Julius Lester

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writer; educator

Personal Information

Born January 27, 1939, in St. Louis, MO; son of W. D. (a minister) and Julia (Smith) Lester; married Joan Steinau (a researcher), 1962 (divorced, 1970); married Alida Carolyn Fechner, March 21, 1979; children: (first marriage) Jody Simone, Malcolm Coltrane; (second marriage) Elena Milad (stepdaughter), David Julius.
Education: Fisk University, B.A., 1960.

Career

Folksinger and photographer, 1960-68; director, Newport Folk Festival, Newport, RI, 1966-68; writer, 1966--; producer and host of live radio shows, WBAI-FM, New York City, 1968-75; host of television program Free Time, WNET-TV, New York City, 1971-73; University of Massachusetts--Amherst, professor of Afro-American Studies, 1971-88, acting director and associate director of Institute for Advanced Studies in Humanities, 1982-84, professor of Near Eastern and Judaic Studies, 1982--.

Life's Work

Julius Lester has distinguished himself as a civil rights activist, musician, photographer, festival promoter, radio and talk show host, professor, poet, and novelist. But he is perhaps best known for his award-winning fiction for young adults, a body of work that directly addresses the black American experience during and after slavery. Especially in his books for children, Lester has been acclaimed for his blend of realistic detail, dialogue, and storytelling, all contributing to a compelling historical portrait of African Americans. Lester has also penned two autobiographies, All Is Well and Lovesong: Becoming a Jew, both of which demonstrate his staunch individualism and rebellion against anyone--black or white--who would wish to judge him by his race alone.

"One of my attributes is blackness, but that is not the sum total of my existence, and I refuse to allow society to make it so," Lester wrote in All Is Well. "I am almost fatally ill with people trying to impose their idea of me on me.... And anything anyone ventures to say about me will not be true. I will not be pinned by anyone's words, particularly my own." Lester, who resists easy categorization both as an academic and as a writer, converted to Judaism in mid-life. He told Publishers Weekly, "I haven't reached an end to my explorations. But I've found something so huge that it's big enough for me to explore and never get bored or tired or worn out. I think Judaism is the closest thing to the infinite within the finite that I have found."

Lester was born in St. Louis, Missouri, in 1939, the younger son of a Methodist minister. He grew up in Kansas City, Kansas, and Nashville, Tennessee, where his father led congregations. Lester was profoundly influenced by his father, a man who told stories in the southern rural black tradition, and by his grandmother, whose strange-sounding maiden name--Altschul--revealed that she was descended from Eastern European Jewry. This connection to a Judaic forebear would become a treasure for Lester when he underwent his own conversion during the 1980s.

As a child and teen, Lester spent summers in Arkansas with his grandmother. There he was exposed to racism and segregation in the days before the civil rights movement gained strength. He was profoundly influenced by what he described in Horn Book as the South's atmosphere of "deathly spiritual violence." In addition to its "many restrictions on where [blacks] could live, eat, go to school, and go after dark," the South was a dangerous place where blacks faced "the constant threat of physical death if you looked at a white man in what he considered the wrong way or if he didn't like your attitude."

Lester was a gifted student who sometimes knew more about subjects than his teachers. He could also sing and play guitar. Although his early artistic interests lay in folk music, he aspired to become a writer. Books, he told Horn Book, raised possibilities that he could not have imagined otherwise. Reading, he said, brought him "the knowledge that the segregated world in which I was forced to live bounded by the white heat of hatred was not the only reality. Somewhere beyond that world, somewhere my eyes could not then penetrate, were dreams, ... and I knew this was true because the books I read ravenously, desperately, were voices from that world."

After earning a bachelor's degree in English from Fisk University in 1960, Lester became politically active in the civil rights struggle. One of his contributions was to play guitar and banjo at rallies in the South, a vocation that brought friendships with other politically committed singers such as Pete Seeger, Phil Ochs, and Judy Collins. As the 1960s progressed--and the racial climate in America became more polarized--Lester joined the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), a group that gradually assumed an increasingly militant stance against racism. Lester, who was also a talented photographer, became head of SNCC's photo department and visited North Vietnam during the Vietnam War to document the effects of U.S. bombing missions. He also traveled extensively in the South, taking pictures to help document the civil rights movement.

Lester's first books were written as a response to his experiences in the civil rights struggle. Middle to late 1960s works such as The Angry Children of Malcolm X, Look Out Whitey, Black Power's Gon' Get Your Mama!, and Revolutionary Notes established him as an eloquent and impassioned defender of the new black militancy. Still, Lester brought his penetrating gaze to the movement itself, not hesitating to criticize its leaders when he detected hypocrisy. In Commonweal, John Garvey wrote that Lester's work of the period "took on not only the targets favored by radicals during the sixties, but the movement itself, when it failed in honesty or compromised itself morally. He made ideologues on the left nervous."

