Haki Madhubuti, the Book Publisher on the South Side
CHICAGO
— In 1956, when Haki R. Madhubuti was 14 years old and living in
Detroit, his mother gave him a firm order: Go down to the public library
and check out “Black Boy” by Richard Wright, the seminal memoir on growing up African-American in the segregated South.
“I
refused at first because I hated myself,” Dr. Madhubuti, a poet and
book publisher who is now 75, said in an interview this week at his
office on the South Side of Chicago. “I didn’t want to go to a white
library and ask for that book. But she persisted.”
So
he did what he was told, found the book on a shelf and was immediately
rapt, reading nearly half of it in one sitting. After finishing the rest
at home, he came back the next day and checked out everything Wright
had ever written.
It
was an intellectual awakening, Dr. Madhubuti said, the first leap on a
path that took him from reading in the library to writing his own poetry
to founding Third World Press, one of the oldest and most prestigious black presses in the country.
“All
these ideas” were “jamming my head at such a young age,” he said,
sitting in the art-filled converted rectory that he uses as an office.
“For the first time in my life,” he recalled thinking, “there’s
something positive: Now I’m a reader, I’m a thinker at another level.”
Dr.
Madhubuti, tall and elegant in a dark suit with a white pouf of a
pocket square, was in a reflective mood one afternoon this week. Third
World Press has just turned 50, an anniversary that will be celebrated
with a week of festivities in Chicago, beginning on Saturday with an
appearance by the author Ta-Nehisi Coates and his father, W. Paul Coates, a publisher of Afrocentric books in Baltimore.
That
half-century has been spent at the heart of black intellectual life in
Chicago, far away from mainstream, and mostly white, publishing circles
in Manhattan. Third World Press has released hundreds of books of
poetry, nonfiction and memoir reflecting on the black experience in
America, many written by people whose work would not have been accepted
by bigger, corporate-owned publishers.
Third
World Press published much of Gwendolyn Brooks’s later work; a
best-selling guidebook of sorts for African-Americans called “The
Covenant With Black America,” by Tavis Smiley, the columnist and
commentator; and more than 20 of Dr. Madhubuti’s own books.
“He has told the hard truths,” said Nora Brooks Blakely,
Ms. Brooks’s daughter. “He has addressed not only the relationships
between blacks and other cultures here in this country and beyond, but
he has also dealt with some of the more uneasy-making interrelationships
between blacks: How blacks have seen each other, what expectations
blacks have of other blacks, whether those are positive and uplifting or
disparaging expectations.”
It
was a teenage interaction in 1960 with an African-American stranger
that helped lead Dr. Madhubuti to his own education and career as a
poet, publisher and academic.
Going
door to door selling magazines, Dr. Madhubuti — then known as Don L.
Lee, his birth name — knocked at a home in Springfield, Ill.
A
very sophisticated African-American man answered the door, he recalled,
and invited him inside, offering him a sandwich and advice.
“He
said, ‘Young man, the one thing no one can take away from you is an
education,’” Dr. Madhubuti said. He urged him to enroll in community
college. Then he gave him $20, which would be about $160 today, and sent
him on his way.
“Tears came to my eyes,” he said. “That was the first time a black man had done anything for me.”
Dr. Madhubuti returned to Chicago determined to build something of his own.
He
changed his name in 1974 to one that he felt better reflected his
identity, then started Third World Press out of his basement apartment
in Englewood, a neighborhood on the South Side, printing chapbooks with a
mimeograph machine and selling them on the street. Working from
Chicago, rather than New York, was an ingredient to his early success,
he said.
“Being
in the middle of the continent was critical because we had access to
both sides of the nation,” Dr. Madhubuti said. “I remember taking books
out to the West Coast in a van and selling them. I would just travel
with our inventory.”
These
days, he publishes about two dozen books each year. After the recession
in 2008, the press’s financial situation faltered, so Dr. Madhubuti
converted it to a nonprofit, Third World Press Foundation, and now he is
breaking even. He has tried to seize on the cultural moment in 2017,
planning to release an anthology on the Trump era this fall.
The 50th anniversary
has pushed Dr. Madhubuti to think about what will come next for Third
World Press, which is a beloved cultural institution in Chicago but is
not widely known elsewhere, even among publishing insiders.
Getting
the word out about the books he publishes has become more difficult. A
bookstore he used to operate in the South Side’s Chatham neighborhood
has long closed, pushed out by a nearby Borders store, which didn’t last
either. He has spent little time on self-promotion and has no team of
marketers and publicists that other publishers consider essential.
“Publishing
independently in America is very difficult,” said Chris Calhoun, a
literary agent who recently sold Dr. Madhubuti’s and the press’s archive
to the University of Illinois. “There aren’t many left. For a black
independent to have survived, to have contributed to the culture as he
has for 50 years now, is just a remarkable achievement.”
Dr.
Madhubuti’s own plan is to begin another memoir, picking up after his
first one, “YellowBlack: The First Twenty-One Years of a Poet’s Life.”
The weeklong festival, beginning Saturday, will draw Cornel West, Father
Michael Pfleger and others.
“I’m
going to use that time to reflect and put it out there that it may be
time for me to move on,” Dr. Madhubuti said. “My problem now is that I
need to write.”
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