Haki R. Madhubuti

Madhubuti, Haki R. (b. 1942), poet, critic, essayist, teacher, editor, publisher, and businessperson. Given the name Don L. Lee, Haki R. Madhubuti changed his name in 1973 as a result of the ideological influences of the Black Arts movement, of which he was a highly visible member. He was born 23 February 1942 in Little Rock, Arkansas. In 1943 he and his parents migrated to Detroit, Michigan, where his father deserted the family before the birth of Madhubuti's sister. In order to cope with poverty and feed her two children, his mother worked as a janitor and a barmaid, eventually becoming an alcoholic and a drug addict. When Madhubuti was sixteen, his mother died from a drug overdose.

This woman, Maxine Lee, was the prime mover behind the creative force that Haki R. Madhubuti has become. When Madhubuti was thirteen years old, his mother asked him to check out for her Richard Wright's Black Boy from the Detroit Public Library. He became a reader with his discovery of Wright, who led him to other writers, such as Chester Himes, Langston Hughes, Claude McKay, Melvin B. Tolson, Jean Toomer, Gwendolyn Brooks, Margaret Walker, and Arna Bontemps.

After his mother's death, Madhubuti went to Chicago, where he attended Dunbar High School. Because he could not get a job after graduating, he traveled selling magazines, ending up penniless and sick in East St. Louis, Missouri, where he pawned everything he owned and joined the U.S. Army. When Madhubuti was eighteen, a white drill sergeant tore the pages of his copy of Paul Robeson's Here I Stand, stimulating in him a commitment to his Blackness, steepening his drive to study Black cultural and intellectual history, and instilling in him the desire to become a writer.

In 1963 Madhubuti left the army, and four years later Dudley Randall's Broadside Press published Madhubuti's first collection of poetry, Think Black (1967), which had been previously published by the author himself. Six books, all published by Broadside Press, followed: five collections of poetry—Black Pride (1968), Don't Cry, Scream (1969), We Walk the Way of the New World (1970), Directionscore: Selected and New Poems (1971), Book of Life (1973)—and a collection of critical essays, Dynamite Voices: Black Poets of the 1960s (1971).

The titles of these early poetry collections demonstrate that he addressed his work to a Black audience and that he was intensely committed to illuminating for that audience the pitfalls of racism in all its psychological, economic, political, and historical guises. The themes and subjects found in these early collections appear in a more sophisticated form in his poetry collections of the 1980s and 1990s, among them the inner beauty and/or environmental difficulties of the Black woman; what it means to be a Black man in America; the importance of Black male-female relationships; political figures who fight racial problems; poets such as Conrad Kent Rivers, Langston Hughes, Gwendolyn Brooks, Ted Joans, and Sterling Plumpp; the problems with Black assimilation into Western culture; how Blacks in the West have allowed themselves to be brainwashed by Christianity; Blacks who lack substance and commitment to their race; the contradiction of Blacks in the military; and the psychological and artistic contributions of Black musicians.

Madhubuti also involves himself in institution building. He took four hundred dollars he made from reading poetry, bought a mimeograph machine, and along with poets Carolyn M. Rodgers and Johari Amini, as well as Roschell Rick, founded Third World Press in his basement apartment on Chicago's South Side on 12 December 1967. With Hoyt Fuller as their guide, Madhubuti and a number of his contemporaries founded the Organization of Black American Culture (OBAC), a city-wide group that tried to impact cultural activity in the arts. Around this time he and other members of OBAC met Gwendolyn Brooks in a church. As is demonstrated by the poems Madhubuti dedicates to Brooks, by his editing and publishing a book that celebrates her seventieth birthday (Say That the River Turns: The Impact of Gwendolyn Brooks, 1987), and by his now consistent publication of her works, a special bond exists between the two poets.

