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Dana Williams opens her narrative of Toni Morrison’s time as associate editor at Random House quite wisely, with Morrison’s words at the 1974 Second National Conference of Afro-American Writers at Howard University. This is wise because this is where Toni Morrison justifies her work in a capitalist enterprise seeking to profit from a book reading public after the start of the Black Power movement within the Black Arts Movement. In this first chapter titled “We’re All We Got,” Williams mentions the presence of Carole Parks who was managing editor of Black World periodical owned by John H. Johnson. Morrison says at this conference that “there must be Black independent publishers.” Williams writes that Morrison’s relationship with Black World would absolutely prove her to be a “career woman” who would choose to side with the mainstream when she did not cite Black World in final edits of Random House’s book by Henry Dumas.

Despite this, her role as an editor in the 1970s was absolutely INSTRUMENTAL in pouring new knowledge to the general American public after the Black Studies movement, true to Morrison’s birth sign of Aquarius. She was absolutely the water bearer or the knowledge distributor of the historical significance of the Black Power movement in the books she chose to edit. However Williams’s framing needs clarity. At the end of this first chapter, Williams writes that of her “distinguished editorship,” Morrison understood that “any attempt to revolutionize the publishing industry to be more inclusive of Black authors and Black stories would require an army of people united by a belief in literary and artistic excellence in Black culture” (10).

As a Black Studies scholar, I have to ask what does Williams mean by “artistic excellence”? Does she mean what can easily amount to a shallow tokenism of Black culture where stories are published that show the material and professional rise of a Black individual at the sake of acknowledging their community?

In the second and third chapters, Williams writes how Morrison responded to a job ad in the New York Review of Books posted by L.W. Singer which was a small publishing house in Syracuse. She was hired and L.W. Singer was eventually bought by Random House. In the fourth chapter, Williams chronicles Morrison’s editing of Contemporary African Literature with Edris Makward and Leslie Lacy. She ends this chapter with Morrison’s atttempts to publish Huey Newton’s autobiography which failed; however, she did publish for Random House Newton’s collection of essays titled To Die For the People.

In the fifth chapter, Williams discusses Morrison’s collaborations with Boris Bittker’s The Case for Reparations, and Melville Herskovits’s Cultural Relativism: Perspectives in Cultural Pluralism. Williams proves her point at the end of this chapter that Morrison’s “editorial choices reflected her belief that books could provoke thought and foster critical discourse” (67). The question is, based on Williams’s vague framing, what kind of discourse? A discourse that pushes reparations or a discourse that, to Williams’s first chapter, does nothing to promote independent Black publishers?

The sixth chapter describes The Black Book which, for Williams “more than any other project…defined Morrison’s editorship” because it encapsulated “what a book about Black life could do–celebrate the pride of Black accomplishment and acknowledge the joy and pain of three hundred years of Black life” (82). Williams could have provided more detail into one of the more influential newspaper clippings, like the clipping that inspired Morrison’s fifth 1988 novel Beloved. She relegates much of the content of The Black Book to lists instead of the spiritual meaning that certain symbols and images had for certain Black people. For Williams, The Black Book helped make the point “that a book about Black life when done well and marketed effectively, could be both a popular and critical success” (82). But Williams does not make the case that The Black Book was a critical success by interviewing its readers about what it specifically meant to them.

It is in Wiliams’s seventh chapter titled “The Two Tonis” where her history, her historiography, and her literary criticism is at its best. This chapter is about Morrison’s collaboration with Toni Cade Bambara who edited the The Black Woman in 1970 just before Morrison arrived at Random House. Her analysis of Gorilla, My Love makes the reader want to read the story again when Williams writes that when Bambara’s protagonist Hazel and her brothers go to see the film “Gorilla, My Love,” the man in the booth plays “King of Kings” instead and Hazel “protests, starting a fire at the candy stand…For Bambara, no mythology was sacrosanct. Every act of violence could be interrogated and revised to show that another, more caring reality was possible” (88). Williams’s analysis of Bambara’s 1980 novel The Salt Eaters that Morrison edited is remarkable when she writes: “the Southwest Community Infirmary offers us an example of an attempt to eliminate the gap between traditional and modern medicine practices” (100). What is jarring about this chapter is Williams’s insistence about the end of the Black Arts Movement; she almost suggests that Morrison’s editorship signaled the end of the Black Arts Movement. In this chapter she writes “the Black Arts Movement, which, by 1970, was in decline,” and that Morrison impacted the African American literature tradition “after the Black Arts Movement” (88, 110) as if it ended.

How could the Black Arts Movement be “in decline” or end if Tony Martin was editing and printing his Marcus Garvey Library during this and future decades? How could the Black Arts Movement be “in decline” or end if Angela Dodson is printing issues of Black Issues Book Review from the nineties into the twenty first century? How could the Black Arts Movement be “in decline” or end if George Curry is still printing Emerge magazine?

What redeems this chapter is Wililams’s narrative of the critical reception of The Salt Eaters and Bambara’s response to specifically Adrienne Rich’s review of it.

In reality, the Black Arts Movement has never ended. It continues, and is driven by those who are inspired by its originators.

Williams’s eighth chapter titled “Leon Forrest and the Collective Complexity of Blackness” is about the work of the subject of Williams’s doctoral dissertation, novelist Leon Forrest. Williams writes that Morrison told Forrest that she would have to get Jason Epstein “who had become the firm’s editorial director to approve any offer she might propose on Forrest’s behalf” (125). In the book The Cultural Cold War, Frances Stonor Saunders writes that Epstein was a member of the General Assembly that was part of the Congress on Cultural Freedom which as she and Mary Helen Washington (in The Other Blacklist) was a front group for the C.I.A. Their members’ activities deserve a healthy skepticism. This chapter shows that Williams has an abiding trust in what Morrison and Random House higher ups like Jason Epstein said about the profit sales of Forrest’s work. If Ishmael Reed’s experience with Doubleday is any indication, privately owned booksellers’ claims about what sells requires a layman’s verification.

