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A clarion call of civil rights activists is that black lives matter. What would happen if they were essentially written off entirely? The question is far from rhetorical, because the U.S. publishing industry cast most African-American life stories into oblivion for much of the country’s history.
Before demands for racial justice rocked the nation in the 1960s, leading publishers produced stunningly few biographies or autobiographies of black figures, no matter how triumphant or tragic, virtuous or vice-ridden their life stories.
Founded in 1924, Simon & Schuster published its first African-American biography in 1968. The work was an illustrated children’s book, “Harriet and the Promised Land,” which tailors the story of Harriet Tubman’s heroism on the Underground Railroad for juvenile readers.
When Holt, Rinehart & Winston marketed Coretta Scott King’s memoir, “My Life with Martin Luther King Jr.,” in 1969, the company and its predecessor firms had previously accepted just three blacks as subjects for biography or autobiography.
When Random House brought out Maya Angelou’s “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings,” also in 1969, the firm had published five African-American narratives since it was founded in 1927.
The book industry’s aversion to black biographies and memoirs extended even to celebrities who would presumably have generated the greatest popular interest.
From the beginning of the 20th century through World War II, major houses produced just two titles about African-American sports figures. Both books centered on heavyweight boxing champions: a 1927 autobiography of the wildly controversial Jack Johnson and a 1945 biography of Brown Bomber Joe Louis.
On a similar timeline, publishing companies offered just three volumes about black entertainers: Harlem Renaissance-era singer Emmanuel Taylor in 1929; jazz trumpet great Louis Armstrong in 1935; and father of the blues W. C. Handy in 1941.
Across every field of endeavor, from the ministry to medicine, from entrepreneurship to education, book merchants balked at memorializing black experiences and accomplishments.
In so doing, publishers reflected the buying preferences of a white customer base decidedly uninterested in life stories that often indicted white society. They also demonstrated the perniciousness of a caste system that excluded African-Americans from the ranks of the achievers who tend to draw biographical interest — military heroes, for example.
“What has not been generally recognized is that many more African-Americans were worthy of biographies and that the publishing industry had an abysmal record,” said Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Leon Litwack, an expert on the history of this country’s books about blacks.
“One would have to say that publishers began to publish these books only when the pressure became insurmountable.”
Founded in 1924, Simon & Schuster published its first African-American biography meant for a juvenile audience in 1968, called “Harriet and the Promised Land.”
In June, Beacon Press issued “One Righteous Man: Samuel Battle and the Shattering of the Color Line in New York,” my own biography of an African-American — the city’s first black cop, who was hired in 1911. The book relied on a never-published, 80,000-word biography that Langston Hughes, genius poet of the Harlem Renaissance, had written for Samuel Battle — only to have publishers reject the manuscript.Why? Questioned at speaking events, I have broached two explanations: First, that Hughes had failed to make a compelling narrative out of Battle’s rise from son of former slaves to friend of First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt; and, second, that racism among publishers and the white reading public had destroyed the commercial value of the project.
Seeking a more definitive answer, I set out to determine how many biographies and autobiographies of African-Americans had been published. I focused on the 70 years from 1900 through 1969 to encompass the 20th century up to the era when racial upheaval brought profound change.
No reference work comprehensively covers the topic. So I drew from five resources: the electronic catalogue of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture; periodic Schomburg listings of significant books about African-Americans; the WorldCat database of American library holdings; Russell C. Brignano’s “Black Americans in Autobiography”; and the Harvard Guide to African-American History’s roster of biographies and autobiographies.
Finally, I presented the findings to the still existing publishers named here so they could correct the record where warranted. None offered additional titles. Representatives generally said the passage of time barred definitively reconstructing their records. HarperCollins did not respond to information requests.
All of that said, given the fractured nature of publishing over the decades, the study’s numerical findings are best taken as providing a sense of scale rather than as precise to the last volume.
Among the thousands of titles produced by major houses across the seven decades, just 263 books focused on individual black lives, as opposed to collections of life stories. They ranged from Booker T. Washington’s autobiography, “Up from Slavery,” published by Doubleday in 1901, to “Malcolm X: The Man and His Times,” published by Macmillan in 1969.
This pace of publishing averages to fewer than four African-American biographies a year — a figure at once paltry and yet still deceptively high, because it is skewed upward by a rush of books during the civil rights movement.