When Madhubuti met Brooks, he was also a self-described “foot soldier” for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). He and other members of the Black Arts movement read and sold their poetry at Black Arts conferences and at SCLC gatherings. Like Sonia Sanchez, Askia M. Touré, Amiri Baraka, and Larry Neal, Madhubuti is as much political activist as he is poet. His role as writer–political activist emerges in From Plan to Planet (1973), Earthquakes and Sunrise Missions: Poetry and Essays of Black Revival 1973–1983 (1984), Black Men: Obsolete, Single, Dangerous? (1990), and Claiming Earth: Race, Rage, Redemption (1994). While these publications illustrate Madhubuti's skill as essayist and poet, his 1978 collection of essays Enemies: The Clash of Races is the most political. In it he demonstrates that the psychological, the economic, and the sociological are all embodiments of the politics that affect Black lives. Enemies, which describes the poet's associations with SNCC, CORE, and SCLC, more than any publication that precedes it, illuminates Madhubuti's global interest, highlighting the Nationalist and Pan-Africanist thinking in his work.

Madhubuti's publication of Black Books Bulletin (BBB) also grew out of his political activity. He and Larry Neal cochaired a workshop on ideas for publishing at the 1970 meeting of the Congress of Afrikan People. Although Black World, Soulbook, and the Liberator were still being published, no book review journal existed, and in 1971 Madhubuti and Neal founded the BBB. It was published as a quarterly for eight years, after which the issues became very erratic because of a low subscriber base and a lack of a full-time staff. The Challenge of the Twenty-first Century, volume 8, and Blacks, Jews and Henry Gates, Jr.: A Response, volume 16, published in 1991 and 1994, respectively, both address intellectual and political issues controversial at the time among the Black and white intelligentsia.

Madhubuti's edition of Why L.A. Happened: Implications of the ‘92 Los Angeles Rebellion, published in 1993, also attests to his continued involvement in the politics that affect Black lives. This collection includes twenty-nine essays written by Black intellectuals from diverse academic disciplines. This array of writers and scholars underscores Madhubuti's varied interprofessional relationships and the different types of writers he brings to his press. An ability to clarify controversial issues in the Black community is also reflected in Madhubuti's 1990 edition of Confusion by Any Other Name: Essays Exploring the Negative Impact of “The Blackman's Guide to Understanding the Blackwoman.”

His 1987 collection of poetry, Killing Memory, Seeking Ancestors, published by Lotus Press, exemplifies the best of Madhubuti's poetic vision and shows his understanding that the same cultural, political, historical, economic, and educational issues that affected Black lives in the 1960s appear in new guises in the 1990s. “The Great Wait” in this collection beautifully exemplifies both the consistency in Madhubuti's style and the more than twenty years in which he has been honing that style, admonishing Blacks for waiting for others to improve the quality of their lives. In this critique of Blacks' failure to empower themselves, the poet carefully makes it clear that Blacks must overcome the psychological indoctrination that inhibits their taking charge of their lives. The poem progresses perfectly through the repetition of the words “waiting” and “waiters.” The use of these words reflects a “jazzy rhythmic effect” that appears periodically throughout Madhubuti's collections of poetry. His love and knowledge of music is a predominant aspect of his poetry; in various poems he merges diverse musical rhythms with narrative voice, aphorisms, and rhetorical devices such as asyndeton, hyperbole, synecdoche, anaphora, anastrophe, litotes, irony, and ellipsis. His heavy staccato rhythm, the dozens, and sharp humor come straight out of Black street language.

Understanding the need to focus on spiritual and physical health at the same time that one confronts political issues, Madhubuti, John Howell (a Black environmental engineer), and David Hall (a lawyer) founded the National Black Holistic Retreat Society in 1980 to address the multifaceted issues that impact Black men's lives. In addition to this work, Madhubuti reads his poetry and gives lectures on educational, political, literary, and historical issues throughout the United States. He has also spoken in Canada, Morocco, Liberia, Ghana, Tanzania, Senegal, Israel, Brazil, Paris, England, and Holland.

Madhubuti is director of the Gwendolyn Brooks Center at Chicago State University and a professor of English. Having received an MFA from the University of Iowa, he has taught as a writer in residence at Cornell, Howard, Morgan State, and Central State universities as well as the University of Illinois in Chicago. In addition to being named author of the year for 1991 by the Illinois Association of Teachers of English, he received an American Book Award for Publishing and Editing in 1991 and the African Heritage Studies Association's Community Service Award in 1994.