The eighth chapter shows that Williams’s abiding trust should, for the reader, transform into a healthy skepticism that seeks verification instead of blind acceptance.

Williams’s ninth chapter titled “The Extraordinariness of Ordinary Black Womanhood” is about Morrison’s collaborations with Barbara Chase-Riboud, Lucille Clifton, and June Jordan. This is where Williams’s reveals Morrison’s humility as an editor who works with human beings, rather than automatons who churn out profitable books. Morrison succeeded in publishing books of poetry but had “run out of patience” when dealing with Chase-Riboud and her husband who resisted his wife’s efforts to promote the book. Morrison’s work with these authors told her that Random House’s “reluctance to publish poetry was well founded” (263).

In her tenth chapter “Will the Circle Be Unbroken?” Williams discusses Morison’s editing works by Henry Dumas, John McCluskey and Wesley Brown. Morrison had James Baldwin write endorsement of Brown., and Williams’s point in this chapter is to make clear that although “Black women writers were being published in record numbers, Morrison looked beyond the trend and acquired novels by Black male writers as well” (189).

Morrison’s eleventh chapter is about her relationship with the novelist Gayl Jones who wrote Corregidora (1975) which received critical acclaim. For Morrison according to Williams, what made Jones hard to work with was her “little interest in doing any promotional work for the book” (200). Like Chase-Riboud, Jones had a partner in Bob Higgins who seemed to make demands on Morrison’s editing that she was not willing to tolerate.

While Williams writes in this chapter that “neither Morrison nor Jones identified squarely with feminism or with the nonion of Black women writers being in vogue” her thirteenth chapter on Angela Davis betrays this: Morrison absolutely identified with Black women writers being in vogue (208). That was how she got Angela Davis to write an individual autobiography.

Her twelfth chapter is about her editing the autobiography of Muhammad Ali titled The Greatest (1975). She had to deal with two middlemen before getting to the text of the life of Muhammad Ali–first his collaborator Richard Durham, who produced Destination Freedom on Chicago Public Radio in the forties; and Herbert Muhammad, the spiritual advisor to Muhammad Ali. Williams point at the end of this chapter about The Greatest is poignant and becomes a pandora’s box to more important questions: “inherent biases made it impossible…to determine non-white groups’ interest and book buying tendencies” (240).

This point begs the reader to ask the extent to which Random House was promoting the book among Black audiences. Morrison’s reaching out to Bill Cosby and James Baldwin was one way, but were there institutional connections she could have made to make it more profitable among Black audiences.

Her thirteenth chapter is about Angela Davis, her trial, and Random House publishing Angela Davis: An Autobiography. Williams provides the history of the criminal trial that made Davis famous. Morrison also acquired a second book Women and Race (I read this book as Women, Race and Class in grad school) by Angela Davis. Williams mentions a “bombshell expose” by a “journalist” named Greg Armstrong who claims he has a tape revealing that George Jackson “confesses” to the murder of a prison guard; she cites an article from the Village Voice. It is clear that Williams adds mention of this letter to dramatize the obstacles Morrison overcame to publish this book. What is absolutely clear is that Morrison’s promotion of the individual Angela Davis resulted in the erasure of the political message of Jonathan Jackson and George Jackson. This erasure could only maintain the same gender divide that Williams claims Morrison was questioning in her seventh chapter.

The fourteenth chapter “Giant Talk” is about Morrison’s editing books dealing with histories of the Third World people, including Giant Talk which was an anthology about literature from the Third World; The West and the Rest of Us by Chinweizu; and They Came Before Columbus by Ivan Van Sertima.

Most telling to a Black Studies scholar in the West, is her quote of Chinweizu saying that the function of universities in Africa is “to turn out products useful to imperialists” (278). Williams writes that Morrison’s decision to publish this and other books shows was “her willingness if not determination to rewrite history more honestly in the tradition of the Black Studies movement, which challenged the dominant narratives that mischaracterized, marginalized, and erased African and African diaspora contributions to world history” (292).

In her fifteenth chapter Beyond the Black Book: Scrapbooking Black History, Williams details Morrison’s editing Railroads: Train and Train People in American Culture (1976) by James Alan McPherson and Miller Williams; The Cotton Club: A Pictorial and Social History of the Most Famous Symbol of the Jazz Era (1977) by James Haskins; and Creole Feast: 15 Master Chefs of New Orleans Reveal Their Secrets (1978) by Rudy Lombard and Nathaniel Burton.

The sixteenth chapter and the Acknowledgments sections belonged in a comprehensive Introduction that included simple summaries of each chapter.

Williams’s organization of her book by theme does not do justice to the heavy lifting and multitasking that Morrison undertook as editor. She was courting Angela Davis at the same time she was editing Henry Dumas at the same time she was courting drafts from Muhammad Ali at the same time she was doing A LOT for Random House. Williams shows this in a detailed and refreshing way. Her choice of specific terms is questionable, however. For example, in her chapter on Muhammad Ali, her use of the term “Zaire” which is the term Western imperialists imposed on the Congo for their purposes of colonization, is telling.

As Morrison told Carole Parks and other Black independent journalists, if it came between them and her career, she would always choose her career, but it will not be a dull career.

What is telling about Morrison’s career is that her longest lasting women clients were women clients who were not married: Toni Cade Bambara and Angela Davis.

The publishing industry and American culture has forever changed due to the editorship of Toni Morrison whose work has prolonged, not truncated the Black Arts Movement. Thank you, Dr. Dana Williams, for detailing why. -RF.

What made reading Richard’s 500 page autobiography worth it was his own reflections on the man that raised him at the end. The Reverend C.L. Smallwood was the Baptist preacher who along with his mother Mabel, raised him to play for his church. They planted the seeds of a pathbreaking composer, whose music brought and BRINGS people together across race, class and nationality.

His autobiography is not strictly chronological. When he talks about his school he is perfectly linear, but the discussion of his music sometimes makes him go back or skip forward in time.

