Building the Black Arts Movement

Hoyt Fuller and the Cultural Politics of the 1960s

Jonathan Fenderson

• Editorial: University of Illinois Press
• Año: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780252051272
• Categoría: Ciencias sociales
• Categoría: Sociología

As both an activist and the dynamic editor of Negro Digest, Hoyt W. Fuller stood at the nexus of the Black Arts Movement and the broader black cultural politics of his time. Jonathan Fenderson uses historical snapshots of Fuller's life and achievements to rethink the period and establish Fuller's important role in laying the foundation for the movement. In telling Fuller's story, Fenderson provides provocative new insights into the movement's international dimensions, the ways the movement took shape at the local level, the impact of race and other factors, and the challenges--corporate, political, and personal--that Fuller and others faced in trying to build black institutions. An innovative study that approaches the movement from a historical perspective, Building the Black Arts Movement is a much-needed reassessment of the trajectory of African American culture over two explosive decades.

1

Designing the Future

Black in a Negro Company

The Johnson Publishing Company was, without question, the biggest and most influential enterprise of its kind in the entire world, and it seemed that, ideally, such a place would be a center of intellectual and literary ferment. That it was not such a center I could understand. The conservatism [in the company] was imposed by circumstance.

—Hoyt Fuller, “Incomplete Autobiography”

The Negro press is not only one of the most successful business enterprises owned and controlled by Negroes; it is the chief medium of communication which creates and perpetuates the world of make-believe for the black bourgeoisie. Although the Negro press declares itself to be a spokesman for the Negro group as a whole, it represents essentially the interests and outlook of the black bourgeoisie.

—E. Franklin Frazier, The Black Bourgeoisie

In 1971 the Johnson Publishing Company released a Festschrift in honor of Illinois poet laureate Gwendolyn Brooks titled To Gwen with Love. Like all Festschrifts, the 149-page book featured the work of writers and artists who had worked with Brooks and been touched by her tremendous literary legacy. Although Brooks was nationally renowned for her poetry, the book better reflected the changing politics within the Johnson Publishing Company. Mindful of the protest that had taken place in front of the JPC building just a couple of years earlier, John Johnson hoped the new book would publicly signal the company's willingness to change with the times. In reality, To Gwen with Love reflected Johnson's dual efforts to embrace the new Black consciousness and simultaneously make inroads in the Black Arts movement by tapping into a new consumer base. Ambivalent about the situation, Hoyt Fuller was happy to see so many artists from his network come together to celebrate Brooks, yet he remained leery of his boss's political expediency. More than any other individual involved in the production of the Festschrift or, for that matter, the larger Black Arts movement, Fuller had a clear sense of his boss's political commitments. After working on the JPC staff for more than a decade—first between 1954 and 1957 and then again from 1961 to 1976—Fuller knew well that Johnson's focus was not on racial solidarity but, instead, profits. Nevertheless, the publication of the Festschrift served as a measure of the undeniable popularity of the Black Arts movement and, perhaps more importantly, Fuller's tangible influence on the print politics of the company through the pages of Negro Digest.

Focused sharply on the peak years of Fuller's employment at JPC as editor of Negro Digest, this chapter has a dual purpose. First, by recalling Fuller's unique editorship, it recounts the magazine's centrality to both the resurgence of a popularly rooted Black nationalism and the associated emergence of new modes of thinking and organizing as it related to African American art, intellectual work, and social activism. In addition, by chronicling the strained professional relationship between John H. Johnson and Hoyt Fuller, the chapter simultaneously illuminates the intraracial struggle between that same emergent group of Black nationalists and a more established elite class of African American liberals who grew comfortable with desegregation and racial equality but eschewed critiques of capitalism and economic exploitation during the civil rights–Black Power era. This struggle was perfectly encapsulated in Fuller's efforts to purposefully contradict and undermine what he deemed as the bourgeois Negro politics of John H. Johnson and the Johnson Publishing Company. By advancing “Black” as counter to JPC's dominant discourse—on consumerism, celebrity culture, and leisure—Fuller used Negro Digest as an influential print mechanism in the production and amplification of an alternative politics for African Americans.

Coincidentally, since Fuller and most Black nationalists understood African American entrepreneurship as an indicator of racial empowerment, it forestalled their ability to raise the difficult, more fundamental questions about class exploitation as an essential component of capitalism and Black business ownership. By ceding the discussion about African American entrepreneurship, they essentially made room for African American economic elites, like Johnson, to regain control over the terms of the debate and redefine “Blackness” while also maintaining their managerial status in the racialized American economy. Even as the racial ordering of that economy shifted—from legal segregation to racial discord and urban rebellions to a post–Jim Crow, liberal, racial democracy—the African American economic elite were able to maintain their profit-driven agenda by incorporating the most innocuous features of Black nationalists' politics and disavowing the more challenging elements. Nevertheless, in the process of taking up this fight with Johnson, Fuller successfully expanded the conversation in African American print culture and, at least for a brief period of time, altered the general tenor of JPC periodicals.