In mid-1996 Madhubuti lived in Country Club Hills, Illinois, with his wife Safisha, a published writer and a professor at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, and their family. GroundWork: New and Selected Poems of Don L. Lee appeared in 1996 and his collection of love poems, Heartlove: Wedding and Love Poems, in 1998. Madhubuti continued his political activism in writing with the publication of Million Man March/Day of Absence: A Commemorative Anthology: Speeches, Commentary, Photography, Poetry, Illustrations, Documents, which he edited with Maulana Karenga in 1996. In the late 1990s, he was also working on a collection of critical essays entitled “Gifted Genius: Writings from the Frontline of the Black Arts Movement” and on a book that contains a page each on the hundred books that have most influenced his life.

Bibliography

• David Llorens, “Black Don Lee,” Ebony, Mar. 1969, 72–80.
• Paula Giddings, “From a Black Perspective: The Poetry of Don L. Lee,” in Amistad 2, eds. John A. Williams and Charles Harris, 1971, pp. 299–318.
• Annette Oliver Shands, “The Relevancy of Don L. Lee As a Contemporary Black Poet,” Black World 21 (June 1972): 35–48. Catherine Daniels Hurst, “Haki R. Madhubuti (Don L. Lee),” in DLB, vol. 41, Afro-American Poets since 1955, eds. Trudier Harris and Thadious M. Davis, 1985, pp. 222–232

Joyce A. Joyce

poet; publisher; educator

Personal Information

Born Don Luther Lee, February 23, 1942, in Little Rock, AR; name legally changed to Haki R. Madhubuti, 1973; son of James L. and Maxine (Graves) Lee; married Johari Amini, 1963; married second wife, Safisha, 1974; children: (first marriage) Don; (second marriage) Laini Nzinga, Bomani Garvey, Akili Malcolm.
Education: Attended Wilson Junior College, Roosevelt University, and University of Illinois, Chicago; Chicago City College, A.A., 1966, University of Iowa, M.F.A., 1984.
Military/Wartime Service: Served in U.S. Army, 1960-63.
Memberships: African Liberation Day Support Committee, Congress of African People, Organization of Black American Culture, Writers Workshop.

Career

DuSable Museum of African American History, Chicago, IL, apprentice curator, 1963-67; Montgomery Ward, Chicago, stock clerk, 1963-64; U.S. Post Office, Chicago, clerk, 1964-65; Speigels, Chicago, junior executive, 1965-66; Third World Press, Inc., Chicago, co-founder, publisher, editor, 1967--. Traveled and lectured throughout Africa, late 1960s-early 1970s; University of Illinois, Chicago, lecturer, 1969-71; Chicago State University, associate professor of English, 1984--; Black Wholistic Retreat Foundation, director, 1984--. Co-founder of Institute of Positive Education and New Concept Development Center. Past writer-in-residence at Cornell University, Northeastern Illinois State College, Howard University, and Central State University.

Life's Work

When Haki R. Madhubuti's first and second volumes of poetry, Think Black! and Black Pride, were published by Dudley Randall's Broadside Press in 1968, they ushered in a new era in black poetry and aesthetical concerns. Often associated with the "new poets" of the late 1960s--including Sonia Sanchez, Nikki Giovanni, and Etheridge Knight--Madhubuti, as Richard Barksdale and Keneth Kinnamon have recognized, "set the style for other Broadside Press poets."

The new poets, according to Barksdale and Kinnamon, "are committed in their poetry to the cause of political, social, and moral revolution, and all believe that poetry and other forms of artistic expression should serve the ends of revolution. All express a deep pride in Blackness, and all believe that poetry should be written from a racial perspective and should probe the full range of racial confrontation." To accomplish these ends, Barksdale and Kinnamon have explained that the new poets use a "language of confrontation," a kind of "ghetto folk speech" containing "irony, understatement, and satiric portraiture." As one of the leading practitioners of the this art, Madhubuti "is one of the most representative voices of his time."

