Richard Prince’s Book Notes™: Holiday Offerings
Sheila Brooks and Clint C. Wilson II
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Our latest list of nonfiction books by journalists of color or those of special interest to them — part one of two.
The second installment will be published in the coming days. [A third installment was added.]
Al Allen
Al Allen, who retired in 2012 after a nearly 50-year broadcast journalism career in news-rich Detroit, including 25 years as a reporter for WJBK-TV, has “We’re Standing By,” (Atkins & Greenspan, $25 hardcover; $13 paperback; $9.99 Kindle).
Written in the short sentences of a television news report, Allen recounts anecdotes from his career and offers advice to would-be journalists, such as knowing the answer before you ask a question.
At last summer’s convention of the National Association of Black Journalists, Allen bemoaned the slow progress on diversity in Detroit television.
“During my tour of duty, Channel 4 only had one black news director, Bob Warfield; Channel 7, one black news director; and Fox 2, none. There’s one human resource director. We have not given up the fight,” he writes in this 76-page book, issued by longtime Detroit television journalist Elizabeth Atkins, now CEO of Atkins & Greenspan Writing and Two Sisters Writing & Publishing.
- Julie Hinds, Detroit Free Press: Fox 2 Detroit great Al Allen looks back on TV career in anecdote-packed memoir (Sept. 17)
Sheila Brooks and Clint C. Wilson II
Sheila Brooks, former television journalist and founder, president and CEO of SRB Communications, an advertising and marketing agency in Washington, and Clint C. Wilson II, professor emeritus of journalism, communication, culture and media studies at Howard University, have “Lucile H. Bluford and the Kansas City Call: Activist Voice for Social Justice” (Lexington Books, $80 hardcover; $76 eBook)
This 98-page book is an adaptation of first-time author Brooks’ doctoral dissertation on Bluford (1911–2003), who fought segregation and became editor and publisher of the Kansas City Call, part of the black press.
The book states, “Bluford’s career was uniquely positioned within a historical continuum of African American women journalists and editors — from Mary Ann Shadd Cary and Ida B. Wells[-]Barnett to Charlotta Bass and Mildred Dee Brown and their contemporary activist and publisher, Daisy Bates.
“Readers of this book will find Bluford’s activism placed within context of both the African American 1960s and 1970s civil rights movement and the two major phases of the White feminist movement in the United States . . . .”
Todd Steven Burroughs
In a year when Marvel produced one of the year’s biggest cinematic successes, “Black Panther,” Todd Steven Burroughs, Newark, N.J.-based researcher and writer, has “Marvel’s Black Panther: A Comic Book Biography From Stan Lee to Ta-Nehesi Coates” (Diasporic Africa Press, $19.99 paper).
From the foreword, by Makani Themba, chief strategist, Higher Ground Change Strategies, Jackson, Miss.:
“This book provides the first real exploration of the power and legacy of the Black Panther franchise. Just in time, as the superhero is being reimagined and reintroduced to a new generation of comic book ‘heads.’ And like its debut in the turbulent 1960s, today’s Black Panther resurfaces in a time of unremitting state violence, and a rising people’s movement.
“And once again, it is buoying the spirits of a people in need of stories where Black people are not only winning, but decimating their enemies. As the Panther would say as he handily defeated Marvel standard bearers, ‘You had no chance.’
“Todd Steven Burroughs, who describes himself as a serious historian and a comic book geek, takes us on a journey from Black Panther’s beginnings in the white imagination of Stan Lee and Jack Kirby to his more contemporary incarnation as a product of Black writers and artists. It is a compelling story of the power of Black imagery, the pervasive influence of the Black Power movement on popular culture, and what happens when Black writers and artists get space to tell their own stories in their own voices. . . .”
Margena A. Christian
Margena A. Christian, a distinguished lecturer in the English Department at the University of Illinois at Chicago and a former editor and writer with Ebony and Jet magazines, has “Empire: The House That John H. Johnson Built: The Life & Legacy of Pioneering Publishing Magnate” (DocM.A.C. Write Publishing, $39.95 hardcover, $24.95 paper). The book makes a successful transition from doctoral dissertation to readable pages for consumers.
Today’s Ebony magazine is more in the news for its struggles to stay financially viable since the 2005 death of founder Johnson, and the publication’s subsequent sale to an African American private equity firm. But Christian thinks it important that Ebony’s pioneering past not be forgotten.
“Under the watchful leadership and careful guidance of its iconic founder, Mr. Johnson,” she writes, “we did more than learn to write stories about African-American people, moments, and events. Mr. Johnson taught us the importance of being gatekeepers by writing history and shaping it through a lens framed from people who looked like its audience. This was rare and we knew it.”
