Hoyt Fuller

Hoyt William Fuller was born on the tenth of September 1923 at Atlanta, Georgia, the only son of working-class Atlantans Thomas and Lillie Fuller. The family migrated north in the late 1920s to Detroit, where he was raised and educated through the segregated Detroit public schools. He completed the bachelor's in journalism at Wayne University — now Wayne State — in 1950 after war service in the United States Army. He worked for a year as a feature writer at the Detroit Tribune, two years at the Michigan Chronicle, and from 1954 as an associate editor of the Ebony Magazine staff at the Johnson Publishing Company in Chicago.

He resigned from Johnson Publishing in 1957 and spent four years abroad — in Mexico, in Spain, in Senegal and in West Africa — broadly correspondent for the Algiers-based Pan-African journal Présence Africaine and the Italian magazine Etna. He returned to Johnson Publishing in 1961 as managing editor of the revived Negro Digest — the monthly journal Johnson had founded in 1942 and suspended in 1951. Across the following sixteen years Fuller would make Negro Digest, retitled Black World in 1970, the principal American literary journal of the Black Arts Movement.

He published in Black World the early work of Amiri Baraka (placed in this archive), Toni Morrison (placed in this archive), Audre Lorde (placed in this archive), June Jordan (placed in this archive), Larry Neal, Mari Evans (placed in this archive), Carolyn Rodgers, Haki Madhubuti, Sonia Sanchez and Henry Dumas — and the prose of Stephen Henderson, Addison Gayle Jr. and Houston Baker. The journal across his tenure became the principal venue for the founding theoretical statements of Black Arts criticism.

He founded in 1967 the Organization of Black American Culture at Chicago — the workshops at OBAC, with Hoyt Fuller as their principal facilitator, produced the founding generation of Chicago Black Arts writers. The Wall of Respect mural of June 1967 at 43rd and Langley — by the OBAC visual workshop under William Walker and Sylvia Abernathy — became the defining public artwork of the Black Arts movement and the prototype of the international Black mural tradition that followed it.

He left Johnson Publishing in 1976 after a dispute with the publisher over the direction of Black World, returned to Atlanta in 1976 as senior editor of First World, and taught at Cornell, at Wayne State, and at the Atlanta University Center. He died of a heart attack at Atlanta on the eleventh of May 1981, at fifty-seven.

He is honored here as the editor of the Black Arts Movement.