Madhubuti was born Don Luther Lee in Little Rock, Arkansas, in 1942 and grew up in Detroit, Michigan. He and his sister Jacqueline were raised by their mother, Maxine Graves Lee, after their father, James Lee, abandoned the family. Living in extreme poverty, Madhubuti's family was often on welfare, wearing second-hand clothes and residing in apartments where the utilities were rarely connected.

He began working when he was ten to help his mother, who, as D. H. Melhem, author of Heroism in the New Black Poetry, has explained, "worked desperately to maintain her family." Maxine Lee's struggle to survive eventually led her to prostitution and alcoholism. She died at age 35, when Madhubuti was 16 years old and Jacqueline, herself the mother of a year old baby, was 14. Madhubuti recalled, "At her death, it was almost too hard to cry."

Melhem has attributed Madhubuti's early love of literature and Black secular music, as well as a heightened racial consciousness, to his mother's influence. From the tragedy of his mother's death, however, "he learned to see liquor, drugs, and religion as deliberate tools to control populations," explained Melhem. After his mother's death, Madhubuti moved to Chicago to live with an aunt.

Madhubuti joined the army when he was 18. He explained, "This was the first time in my life I didn't have to worry about where I was going to be the next day, or what I was going to eat. The Army was an education for me. I read a lot and mingled with whites for the first time." He later told Melhem that he read an average of a book a day. In 1963 Madhubuti returned to Chicago and worked at various jobs. He was an apprentice curator at the DuSable Museum of African American History, a stock department clerk for Montgomery Ward, a post office clerk, and a junior executive for Spiegels.

In 1966 Madhubuti quit his job with Spiegels and returned to school in order to write poetry full time. He described this experience in the first poem he wrote, "Back Again, Home (confessions of an ex-executive)." The last stanza reads: "He resigned, we wonder why; / let his hair grow--a mustache too, / out of a job--broke and hungry, / friends are coming back-- bring food, / not quiet now--trying to speak, / what did he say? / 'Back Again, / Black Again, / Home.'"

In 1967 Madhubuti had a thousand copies of Think Black!, his first collection of poetry, privately printed. In an article by Brent Staples, Madhubuti recalled, "I started selling at the El stop along 63rd [in Chicago]. I sold 600 copies in a week. It scared me a little--people were actually reading me." The following year, after joining Gwendolyn Brooks's workshop and meeting Dudley Randall and others, Randall's Broadside Press published his second book of poetry, Black Pride, as well as an enlarged edition of Think Black!.

Think Black! has been called autobiographical in tone. In the introduction, Madhubuti states his belief that "black art will elevate and enlighten our people and lead them toward an awareness of self, i.e., their blackness." Madhubuti also discusses his vision of the black poet as a "culture stabilizer: bringing back old values, and introducing new ones." The source of Madhubuti's poetic vision--blackness, Africanness, and the retrieval of old values--manifests itself in his poetic exploration of "all facets of black life: black pride, black identity, black beauty, black women, black heroes, black education, black love, as well as black revolution," claimed Catherine Daniels Hurst.

Madhubuti executes his vision by breaking with a Western poetic tradition and drawing on an aesthetics that is unique to black cultural life: street language and dialect, orality, and music. Gwendolyn Brooks has suggested that "around a black audience he puts warm healing arms," and Paula Giddings has added that "he uses the language of the black communities. It is the language we spoke when we left the white schools and/or teachers--the language we spoke when we got home."

Madhubuti's second collection of poetry, Black Pride, is dedicated to "brothers Malcolm X, Langston Hughes and John Coltrane: All innovators in their own way." Like Think Black!, Black Pride continues, as Marlene Mosher has purported, "to reject the European frame of reference that the American Establishment has foisted upon him and to establish a more positive (for him, a Black man) Afrikan frame of reference."

Mosher has also asserted that, because of Madhubuti's "anti- White, anti-Western bias, his first volumes of poetry, Think Black! and Black Pride, were extremely negative works." Eugene E. Miller has interjected an even more critical voice into the assessments of Madhubuti's first volumes, calling his poems "obvious," "flat," and "literal" and questioning whether they tell us "something significant about the human condition and eternal verities."

