Digest of Rage

I don't really have any interest in having any publicity in a national magazine. It's not going to help me. It's not going to help black people. It's certainly not going to help Black World. I've been alive a long time. Sure, things change and things have the appearance of change. But I don't expect things to change from the white side, so I'm working to change things from the black side. If you weren't black, I wouldn't talk with you.

The interviewer was TIME Correspondent Jacob Simms; the speaker was Hoyt Fuller, managing editor of Black World magazine; the subject was the black journalist's distrust of a white world. "The black revolt," Fuller says, "is as palpable in letters as it is in the streets." Several small magazines (among them Liberator, Freedomways) are struggling to provide an outlet for the resulting explosions of prose and poetry. Fuller's Black World is by far the most influential and widely read (circulation: more than 69,000).

White Identity. Perhaps because of its pocket-magazine size, Black World conveys a sense of compressed passion. Its articles, fiction and poetry seethe with resentment, with desire for identity, with rejection of the subhumanity of the ghetto. A short story in the August issue gives a chilling description of a group of neighborhood children watching and wisecracking as the mother of one of them makes it with her lover of the moment. There are occasional "how to" articles--how to establish a distinctively black system of education, how to develop a "black aesthetic"--but mainly the tone is exhortatory, an urging that blacks throw off white shackles of the mind.

Black World's villains are white--but not the predictable woolhats and rednecks. The real enemies are white liberals, whose good intentions tend to dull the edge of black rebellion, and members of the black middle class. Says Fuller: "My experience with middle-class blacks has been that all their efforts have been directed toward identifying with whites, emulating white people. They are not helping the black community to survive."

The theme is one that Fuller cannot get out of his mind and his life. His small office overlooking Chicago's South Michigan Avenue is cluttered with books and manuscripts by blacks. He appears to belie his radical mission. His sense of humor is close to the surface; he smiles and manages to needle outsiders without offending them.

In turning on the black middle class, Fuller, now 42, is turning on himself. Brought up in a middle-class black neighborhood in Detroit, he seemed well on his way to predictable success. He studied literature at Wayne State University (B.A.) and at the University of Florence. But, as he traveled through Europe and Africa, he began to believe that his middle-class values "support the system under which blacks are degraded and oppressed." He worked briefly in New York for Collier's Encyclopedia, then took an editorial job with Ebony magazine.

He had been there only a year when Ebony Publisher John Johnson offered him the editorship of Negro Digest. The publication had been founded in 1942 as a carbon copy of the Reader's Digest, just as Ebony imitated LIFE, and Jet, another Johnson publication, was a black substitute for Coronet. Despite such well-Digested features as "My Most Humiliating Jim Crow Experience," the imitation collapsed in 1951. To keep abreast of the new black militancy, Johnson revived it ten years later and turned it over to Fuller.

Renamed Black World, it still loses money (Fuller refuses to say how much), but the losses are easily absorbed by the highly profitable Ebony and Jet. Besides, these days there is psychic profit to be gained from publishing an article emphasizing the black woman's seminal role in the black revolution (by Imamu Amiri Baraka, known to the white world as LeRoi Jones), or a comparison of Christian and Muslim attitudes toward slavery (the Christians come off second best), or an issue on African politics.

Fuller uses humor and put-downs as weapons. One cartoon depicts a black executive storming out of an office door on which the title "Head Nigger in Charge" has just been painted. A prostrate white man with a newly acquired black eye is looking after him and saying ruefully, "Ah thought he would be grateful for the advancement." And on the back cover of a recent issue, Fuller put down "poseurs and hustlers playing revolution" or "the Black Militant Game, which is all the rage just now, and which has merits of its own in attention grabbing: a brother can come on like gangbusters with a boss Afro and a hand-tailored dashiki."

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