February 2, 2023
A legendary publisher on Chicago’s South Side found himself facing thousands of dollars of damage following a flood that destroyed a large amount of merchandise.
A burst pipe sent water gushing into the headquarters of Third World Press (TWP), which has published works by the likes of Amiri Baraka, Gwendolyn Brooks, and Chancellor Williams.
Dr. Haki Madhubati, who recently received the Pegasus Lifetime Achievement Award from the Poetry Foundation, set up a GoFundMe page to repair damages to the independent company.
“I think we put the GoFundMe nonprofit page up on a Friday, and within a week or so, we saw people were responding. It multiplied. And people who had not contacted us in years came to help,” Madhubati said during an interview with Fobes.com. “And what happened? I see it as a movement equated to what we were doing in the sixties and the seventies. It was a movement to save an institution because they knew -one- that I love black people, that’s number one. But they knew also that Third World Press was a publisher of record.”
“We had to throw out books that look like they can be sold, but they had been contaminated as a result of water and mold and so forth. It’s been very difficult,” Madhubati said. He added that damages are somewhere between $250,000 and $300,000.
One of TWP’s most well-known authors, Brooks, has penned more than twenty books of poetry, including Children Coming Home, To Disembark, which was published by Third World Press. In 1946 and 1947, Brooks was awarded a grant from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation. In 1949, she published her second volume of verse, Annie Allen, a portrait of a Bronzeville girl as a daughter, a wife, and a mother, experiencing loneliness, loss, death, and poverty. In 1950, Brooks won the Pulitzer Prize for Annie Allen.
Baraka, who is known as the Father of Black Arts Movement, which sought to duplicate in fiction, poetry, drama, and other mediums the aims of the black power movement in the political arena. Among his best-known works are the poetry collections The Dead Lecturer and Transbluesency: The Selected Poetry of Amiri Baraka/LeRoi Jones, 1961-1995; the play Dutchman; and Blues People: Negro Music in White America.
“We have this tradition and people around the country responded with donations of all sizes,” Madhubuti, 80, said to Forbes. “And we don’t have any judgment around what people give or do not give us, but I always felt that they gave what they can afford to give.”
This year, TWP is set to publish Letters/Poems by Sonia Sanchez, as well as a new edition of Jonathan Tilove’s Along Martin Luther King, Travels On Black America’s Main Street, and A New Black Reconstruction: The Thought, Activism & Love of Edmund Gordon, edited by Ezekiel Dixon-Roman, David Wall Rice, Carol D. Lee and Haki R. Madhubuti.