With the 1969 publication of Don't Cry, Scream and the 1970 volume, We Walk the Way of the New World, Madhubuti shifted the focus of his poetry from what Mosher described as "'anti- '(White) to 'pro-'(Black)." This better enabled him, Mosher suggested, "to draw from both his own inner strength and the combined strength of other struggling Black poets." The title poem, dedicated to John Coltrane, the great tenor saxophonist, signals that this and Madhubuti's subsequent volumes draw significantly on rhythms from a black American musical tradition. Melhem observed that beginning with Don't Cry, Scream, Madhubuti's poetry resembles "performance" with its "jazzy rhetoric of urgency."

This observation is echoed by C. W. E. Bigsby, who noted in his book The Second Black Renaissance Madhubuti's "increasing concern for incorporating jazz rhythms" and the styling of poems "for performance, the text lapsing into exultant screams and jazz scats." Madhubuti himself has explained that "Black music is our most advanced form of Black art. In spite of the debilitating conditions of slavery and its aftermath, Black music endured and grew as a communicative language, as a sustaining spiritual force, as entertainment, and as a creative extension of our African selves.... To understand ... art ... which is uniquely black, we must start with the art form that has been least distorted, a form that has so far resisted being molded into a pure product of European-American culture."

According to Mosher, Madhubuti's fourth volume of poetry, We Walk the Way of the New World, "mark[s] the culmination of [Don L.] Lee's poetic career." She has further asserted that, "with this volume, Lee has become a 'revolutionary' Black poet in the fullest sense of the term." Mosher praised the title poem in particular, noting parallels between the poem's movement and Madhubuti's own "program of action" in which "Black people move from accommodation or inaction ('run[ning] the dangercourse') through reaction (having '[run] the dangercourse') and finally into action in 'the New World.'"

In 1971 Madhubuti published selected poems and five new poems in Directionscore, and in 1973 he published Book of Life, the first book to be published under his new Swahili name. Book of Life also marks a technical departure from his earlier works: Part II contains a long prose poem composed of 92 numbered stanzas which use standard English to convey values and principles that he learned from his research in African and African American culture.

Madhubuti's interest in retrieving black cultural values and introducing new ones moved him in directions beyond the realm of poetic expression. He and other members of Gwendolyn Brooks's 1967 workshop conceived the idea of founding Third World Press, Inc. to publish works of black writers, including Amiri Baraka and Brooks, and to fight against what Madhubuti called "brain mismanagement."

Madhubuti continues as publisher and editor for Third World Press and for the social and literary journal Black Books Bulletin, which he founded in 1972. His interest in education led him and others to found the Institute of Positive Education in 1969 with Madhubuti as director. In 1972 the Institute established the New Concept Development Center, an elementary school created for inculcating many of the Institute's "nation-building ideas." In an interview with Donnarae MacCann, Madhubuti elaborated on his goals for educating black children, stressing the importance of steering them away from white "enculturation" and his desire to develop an understanding of their own cultural heritage: "My generation learned from that Western tradition, but we were not given the tradition that spoke best to our insides."

He explained to Melhem that his involvement in institution- building was due largely to his belief that institutions were more enduring than "singular persons." With the exception of the church, Madhubuti told Melhem, "strong institutions" are "missing among our people" and consequently, he envisions building institutions as "his job." During the seventies, Madhubuti also turned his attention to writing social essays and literary criticism, including Dynamite Voices I (1971), From Plan to Planet (1973), and Enemies: The Clash of Races (1978).

In addition to pursuing his literary career, Madhubuti began traveling extensively throughout the late sixties and early seventies. In 1969 he participated in the First Pan-African Festival in Algiers, and in 1974 he attended the Sixth Pan- African Congress in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. In 1976 the Senegalese government invited him to participate in Encounter: African World Alternatives, and three years later he went to Israel to learn more about a group called Original Hebrew Israelites (Black Jews). According to Melhem, Madhubuti "has also presented his work at more than a thousand colleges, universities, and community centers in Africa, Asia, the Caribbean, South America and the United States."