Lester ended the 1960s with a measure of fame as a photographer, a journalist, an essayist, and a folksinger with two albums to his credit. In 1968 he was hired to host a radio show at WBAI-FM, a public broadcasting station in New York City. Previous to this, he had served as director of the prestigious Newport Folk Festival, at a time when that gathering of alternative musicians was becoming more and more popular. These accomplishments may have been enough for some, but Lester was about to embark on yet another career, one that would bring him still more acclaim.

An editor at Dial Press who helped to prepare one of Lester's adult books for publication suggested that he try to write for children. Lester was initially somewhat puzzled by the idea, but he gave it a try. In 1969 he released two books that came to mark his future success as a writer for young people. To Be a Slave, a collection of six stories based on historical accounts, evolved from an oral history of slaves Lester was compiling. The book, Lester's first for children, was the runner-up for the Newbery Medal, one of American literature's most important prizes. Later that year Lester published Black Folktales, recasting various human and animal characters from African legends and slave narratives.

In 1971 Lester began to host a public television show called Free Time. He was also hired at the University of Massachusetts--Amherst as a professor in its new Afro-American Studies Department. Over the years, particularly in the early 1980s, Lester earned national awards for his teaching. He left radio and television in 1975 and settled in Amherst as a full-time professor and author.

During the 1970s and 1980s, Lester released a number of popular books that showed his overlapping interests in African American history, folklore, and politics. The Knee-High Man and Other Tales assembles six black folk stories, including those of the well-known Brer Rabbit, treating them with subtle emphasis on the politics of defying racism. 1972's Long Journey Home and Two Love Stories as well as This Strange New Feeling, published ten years later, offer lessons in black heritage through fiction based on actual African American experiences. Long Journey Home, a finalist for the National Book Award, explores the everyday lives of ordinary African Americans in the Reconstruction period--a subject that Lester described as "history from the bottom up."

Lester had also teamed up with illustrator Jerry Pinkney for a series of well-received Uncle Remus retellings, beginning with The Adventures of Brer Rabbit, published in 1987. The cycle of titles, which came to be known as The Tales of Uncle Remus, continued into a fourth volume in 1994, with The Last Tales of Uncle Remus as told by Julius Lester. He and Pinkney produced a children's picture book that year, too; John Henry, described in a Publishers Weekly critique as a "triumph of collaboration," touched upon various episodes in the American folktale hero's life. The reviewer lauded the "carefully crafted updating [which] begs to be read aloud for its rich, rhythmic storytelling flow."

Lester's fame as a young adult writer did not diminish his desire to work on adult literature. In 1994 he published a civil rights novel entitled And All Our Wounds Forgiven, which tracks four volatile lives through the dramatic events of the 1960s. But Lester's memoir Lovesong, in which he writes about his conversion to Judaism, remained one of his best-known books for adults. Documenting the seminal event of Lester's midlife, Lovesong came about after a long period of spiritual searching. Ironically, Lester was once branded an anti-Semite during his days at WBAI Radio, when he allowed an anti-Semitic poem to be read over the air as part of a larger debate on black-Jewish relations.

Lester assured Publishers Weekly that he had never held anti-Semitic views and that he was in fact sensitive to Jewish issues long before he made his conversion. Asked what particularly attracted him about the faith, Lester commented, "Jewish music is so emotional. The emphasis in black music is on rhythm. The emphasis in Jewish music is more on melody, [which] I love.... What I find so incredible is that in Jewish worship, you pray in song."

As part of his spiritual journey, Lester moved from Reform to Conservative Judaism. Not only does he lead prayers in the synagogue, he also observes many of the strictest commandments set down for the Jewish faith. His religious conversion led to career changes as well. In 1988 Lester was ousted from the renamed African American Studies Department at the University of Massachusetts. A New Republic reporter noted that Lester's "crimes would seem such only to those with no understanding of academic freedom, who insist that their colleagues march in ideological lockstep.... He does not believe that the very existence of black studies as an academic field requires a monolithic politics."

