There’s a story I tell whenever I’m in a circle of writers, and it goes something like this:
On the afternoon that Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Gwendolyn Brooks was dying, a few family members and friends, including Brooks’ longtime publisher, protege and spiritual son, Haki Madhubuti, gathered around her bedside in Hyde Park. They read to her and recited poetry. And just before Brooks took her final breath, her daughter placed a pen in her hand.
For Brooks and Madhubuti, the pen had served a dual purpose as an instrument of social change as well as of creative expression. This concept always has resonated with me. But Madhubuti took it one step further by starting Third World Press in 1967. Since then, Third World has become a safe haven where ideas are not only showcased but also nurtured to maturation.
Over the weekend, about 400 people gathered to celebrate the 40th anniversary of Third World, which Madhubuti started with a used mimeograph machine in a humble Englewood apartment and grew into a company that would publish hundreds of titles. Its list includes work by Gloria Naylor, Sonia Sanchez, Tavis Smiley, Amiri Baraka, Gil Scott-Heron, Chancellor Williams, as well as Madhubuti.
Madhubuti says that to understand how Third World Press evolved, you have to understand that literature and words saved his life.
As he wrote in his book, “Yellow Black,” he came up on the rough side. His mother was “in the sex trade”; his sister had seven children before age 30.
“I had a hard life,” he said to me last week before the celebration. “I was young and just angry. Angry about my upbringing, about what this country was doing to our people. I was ready to go to war.”
In the early 1960s, he was in the Army and reading voraciously but had no one with whom he could discuss what he was reading. Richard Wright’s novel “Black Boy” and his collection of essays, “White Man, Listen!” opened him up to other work by black writers such as Langston Hughes, Claude McKay, Paul Robeson and Brooks.
In 1962 he met Margaret and Charlie Burroughs, who ran the Ebony Museum of Negro History out of their home. (It would later become the DuSable Museum.)
“For the first time in my life, I was around people who dealt with ideas and I began to feel more comfortable with my own ideas,” he said. “That was critical for me to find this intellectual and cultural family.”
His own stories and ideas began to flourish, and when he learned the publisher of his second book of poetry ran a press out of his home, Madhubuti said it seemed possible that he could do the same.
After three poetry readings, he raised $400 and bought the copy machine. He began producing chapbooks out of an apartment Madhubuti describes as being the size of a coffee table. He sold his books on the street and later carried them in suitcases while lecturing around the country.
He soon met Gwendolyn Brooks at a church in Woodlawn. She was spending her Saturday mornings teaching gang members, the Blackstone Rangers, how to write poetry.
“We became friends and eventually family,” he said. “But that was after a rough start. We disagreed in some cases about poetry and language. I was young, impetuous and full of myself. She quickly squashed that.”
He said his mentors instilled in him the idea of creating black independent institutions surrounding education and communication.
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In 1974 Third World was housed in two storefronts at 75th Street and Cottage Grove Avenue. Twenty years later, it moved to an old Catholic school building at 7822 S. Dobson Ave. The press occupies the rectory. Two of the four schools in Madhubuti’s Institute of Positive Education are on site.
Third World Press’ foundation supplies books to incarcerated men and women, as well as to shelters, halfway homes and elementary schools.
“I don’t collect a salary from Third World Press,” said Madhubuti, founder and director emeritus of the Chicago State University Gwendolyn Brooks Center. “All of my royalties go to the foundation. I never wanted anybody to say I started Third World Press to enrich myself because that’s not true.”
Instead, those of us who know Third World Press know it has enriched us all.
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