of collaboration, with Howard University Press, there are two things. I really want to be clear on this and I don’t even know that many of the people who at Howard understand this because they’re not publishing, and they haven’t been for a long time. People who set up the press were publishing people and they had a great understanding of the fundamentals of publishing. But as those people transitioned out, as the budgets for publishing evaporated—when the Press was established, there was a budget for it, and there was an expectation that if the press would publish books, it would generate money. Well, that doesn’t happen so much with the academic presses, period. Not just Howard. The academic presses that you see existing now are tied to schools with enormous endowments. You just will not find bestselling books at academic prices. That’s not happening. And unless you have a number of bestselling books, you can’t afford a press. People at Howard, I don’t think fully understood that and I don’t know if they understand it today. I know a lot of people who work at the press, a lot of people who have been affiliated with Howard would say in a minute, ‘we should have our own publishing house.’ They don’t understand. They’re talking about a multimillion dollar annual budget, if you’re talking about the press. And the question becomes, what business are you in? Are you in the business of educating our children? Or are you in the business of publishing books? What business are you in? Whether they understood those fundamentals or not, when the profit and loss statements get done, just like any other business, Howard has to look at those. And they got to cut to the profit side. That’s one side. The other side is there was an intended collaboration in which Black Classic Press was supposed to acquire Howard University Press in 2011. That never happened. And in part, even though we went through all the motions of it, in part it never happened because there were elements at Howard that still held onto the notion that Howard University should have an academic press. But they had no understanding at all what that meant in terms of the fiscal responsibility. How much money, just think, Rhone, you’ve published. Just think in terms of how many editors you have to have on board to keep a flow of books going, okay? To keep a flow.
FRASER: It’s a lot of work.
COATES: You think about that, you know that’s just editors, you know when when you think about marketing department, when you think about all the conferences these people have to go to, you’re talking about millions and millions of dollars. They couldn’t afford that. They couldn’t afford that. So the deal with Howard in 2011 did not go down. We actually noticed them even though they had announced it, they got cold feet and they didn’t respond immediately to requests we made once we noticed that, we actually canned the deal. We sent a letter and did it publicly that said that we were backing out of the deal. Under no circumstances, did I want Black Classic Press to be a whipping boy in a decision that Howard would make to say, hey, no, we’re not going through with this because XYZ. So we did it first. We pulled the plug first.
FRASER: I understand that very clearly. Thank you for making that clear. Recently, Zionist entities in a weird way kind of inspired me to just remind all of my readers, about the value of your press. I noticed particularly the Jewish Forward periodical, tried to question the value of your printing, claiming that because you chose to reprint works like The Jewish Onslaught by Tony Martin, you promote anti-Semitism, making that argument. As a literate and degreed scholar in the field of Black Studies, I, Rhone, find this charge outrageously baseless and racist. Baseless because nowhere in any of the books you have printed, Paul, are there any ideas that promote discrimination against readers because of their religion, Jewish or otherwise? And I find the charge very racist. I was appalled that this was even being brought up last month when you were rightfully awarded by the National Book Foundation. It’s racist because the unfounded and publicized charges, like those against Kyrie Irving and Kanye of anti-Semitism, I’m noticing that trend, and Jesse Jackson, it’s used to uniquely smear the reputations of specifically black men. And, you know, it was just outrageous that people don’t understand your value and would dare fabricate a claim like that. Can you speak to how the National Book Foundation rightfully ignored that and this so-called attack?
COATES: It became obvious when they did it that it wasn’t about me. You know, they were trying to score points and put points on the board in an attack against my son Ta-Nehisi, who had just released his book The Message, and what their desire was, was to create a counter narrative, a counter argument that was going on while he was talking about Palestine, while he was talking about apartheid in Israel. They wanted a counter conversation to go on. And they especially wanted a blow up where the folks who were honoring me, the National Book Foundation would come out on their side of the argument. The problem with that was most of these people knew me, but they also are publishers. And they’re clear. They’re very clear in their own work that you publish books because they have important arguments in them. You don’t publish books because they’re your arguments. There’s a distinction between that.
FRASER: Important arguments that need to be heard and debated publicly. That’s right.
COATES: And you don’t have to agree. Like I don’t agree with everything I published, but whenever I publish, I look for it to have some basis, some relevance, some importance to somebody because all of those conversations are what give us a world conversation. You know, the moment you start isolating or a group comes in and starts isolating a conversation as not being favorable to them, the moment that’s done, you’re taking a huge chunk out of the conversation, especially if it’s in the case, like Tony Martin, you are talking about your lived experience. The Jewish Onslaught is a great memoir, as far as I’m concerned. And so when you go to sanction…that book, you’re taking away a voice. Now, the interesting thing is, in those articles, one of the guys who was writing those articles and trying to convince the National Book Foundation to not give me that award. One of the things he had to admit was that the major publishers are still publishing Mein Kampf!