Undaunted, Lester moved to the university's Near Eastern and Judaic Studies Department, where he teaches a course comparing Jewish and black oppression, and others on biblical interpretation. If he had to choose a favorite aspect of his multifaceted career, Lester would probably choose writing his young adult books. "Children's literature is the one place where you can tell a story," he told Publishers Weekly. "Just, straight, tell a story, and have it received as narrative without any literary garbage. I've done a fair amount of historically-based fiction that would be derided as adult literature because it's not 'sophisticated.' I'm just telling a story about people's lives. In children's literature, I can do that."

Lester told the Fourth Book of Junior Authors and Illustrators that he began writing for children because he wanted his own children to have books that he couldn't find as a youngster in a segregated society. "I have found writing for children of all ages more rewarding than writing for adults," he concluded, "primarily because I like the audience and the responses I get from children."

New York Times Book Review contributor Rosalind K. Goddard recommended Lester's young adult writing as both lesson and entertainment, noting, "These stories point the way for young blacks to find their roots, so important to the realization of their identities, as well as offer a stimulating and informative experience for all."

Awards

Newbery Honor Book citation, 1969, and Lewis Carroll Shelf Award, 1970, both for To Be a Slave; Lewis Carroll Shelf Award, 1972, and National Book Award finalist, 1973, both for The Long Journey Home: Stories from Black History; Lewis Carroll Shelf Award, 1973, for The Knee-High Man and Other Tales; honorable mention, Coretta Scott King Award, 1983, for This Strange New Feeling, and 1988, for Tales of Uncle Remus: The Adventures of Brer Rabbit; Distinguished Teacher's Award, 1983-84; National Professor of the Year Silver Medal Award, Council for Advancement and Support of Education, 1985; Massachusetts State Professor of the Year award and Gold Medal Award for national professor of the year, both from the Council for Advancement and Support of Education, both 1986.

Works

Writings

• (With Pete Seeger) The 12-String Guitar as Played by Leadbelly: An Instructional Manual, Oak, 1965.
• The Angry Children of Malcolm X, Southern Student Organizing Committee, 1966.
• (Editor, with Mary Varela) Our Folk Tales: High John, The Conqueror, and Other Afro-American Tales, illustrated by Jennifer Lawson, 1967.
• (Editor, with Varela) Fanny Lou Hamer, To Praise Our Bridges: An Autobiography, KIPCO, 1967.
• The Mud of Vietnam: Photographs and Poems, Folklore Press, 1967.
• Look Out Whitey! Black Power's Gon' Get Your Mama!, Dial, 1968.
• To Be a Slave, illustrated by Tom Feelings, Dial, 1969.
• Black Folktales, illustrated by Feelings, Baron, 1969.
• Search for the New Land: History as Subjective Experience, Dial, 1969.
• Revolutionary Notes, Baron, 1969.
• (Editor) The Seventh Son: The Thoughts and Writings of W. E. B. Du Bois, two volumes, Random House, 1971.
• (Compiler, with Rae Pace Alexander) Young and Black in America, Random House, 1971.
• The Long Journey Home: Stories from Black History, Dial, 1972.
• The Knee-High Man and Other Tales, illustrated by Ralph Pinto, Dial, 1972.
• Two Love Stories, Dial, 1972.
• (Editor) Stanley Couch, Ain't No Ambulances for No Nigguhs Tonight (poems), Baron, 1972.
• (With David Gahr) Who I Am (photopoems), Dial, 1974.
• All Is Well: An Autobiography, Morrow, 1976.
• This Strange New Feeling (short stories), Dial, 1982.
• Do Lord Remember Me (novel), Holt, 1984.
• The Tales of Uncle Remus, illustrated by Jerry Pinkney, Dial, Volume 1: The Adventures of Brer Rabbit, 1987, Volume 2:The Further Adventures of Brer Rabbit, 1988, Volume 3:The Misadventures of Brer Rabbit, Brer Fox, Brer Wolf, the Doodang, and Other Creatures, 1990.
• Lovesong: Becoming a Jew (autobiography), Holt, 1988.
• How Many Spots Does a Leopard Have? and Other Tales, illustrated by David Shannon, Scholastic, 1990.
• Falling Pieces of the Broken Sky, Arcade, 1990.
• John Henry, illustrated by Jerry Pinkney, Dial, 1994.
• And All Our Wounds Forgiven (novel), Arcade, 1994.
• Contributor of essays and reviews to numerous magazines and newspapers. Associate editor of Sing Out, 1964-70; contributing editor, Broadside of New York, 1964-70.

