Launching Black American Literature Forum, the Progenitor of African American Review

Abstract

Joe Weixlmann Launching Black American Literature Forum, the Progenitor of African American Review Although I write from the fledgling days of my retirement, recollections of my twenty-nine-year-old self’s assuming the editorship of what in the fall of 1976 was Negro American Literature Forum are vivid. Three years after receiving my Ph.D., and having completed a one-year term appointment at the University of Oklahoma and two years of a three-year term appointment at Texas Tech University, I was excited to be starting a tenure-track position at Indiana State University. To me, the demands of the job sounded more inspiring and challenging than onerous: successfully teaching three classes per semester (usually involving three different preparations), continuing to build my own scholarly reputation, and editing a journal —a task that I began with very modest institutional support and for which I had no preparation other than what I’d gleaned from the other side of the editor’s desk as the author of a book and a half-dozen lesser pieces of scholarship. Youth, for all of its inherent shortcomings, has decided advantages. A decade ago, in the last of a series of remarks that appeared under the title “African American Review at 40,” Jerry Ward enjoined me “to write an autobiographical biography” of the journal’s development from Negro American Literature Forum to Black American Literature Forum to AAR (14). But I would like to think that I have grown wiser since 1976,1 and so this short piece should not be misconstrued as an introduction to, or précis of, the magnum opus Jerry had in mind. Rather, the brief 1115 African American Review 50.4 (Winter 2017): 1115-1120© 2018 Saint Louis University and Johns Hopkins University Press At the editor’s desk, ca. 1979. Photo courtesy of Sharron Pollack. Weixlmann_Weixlmann 2/14/2018 5:51 PM Page 1115 reflections that follow are primarily intended to offer readers a glance at the very early years of the journal’s evolution under my editorship—years that paved the way for the publication’s development into the important cultural force it would become over the ensuing four decades. That Plaguey Name My first weeks as editor largely took the form of reading through every document in a deep, four-drawer file cabinet of the journal’s papers in an attempt to glean what I felt was necessary background information. Materials I understood to be significant for my purposes were reorganized and re-filed, and I concluded this chore feeling more prepared to undertake what I understood to be the real work of the position. The next task was twofold: suitably replacing the anachronistic title Negro American Literature Forum and attracting a working advisory board to the journal, principally to serve as manuscript evaluators, since one of the many things I learned in foraging through the files was that, while NALF possessed a respected advisory board,2 submissions had not been undergoing peer review. I envisioned this as a single, two-part task designed to upgrade the journal rather than two discrete tasks, because asking respected scholars to serve as board members of a publication with Negro in its title in 1976 seemed not just imprudent, but wrong. Not wishing to altogether abandon the journal’s identity, which had been nearly a decade in the making, I decided simply to replace Negro with Black3 and move into recruitment mode. Happily, this effort went more smoothly than I had anticipated it might. Virtually everyone I asked, including such established luminaries as Houston Baker, Dick Barksdale, Don Gibson, Jim Hatch, Phyllis Klotman, and Charles Nichols, generously agreed to commit themselves to the task of fulsome board participation, as did a number of promising young scholars including Bill Andrews (a former colleague of mine at Texas Tech who even then was becoming a star in his own right), Daryl Dance, and Chester Fontenot. The only notable solicitation which failed to bear fruit was that sent to Hoyt Fuller, the outgoing editor of Black World (formerly Negro Digest, the publication having changed names in 1970).4 In an extremely cordial letter, Hoyt responded to my invitation at some length...