Negro Digest, the JPC Empire, and African American Print Culture

Although Fuller's editorship of Negro Digest began in 1961, the magazine's origins start in 1942 with a lofty idea, a five-hundred-dollar loan, and a gentleman's agreement between strange bedfellows.¹ While working on a weekly compendium of news clippings for the Supreme Liberty Life Insurance Company, Johnson came up with the innovative idea to create an alternative to the immensely popular Reader's Digest. His venture however, was aimed squarely at African Americans as both a reading audience and a potential consumer base. After being denied financial support from multiple banks and several well-to-do individuals, Johnson took out a loan of five hundred dollars against his mother's home furniture. Upon securing the necessary startup funds, he still lacked the editorial skills and experience required to put together a top-tier periodical worthy of space on national newsstands. To fill this need, he broached Benjamin Burns (born Benjamin Bernstein), a Jewish communist and editor at the Chicago Defender, who agreed to help launch the new venture. Within this arrangement, Johnson served as the public face of what began as the Negro Digest Publishing Company, and Burns served as the skilled editor working behind the scenes.²

Formatted as a digest, the magazine was “a convenient, economical monthly magazine of condensations taken from an international list of newspapers and magazines…printed to fit in your pocket and priced to fit your pocketbook.”³ While keeping the sales cost low, Johnson and Burns also solicited original pieces, which over time appeared more frequently than reprints. The “race-angled duplication,” as Burns once described it, mimicked the layout, type, formatting, and several regular features in Reader's Digest.⁴ At the same time, in an effort to align the magazine with its particular target audience, Burns and Johnson developed several unique columns over the course of Negro Digest's initial run, including “The Roundtable,” “Dixie Drivel,” “My Most Humiliating Jim Crow Experience,” and “If I Were a Negro.” Collectively the columns, much like the magazine, sought to capture the distinct experiences, discourses, and dialects of Black America while situating African Americans as an integral, and loyal, constituent of the American body politic.

Initially Negro Digest's attempt to serve as “a magazine of Negro comment” was seriously misunderstood by J. Edgar Hoover's Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). In 1944 one of Hoover's men declared, “This publication might be characterized as a militant Negro publication of the variety of [the Baltimore] ‘Afro-American’ and the ‘Pittsburgh Courier.’”⁵ Likely the result of Burns's involvement, the California Committee on Un-American Activities, which worked closely with the FBI, believed Negro Digest was “communist initiated and controlled, or so strongly influenced as to be in the Stalin solar system.”⁶ The Chicago Field Division of the FBI reported that Negro Digest “was in a position to influence a considerable number of Negroes.”⁷ In a 1943 report, one agent surmised, “An examination of the contents of the publication causes doubt that it will be helpful in leading to more harmonious race relations.” The agent further noted that “Negroes reading the Negro Digest are likely to become more agitated after reading numerous articles in the publication.”⁸ Even as the FBI agent projected his own fanciful ideas about Black political behavior onto the magazine's readers, he also offered a shrewd option for the FBI moving forward, stating, “It is believed that this publication [if] handled properly could do much to help/prevent racial friction.”⁹ Appearing to heed the agent's words and come to grips with the magazine's repeated attempts to solicit written commentaries from Hoover, the bureau abandoned its hostile oppositional posture toward the magazine.¹⁰ In 1948 one FBI agent encouraged Hoover to oblige Johnson's requests to contribute to the magazine, noting that the company “has been favorable to the FBI.”¹¹ Following the suggestion of his agent, Hoover's October 1948 article “Crime Fighting as a Career for Negroes” appeared as one of several FBI promotion pieces in Johnson's magazines over the years.¹² From that point on, Hoover and Johnson established an amicable relationship, though Hoover would reestablish FBI surveillance of Negro Digest in 1969.¹³

Contrary to the incendiary magazine initially imagined by the FBI, Negro Digest reflected the enterprising character of its founder far more than its communist editor. Breaking with long-standing traditions of the African American press, and arguably its raison d'être, Negro Digest did not aggressively prioritize and denounce issues of American racism, inequality, and injustice. Instead, Johnson's magazine at times made light of, frequently downplayed, and intentionally sidestepped passionate discussions on racial justice, civil rights, and historic discrimination. In those instances when the magazine did lend space to more intense discussions of racial justice, the articles were clearly marked as reprints and often framed by a critical, yet supportive, African American patriotism, or as part of a larger project to enhance “interracial understanding.”¹⁴ In fact, Johnson's decision not to prioritize racial justice effectively set Negro Digest apart from the most widely circulating African American magazines—the NAACP's Crisis and the Urban League's Opportunity—and the dominant African American newspapers of the 1940s, including the Pittsburgh Courier and Chicago Defender. By creating an innovative magazine marketed to, sold to, and consumed by African Americans, sans the explicit racial justice stance, Johnson initiated an important bourgeois turn in African American print culture that grew only stronger with subsequent JPC publications.