Further Reading

Books

• Black Writers: A Selection of Sketches from "Contemporary Authors," Gale, 1989, pp. 355-56.
• Children's Literature Review, Volume 2, Gale, 1976.
• Contemporary Authors New Revision Series, Volume 43, Gale, 1993, pp. 273-75.
• Fourth Book of Junior Authors and Illustrators, Wilson, 1978, pp. 223-24.
• Lester, Julius, All Is Well, Morrow, 1976.
• Lester, Julius, Lovesong: Becoming a Jew, Holt, 1988.
• Something about the Author, Volume 74, Gale, 1992, pp. 158-61.

• Commonweal, March 25, 1988, pp. 167-69.
• Horn Book, April 1984, pp. 161-69.
• New Republic, June 27, 1988, pp. 9-10.
• New York Review of Books, April 20, 1972, pp. 41-2.
• New York Times Book Review, November 3, 1968, p. 7; November 9, 1969, pp. 10, 12; February 4, 1973, p. 8; May 17, 1987; August 7, 1994, section 7, p. 14.
• Publishers Weekly, February 12, 1988, pp. 67-8; September 5, 1994, p. 108.
• Washington Post, July 12, 1994, p. E1.

— Anne Janette Johnson

This biographical article needs additional citations for verification. Please help by adding reliable sources. Contentious material about living persons that is unsourced or poorly sourced must be removed immediately, especially if potentially libelous or harmful. (January 2011)

Julius Lester (born January 27, 1939) is an American author of books for children and adults,^[1] and taught for 32 years (1971–2003) at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. He is also a photographer, as well as a musician who recorded two albums of folk music and original songs.

Contents 1 Biography 1.1 Early life and family 1.2 New York years 1.3 University years 1.4 Personal 1.5 Creative endeavors 2 Awards 2.1 Book awards 2.2 Other awards 3 References 4 External links

Biography

Early life and family

Born on January 27, 1939, in St. Louis, Missouri, Julius Lester is the son of Rev. W.D. Lester, a Methodist minister, and Julia (Smith) Lester. The family moved to Kansas City, Kansas in 1941, and to Nashville, Tennessee,in 1952. In 1960 he received his BA from Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee with a major in English and minors in Art and Spanish.^[2]

In 1961 he moved to New York City where he married Joan Steinau. They had two children, Jody Simone (1965) and Malcolm Coltrane (1967). The couple divorced in 1970. Malcolm Lester coaches lacrosse and teaches English at St. Albans School in Washington DC.^[3]

New York years

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During his New York years, Lester hosted a radio show on WBAI-FM (1968–1975), co-hosted a television show on Channel 13 for two years, taught a course on Afro-American history at the New School for Social Research, recorded two albums of traditional and original songs for Vanguard Records, Julius Lester (1966) and Departures (1967). A compilation of songs from both albums was released on a CD, Dressed Like Freedom, on Ace Records in 2007. During this time, Lester became active in the civil rights movement, first as a folk singer at numerous civil rights rallies and as part of the 1964 Mississippi Summer Project.^{[citation needed]} In 1966 he began working full time with SNCC (Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee) as a photographer and traveled to North Vietnam to document U.S. bombing of the country,^{[citation needed]} something the U.S. government was denying at the time. That same year he traveled to Cuba, where he and Stokely Carmichael spent three days traveling with Fidel Castro through the mountains of eastern Cuba.:)^{[citation needed]}

University years

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In 1971 he began teaching in the Afro-American Studies department of the University of Massachusetts Amherst. He remained in that department until 1988 when, after differences with members of the department,^{[citation needed]} he became a member of the Judaic and Near Eastern Studies department, where he remained until his retirement at the end of 2003. During his 32 years at the university, Lester taught courses in five departments: Comparative Literature ("Black and White Southern Fiction"), English ("Religion in Western Literature"), Afro-American Studies ("The Writings of W. E. B. DuBois"), ("Writings of James Baldwin"), ("Literature of the Harlem Renaissance"), ("Blacks and Jews: A Comparative Study"), and Judaic Studies ("Biblical Tales and Legends") and ("The Writings of Elie Wiesel"), History ("Social Change and the 1960s"), one of the university's largest and most popular courses. He was awarded all three of the university's most prestigious faculty awards: the Distinguished Teacher's Award, the Faculty Fellowship Award for Distinguished Research and Scholarship, and the Chancellor's Medal,the university's highest honor.^{[citation needed]} The Council for Advancement and Support of Education selected him as the Massachusetts State Professor of the Year.

Personal

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In 1979 he married Alida Carolyn Fechner, who had a daughter, Elena Milad; the couple had a son, David Julius. The marriage ended in 1991. In 1995 he married Milan Sabatini; his stepdaughter from this marriage is performance artist Lián Amaris.

