Williams was elected a fellow with the Black Academy of Arts and Letters, and was presented with this certificate in Boston, April 1969.

AMISTAD 1 (1970)

Charles F. Harris of Random House was my co-editor. We believed this "magazine" could have a long and happy life. I went to Spain with my wife, Lori, to do the interview with Chester Himes. Harris and I chased C.L.R. James down and found him sick in bed at Northwestern University. In addition to James, we had Ishmael Reed, Addison Gayle, Jr., Calvin Hernton, Vincent Harding, and Langston Hughes, among others in the collection. Harris and I got off to a very good start and could have gone far with Amistad. Unfortunately, this kind of partnership, or co-editorship, only works in some cases; this was not one of them.

AMISTAD 2 (1971)

I met with Ellen Wright in Paris to get some work of Richard Wright's for this volume. She let us use the original version of his "Blueprint for Negro Literature." The excerpt from Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye unfortunately appeared shortly after the novel was published, but we did manage to publish the first fiction of Gayle Jones. With John O. Killens, Basil Davidson, W.E.B. Du Bois, and Amiri Baraka, among others represented, this made for a strong collection, and a tough follow-up to Volume 1.

AMISTAD 2. Co-edited with Charles F. Harris. New York: Random House (1971). First edition, copy proof.

AMISTAD 2. Co-edited with Charles F. Harris. New York: Random House (1971). First edition. Cover art by Sam Middleton.

But conflicts began to emerge. I would sometimes accept a piece only to discover that Harris's secretary had rejected it without letting me know. We had already begun #3. Bill Cosby had agreed to an interview, and I went to Lake Tahoe to do it. But Harris and I were now having serious problems in scheduling meetings and selecting materials. Finally, I had to choose between spending a lot of time with him and Amistad or going back full-time to my own work. I decided on the latter. I quit. I was as surprised as Harris when Random House summarily let him go. Over the years, I offered to buy out Harris (where the money was coming from I did not know), but he refused, and he wouldn't buy me out (probably because he didn't have the money to do anything with the book, either). Sometime in the late seventies or early eighties, I said to hell with it; I told him to take the magazine and do something with it.

WRIGHT, Richard. Carbon typescript of "Blueprint for Negro Literature" (1937).

Introducing Amistad. Random House promotional poster (1970).

CAPTAIN BLACKMAN. Original typescript with the author's corrections and additions.

I also made a trip to the war documentation museum in Paris, where I asked for a room so I could tape-record the material, since talking was faster than writing. Sacre Bleu! They'd never heard of such a thing, but they obliged me. This was, I think, 1969 and I was staying at the Hotel Raphael across the alleyway from where they were holding the Vietnam peace talks every Thursday. I had a camera with a long lens. This Thursday the big cars drove up and all the diplomats got out. I had had to prove I was a guest in the hotel in order to get to my room, which was on the same level as the roof of the building where the talks were being held. I thought I would take some pictures. But, as I approached the window with this long lens affixed, I noticed cops with machine guns on the roof. How could they tell that what I had was a lens and not a gun? I backed away from the window in a hurry.

CAPTAIN BLACKMAN. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday (1972). First edition.

CAPTAIN BLACKMAN. New York: Bantam Books (1974). First paperback edition.