The rapid success of Negro Digest allowed Johnson to expand and exercise greater control on the African American print industry. Starting with a circulation of five thousand copies in November 1942, Negro Digest's circulation quickly grew to fifty thousand copies in eight months and over one hundred thousand copies by 1945.¹⁵ The revenues and reader interest in Negro Digest led Johnson and Burns to launch Ebony, a large glossy Life-like magazine filled with colorful pictures of “the happier side of Negro life—the positive, everyday achievements from Harlem to Hollywood.”¹⁶ According to Burns, Johnson was the lone figure who preferred the emphasis on African American celebrities, sensationalism, success, and sex, instead of “get[ting] all hot and bothered about the race question.”¹⁷ As a communist, Burns preferred a more political emphasis, but he feared federal persecution for his beliefs and felt he lacked the racial insight and leverage to trump Johnson's vision.¹⁸ Moreover, nebulous business agreements between the two men eventually played out with Johnson claiming the title of founding owner and Burns serving simply as an employee.¹⁹ Ultimately Johnson's vision and politics carried the day, and what started as the Negro Digest Publishing Company was eventually rebranded as the Johnson Publishing Company. As a result, Ebony's pages granted even less space to the struggle for racial and economic justice than its predecessor, Negro Digest.

Gracing newsstands for the first time in 1945, Ebony was an immediate success, selling out all of its initial copies. As a huge overnight sensation, Ebony's revenues quickly outpaced Negro Digest and displaced the first magazine as the bedrock of the company. In two short years, Ebony had a circulation of over three hundred thousand copies, claiming the lofty distinction of the largest circulating Black publication in the United States.²⁰ Not only did Ebony garner an instant subscription base, but in its first few years it also attracted major corporate advertisers in Zenith, Swift Packing Company, Armour Food Company, Quaker Oats, Pepsi-Cola, Colgate, Old Gold, Seagram, and Remington Rand.²¹ Johnson's ability to desegregate the advertising industry by courting major (read, white) corporate sponsors had the dual effect of positioning JPC's head man as a key gatekeeper between African American consumers and white corporate America while also expanding JPC's dominance in the arena of African American print culture.

JPC's growing relationship with white corporate America and its steady subscription base in Black America allowed Johnson to grow the mom-and-pop company into a formidable publishing empire in less than a decade. Johnson was able to outlast or buy out any competition, as he did with Black-owned magazines such as Our World, Tan Confessions, and Copper Romance. He also rapidly expanded JPC's staff, adding competent and experienced employees, attracting some of Black America's best graduates in journalism, and wooing top-notch and emergent African American journalists from other successful publications. One such journalist was Hoyt Fuller, who cut his teeth writing for the Detroit Tribune and the Michigan Chronicle before joining JPC as an associate editor of Jet in 1954.²² Johnson's ability to attract African American journalists added to JPC's growing mystique, making it both a magnet for up-and-comers in the profession and a source of anxiety for owners of other African American publishing outfits.²³ To the owners of rival periodicals, Johnson was a headhunter and JPC was a merciless empire with enough resources to pilfer the best journalists from their respective rosters.²⁴ The expansion of staff led Johnson to purchase a three-story former funeral home on South Michigan Avenue, not far from the center of Chicago's major business district, in 1949.²⁵ From the comfort of the new location, Johnson and his staff initiated several startup publications, such as Jet and Hue, with some lasting longer than others. At the same time, the stability of JPC allowed Johnson to take risks and terminate financially solvent magazines, such as Negro Digest in 1951, whenever he devised new ways to increase profits. By the middle of the 1950s, Johnson's business, with its numerous magazines, official corporate office, top-notch staff of over one hundred employees, and Fortune 500 connections, had emerged as a modern American company and by far the most prominent African American publishing empire in the United States.²⁶

Marginal by no means to the JPC success story are the politics of the company's founding owner, John H. Johnson. More than any individual editor, writer, or employee, JPC publications reflected the class-based, racial politics of their owner. Johnson strongly believed in the American traditions of rugged individualism and free enterprise. These beliefs firmly shaped his racial politics, which most times discreetly doubled as class politics. Though infrequent, his most vociferous criticism of racial discrimination stemmed from the limits that American racism placed on social mobility and economic opportunity, especially as it related to his own life. Johnson believed that racism was destructive to the lives of African Americans and that it tarnished the American social order. However, in his estimation, racism was not a problem that was endemic to American society; instead it was a temporary shortcoming that could be overcome through expanded interracial understanding, genteel public comportment, and veritable desegregation of the free market. In order for this to happen, though, white economic powerbrokers had to be made aware of the “goldmine in their backyard.”²⁷ From Johnson, these influential businessmen needed to learn “the secret of selling th...