In the foreword, the Rev. Jesse Jackson gives us information new to most of us: that he was among Johnson’s employees. Jackson came to Chicago in 1966 to attend Chicago Theological Seminary and met Chicago Mayor Richard J. Daley thanks to a letter of introduction from North Carolina Gov. Terry Sanford. Daley offered Jackson a job as a toll collector. He met Johnson’s mother, Gertrude, at church, and she arranged for him to meet her publisher son.
Jackson offered to work in the mailroom, but Johnson recognized his communications skills. He gave Jackson a car and assigned him to sell magazines at Chicago newsstands.
“Daley saw me as a toll collector but he saw me as a communicator,” Jackson writes. “He became my counselor and my guide. I wrote my first article for Negro Digest that summer. When Dr. [Martin Luther] King got to the city, they were looking for someone to work with him. I put them together. . . .”
With the late Lerone Bennett Jr., Johnson told his own story in his 1989 book, “Succeeding Against the Odds: The Inspiring Autobiography of One of America’s Wealthiest Entrepreneurs.”
Journal-isms asked Christian how her book differs.
She messaged, “What differentiates the biography Empire from the autobiography Succeeding Against the Odds is that as a scholar and as a journalist, I utilized historical inquiry based upon my being a primary source and my examining extensive secondary sources for research to offer a composite of the man, his mission and his message.
“Empire also delves into Johnson’s life and legacy after his death and the demise of his privately-owned company as we once knew it by providing a timeline of pivotal moments.”
That delving includes reporting on the celebrities who should have attended Johnson’s funeral but did not, and mainstream media’s paltry coverage of Johnson’s passing. Most who worked in the mainstream, it appeared, did not know who Johnson was.
Dorothy Butler Gilliam
Dorothy Butler Gilliam has the forthcoming “Trailblazer: A Pioneering Journalist’s Fight to Make the Media Look More Like America” (Center Street, $27
hardcover; $12.99 Kindle; $27.97 audio CD on Amazon).
At the 9th Annual Journal-isms Roundtable Holiday Party, held in Washington on Dec. 1, Washington Post Metro columnist Courtland Milloy, introduced Gilliam by calling “Trailblazer,” to be released Jan. 8, “a fantastic book.
“It’s not just a memoir. It is the reconstruction of an identity, where she is transformed from a conservative preacher’s daughter . . . into this firebrand.”
And, he continued, as the Post’s first black female reporter, hired in 1961, “she chronicles this crucible that you can’t even imagine. . . . I’ve known Dorothy since 1975, but only met her after reading this book,” (video) Milloy said.
Gilliam went on to become a Post editor and columnist, co-founder of the Maynard Institute for Journalism Education and founder of the Post’s Young Journalists Development Program. She is also a past president of the National Association of Black Journalists.
As the forthcoming book jacket says, “Gilliam witnessed profound societal changes in her lifetime. Her inside-the-newsroom and from-the-field memoir spans more than a half-century — the last years of the Jim Crow segregated South, the Civil Rights Movement, the Black Arts and Black Power Movements and today’s era of increasing diversity. . . ”
Editor Ben Bradlee grumbled that Gilliam and other black journalists in the Post Style section were turning it into Ebony magazine.
Gilliam said at the Newseum that it was “almost providential that this book is coming out now, at a time when we have people in the White House calling the Washington Post the ‘enemy of the people’ . . . . So many of you have stories. . . .
“I can’t stress enough the importance of diversifying the media, of having representation from all communities. We still need that. We must press for that. We must still pressure for that because it can mean the difference between life and death.”
The example Gilliam set was appreciated. Ron Harris, who now teaches at Howard University, said he became a journalist in 1975.
“You and your generation set the tone for what all of us did,” Harris told her from the audience. “We didn’t get into journalism just to write, and to cover crime. But we did what you said do, which is to illuminate this world called African American media and all its wonders and forms. And that was our job. And I want to thank you, and [Bob] Maynard, and everybody else.”
Maynard, who died in 1993 at age 56, was a Post reporter and ombudsman who became the first black owner of a major mainstream newspaper, the Oakland Tribune. The Institute for Journalism Education, which trained journalists in order to spur diversity in the industry, was later named for him.
Eugene L. Meyer
Eugene L. Meyer, author and former Washington Post reporter, has “Five for Freedom: The African American Soldiers in John Brown’s Army” (Chicago Review Press-Lawrence Hill Books, $26.99 hardcover)
At an August meeting in Washington of the Journal-isms Roundtable, Meyer said his book about the African Americans who accompanied white abolitionist John Brown on his 1859 raid on Harpers Ferry, Va., is about five men who “have been overshadowed for 150 years and treated as footnotes if at all.”
Alice Bonner, former journalist and news executive, said after the presentation that “there are so many vital stories in this story; the faces that you see on the cover of this book are in the Harpers Ferry museum. What I remember from looking at those faces on the wall is how much European is in there. For this book, wherever he could find the white ancestor, he put it in there.