In the 1960s, the industry pumped out 112 African-American biographies and autobiographies, more than double the number of titles released during the entire first half of the century. From 1900 to 1950, publishers offered readers a total of just 48 black life stories, an average of less than one a year, with no new books at all in 22 of the 50 years.
Doubleday’s library was the largest at 25 titles, yet it still included not a single new book from 1922 through 1942.
Harper companies logged 15 titles, including Richard Wright’s classic “Black Boy” in 1945 and “A Choice of Weapons” by photographer Gordon Parks in 1966.
Alfred A. Knopf waited 25 years after starting business to publish the first of the firm’s five titles, Langston Hughes’ “The Big Sea: An Autobiography,” in 1940.
Farrar, Straus’ three titles included 1965’s “Yes I Can: The Story of Sammy Davis Jr.”
Founded in 1846, Scribner published two biographies, both in the 1960s, one about black physician Charles Drew, the other about Jack Johnson.
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Worsening the erasure of black lives, publishers focused on roughly 120 characters over the seven decades, often retelling the stories of a few achievers most palatable to the white audience.
Seven general-interest subjects accounted for 51 books: George Washington Carver, renowned botanist, 17; Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., epoch-changing giant, 8; Booker T. Washington, accommodationist leader, 6; Harriet Tubman, savior of slaves, 6; Frederick Douglass, leader of 19th century black America, 5; Mary McLeod Bethune, educator and civil rights activist, 5; and Paul Dunbar, novelist and poet, 4. In the sports world, publishers devoted some 50 titles to 16 athletes, led by Jackie Robinson with seven books and Jack Johnson and Willie Mays, each with five books.
Meanwhile, behind a virtually impenetrable racial barrier, African-Americans like Samuel Battle ached to have their stories told.
Shut out of mainstream houses, some self-published. Some found publishers in organizations with affiliations to religions, or in presses with narrow racial, social or political orientations. Some relied on companies based far from the general industry.
The Bostrop (Tex.) Advertiser published the autobiography of Rev. Joshua van Buren Goins, an African Methodist Episcopal minister, in 1913. The Hemingford (Neb.) Ledger, published “From Slavery To Affluence: Memoirs of Robert Anderson, Ex-Slave,” in 1927.
The Free Methodist Publishing House brought out Mrs. L.P. Ray’s autobiography, “Twice Sold, Twice Ransomed,” in 1926. It opens: “I was born twice, bought twice, sold twice, and set free twice. Born of woman, born of God; sold in slavery, sold to the devil; freed by Lincoln, set free by God.”
Even a seminal civil rights activist, the Rev. Reverdy Ransom, was limited in 1946 to publishing his autobiography through the Sunday School Union of Nashville, Tennessee. “The Pilgrimage of Harriet Ransom’s Son” told of a life that ranged from joining W.E.B. Du Bois in the Niagara Movement, which gave birth to 20th-century civil rights activism; to facing down violent gangsters as a minister in Chicago; to advocating for the integration of the New York Police Department before Battle broke its color line.
All told, small presses like these published 276 black biographies or autobiographies over the seven decades — more than produced by mainstream firms.
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W.E. Du Bois’ proposal for a Nat Turner biography was rejected. Instead, the publisher steered Du Bois to a biography of John Brown, white leader of a doomed slave rebellion.
“They were extremely important, as important as all the institutions that served the black community at a time when the mainstream had turned its back on that community, as important as black colleges, black medical schools and all the places that blacks could not get into,” said Arnold Rampersad, author of the definitive biography of Hughes.
Collectively, publishing’s slim production points to a loss hidden in life stories never told.
Think how powerfully Rosa Parks influenced history by refusing to give up her seat on a Memphis bus in 1955. Now consider the story of Elizabeth Jennings.
In 1854, Jennings was a 24-year-old African-American teacher in a New York school that served black children. Only some of the city’s horse-drawn trolleys — those bearing a sign, “Negro Persons Allowed in This Car” — were open to blacks. Hurrying to church, Jennings boarded a forbidden car and refused to get off. A cop ejected her.
Represented by future President Chester A. Arthur, Jennings sued. New York’s highest court decreed in a landmark ruling that “colored persons if sober, well behaved, and free from disease” were entitled to ride public conveyances. Jennings went on to found the city’s first kindergarten for black children. She has never been the subject of a biography.
