Toni at Random: The Iconic Writer’s Legendary Editorship By Dana A. Williams Amistad | 368 pages | $21 Some brief tales of scholarly success:    Angela Davis, a member of the Communist Party USA and of the Black Panthers, was tried in 1971 for supplying weapons for a courtroom takeover that ended in a bloodbath. After beating the rap, she won the Lenin Peace Prize and spent decades on the faculties of UC Santa Cruz, Rutgers, Vassar, and UCLA. Amiri Baraka (formerly LeRoi Jones), the Maoist revolutionary who was called “the primary theorist of the Black Arts Movement” – one of his theories being that “most American white men are trained to be fags” and that white women therefore secretly want to be raped by black men” — became Poet Laureate of New Jersey and a tenured professor at Stony Brook.  Maulana Karenga (a.k.a. Ron Karenga), who invented Kwanzaa and co-founded the violent Black Nationalist group US Organization, was sent to a California prison in 1971 for felony assault, torture, and forced imprisonment. Now 83, he is the chairman of the Africana Studies Department at Cal State Long Beach.  These are, of course, only three of many black radicals who, after the ferment of the late 1960s and early 1970s, took their activism from the streets to the campus, where they were selected over infinitely more qualified competitors for academic perches from which they inculcated students in anti-American revolutionary thought while leading exceedingly comfortable American lives.  One more story, this one a little longer.  Toni Morrison (born Chloe Ardelia Wofford), whose novels, published between 1970 and 2015, would eventually win her the Nobel Prize, taught English at Texas Southern University and at Howard University between 1955 and 1964. But while Davis, Baraka, and Karenga spent their middle and later years preaching revolution from the front of a classroom, Morrison, during the years 1967-83, was taking on the white man from behind a desk at Random House, where she worked as a fiction editor — an aspect of Morrison’s life that is the subject of Dana A. Williams’s new book Toni at Random: The Iconic Writer’s Legendary Editorship.  For all the charm she could project in TV interviews … she was … every bit as much of a radical ideologue as the likes of Huey Newton, Angela Davis, Amiri Baraka, and Maulana Karenga. By juxtaposing Morrison’s career with those of Davis, Baraka, and Karenga, am I suggesting that she was, like them, a revolutionary? Consider the evidence. On the one hand, so far as I know, Morrison (who died in 2019 at 88) was never a card-carrying Communist or Black Panther and never spent time in the slammer. In some ways, indeed, she ran against the grain of the black activism of the day. For instance, when the NAACP slammed Amos ‘n’ Andy as racist caricature, she retorted that “the program did not deal in stereotypes as much as in genuinely funny characters.” On the other hand, Morrison was a writer who practiced, and preached, the value of depicting characters not as individuals whose stories transcend racial categories and reflect universal human truths but as black (or black female) prototypes. In her book Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (1992), she declared that to deny the centrality of racial identity to American literature was to “[p]our … rhetorical acid on the fingers of a black hand.” We now learn from Dana A. Williams, who is a professor at Howard University, that Morrison’s primary goal as editor was not to discover and promote literary excellence but to abet “a revolution, one book at a time” — to serve up within hard covers the same toxic stew of racial grievance and radical ideology that Davis, Baraka, and Karenga pushed from the front of a classroom. The objective was there from the start. The third book Morrison edited at Random House was To Die for the People (1972) by Black Panthers founder Huey P. Newton, who in 1967 served six months for assault with a deadly weapon and in 1968 was found guilty of voluntary manslaughter — although two retrials ended in hung juries, allowing him to travel in 1971 to China, where, at the height of the Cultural Revolution, he hobnobbed with Zhou Enlai and Madame Mao.  Newton’s agitprop required heavy editing. But the mediocrity of his prose was a minimal concern: what mattered was that, as Morrison explained in an in-house document, his book powerfully challenged “the institutions, values, and systems that undergird the American Empire.” Upon its publication, she wrote to Newton thanking him for having illuminated “the many facets and strengths of the [Black Panther] party.” Another Black Panther who became one of Morrison’s authors — and, indeed, a chum — was the aforementioned Angela Davis. After the latter’s notorious acquittal, Morrison arranged a lunch at which they agreed to collaborate on an autobiography, whereupon Davis flew to Cuba (where else?) to produce a 700-page first draft. The two women honed the final version at Morrison’s home in Spring Valley, New York, where Davis lived for several months, commuting every day with Morrison to the latter’s office in Manhattan.  None of her Random House authors, it appears, became as close to Morrison as Davis did. They shared “intellectual camaraderie.” And Morrison became Davis’s ardent defender: reviewing the 1972 biography Who Is Angela Davis? for the New York Times, she dismissed its author, Regina Nadelson, as a “simpatico white girl who felt she was privy to the secret of how black revolutionaries got that way.”  Remarkably, Morrison also edited a number of poets. Even back then, to get a book of poetry published by a major New York house was a huge coup. Consistently, Morrison bestowed this honor on black female mediocrities. The most ungrateful was June Jordan, who tirelessly complained that Random House was mistreating her because she was black and female — when in fact this colossal no-talent would never have become a Random House author (as well as the director of Stony Brook’s Poetry Center) if she hadn’t been black and female.   Among the other books Morrison edited were Boris Bittker’s The Case for Black Reparations (1973); Quincy Troupe and Rainer Schulte’s Giant Talk (1975), an anthology of writings by Third World revolutionaries; and Ivan van Sertima’s They Came before Columbus (1976), a breathtakingly irresponsible pseudohistory claiming that Africans had visited the New World before Columbus. The fiction writers in her stable, including Toni Cade Bambara, Gayl Jones, and Leon Forrest, tended to be black activists whose stories — like Morrison’s own — were intense, overripe, sometimes violent takes on the “black American experience.”   How, in the end, does Toni at Random affect our view of Toni Morrison? Quite simply, it dispels any doubt about her politics. For all the charm she could project in TV interviews, and for all the pleasure she patently took from her fame, wealth, prestige, and cultural authority, she was, at least throughout her years at Random House, every bit as much of a radical ideologue as the likes of Huey Newton, Angela Davis, Amiri Baraka, and Maulana Karenga. Morrison was a tireless packager and canny booster of the truly menacing ideas that motivated these radicals, and a fierce, if not entirely frank, adversary of the free, capitalist, and Caucasian-dominated civilization that not only lifted her to the very apex of the publishing business but also rewarded her with the Western world’s ultimate accolade for literary greatness. READ MORE from Bruce Bawer: Fry vs. Rowling ¡Babalú! The post %POSTLINK% appeared first on %BLOGLINK%.