“Until we deal with that story . . . we are not going to deal with race in this country. . . . The thing that got to me is how each of these families carries all of our story. The selling of mother and child. They were part of a million people who were sold south in the 30 years before the Civil War. . . .
“It was just money to feed the cane and cotton machinery. That was building up all that wealth in the South, so . . . the connection between that and what’s happening at our Southern border today [with separation of families of undocumented immigrants] is . . . if you don’t see it, then you’re not reading the history clearly. . . . There’s a lot of stories in there, from miscegenation to the domestic slave trade, which is about as brutal as anything I’ve ever heard of in history.”
Meyer added that he found one of the descendants of the Dangerfield Newby, one of the five, in Cannonville, Utah. Ashton Morrison Robinson III did not learn he was African American until he was in his mid-40s.
“His parents had lied to him for years and years.” Robinson wrestled with how his life “would have been different had he known who he was in American society,” Meyer said.
Rochelle Riley
Rochelle Riley, Detroit Free Press columnist, has edited “The Burden: African Americans and the Enduring Impact of Slavery” (Wayne State University Press, $26.99 hardcover; $29.99 audio CD on Amazon; $9.99 Kindle)
Riley has compiled a Who’s Who of black journalists and others to discuss the lingering effects of slavery. Contributors include Nikole Hannah-Jones, A’Lelia Bundles, Benet J. Wilson, Tim Reid, Patrice Gaines, Leonard Pitts Jr., Kevin B. Blackistone, Betty DeRamus, Vann R. Newkirk II, Julianne Malveaux, Paula Williams Madison, DeWayne Wickham, Herb Boyd and Michelle Singletary.
Part of the inspiration for the book, Riley writes, comes from a white columnist’s “blasphemous” declaration that “Slavery was horrible, but no black American living today has suffered from it. Most are better off than if their ancestors had remained in Africa.”
Riley replies, in part, “And if I hear one more ill-informed commentator criticize the disintegration of the black family as if slavery didn’t disintegrate black families — separating mothers from daughters, husbands from wives — my scream will be heard for three states.”
Hannah-Jones, who writes for the New York Times Magazine, asserts in her foreword, “The election of Barack Obama was the exception, the election of Donald Trump the correction. And this uncomfortable truth drives the urgency for this book. We must face this history, or heritage, if we do not want to be lassoed to the past.”
Bruce W. Talamon
Bruce W. Talamon, a freelance photographer who has been crafting still photos for Hollywood films, has released “Soul. R&B. Funk. Photographs 1972–1982” (Taschen, $70 hardcover).
The publisher says, “Get down with such legends as Marvin Gaye, Earth, Wind & Fire, Stevie Wonder, Donna Summer, the Jackson Five, Diana Ross, James Brown, and Chaka Khan in this collection of largely unseen images from the golden age of soul, R&B, and funk. Sourced from our superfly Art Edition, this XL volume gathers all of the glamour and groove captured by photographer Bruce W. Talamon.
“Also available as an Art Edition with a portfolio of four prints, signed by Bruce W. Talamon and limited to 500 copies. . . .”
Talamon said by telephone Tuesday that he is proud to have produced the only collection of its kind done by one photographer, in an industry that has been virtually closed to African American photographers. “That’s the same stuff I showed Rolling Stone and they turned me down,” he said of his handsomely displayed work. The difference between his shots and others is that he was given access to private moments that others were not.
Moreover, as an African American, he brought a different sensibility. “I didn’t want to have all folks shouting . . . and sweating,” Talamon said. “We had to negotiate that,” he said of himself and the publisher.
Talamon also said he was “troubled” by what he sees on today’s landscape. Celebrities are much more restrictive and controlling of their images, and in the job market, work for photographers that includes benefits and decent pay is shrinking.
While those who remember the 1970s and 1980s will most appreciate these 375 oversized pages, “hopefully, younger people will be open to discovery,” Talamon said. Those who never saw Michael Jackson as a boy with brown skin and a little round nose will see that “before he captured the world, Michael Jackson belonged to little black girls in Gary, Ind. . . .”
- Maurice Berger, New York Times: Chronicling the Virtuosity and Struggles of 1970s Soul and Funk Musicians (Sept. 6)
- Makeda Easter, Los Angeles Times: Photographer Bruce Talamon captured black joy in the glory years of soul and funk. Now he’s getting his due
- Killian Fox, the Guardian: Behind the scenes with the biggest soul stars of the 70s
- Gail Mitchell, Billboard: Grammy Museum Spotlights Photographer Bruce Talamon in New Soul, R&B and Funk Exhibit (June 29)
Juan Williams
The prolific Juan Williams has written ” ‘What the Hell Do You Have to Lose?’: Trump’s War on Civil Rights, ” (PublicAffairs, $27, hardcover).