Hers was a life story that might have spurred civil rights activism by blacks and whites alike, as well as shed a challenging light on America’s social structure — especially in an era when books were a dominant mass media force. Other such tales of accomplishments and courage might also have expanded the horizon of the possible for all readers.
Consider the dreams of young people. Often, they gravitate toward heroes; often, the inspirers arise from the sports world.
Jimmy Winkfield should have been such a magnetic black figure in the early 20th century. Born into a sharecropping family, he triumphed as a jockey, winning the Kentucky Derby and then starring as a rider abroad. A century would pass before McGraw-Hill published “Wink: The Incredible Life and Epic Journey of Jimmy Winkfield” in 2005.
Worsening the erasure of black lives, publishers focused on roughly 120 characters over the seven decades, often retelling the stories of a few achievers most palatable to the white audience.
In 1892, William H. Lewis became the first black college football All-American. After graduating from Harvard Law School, he won appointment as Boston’s first black assistant United States attorney. President William Howard Taft then named Lewis an assistant to the attorney general. No publisher saw Lewis as fit subject for a biography.
Only a small publishing house in Worcester, Mass., took note, in 1928, that Marshall Taylor had dominated the sport of bicycle racing around the turn of the 20th century, including winning the world championship.
Truth-telling’s lost potential is, perhaps, best revealed in an episode from early in the career of W.E.B. Du Bois, the intellectual godfather of the modern civil rights movement.
n 1904, a publisher invited Du Bois to write a biography of an African-American. Du Bois proposed Nat Turner, leader of the 1831 slave rebellion that had terrified white Southerners and had prompted states across the region to impose even stricter limitations on blacks.
As told by Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer David Levering Lewis, Du Bois envisioned presenting Turner as “the flesh-and-blood paradigm” of slavery while tracing the history of the slave trade and insurrections and describing the plantation economy and origins of abolitionism.
Du Bois’ planned book would have focused “the attention of intelligent white readers and historians on much that was unfamiliar,” wrote Lewis. Instead, the publisher steered Du Bois to a biography of John Brown, white leader of a doomed slave rebellion, depriving America of a work that, as Lewis put it, “might have been something of an event in historiography as well as biography.”
More than six decades would elapse before best-selling 1967 novel, “The Confessions of Nat Turner,” by a white author, William Styron, thrust the rebel to the forefront of America’s awareness.
Many life stories were long delayed.
Once expected to succeed Frederick Douglass as America’s preeminent back leader, Timothy Thomas Fortune led the New York Age newspaper as one of the country’s smartest, toughest editors. He died in 1928. The University of Chicago Press published his biography in 1972.
Swashbuckling moneyman Jeremiah Hamilton went to his grave in 1875 having amassed an estimated $250 million in today’s dollars — and only last year were his adventures recounted in “Prince of Darkness: The Untold Story of Jeremiah G. Hamilton, Wall Street’s First Black Millionaire,” published by St. Martin’s Press.
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“Malcolm X: The Man and His Times,” was published by Macmillan in 1969.
Swashbuckling moneyman Jeremiah Hamilton went to his grave in 1875 having amassed an estimated $250 million in today’s dollars — and only last year were his adventures recounted in “Prince of Darkness: The Untold Story of Jeremiah G. Hamilton, Wall Street’s First Black Millionaire,” published by St. Martin’s Press.
Madame C.J. Walker, daughter of former slaves, became a fabulously wealthy businesswoman in the early 20th century by marketing beauty, hygiene and hair-care products to African-American women, much as Helena Rubinstein and Elizabeth Arden did in white society.
Although Walker and her daughter were prominent in black society, 72 years would pass after Walker’s death in 1919 before her great-granddaughter, A’Lelia Bundles, succeeded in publishing the first of three biographical volumes about Walker in 1991.
In the 1980s, Bundles recalls, the National Endowment for the Humanities rejected her application for a writing grant because one evaluator judged that Walker lacked sufficient significance.
U.S. publishers are now far more welcoming to black life stories, as shown by a review of their records since 2005.
Simon & Schuster, for example, produced 36 titles under its name over the past 10 years, including biographies of Michelle Obama and ballerina Misty Copeland. Imprints under the company’s umbrella released an additional 47 titles.
Recent industry offerings encompass tales of “firsts,” including my biography of New York’s first black cop.
And, these many years later, the continuing emergence of books about path-breakers stands witness to all the African-American life stories that should have been told long ago.
