Hoyt Fuller

Hoyt William Fuller was born on the tenth of September 1923 in Atlanta, Georgia. Grief shadowed his earliest years: his father, Thomas Fuller, died when Hoyt was about four, and in that same period his mother, Lillie Beatrice Ellafair Thomas, fell gravely ill and became an invalid before her death. Orphaned, the boy was sent north to Detroit, Michigan, to be raised by an aunt — though he returned often to Atlanta to visit his grandmother, who first urged him to explore the depths of African-American culture.

In Detroit he came of age and, in 1950, took his bachelor's degree in literature and journalism from Wayne State University. He served his apprenticeship at the Detroit Tribune and the Michigan Chronicle, then joined Ebony, before frustration with its distance from the freedom struggle sent him abroad for three years on Mallorca and as a correspondent in West Africa.

His enduring work began in 1961, when he revived the dormant Negro Digest and made it a living forum for Black letters. In 1970 he reshaped it as Black World, the most widely read Black literary magazine of its day and an indispensable home for the writers of the Black Arts Movement. In Chicago he founded the Organization of Black American Culture, and after Black World closed he launched the journal First World, teaching all the while at Columbia College Chicago, Northwestern, and Cornell.

Hoyt Fuller died on the eleventh of May 1981 in the Atlanta of his birth. An architect of the Black aesthetic, he built the very rooms in which a generation of Black voices learned to speak — and those rooms endure. We honor the editor who made a home for the word.