FRASER: That’s right. You had to admit that. So he’s not attacking them.
COATES: What they said is that Mein Kampf is okay to publish because there’s an Introduction to it and that Introduction uses context.
FRASER: We’re not allowed context. Black people are not allowed context.
COATES: It just doesn’t make sense. Tony Martin has never killed anybody. Let alone anyone from the state of Israel, let alone any of those professors, at Wellesley, you see, he didn’t do that, but here you have Hitler who’s responsible for [murdering] supposed a six million Jews. I don’t know. I mean six million Jews and, you give him a pass? No, something’s not right there. And what’s not right there was their defeated attempt to just make a case that wasn’t there and again to drag Tony Martin, who rightly and thankfully to you, you’ve done the first real celebration and examination of his work. His life and needs to be examined. He was a brave scholar, a brilliant scholar, and he brought a lot of stuff to the table when he wrote, including The Jewish Onslaught. Certainly.
FRASER: Something you said really struck me. I just wanted this to be my last question. Any idea in particular you mentioned there are certain ideas about authors that you do not agree with, but that you, the publisher, knew, was an idea that needed to be heard? Can you give an example of that in any of the books you published, that something you knew personally you didn’t agree with, but you thought this is a conversation that needs to be out there?
You can purchase the edited collection about Frances Cress Welsing called The Osiris Papers here.
COATES: Well, I have to be honest. I don’t agree with everything that Frances Cress Welsing said. Okay, okay. I don’t agree with everything she said. However, Frances was a friend and she was one of the most important voices that I can think of of this century, and largely because Frances didn’t ask you to agree with her. She didn’t ask me to agree with her. She said, ‘look, I have a theory’ and if someone says they have a theory, there is room for you to put up your theories.
FRASER: Which you’ve done really in your Black Classic Press.
COATES: She didn’t ask me to agree with her. She simply said this is my theory. I think her theory is significantly enough that other people should recognize this woman and recognize the space that she’s operating in because here is the deal: what other theories do we have? Oh, why there is a dominant world of white supremacy? She came forward and she says ‘well look, this ain’t even mine. This is Neely Fuller. Yeah, I’m simply interpreting, but what he’s saying makes sense to me.’ Well, a lot of what she said needs sense to me. It still does. It doesn’t mean I wholly agree with it. I never agreed with all of what Dr. Ben said. How do you agree with everything somebody says? Why should agreement be a prerequisite for publishing? It isn’t! Its very important. You don’t have to agree with everything. You don’t have to agree with me on everything I said. You don’t have to recognize me, you don’t have to agree with everything I say. I would think one crazy to agree with everything I said. Because I think I’m gone sometimes. It’s not a prerequisite. What is a prerequisite for a publisher as far as I’m concerned to do is recognize the significance of the conversation, and how in Frances’s case, how her theories are fertile ground and they can give root to other people who have theories. We’ve got a situation because other than that all we’re dealing with is a white dominated view of race and racism. And that race and racism, you know, people attack Frances all the time. I haven’t seen anyone attack her on the global [nature] of white supremacy. You know, the white supremacy. I just have not seen that. And I think she has something there because wherever you look in the world, white supremacy dominates, it has to dominate in order for it to continue to exist. It can’t it exist on a level of equality. It has to dominate. And that’s what we see reflected over and over and over again in the world.
FRASER: I certainly appreciate your time, Paul and sharing your thoughts about the significance of Black Classic Press. Any closing remarks?
COATES: Well, I just want to thank you, first of all for making the time to do this interview. I want to encourage you. I want to encourage you to continue your publishing. You’ve got a voice and now you’ve got a feel of how to get it done. One of the things that’s important for all of us to understand is that the presses that exist, the Black presses that exist, operate on a needle and a thimble. You know what I mean? They got nothing but a piece of a string in between them that’s holding them together. I talk with these guys and these women all the time, okay? And everybody is having a hard time. Well, that simply means that there is space for other people to operate. And we should operate. So I’m encouraging you to continue your work. I love it, it takes a lot of work to pull together collective essays. That is a monster of a job. But if you got the energy for it, continue doing that. Continue looking at some of the hard subjects that need to be done. I don’t know who would have looked at Tony Martin’s work like this. You know? But they’re young scholars out there that want to write in those veins. And if you’ve got the energy to bring those together and work on them, do it while you can, you know, do it while you can. So that’s what I’m going to close with.
Me, Ian Smart, and Paul Coates at Sankofa Bookstore in DC, 2015.