In his fourth chapter “My Song,” Smallwood writes “my music became my escape and my refuge from the growing fear and the uncomfortable feelings I had toward my father” (37). He self identifies as a true astrological Sagittarius when he writes: “I had my bows and arrows with the suction cup tips” (37).

The autobiography reminds me of terms I’ve heard in the church often: your earthly father and your Heavenly father. All of Richard’s music was about praising our Heavenly father, and living a life that pleases our Heavenly father. That means knowing on this earth that there are no such things as monsters because monsters become crutches or excuses humans tend to use as an excuse not to take the steps needed to grow up.

In his sixth chapter he mentions a pianist he saw in the fifties who influenced his playing style: Little Lucy Smith, of the Roberta Martin Singers. He dedicates a song from his last live recording (that I attended on 8/24/14) to Little Lucy Smith called “Only A Look.”

His childhood was defined by the movement of his itinerant preacher father who moved his family from DC to New Jersey to Philadelphia back to DC.

He makes a point in the tenth chapter that is true for everything he says before and after: “God was placing people in my life to bring me to my destination” (121).

One of those people was his piano teacher named Bernard Barbour. His parents would send Richard to Mr. Barbour for lessons and when they didn’t have the money to pay him, wouldn’t send Richard. However, when they were short Mr. Barbour’s money, Richard writes that he would reply: “Don’t you dare keep Richard home because of that! Send him right on to lessons. I’ll be waiting” (98). After Mr. Barbour said he could take him no further in piano, Richard enrolled as a high school student in the Junior Preparatory Department at Howard University.

In the same chapter he mentioned God placing people in his life, he brings up a high school classmate who told him that Donny Hathaway would be performing at Howard University. That would be the beginning of a ARTISTIC IMPRINT that Donny Hathaway would leave on Richard. The high school classmate who told Richard about Donny is Julius James who was Minister of Music of my church, Saint James House of Prayer that I attended.

This photo is of the McKinley Technical Senior High School Class of 1967. From the “Classic Black and White” Facebook page. Julius James is in the back row, third from the left, and Richard Smallwood is to his right.

Richard’s autobiography makes clear that it takes a village to raise a composer and he is intentional about DOCUMENT each individual part of that village who made his success possible. Mr. Barbour brought him to Ms. Anne Burwell who emphasized in Richard the need to sight read music and not simply play by ear. He writes that his “Ear Training and Sight Singing Teacher” was Mrs. Evelyn Davidson White who was “a Gestapo taskmaster” (134,5). Mrs. White paid him a high compliment when she called him and said that Richard and his choir “became the music.” When he entered Howard as a Piano major and a voice minor, his instructor was then chair Professor Thomas Kerr whose class he failed during the second semester of his sophomore year because he didnt study nor practice: he partied (169). Kerr gave him an ultimatum to either change majors from Music, or go to “summer school, learn a complete recital by memory, pulling from…the Baroque, Classical, Romantic, and Contemporary and perform it” (174).

He writes that hearing the music Edwin Hawkins inspired him “to finally take writing music seriously” (161). He founded the Celestials on Howard’s campus and visited music labels with demo tape casssettes for label execs to play. He tells of him and Wesley Boyd going to Blue Note Records, whose exec was George Butler. Butler told Richard “This music is great and I’m loving what I’m hearing but it’s so far ahead of what people are doing right now, that no one is going to get it” (185).

His autobiography shows us that the dedicated artist is the trendsetter in the music industry.

Another Gospel recording artist who influenced him is Andrae Crouch whose 1978 album “Live in London” influenced Richard’s sound. He said that watching the Hawkins singers at Constitution Hall in the late seventies was a profound influence on him and he remembers crying and making a decision to become a Gospel artist, despite the fact that throughout the seventies, he said he could not get a record deal. In his twenty third chapter, he writes that he “was promised every kind of record deal known to man,” and that “record execs would say they were interested and I’d never hear from them again” (284). Richard writes that Edwin encouraged him when he told him “there’s no reason why you can’t” be a recording artist.

His first record deal came from Bob McKenzie at Benson Records in Nashville. He said he felt like a “late bloomer” to get a contract at 33, when his classmates seemed to be progressing much faster than he was, and he shared: “Don’t ever compare or judge your progress or lack of it by anyone else’s journey” (297)

He describes feeling humiliated when the label said that songs he wanted to record were not good enough. In 1982 his debut album was released and it led to bookings across the country. In his twenty eighth chapter, he writes how Benson was no longer interested in its Black music, then abruptly invited Richard and his singers back under their label. Richard the artist, knowing his worth, writes: “because Benson had found to be in breach of contract, I was able to leave and I walked. It was not long before I signed with Word Records” (330). While in Nashville he tells the story of how he and Bill Gaither and Gloria Gaither wrote “The Center of My Joy” (331).

The Singers’ next three albums were “Textures” (1987), “Vision” (1988) and “Portrait” (1990). In his thirty second chapter, he discusses putting together the choir now known as Vision, names each member and where they came from. At this time in his life, he was dealing with his mother’s failing health and the foster kids she took in needing more emotional support, and began feeling overwhelmed. These feelings birthed him composing “Total Praise.” The song comes from the lyrics of Psalm 121 which says “I will lift up mine to the hills from whence cometh my help.” Richard describes his own emotional state the best when writing his most popular song talking about the scripture:

It was comforting to me and I wanted to develop it musically into a song that asked for God’s help. However the more I worked on it, the more it kept going in the direction of a praise song. Praise was the last thing I felt like doing. I kept tugging in the opposite direction, but it was like the song was already written and I was just receiving it (368).

“Total Praise” catapulted Richard into national and international popularity. In his thirty second chapter he writes that he’s heard it done “in French, Japanese, Norwegian, Portuguese, Swedish, Samoan, as well as other languages” (374). The thirty third chapter is titled with a phrase Richard has written and spoken often in interviews: “my gift made room for me.” His song “Total Praise” on his first album with Vision titled “Adoration” was making room for him. After getting a phone call from a friend, Richard said he got inspiration for the title song of his second Vision album from a dream. The second Vision album called “Healing” features the UNFORGETTABLE songs “Come Before His Presence” with soloist Debbie Steele-Hall, “Holy Art Thou God” with soloist Vanessa Williams, and with “Be Open” with duet by Charrisse Nelson McIntosh and Darlene Simmons.

