Don L. Lee was ten years old when his mother, Maxine, took him and his younger sister to visit the minister of one of the largest black churches in Detroit. It was mid-20th-century America, and, abandoned years before by her husband, Maxine, a beautiful, vivacious woman, had been trying to keep the family afloat with the odds stacked against her.
Within a week, Maxine and her children were on the street.
If you’re African-American, you might not recognize the name Haki Madhubuti unless you move in literary and intellectual circles. But you’ve heard echoes of his poetry in the music of rap and hip-hop. And you’re familiar with the tension between those in the black community who favor the opportunities of integration and those who argue that blacks need to take control of their own lives, a gospel Madhubuti has preached for more than half a century.
“I could have been famous as Don L. Lee,” Madhubuti says to me as we walk down a stairwell at the Barbara A. Sizemore Academy in Chicago’s Englewood neighborhood while, outside, a late winter sun has turned the worn-down homes and cityscape across the street into blazing beauty. He’s what used to be called a long drink of water—six-foot-one and still thin at the age of 76, a vegan who exercises daily, meditates, and does yoga.
Black empowerment had been his lodestar since his teenage years, and already he’d begun to put down roots among his fellow blacks in Chicago, even though, because of his light skin (his memoir is titled YellowBlack: The First Twenty-One Years of a Poet’s Life), he never felt fully accepted.
Indeed, last year at one of the 50th anniversary celebrations for Third World Press, Ta-Nehisi Coates, best-selling author of Between the World and Me and writer of the Black Panther comic books, told the audience, “There were numerous times throughout the course of my childhood and early adulthood . . . when books [written] by Brother Haki directly and published by Brother Haki were central to me.” Those books, he said, “made me possible.”
