Julius Lester

Lester, Julius (b. 1939), activist, essayist, journalist, radio broadcaster, folklorist, writer, historian, poet, and professor. Julius Lester was born on 27 January 1939 in St. Louis, Missouri, the son of Woodie Daniel Lester and Julia B. Smith Lester. He received his BA from Fisk University in 1960, with a semester at San Diego State College, and an MA from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst in 1971, where he is currently a professor. He is married to his second wife and has four children. Lester has won the Newbery Honor Award (1969) and the Massachusetts State Professor of the Year Award (1986), and was a finalist for the National Book Award (1972) and the National Jewish Book Award (1988). Lester converted to Judaism in 1982.

Julius Lester's literary career has spanned a broad variety of political events and literary genres. Lester began his career as an activist with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), traveling to Mississippi, Cuba (with Stokely Carmichael), North Vietnam, and Korea. In 1963 Lester coauthored We Shall Overcome! Songs of the Southern Freedom Movement with Guy Carawan, Candie Carawan, Ethel Raim, and Joseph Byrd. His first solo work, Look Out, Whitey! Black Power's Gon' Get Your Mama, was published in 1968 and followed in the same year by To Be a Slave. In 1969 Lester's collection of essays and articles about revolutionary movements in the United States, entitled Revolutionary Notes, was published and, in the same year, Black Folktales and Search for a New Land. In 1970 Lester divorced his first wife and left activism. He continued his prolific output with The Seventh Son: The Thought & Writings of W. E. B. Du Bois (1971), The Long Journey Home: Stories from Black History and Two Love Stories (1972), and a book of poetry, Who I Am (1974), followed in 1976 by his first autobiography, All Is Well. In 1982 he began another series of books with This Strange New Feeling and continuing with Do Lord Remember Me (1984), The Tales of Uncle Remus (1987), More Tales of Uncle Remus (1988), Lovesong, his second autobiography (1988), How Many Spots Does a Leopard Have? (1989), Falling Pieces of the Broken Sky (1990), and Further Tales of Uncle Remus (1990). Four books followed in 1994: The Last Tales of Uncle Remus, And All Our Wounds Forgiven, John Henry, and The Man Who Knew Too Much.

Lester's work is characterized by his interest in education and change. His participation in academia and literature is marked by a concern both with African American culture and the need to break down the institutionalization of education and information that led him to activism in the 1960s and early 1970s. From the beginning of his career, however, Lester's work has been controversial. In the 1970s, he refused to endorse the Black Panther Party or Stokely Carmichael, consistently writing articles that editorial boards were reluctant to publish. Lester's most recent work is still controversial. His essays, courses, and speeches celebrating Judaism and Jews have raised angry responses from some African Americans, who accuse Lester of being a self-hating African American. Lester's most recent collection of essays, Falling Pieces of the Broken Sky (1990), continues to explore the intersections of race, religion, and education, addressing issues of personal identity and group identity, the role of spirituality in life, and the nature of formal and informal education and reeducation.

Bibliography

• “Julius Lester,” in Who's Who among African Americans, 9th ed., Shirelle Phelps, 1994, p. 927.
• Paula T. Connolly, “Still a Slave: Legal and Spiritual Freedom in Julius Lester's ‘Where the Sun Lives,’” Children's Literature 26, 1998, pp. 123–139.
• Lisa W. Nikola, “John Henry: Then and Now,” African American Review 32:1 Spring 1998): 51–56

Karen R. Bloom

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

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