In 1973, influenced by his travels in Africa, Don L. Lee officially accepted the Swahili name Haki R. Madhubuti. "The name was given to me by people at the Institute [of Positive Education]--our Naming Committee," explained Madhubuti. "People who wish to change their names submit reasons why, and a biographical sketch either written by them or by somebody else, and then generally the committee looks into the person's background, and names are given according to how the name might fit the current personalities and what they feel the people are.... So the names have not only a spirit behind them, we feel, but also a literal meaning which, if understood properly, will give direction to those who take the name. And so I honestly try to live up to the name that was given to me, so that it would be in the context of both spirit and literal meaning." Melhem reported that "'Haki R. Madhubuti' translates from Swahili as justice, awakening, strong; also precise/accurate."

The years 1984 and 1987 saw the publication of two more volumes of poetry, Earthquakes and Sun Rise Missions and Killing Memory, Seeking Ancestors. These two volumes are more international in scope than Madhubuti's earlier poetry. Melhem found in these works an "increased awareness of the Third World and ... the Pan-African relation to freedom struggles outside the United States." She asserted that the "amalgamation of poetry and prose" that characterizes Earthquakes "tends to liberate both the style and the message."

The final poem of Killing Memory, Seeking Ancestors, "Seeking Ancestors," illustrates Madhubuti's international awareness. Divided into five parts, the poem was written for the First Annual Egyptian Studies Conference in Los Angeles in 1984. Regarding this piece, Melhem observed, "The poet begins with an emotion-filled prophetic vision of the United States. Next, he identifies a proud African cultural heritage; he cites needs and recalls ancestry.... He concludes with a dual quest: for the lost records of a people, and for the rise of Black artists and intellectuals 'to / recall the memory / to / recall the tradition & meaning / to rename the bringers / genius.'"

Paula Giddings has also discovered a certain maturity in Madhubuti's more recent poetry, noting in particular a movement from the "frequent use of 'i'" in his first volumes to the "inevitable movement to you," and "eventually to the consummation of the we and the us" in his later works: "WE'RE an Africanpeople / hard-softness burning black. / the earth's magic color our veins. / an Africanpeople are we / burning blacker softly, softer." As Madhubuti himself has said, "These are the stages which are a necessary part of the growth. You start by being very involved with yourself, and then you grow and become a part of the community. So your work moves from that of the personal to that of being an active part of the people. And then you move to a point where you feel that sense of oneness with the community."

Since the late 1980s, Madhubuti has turned to an increased focus on the life of black men, writing Black Men: Obsolete, Single, Dangerous? Afrikan American Families in Transition, Essays in Discovery, Solutions, Hope (1990) and editing Confusion By Any Other Name: Essays Exploring the Negative Impact of the Blackman's Guide to Understanding the Black Woman (1990) and Why L. A. Happened: Implications of the '92 Los Angeles Rebellion (1993). These works explore what Madhubuti considers one of the major problems of black contemporary life--the absence of fathers and a strong family life to nurture the younger generation.

Since his first publication in 1967, Haki R. Madhubuti has exerted a strong influence on American cultural life--writing poetry and prose, building institutions, publishing, lecturing, teaching, and performing his poetry throughout the world. During this time, his "confident hope and optimism for black people and what they will eventually accomplish," as R. Roderick Palmer has phrased it, remains his primary motivation. This is perhaps most evident in Madhubuti's "A Message All Blackpeople Can Dig (& a few negroes too)," where he writes "We'll move together ... / discover new stars: ... / are moving, moving to return / this earth into the hands of / human beings."

Awards

National Endowment for the Humanities grants, 1969 and 1982; Kuumba Workshop Black Liberation Award, 1973; Broadside Press Outstanding Poet's Award, 1975; DuSable Museum Award for Excellence in Poetry, 1984; National Council of Teachers of English Award, 1988; Sidney R. Yates Arts Advocacy Award, 1988; African Heritage Studies Association citation, 1988.