Williams, the veteran journalist who is most recently a Fox News pundit and weekly columnist for the Hill, answers President Trump’s question with chapter-by-chapter recitation of the state of African Americans in various subject areas, such as public accommodations, education, housing and voting rights.
Williams did not respond to a question about the book’s intended audience, but John Dittmer wrote in the Washington Post, “. . . any concerned citizen who reads a newspaper or watches cable is well aware of Trump’s almost daily outbursts concerning racial matters.
“Williams’s topic is certainly timely, but the book promises more than it delivers.”
The Book Marks website has summarized other reviews.
Gail Campbell Wooley
Gail Campbell Wooley, a reporter for the old Washington Star, the Baltimore Sun and the Washington Times before joining the public relations department of the ExxonMobil Corp., wrote “Soar: A Memoir” (Agate Bolden, $16 paper; $16 ebook) before her death from sickle cell anemia in 2015.
The manuscript was completed by journalist and author Nick Chiles, who writes in the preface, “Her fervent embracing of life and fierce commitment to squeezing the joy out of every moment are principles that have served me well in thinking about my days and my own mortality.”
Told at age 7 that she and her younger brother would not live past 35, Wooley pressed on until age 58, with a positive attitude and a loving husband, Howard Wooley. “What I hope to do with my words — my truth — is to explain how my medical challenges created in me a particular mindset, a driven and fearless approach to living my life, that I believe might serve to inspire you to follow suit — even if you don’t have a killer disease brooding inside of you.”
Her brother, sadly, did not have the same mindset. “Tim descended into a fog of pain, self-pity, and self-destruction,” Chiles writes. “Horribly, he turned the doctor’s dark prediction into fact and died at exactly age thirty-five.”
Jennifer K. Moore Smith, like Wooley a sickle cell survivor, said of this book, “An amazing memoir by a warrior who did not let her disease define who she was and how she would live her life, Soar is a must read [for] everyone.”
Moore Smith also wrote, “I feel like Gail could have been a mentor to me despite our different career paths. We shared this disease that is underfunded, understudied and largely misunderstood. Yes, sickle cell research has come a long way, but the individual experiences of those like myself [are] not given enough publicity like we see with other diseases. We are invisible to most, but we are many and we are very strong and one day we will find a cure.”
When Wooley died in 2015, Lorraine Branham, dean of the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications at Syracuse University, told Journal-isms, “I knew Gail both as a colleague when we worked together at the Baltimore Sun and later as the dean of her alma mater. . . . She was outspoken, compassionate and dedicated to the cause of helping the next generation of African American journalists.”
Hugh Wyatt
Hugh Wyatt, one of the first black reporters at the Daily News in New York, there from 1965 to 1993, a bass player and a co-founder of New York’s Inner City Broadcasting Co., has written “Sonny Rollins: Meditating on a Riff” (Kamama Books, $19.95 paper; $9.99 ebook).
Wyatt wrote in July on Facebook, “It’s taken three decades, but I have finally completed a tell-all biography of jazz legend Sonny Rollins. I’ve known Sonny on a deep, personal level for over 50 years, so it is not a regurgitation of previous books, newspaper and magazine articles. Called ‘Sonny Rollins: Meditating on a Riff,’ my book focuses on the tenor great’s spiritual life.
“Sonny has been a big proponent of yoga, Buddhism, and other Eastern belief systems, which he believes have helped him not only become what many consider to be the greatest living jazz musician, but one of the most balanced persons on the planet. The book also focuses on Sonny’s romances and details of his s personal life, which reveal other facets of the real Sonny Rollins, rather than just the mystical figure that people superficially see.”
Wyatt told Journal-isms by telephone Tuesday that the book also discusses the broader topic of the influence of black musicians on white intellectuals as well as the spiritual quests of other jazz musicians of the era.
Steve Provizer, a jazz brass player and vocalist with a radio show on WZBC-FM, the Boston College station in Newton, Mass., regretted that “the book didn’t go through a rigorous editing process,” though Wyatt said it went through further editing.
Provizer also wrote, “Wyatt has written an interesting history of Rollins’ spiritual life, albeit more as an acolyte than as a disinterested chronicler. His point of view shapes the information he gives us — it would be good to have a wider variety of voices tell Rollins’ story. What Wyatt does well is fill in some lesser-known aspects of Rollins’ narrative, limning an especially vivid sense of the drug and religio-spiritual lives of jazz, focusing on the late ’40s to the ’60s. From ‘certified thug’ to wise elder, Wyatt gives us a sense of the epic outer and inner lives of Sonny Rollins.”
- Hugh Wyatt, Library of Congress: “Saxophone Colossus” — Sonny Rollins (1956) (PDF)
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