Skip to content

Breaking News

Haki Madhubuti, poet-publisher, with a manuscript of his new book titled "Taking Bullets" in his office at the Third World Press publishing business in Chicago on May 29.
Zbigniew Bzdak, Chicago Tribune
Haki Madhubuti, poet-publisher, with a manuscript of his new book titled “Taking Bullets” in his office at the Third World Press publishing business in Chicago on May 29.
Author
PUBLISHED: | UPDATED:

When he was still known as Donald L. Lee, the poet-publisher-teacher-writer-activist Haki Madhubuti sold copies of his first book, a poetry collection titled “Think Black,” on the corner of 63rd St. and Cottage Grove Ave. on the city’s South Side.

That was in 1967 and last week he was sitting not so very far away, but also decades and worlds removed from that corner. He was in his office in what was once the rectory of a church. The building, near 79th St. and Dobson Ave. in the Chatham neighborhood, has been for more than two decades the headquarters of his Third World Press (www.thirdworldpressbooks.com), which he started in his basement apartment in Englewood, using $400 earned from poetry readings to buy a mimeograph machine and make books.

TWP has since published hundreds of books and is one of the oldest and most influential black publishing houses in the country. His office, as well as the other offices and shared spaces in the building, is filled with books and art, photos and plaques, manuscripts and other materials that collectively attest to its active past and ongoing vitality.

He has written 30-some books of poetry and nonfiction. These include such best-sellers as “Don’t Cry, Scream” and “Black Men: Obsolete, Single, Dangerous?” and a personal favorite, the memoir “Yellow Black: The First Twenty-One Years of a Poet’s Life.”

TWP has published the works of such literary giants as Sonia Sanchez, Amiri Baraka and the woman Madhubuti calls “my cultural mother,” Gwendolyn Brooks, Chicago’s own poet/novelist and the first African-American to win a Pulitzer Prize.

Madhubuti is a book man through and through, in the same way that Bob Dylan is a music man. That he is not generally revered here is something of a mystery. Though greatly admired in some quarters, he has yet to attain the civic stature of someone like — though there really has never been anyone quite like — the late Studs Terkel, who was his friend.

But he does not worry about such matters.

He is a busy man and starts talking about his new book, which will be published within months. It is titled “Taking Bullets: Black Boys and Men in Twenty-First Century America Fighting Terrorism, Stopping Violence and Seeking Healing.”

“We need to change the conversation in this country, and I hope this book will do that,” he says.

He writes energetically and reads voraciously, has a personal collection of “some 50,000 books and growing” and cannot recall ever reading a book that he did not like. He can, however, easily and vividly remember the book that started it all.

He was 14 years old and living with his mother in Detroit. She was a “worker in the sex trade,” he says, but an avid reader. One day she told him to go to the library and check out Richard Wright’s 1945 novel “Black Boy.”

“At first, I wouldn’t do it,” Madhubuti says. “How could I go to a white library and ask a white librarian for a book about a black kid by a black author who was criticizing white society? I was not in a good place at that time. I hated myself, my poor conditions, my lack of education. But as I read it, I began to cry. I was reading something that didn’t insult me. I finished the book in 24 hours. I didn’t sleep until I finished it, and the next day I went back and checked out everything Wright wrote.”

Born in Little Rock, Ark., and raised in Detroit, Madhubuti came here as a teenager and graduated from Dunbar High School. He attended various local colleges and served in the Army from 1960-63, coming back to start his career here.

He is a dignified man and stylish dresser. A vegan and serious bicyclist, he looks a decade younger than his 73 years. In print and in person, he is a man never afraid to speak his mind.

In 2002 he was sitting next to former President Bill Clinton at a black tie event in Little Rock. Both men, and some others, were being inducted into the Arkansas Black Hall of Fame.

Their dinner table conversation went something like this:

“How to you pronounce your name?” asked Clinton.

Madhubuti pronounced it, adding that in the Swahili language “haki” means “justice” and “madhubuti” means “accurate” or “precise.” (He changed his name in 1974.)

The ex-President nodded.

“I have to tell you that I don’t like you,” said Madhubuti.

Clinton looked shocked and said, “What’s the problem?”

“Rwanda,” said Madhubuti, referring to what he considered the U.S. government’s failed response to the genocide that took place in that tiny African nation when nearly 1 million people were killed in less than two months in 1994. “You let that happen on your watch.”

End of conversation.

That’s rare, for there seems never to be an end to most of Madhubuti’s conversations, so filled is he with plans and ideas and passions. He has never taken a salary or a penny in royalties from his work for TWP, saying “I see what I am doing as a service. What I write and what we publish allows us to grow as a people. We are giving back.”

He talks about his years teaching. He was on the faculty of Chicago State University for nearly three decades, establishing there the (Gwendolyn) Brooks Center for Black Literature and Creative Writing, an annual writing conference, master of fine arts in creative writing program and International Literary Hall of Fame for Writers of African Descent.

When the university’s board of trustees selected Wayne Watson as its new president in 2009, Madhubuti rapped the decision in an open letter and soon parted company with that institution.

In 2010 he became DePaul University’s Ida B. Wells-Barnett professor and held faculty and public lectures on Wells-Barnett’s legacy as a journalist and civil rights activist, and he taught courses on art and race and the Black Arts Movement.

But wait, there’s more: he and his wife, Carol D. Lee (Safisha Madhubuti), a professor of education and social policy and African-American Studies at Northwestern University, helped found four South Side schools that have been in operation since 1969 and serve some 1,000 children.

“She is a brilliant woman,” says her husband.

He then says that he first began to read “because I was trying to save myself” and he still believes that “if America has any great promise, it’s because of young people.”

Though he will talk about social injustice and inequities and what he calls “the United States of Empire,” he still calls himself “a realistic optimist.” “It’s always been a battle,” he adds, “and though I may have been angrier when I was younger that anger is now more focused toward the 1 percent. But, no, I never imagined that the struggle would ever get easier.”

He says he will not be part of this weekend’s Tribune-sponsored Printers Row Lit Fest, though he has been in the past. He was not chosen as one of the annual Lit 50, the list of the city’s 50 most influential literary figures as selected annually by the publication New City, though he has been on the list in the past. He will be part of the third annual Brooks Day, a celebration of his mentor and friend that takes place from 1-6 p.m. Sunday at the Logan Center for the Arts, 915 E. 60th St., only four blocks away from the corner on which he hawked his first book.

In another of his books, Brooks wrote this in her foreword: “He is a toughness. He is not a superficial toughness. He is the kind of toughness that doesn’t just sass its mammy but goes right through to the bone.”

When you ask him what he does for a living, his answer is simple: “I am a poet,” he says.

He is, of course, so much more. He writes in his forthcoming book, “All the white systems of organizations, control and definition have been put in place to keep Black men out.”

So, the struggle continues, with Madhubuti firmly on the front line.

“After Hours With Rick Kogan” airs 9-11 p.m. Sundays on WGN-AM 720.

rkogan@tribpub.com

Twitter @rickkogan