.In the thirty fifth chapter called “The Secret,” Richard’s mother reveals to him the identity of his biological father, when Richard was in his fifties. He writes she shared this news days before his live recording for his seventh album. This explains why in the piano interlude section of the 2001 Live recording, one can hear Richard’s mother cry “Hallelujah” in the audience. She must have been relieved to release the burden of that secret. Richard writes: “she told me of a loveless marriage where she was little more than a trophy wife, never touched” (398). Of his step father he explains why he was abusive: “he was angry about me being someone else’s and took it out on me” (400). In 2002, Richard writes that he was diagnosed with clinical depression.

In the thirty sixth chapter, he writes that he delivered his initial sermon called “How to Survive A Babylon Experience.” All of his music deals with surviving in a Babylon Experience. He writes “even though I was taught in Divinity School, I really learned how to structure a good sermon by listening to Pastor Hicks. He influenced me greatly” (409). At the funeral service for Richard, Pastor Hicks that the work of Richard reminds us that “excellence is not elitism. It is stewardship.”

In his thirty seventh chapter titled “Revelation” he details his fourth album with Vision entitled “Journey: Live In New York” that features songs by Kim Burrell, Kelly Price, Chaka Khan, the Hawkins Singers, and the original Smallwood Singers. After the 2005 recording in New York’s Hammerstein Ballroom. The most captivating is the powerful worship song “I’ll Trust You.” The thirty eighth chapter is titled “The Last Voice She’ll Hear” because Richard was the last voice his mother heard before she passed on December 1, 2004. After his mom passed, he said his brain “was on shutdown” and his “comprehension level was close to none.”

The thirty ninth chapter shows that he has a vivid spiritual imagination. He attributed his negative feelings to a spiritual entity with a cat’s head and a snake’s body. He describes himself fighting this creature which represented his fear and depression. Richard said “GET THE HELL OUT OF MY HOUSE!! My fear was gone and all I was left with…was anger” (455). The duel between Richard and this snake-cat felt like reading a battle in Beowulf. At the end of this chapter, he writes: “everything is spiritual” (458).

The fortieth chapter describes his inspiration for his fifth project with Vision, a studio album called “Promises” (2011). Of his inspiration, Richard writes: “no matter what the media says or its naysayers say, or whats going on in politics, God is still in control” (464). The theology of Richard and of his pastor H. Beecher Hicks is not a theology where God condones, Jim Crow or neocolonialism. In the theology of Richard’s music and lyrics, when one reads “God is in control,” one assumes a God that will take vengeance against one’s enemies. Thats why one of the most memorable songs is “Unbroken Promises” and the song he composed for Donny Hathaway’s daughter Lalah, called “Praying For Peace.”

In his forty first chapter he describes a vivid dream with his stepfather where they were walking down a street together and the two of them are hearing music and are walking together to find its source. They locate the music in a church and sit down together. The stepfather was reaching down to pick him up at the end of their time in the church and Richard politely replies “I’m fine, Daddy.” He writes that immediately after this he starts “to cry uncontrollably” (478). It is this dream of his stepfather that humanizes Richard’s perception of his father to the extent that he writes: “I do know I am healed of the emotions that had me bound and troubled for so long. There was healing in that music that I experienced. My bitter feelings about my stepfather were gone” (479).

In the forty second chapter he visits the plantation on land owned by his maternal great-grandfather James Cain.

The forty third chapter details how he prepared for his last live recording “Anthology” in Largo, Maryland in 2014, which I attended. He wrote that Warren Shadd provided “his amazing 9’3″ grand piano that was absolute heaven to play. It became my favorite piano, hands down” (494).

He elaborates one last time on the “healing” of emotions about his father:

One of the things I had to accept after having that vision in 2010 is that I actually loved my stepdad…Even as messed up as he was, he still established some great churches around the country, many of which are still flourishing. I’ve sat and pondered the idea of him never being in my life. Suppose my mother had not married him and she had raised me in Durham. Would I be who I am today? He insisted I learn every major hymn in the old Baptist Hymnal. He insisted I learn every major hymn in the old Baptist Hymnal. I believe there is purpose in everything.

Reading Richard’s reflections on the abuse at the hands of his father was humbling to read. However what makes his writing about it remarkable is that at the end of the autobiography he enumerates all the ADVANTAGES he experienced as a result of being raised by Reverend Smallwood. He is able to reconcile his resentment with his success as a world renowned composer. He exhibited the WISDOM, which is virtue popularly associated with the astrological sign of Sagittarius. He applied knowledge about everything that happened in his life and he did not allow the reader to see Reverend C.L. as only a monster.

I remembered one thing about the photos Richard shared of his biological father, Robert. He was pointing to a vinyl record cover with the face of Paul Robeson.

Both Robeson and Richard Smallwood were artists whose music was not easily accepted by the music industry.  Robeson’s music suffered an industry boycott because of his political views.  Richard describes an invitation to the White House while Obama was President that was rescinded because of his association with Jeremiah Wright.  Jacquie Luqman’s forthcoming book We Need More John Brown Christians calls on Christians to make their faith more relevant.  We thank Richard Smallwood for bringing Gospel music into the twenty first century and reminding us that despite whatever shenanigans pulled by Republicans or Democrats, “God is still in control.”  -RF.  

This video discussed my latest book “To A More Positive Purpose: Critical Responses to the Scholarship of Tony Martin” that you can watch here. You can buy the book here.