Works

Selective Discography

• Recordings, released under the name Don L. Lee, include Rappin' & Readin', Broadside Voices, 1970; and Rise, Vision, Coming (with the Afrikan Liberation Arts Ensemble), Institute of Positive Education, 1976.

• Poetry Think Black!, privately printed, 1967, Broadside Press, 1968.
• Black Pride, Broadside Press, 1968.
• Don't Cry, Scream, Broadside Press, 1969, with introduction by Gwendolyn Brooks, Third World Press, 1992.
• We Walk the Way of the New World, Broadside Press, 1970.
• Directionscore: Selected and New Poems, Broadside Press, 1971.
• Book of Life, Third World Press, 1973.
• Earthquakes and Sun Rise Missions: Poetry and Essays of Black Renewal, 1973-1983, Third World Press, 1984.
• Killing Memory, Seeking Ancestors, Lotus Press, 1987.
• Prose For Black People (and Negroes Too), Third World Press, 1968.
• (Author of introduction) To Blackness: A Definition in Thought, Kansas City Black Writers Workshop, 1970.
• Dynamite Voices I: Black Poets of the 1960's, Broadside Press, 1971.
• (Editor with P. L. Brown and F. Ward) To Gwen With Love, Johnson Publishing, 1971.
• (Author of introduction) Marion Nicolas, Life Styles, Broadside Press, 1971.
• The Need for an African Education (pamphlet), Institute of Positive Education, 1971.
• Kwanzaa, Third World Press, 1972.
• From Plan to Planet--Life Studies: The Need for Afrikan Minds and Institutions, Broadside Press, 1973, Third World Press, 1992.
• (With Gwendolyn Brooks, Keorapetse Kgositsile, and Dudley Randall) A Capsule Course in Black Poetry Writing, Broadside Press, 1975.
• (With Jawanza Kunjufu) Black People and the Coming Depression (pamphlet), Institute of Positive Education, 1975.
• Enemies: The Clash of Races, Third World Press, 1978.
• (Editor) Say That the River Turns: The Impact of Gwendolyn Brooks, Third World Press, 1987.
• Black Men: Obsolete, Single, Dangerous? Afrikan American Families in Transition, Essays in Discovery, Solutions, Hope, Third World Press, 1990.
• (Editor) Confusion By Any Other Name: Essays Exploring the Negative Impact of the Blackman's Guide to Understanding the Black Woman, Third World Press, 1990.
• (Editor) Why L.A. Happened: Implications of the '92 Los Angeles Rebellion, Third World Press, 1993.
• Claiming Earth: Race, Rage, Rape, Redemption; Blacks Seeking a Culture of Enlightened Empowerment, Third World Press, 1994.
• Works published prior to 1973 were written under the name Don L. Lee.
• Contributing editor, Black Scholar and First World; publisher, editor, contributor, Black Books Bulletin, 1972--; contributor to more than one hundred anthologies; contributor to numerous magazines and literary journals, including Black World, Negro Digest, Journal of Black Poetry, Essence, Journal of Black History, and Chicago Defender.

Further Reading

Books

• Barksdale, Richard, and Keneth Kinnamon, editors, Black Writers of America: A Comprehensive Anthology, Macmillan, 1972.
• Bigsby, C. W. E., The Black American Writer, Volume I: Poetry and Drama, Penguin, 1969.
• Bigsby, C. W. E., The Second Black Renaissance: Essays in Black Literature, Greenwood Press, 1980.
• Dictionary of Literary Biography, Volume 41: Afro-American Poets Since 1955, Gale, 1985.
• Gibson, Donald B., editor, Modern Black Poets: A Collection of Critical Essays, Prentice-Hall, 1973.
• Henderson, Stephen, Understanding the New Black Poetry: Black Speech and Black Music as Poetic References, Morrow, 1973.
• Melhem, D. H., Heroism in the New Black Poetry, University Press of Kentucky, 1990.
• Mosher, Marlene, New Directions from Don L. Lee, Exposition, 1975.
• Vendler, Helen, Part of Nature, Part of Us, Howard University Press, 1980.
• Williams, Sherley Anne, Give Birth to Brightness: A Thematic Study in Neo-Black Literature, Dial, 1972.