In 1982, Lester converted to Judaism. At the age of seven, he had learned that his maternal great-grandfather was a German Jew, Aldolph Altschul, who had lived in Pine Bluff, Arkansas, where, every summer, Lester visited his grandmother, one of Adolph's daughters.^{[citation needed]} Lester recounts the story of his spiritual odyssey to Judaism in his book Lovesong. From 1988 to 1991, he was one of the cantors for Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur services at Congregation B'nai Israel, in Northampton, Mass.^{[citation needed]} In 1992 he became lay leader of Beth El Synagogue in St. Johnsbury, Vermont, until resigning in 2006.^{[citation needed]}

Creative endeavors

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Since 1968 Lester has written 43 books: 8 nonfiction, 30 children's books, one book of poetry and photographs (with David Gahr), and three adult novels. His very first book was an instructional book on how to play the 12-string guitar, co-authored with Pete Seeger. Among the awards his books have received are the Newbery Honor, Boston-Globe Horn Book Award, Coretta Scott King Award, National Book Award finalist, ALA Notable Book, National Jewish Book Award finalist, National Book Critics Circle Honor Book, and the New York Times Outstanding Book Award. His books have been translated into 10 languages.^{[citation needed]}

He has published more than 200 essays and book and film reviews for such publications as The New York Times Book Review, The New York Times Op-Ed page, The Boston Globe, Village Voice, The New Republic, Moment, Forward and Dissent.^{[citation needed]}

His photographs have been included in an exhibit of images from the civil rights movement at the Smithsonian Institution. He has had solo shows at the University of Massachusetts Student Union Gallery, the Forbes Library, Northampton, Mass., Valley Photo Center, Springfield, Mass., and the Robert Floyd Photography Gallery, Southampton, Mass.

Awards

Book awards

• Newbery Honor, 1969, and Lewis Carroll Shelf Award, 1971 both for To Be a Slave
• Lewis Carroll Shelf Award, 1972, and National Book Award finalist, 1973, both for The Long Journey Home: Stories from Black History
• Lewis Carroll Shelf Award, 1973, for The Knee-high Man and Other Tales
• Coretta Scott King honor, 1983, for This Strange New Feeling, and 1988, for Tales of Uncle Remus: The Adventures of Brer Rabbit
• Parents' Choice Story Book award, 1987, for The Tales of Uncle Remus, and 1990, for Further Tales of Uncle Remus
• Reading Magic Award, 1988, for More Tales of Uncle Remus
• Boston Globe-Horn Book Award, American Library Association Notable Book, and Caldecott Honor, all 1995, all for John Henry
• ALA Notable Book, 1996, for Sam and the Tigers.
• Coretta Scott King Award, 2006, for his novel Day of Tears: A Novel in Dialogue.^[4]

Other awards

• Distinguished Teacher's Award, 1983–84
• Faculty Fellowship Award for Distinguished Research and Scholarship, 1985
• National Professor of the Year Silver Medal Award, Council for Advancement and Support of Education, 1985
• Massachusetts State Professor of the Year and Gold Medal Award for National Professor of the Year, Council for Advancement and Support of Education, both 1986
• Distinguished Faculty Lecturer, 1986-87.

References

1. ^ "Julius Lester". WorldCat.org. http://www.worldcat.org/search?q=Julius+Lester&dblist=638&fq=ap%3A%22lester%2C+julius%22+%3E+dt%3Abks&qt=facet_dt%3A. Retrieved 30 March 2010. 
2. ^ "Julius Lester: biography". Scholastic. http://www2.scholastic.com/browse/contributor.jsp?id=3308. Retrieved 30 March 2010. 
3. ^ "Julius Lester". HarperCollins. http://www.harpercollins.com/authors/13371/Julius_Lester/index.aspx?authorID=13371. Retrieved 30 March 2010. 
4. ^ "Coretta Scott King Author Awards". The African American Literature Book Club. http://aalbc.com/books/related.htm. Retrieved 30 March 2010. 

• "Julius Lester." Authors and Artists for Young Adults, Volume 51. Gale Group, 2003.
• Lester, Julius. Lovesong: Becoming a Jew, 1988.
• Oppenheimer, Joel. "The Soul that Wanders", The New York Times. January 31, 1988.[1]
• Weisnstein, Natalie. "Julius Lester: There's no magic formula' for blacks and Jews," J. February 16, 1996.[2]

External links

• Official Site
• University of Massachusetts faculty page on Lester
• Manuscript collection, Special Collections, Jones Library, MA.

Persondata
Name	Lester, Julius
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Date of birth	January 27, 1939
Place of birth
Date of death
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