This book considers how the real life figure of Malcolm X is dealt with in different genres–the painting, the poem, the stage play, the opera, the adult novel, the young adult novel and the children’s novel. It is A MUST READ.  It gets the reader to think about which exact form suits the purpose of their unique study of the life of Malcolm X.  If one wants to teach an actor how to portray Malcolm on stage, like Denzel Washington did in Laurence Holder’s stage play, When the Chickens Come Home to Roost, they should read Derek Handley’s article in this collection about Jeff Stetson’s stage play The Meeting.  

Nicole Hodges Persley’s article “Malcolm X’s Echo:  Shaping the 21st Century Black Artscape” was probably the most vague and unfocused of all the reflections in this book collection because it used the most vague descriptors such as “empowerment” without making clear to the reader the relationship between the current artists mentioned and Malcolm X’s actual philosophy: this article needed to quote directly from Malcolm’s speeches and writings.  For example, Persley writes “the works of [Kendrick] Lamar, [Ava] Duvernay, [Kehinde] Wiley, and [Suzan-Lori] Parks engage with his [Malcolm’s] later, more inclusive philosophy that speaks to a broader humanistic perspective.”  This reviewer was not clear as to how exactly each of these articles did this, and wanted to know where in Malcolm’s speeches and writings he encourages a “humanistic” perspective.  Persley did not make this clear.  

Conversely, Sarah RudeWalker’s article “Poems For Malcolm as Aesthetic Activism in the Black Arts Movement” makes clear exactly the goal of poetry that emerged from the Black Arts movement: “to bring readers to Black consciousness by distinguishing real revolutionary thinking and actions from apathy, complicity, conservatism and performativity” (32).  RudeWalker focuses on the 1969 poetry book For Malcolm:  Poems on the Life and Death of Malcolm X published by Broadside Press and the poets that contributed to this collection including Amiri Baraka and Margaret Danner.  

   In her article “The X-Factor in the Poetry of Haki R. Madhubuti,” Regina Jennings uses an African centered theory, influenced by C. Tsehloane Keto and Mariamu Welsh-Asante to analyze Haki Madhubuti’s poetry about Malcolm X.  She writes that Madhubuti urges the Negro to evaluate reasons why Blacks would run from identification with Africa; she writes that both Malcolm X and Madhubuti helped make fertile ground for the coming and the new people who discarded a racist name (55).

Derek Handley provides a comprehensive analysis of a 2023 Milwaukee production of Jeff Stetson’s 1987 stage play The Meeting based on Stetson’s imagined meeting between Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr.  For Handley, “both men resume their friendly dialogue and have one last arm wrestling which…ends with both men declaring a draw” (61). However Handley writes that Stetson used Malcolm, more than King, “as a symbol to represent the larger struggles of Black people” (65).  

Howard Rambsy’s article “The Malcolm X Crime Scene Investigator” takes a comprehensive look at studies of the scene of Malcolm X’s 1965 assassination in the Audubon Ballroom.  He privileges the work of Abdur-Rahman Muhammad, a citizen journalist, or who Rambsy calls an “amateur investigator” whose due diligence pieces together a narrative that includes culprits of the murder of Malcolm X.  Although the mainstream media’s 2011 interest in the assassins of Malcolm X might have shed light on Manning Marable, Rambsy makes clear that Abdur-Rahman Muhammad’s contribution to exposing the identity of the assassins was downplayed: “amateur investigators persisted in continuously disentangling the Malcolm X crime scene long after NYC court officials considered the case solved” (90). Evaluating this case from a Black Studies perspective, the work of Muhammad is that of a “citizen journalist” which in many cases is more professional and less amateur than the work of a mainstream academic whose work generally promotes a social agenda made to silence those of citizen journalists.  In Malcolm X: A Lie of Reinvention, Jared Ball and Todd Steven Burroughs made the case that Marable’s biography of Malcolm aimed to turn Malcolm X into a liberal.  Rambsy could have made his case that his agenda was not to do the same by avoiding the word “amateur” as it only seems to reinforce those distinctions made by the U.S. academy to unnecessarily separate degreed from the non-degreed.

In her analysis of the 2023 Metropolitan Opera production of X: The Life and Times of Malcolm X composed originally by 1986 by Anthony Davis with a libretto by Thulani Davis, Allison Michele Lewis writes that the Davises “work to destabilize white supremacist categories of genre, sound, and race, exemplifying the Black cultural nationalist politics embedded in the foundations of Black people” (91).  The story of the opera, for Lewis, holds the audience complicit in and responsible for his death.  She traces the history of Black operas in the twentieth century from works by Shirley Graham Du Bois, and makes the point that “most opera companies fail to truly repair the damage they have done over the last century whether when they explicitly excluded Black companies and in turn Black audiences from operatic performance” (100).  However this assumes an obligation by the mainstream to include Black composers, when they absolutely have no obligation to do, especially in a twenty first century world where a global internet and a global economy opens the door for the opera genre to not require the requirements that mainstream opera houses require.  Lewis’s mention of Garvey assumed he would use his shipping line to “transport Black people to a Black nation/planet” when Garvey made clear that creating a nation is not for all Black people, only those conscious Blacks aware of its importance.  

Mudiwa Pettis provides an awesome review of Kemp Pettus’s screenplay of the 2023 film One Night in Miami based on an actual 1964 meeting of Jim Brown, Sam Cooke, Muhammad Ali, and Malcolm X.  Most climactic in her review was Malcolm’s ugly argument with Sam Cooke that gets reconciled when Sam reenters the scene, and when Malcolm expresses appreciation for Sam Cooke’s musical brilliance and “its distinctive ability to inspire Black people to mass action” (128).  Like Stetson’s play, both Handley and Pettis show that the storylines depend on the thought and actions of Malcolm X.  This play and film each show Malcolm X as a pivotal figure who represents the interests of the masses of Black people.   