• American Scholar, Spring 1973, p. 330.
• Amistad, 1971, pp. 297-317.
• Black Collegian, February-March 1971, pp. 33-34.
• Black Enterprise, May 1993, p. 14.
• Black World, November 1970, pp. 17-18; April 1971, pp. 84-87; June 1972, pp. 35-48.
• Booklist, March 15, 1993, p. 1283.
• Chicago Journal, February 27, 1980, p. 6.
• Chicago Tribune, December 23, 1987, sec. 5, p. 3.
• CLA Journal, September 1971, pp. 25-36.
• College English, May 1973, pp. 1094-1102.
• Dollars & Sense, January 1993, pp. 61-62.
• Ebony, March 1969, p. 72.
• Essence, June 1990, p. 44; July 1991, p. 92.
• Journal of Black Studies, December 1979, pp. 139-66.
• Journal of Negro History, April 1971, pp. 153-55.
• Library Journal, November 15, 1990, p. 48.
• National Observer, July 14, 1969, p. 28.
• Negro Digest, June 1968, pp. 51-52.
• New York Times Book Review, September 29, 1974, p. 3.
• Poetry, February 1973, pp. 292-93.
• Publishers Weekly, January 4, 1993, p. 22.
• Washington Post, June 6, 1971, p. K5; December 26, 1971, p.
• F1; March 28, 1993, p. 5.

— Mary Katherine Wainwright

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Haki R. Madhubuti (born Don Luther Lee on February 23 1942 in Little Rock, Arkansas, United States) is a renowned African-American author, educator, and poet. He received a Master of Fine Arts degree from the University of Iowa, and served in the U.S. Army from 1960 to 1963.

Madhubuti is a major contributor to the Black literary tradition beginning in the mid-60s, and continuing to have major influences today. Over the years, he has published 24 books (some under his former name, "Don L. Lee") and is one of the world's best-selling authors of poetry and non-fiction, with books in print in excess of 3 million. His Black Men: Obsolete, Single, Dangerous?: The African American Family in Transition (1990) has sold over 1,000,000 copies. His latest books are Claiming Earth: Race, Rage, Rape, Redemption (1994), GroundWork: New and Selected Poems 1966-1996 (1996), and HeartLove: Wedding and Love Poems (1998).

Madhubuti has also co-edited two volumes of literary works from "Gallery 37", releasing The Spirit (1998), and Describe the Moment (2000). His poetry and essays were published in over 30 anthologies from 1997 to 2001. He also wrote Tough Notes: A Healing Call For Creating Exceptional Black Men (2002).

He is a much sought-after poet and lecturer, and has convened workshops and served as guest/keynote speaker at thousands of colleges, universities, libraries and community centers in the U.S. and abroad. A proponent of independent Black institutions, Madhubuti is the founder, publisher, and chairman of the board of Third World Press (established in 1967), co-founder of the Institute of Positive Education/New Concept Development Center (established in 1969), and co-founder of "Betty Shabazz International Charter School" (established 1998) in Chicago, Illinois. He is also a founder and board member of the National Association of Black Book Publishers, a founder and chairman of the board of The International Literary Hall of Fame for Writers of African Descent, and founder and director of the National Black Writers Retreat.

Currently, Madhubuti is the Distinguished University Professor, founder and director emeritus of the Gwendolyn Brooks Center for Black Literature and Creative Writing and director of the Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing program at Chicago State University.

Madhubuti's latest book, Yellow Black, is an autobiographical novel detailing the first 21 years of his life.

The name Haki means "just" or "justice," and Madhubuti means "precise, accurate and dependable," both names deriving from the Swahili language. He changed his name in 1974.

External links

• Haki R. Madhubuti at the African American Literature Book Club
• Haki R. Madhubuti at the Encyclopedia Britannica On-line
• Haki Madhubuti interview
• Haki Madhubuti Stars in Motherland (film)

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