Word: blacks
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Powell is president of the two-month-old Black & Brown Trading Stamp Co., which issues stamps bearing the picture of Soul Singer James Brown, a B & B director. The company is managed by Powell and Lawyer Donald Warden; they recruited Brown because they needed a folk hero to appeal to blacks. B & B has signed up about 700 groceries, barbershops, gas stations and even auto dealerships to offer and redeem the stamps in the San Francisco Bay area and Los Angeles. Customers get four stamps for each dollar spent, and when they have collected a book of 1,200 stamps...
...founded an advertising agency to design its stamp-collecting books; now the agency also represents Singer Brown, and will produce ads for his new restaurant chain. Later this month the company plans to start distributing a free newspaper for shoppers, the B & B Exchange, which will feature stories about black businessmen. Eventually, B & B expects to distribute its stamps nationally, possibly in white areas as well. Powell and his officers promise to extend to white communities a B & B policy of devoting 20% of profits earned in any area to scholarships for children of the neighborhood...
...Black writers telling it like it is have found no substitute for straight-out autobiography. No novel by James Baldwin can match the fervid personal essays in his The Fire Next Time. What black fiction can begin to compare with The Autobiography of Malcolm X or even Claude Brown's somewhat overrated Manchild in the Promised Land? The fire a black autobiographer kindles burns the reader. The fire a black novelist sets has a way of burning himself -blowing his cool, singeing his prose style and casting clouds of smoke over his intentions...
Among the black novelists now writing, though, John A. Williams has come as close as any to putting into fictional terms the experience of being black in America. Williams' secret: his characters are human first, black second. In The Man Who Cried I Am, for instance, the problem of surviving as an artist was treated as carefully as the problem of surviving as a black. Williams' protagonist was a writer who happened to be a black as much as he was a black who happened to be a writer...
Sons of Darkness, Sons of Light is less clearly conceived, but it is free of reverse stereotypes. It vibrates to the grievances of a man rather than a people. Eugene Browning, Columbia graduate, ex-political-science professor and middle-class black, has put in half a lifetime being reasonable. As the story opens in 1973, he is No. 2 man in a moderate civil rights organization named the Institute for Racial Justice. But when a New York policeman shoots an unarmed 16-year-old black boy, all the reasonableness runs out of Browning, not so much in anger...