In his article “Malcolm X and the Novel,” Keith Gilyard analyzes Kevin Baker’s 2006 novel about Malcolm X called Striver’s Row and Ilyasah Shabazz’s 2015 work X: A Novel.  He details Baker’s creative liberties and writes of his “compression” of “events that unfolded over years…into a two month period…allows for a dramatic intensity because Malcolm’s obsession with Miranda [an employee of West Indian Archie], his self destructive descent, his acute paranoia, and the hauntings of his mother are unyielding” (134).  This seems to culminate on his reported jump into “Buzzard’s Bay” on his way back to Harlem.  For Gilyard, Shabazz’s novel adheres more to the contours of Haley’s autobiography with some “revisionist aspects.”  He calls her 2021 sequel The Awakening of Malcolm X, a “stirring story of her father’s intellectual, emotional, psychological and rhetorical growth” that while it “misses some opportunities to explore her protagonist’s psyche in greater depth,” is still an account “superior” to any other published account of Malcolm’s prison time (143).  

Lindsay Burton’s article “The Symbolic Malcolm X in Contemporary Young Adult Fiction” looks specifically at Angie Thomas’s 2017 novel The Hate You Give, Nnedi Okorafor’s Nisibidi Scripts series (2011, 2017, 2022), and Brittney Morris’s 2019 novel Slay.  She could have improved her analyses of these novels’ relationships to Malcolm X by quoting his speeches or writings as her analyses reveals an incomplete understanding of what Malcolm X stood for.  She writes that Thomas’s protagonist Starr’s choice “to fight police action primarily with her voice, rather than by gun violence…indicates her ability to grasp the complexities of X’s ideologies” when in reality this indicates Starr’s inability to grasp the simplicity of Malcolm’s fundamental belief in self-defense in his 1963 Message to the Grassroots.  Burton writes that Okorafor “acknowledges the impact that [Malcolm] had on..generations of Black children and their negotiations of their…Pan-African, Black identities,” but does not make clear how Okorafor does this (154).  Her mention of Okorafor’s use of the “Lamb” and “Leopard” groups in Nigeria begged a comparison to Malcolm’s 1964 speech to the UN entitled “An Appeal to African Heads of State.”  Her attempt to relate Malcolm X or his philosophy to Morris’s novel is by far the biggest reach of this collection, as nowhere in her plot discussion is Malcolm’s philosophy.  What is in the plot is a character named Malcolm, but he espouses Malcolm’s philosophy in name and rhetoric only, not in action.  Burton writes that Morris’s protagonist Kiera is the mastermind behind a video game that gets a user killed and Kiera’s boyfriend Malcolm consequently threatens Kiera’s own life.  This novel ends with Kiera moving to Europe where she is paid to continue the kind of Western role play conceptions that actually counteract the goals that Malcolm X promoted in his lifetime.  What Burton calls the “cosmopolitan version” of Black identity is more in line with what Malcolm X has called the “house nigger” in his 1965 “Message to the Grassroots” speech.  Like Persley, Burton’s article could have benefited with a more exhaustive look at Malcolm’s philosophy which actually pushes Morris’s novel as a cautionary tale about how not to develop healthy adult relationships.  

In her article “Ideologies and Evolution in Representing Malcolm X For Young Readers,” Mursalata Muhammad rightfully critiques the deficit model in books about Malcolm X for young readers.  Muhammad makes clear that this deficit model is one where Malcolm’s family and its members are portrayed as tragic victims who left their son at a deficit.  Muhammad writes that Ilyasah Shabazz disrupts the deficit narrative by showing how Malcolm X grew up in a close knit family where his parents nurtured his natural curiosity and instilled “discipline, fortitude, and self-determination;” it was not an environment “defined solely by oppression” (170).  Her examples include “the scenes of Louise [Malcolm’s mother] and Malcolm’s siblings working together in the garden” where they “reflect a sense of unity and collaboration, showcasing the family’s shared efforts and love for the land” (171).  -RF.

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.

This past Sunday I saw Donja R. Love’s play produced at the Contemporary American Theater Festival at Shepherd University in Shepherdstown, West Virginia (SPOILER ALERT: If you do not want to know the plot and the resolution of this theatrical work, please do not continue reading.) This play was worth the wait. Whereas I am ready to call this work a “play” because it is rehearsed, performed, and staged by a cast and crew and its elements, Donja made clear to me that he wants his work to be considered an “offering” rather than a play.

This “offering” should be produced, supported and seen for two main reasons. One, it unites the sacred and the secular of the Black radical tradition and restores the role of the Black church as the vanguard for social change. Two, it demonstrates better than any other play in the twenty first century the value of the masculine-feminine dynamic in overcoming ANY obstacle to pass moral values to the younger generation.

This play is an obvious response to Jasper Wiliams’s troublesome eulogy of Aretha Franklin that pathologized the Black family since the civil rights movement. In this eulogy the moral ills of our LGBTQ or SGL (Same Gender Loving) members were blamed for the downfall of the Black family, instead of the rampant deindustrialization and mass incarceration that came to define the end of the twentieth century. Donja’s offering shows us that the LGBTQ or the SGL members are the vanguard or the future of the Black family.

The play begins and ends with a sermon in a pulpit. It begins with Reverend Bridges asking his congregation where the beauty is, in the midst of our daily difficulties. The play ends with Reverend Bridges’ grandson answering his grandfather’s question and telling his younger congregation thirty years later, that the answer to his grandfather’s question of where to find the beauty in life is, in himself.  Despite the social conditions that try to deny Black life beauty, from the AIDS epidemic to deindustrialization, to a church culture that is handicapped by homophobia, Manny at the end of this play shows that in his life is beauty.  The first act is set in 1986 Brooklyn, New York and the second act is set in 2016 Jackson, Mississippi.

Donja’s offering does a remarkable job of showing the beauty of Manny’s life, first in the life of his father J.R. who dies by the end of the first act, to the life of his son who demonstrates what it looks like to hold on to beauty.  

In the first act, we are introduced to the “beauty” of J.R.  Not only is he physically attractive with a powerful machismo performed unforgettably by Jude Tibeau, he also enjoys a healthy sex life. 

(a photo of me and Jude Tibeau who performed J.R. & Manny)

J.R. asks his pregnant wife Max if they can have sex, and she politely declines and encourages him to get tested at the doctor’s office.  When J.R. gets tested, his Doctor “Steinberg” tells him he has AIDS.  Before he leaves the doctor’s office, he is approached by a caring advocate in Abdul who invites him to a group therapy session for HIV positive men.  

