The Haunting of the Publishing House

In January 1971, Publishers Weekly asked its readers—for the first time, but certainly not the last—a provocative question: “Publishing: A Racist Club?” Bradford Chambers, the director of the Council on Interracial Books for Children, wrote the piece in response to two high-profile awards controversies. Four years prior, in 1967, William Styron’s Confessions of Nat Turner won the Pulitzer Prize, despite staunch criticism from many Black writers. Three years later, William H. Armstrong’s Sounder, a young adult novel about a boy, his dog, his imprisoned father, and their sharecropping family, won the Newbery Medal, even though it was, like Confessions, written by a white man and roundly criticized for perpetuating offensive caricatures of Black life. As Chambers wrote in Publishers Weekly, “If we give our highest awards to books that try to delineate the minority experience yet, upon further re-examination, turn out to be inherently racist, what does this say about the publishing industry?” This question would be asked countless times over the next 50 years. 

Chambers details the creation of the Office of Minority Manpower in 1969—by his estimation, the first “industry-wide effort to recruit minority talent.” Among the initiatives that the group pursued, but ultimately abandoned due to a lack of funds and interest, was a coordinated financial investment in Black-owned bookstores, the creation of new imprints to produce books by and about people of color, and high-profile editorial hires to staff them. Chambers asked, “Do these steps add up to a commitment, to a sincere desire to change the structure of publishing? Or are they tokenism…