At this session, we meet an HIV positive corporate scion in Troy, a transwoman named Grace, and a young man “with lesions on his face” named Eric.  J.R. is encouraged to tell Max that he is HIV positive.  When he tells her, she discloses that since their conception, she got tested and that she and her child is HIV negative. She meets Abdul and, as J.R. told his group, his wife Max and him have “an understanding” about him sleeping with men and women.  

This is the part of the play where the audience feels the “beauty” of sexual freedom for J.R.  Max notices the nonverbal chemistry between J.R. and Abdul and invites Abdul to spend the night with J.R. while she visits her friend Vernetta, suggesting the whole time her own intimate relationship with Vernetta.   

Love’s offering shows us that an AIDS diagnosis does not have to be a death sentence that requires a suppression of one’s sexuality.  Max cherishes her husband’s relationship with his lover Abdul.  She does not use his disclosure of his status as a ball and chain to police his sexuality or stifle his beauty.  In the relationship of Max and J.R., we see unapologetic beauty.  We see the beautiful affection between J.R. and Abdul, we J.R. living his full life.

Abdul introduces a camcorder to the group and brings a camcorder to Max. Max encourages J.R. to record a video for their soon-to-be born child.  J.R. obliges and sings to the recording device.  He sings with a passion and an awareness and reflects the beauty that Max and Abdul have showed him.  This beauty is plucked at when the supply of health insurance medications that J.R. is using on Max’s employment is threatened when her co-workers start ostracizing her because of the rumor about J.R. having HIV.  When Max chooses to inform J.R.’s parents about their situation, Max and J.R. argue. We as the audience feel the social pressures that J.R. endures for choosing to hold on to the beauty in his life.  Abdul passes from AIDS, then J.R.  We see the social pressures on Max.  She loses her husband, her lover, and her child’s father.  In one scene, these pressures trigger an emotional outburst in her.  Toni L. Martin’s talent shines in this scene and culminates in her taking out J.R.’s robe and wearing it. 

(A photo of me and Toni L. Martin who performed Max)

The first act ends with a visit to Max by J.R.’s father, the Reverend Bridges who is clearly paralyzed by the stigma of AIDS.  Max declines his offer but with the social pressures of the care of a newborn, an increasingly comfortable alcoholism, she eventually takes the Reverend up on his offer to allow him and his wife to raise her son.  

In the second act we are introduced to a group home for SGL queer youth, led by Reggie.  We are fast forwarded thirty years to see J.R.’s son Manny now, thirty years old, in a relationship with Elijah who both live in a dilapidating shack in Jackson, Mississippi, that also is home to Terrell, a “flamboyant teenager” and Eve “a transwoman in her early twenties.” 

This act we see the son of J.R. who is Manny hold on to the “beauty” that a repressive society taught him to deny.  Manny’s ambition in this act is to get meds for his HIV positive lover Elijah, and he endures several obstacles in the twenty first century to do so. He holds on to the beauty and the audience sees the sacrifices he makes to hold on to it. 

Manny does not realize that the nurse that Reggie has hired part-time to take care of Elijah is none other than Max, his biological mother.  She surprises Manny when she notices him drink his stash of booze hidden on the front porch, recalling the social pressures she succumbed to decades before.  

The sympathy for Manny rises as he talks with his father Reverend Bridges who keeps a veil over Manny’s head about the true identity of his biological mother and father.  The fact that Reverend Bridges is completely unable throughout the entire play to tell Manny about his father J.R. and the beauty in his life is a sincere tragedy, and it shows how SERIOUS the stigma of HIV and AIDS was for people of Bridges’s generation.  

Part of Manny’s beauty is his patience with Elijah, his belief in modern medicine, and his belief that this medicine will keep Elijah alive and maintain part of his beauty which is affection with Elijah, and his loving relationship with Elijah.  We see how Manny will do anything for Elijah.  To keep his beauty, Manny sells sex to a wealthy patron in Adam despite the havoc this creates in his relationship with Elijah.  The stage directions tells us that the sex Adam pays for from Manny is “quick as can be, but for Adam, it’s everything he needs it to be.”  

When he returns to the group house, Eve is the one who tells Manny “I saw you get out that car.”  Eve asks Manny to be careful.  Elijah interrogates Manny who replies that “I told him I upped my prices.  And it worked.  Now I got money to go towards all the repairs the house needs and to help pay for Ms. Max.”  However Elijah tells Manny that he is giving up on him.  Manny is no longer sleeping in their bed: he now sleeps in the attic.  Terrell tells Manny that his lover’s mother kicked him out of his house and Terrell asks Manny if his lover can stay in the group home.  Manny says “of course.”  

Amid the social pressures that Max faces, Manny goes out on the porch for his secret stash of booze, where Max reveals to Manny that she is his biological mother.  Manny is furious and orders Max to leave.  Before she leaves, she hands Manny a VHS cassette that Manny reluctantly but eventually seeks to watch.   When Manny confronts Reverend Bridges about his true maternity and paternity, he offers a hush money check of one thousand dollars to Manny.  Manny says to make it twenty five hundred.  The Reverend obliges, but only if Manny agrees to become the new Reverend of his church.  Reverend Bridges shows himself here as a passive figure.  He does not “go forward” to make new disciples as Jesus did.  Instead he waits until he is acrimoniously confronted to educate the younger generation about the truth of where they came from.  

When Manny returns to the attic, Reggie notices him looking for the VHS tape cassette player and locates it for Manny.  Manny watches his father J.R. and evidently musters the strength he needs to tell his congregation how one can in fact live with the God given beauty one is allowed.   Manny and Max reconcile.

This offering destroys the myth that the Black family is dead.

This offering destroys the myth of the “no-good” Black man who wants no relationship with his children.

This offering destroys the myth of the Black woman as a hopeless nag.

This offering destroys the myth that Black women hate Bisexual or gay men.

This offering must be seen, produced, reviewed and studied.  -RF.

Thank you to Donja R. Love, Theresa Davis, Brandon Nick, Jennifer Fritz, Larry Felzer, and my grandmother Maudlin Young who each made my review possible. -RF.

On June 24th this year I had the honor of presenting the paper “Green Lumumba: Identity and Nationalism in Toni Morrison’s Tar Baby and Aimé Cesairé’s A Season in the Congo. I was invited by the Toni Morrison Society to present at the Toni Morrison Symposium this year in Fort-de-France, Martinique. It was a surreal experience.

(Photo credit: Kris Yohe)

In this paper I discussed the theme of betrayal in both Morrison’s fourth novel Tar Baby and in Césaire’s stage play A Season in the Congo. Specifically, I discussed how Morrison’s character Jadine Childs in her romantic experience with Son Green, betrayed Son Green in her relationship by her inability to respect Son Green’s U.S. Southern culture (WARNING: THERE ARE SPOILER ALERTS IN THIS POST). I discussed in this paper the factors that attracted Son to Jadine, but also, how the novel chronicles his moral responsibility to stop pursuing Jadine once he was advised by Thérèse to do so because Jadine “has forgotten her ancient properties.” I find this such a common dilemma among many Americans: loving the sexual attraction but being misled by the individual’s modern soul-killing values.

(Cover illustration by Thomas Blackshear)

I chose to compare this betrayal to the betrayal by Césaire’s Mokutu character of Césaire’s Patrice Lumumba in his play A Season in the Congo. I based my read of this play from my attending the 2013 performance of this play stage managed by Lazette McCants and directed by Rico Speight. While in Martinique I met the niece of Aimé Césaire, Murielle, who granted Rico permission to produce the play in 2013. In the play, Mokutu pledges allegiance to Lumumba to work towards “dipenda” or an independent Congo.

However behind the scenes Mokutu is plotting with the banking class, the U.N. Ambassador and with Belgians to overthrow Patrice Lumumba. This is based on what actually happened in 1961. The dramatic irony of Césaire’s play is that everyone in the play knows this impending betrayal including Patrice’s wife Pauline, except Patrice. It is clear that Césaire intends for Lumumba’s ignorance of Mokutu’s plans to overthrow him to be highly dramatized on the verge of delirium. Both Morrison’s Son Green and Césaire’s Lumumba are lured by the promise of a lasting relationship. However both are deceived by individuals who betray because of their being socialized to desire safety in a Western world. Jadine betrays Son heads for the material safety of her modeling career (the narrator of the novel tells us she was promised thousands in Europe). And Mokutu who betrays Lumumba in the material safety of his role as a neocolonial puppet for Belgian and American banking interests. To this day the coltan in our smartphones comes from the pillage that Césaire wrote about. He intends his audience to see Lumumba’s death as a sincere tragedy. Conversely, in Morrison’s novel, Son has an opportunity to escape the claws of Western colonization. When instructed by Thérèse to follow the horsemen on the rural side of Isle-des-Chevaliers, the novel ends with him taking her advice.

We visited a monument whose origin story had an uncanny connection with the myth Morrison creates of “the horsemen” in her fictional Isle-des-Chevaliers (island of horsemen) in Tar Baby. This monument is called in French Memorial de L’Anse Caffard and on our trip to this memorial we met the sculptor Laurent Valere who told me personally that the Martinican poet Edouard Glissant was instrumental in its creation. This is a monument to the enslaved who lost their lives drowning on a wayward slave ship in 1830. In Morrison’s story, “the horsemen” are descendants of enslaved Africans who were on their way to “Isle des Chevaliers” who were struck blind upon seeing the island. These are “the horsemen” who live like maroons on her island. Thérèse tells Son to join the horsemen at the end of the novel, instead of pursuing Jadine. The horsemen live in the woods and not according to the Western plantation model that Morrison’s Valerian Street lives by. I appreciate the connection that our symposium keynote speaker, Edwidge Danticat (pictured below with myself), made between Morrison’s “horsemen” and the spirits of those who L’Anse Caffard is dedicated to.

The lesson from the novel, the play and the experience in Martinique for me was to NOT forget your ancient properties. This includes not being used as a tool for Western interests. Morrison writes Tar Baby in a way where the reader is supposed to celebrate the psychological freedom of Son because he is not pursuing an individualistic lifestyle like Jadine; Césaire writes A Season in the Congo in a way where the audience member is warned not to be like Mokutu. The audience member is warned not to be the proverbial wood used against other wood in the annihilation of the forest.

I could not help but notice how Western media continues to attempt to promote colonial values in Africa, specifically NBC’s use of a Black reporter to goad African Stream into admitting that African Stream “targets Black audience with misinformation” as African Stream’s July 1st IG post reveals.

African Stream has been first and foremost in reporting news from an anti-Western and African perspective. They continually report on the efforts of the people on the ground to resist Western imperialism and MUST NOT be considered as targeting Black audience with misinformation. As that July 1st post later reveals in promoting the policies of the Biden administration, specifically in goading Kenyan President Ruto to accept the repressive policies of the International Monetary Fund, NBC News is the true culprit in promoting misinformation. I wrote about the difference between industry journalism and advocacy journalism in my first book in 2019 and African Stream is clearly on the side of advocacy journalism.

It is our duty not to be used to decimate the forest of indigenous people. Like Morrison’s Son Green and Césaire’s Lumumba, our spirit guides are waiting for us to make the right decision of moving away from Western colonization and to pursue truth. Special thanks to Dr. Carolyn Denard and the Toni Morrison Society for inviting me to Martinique. -RF.

My third book To A More Positive Purpose: Critical Responses to the Scholarship of Tony Martin will be released Monday, February 19th, 2024 at Penn State University in University Park, PA. I will be interviewed by Penn State University Department of African American Studies Professor Michael West about my book. You can register to attend this book talk via Zoom here.

This book is scheduled for a February 2024 release.