Robert Allen’s life with The Black Scholar began in February, 1972, when his first article for the journal came into print. He was 29 years old. By September of that year, he had not only become Associate Editor of the journal, but had also been elected Vice-President of the Black World Foundation,--the non-profit that published and governed the journal. And by late December that same year, he, as member of the Venceremos Brigade, introduced my father to Cuba, having organized a three-week tour that was to be a formative, transformative, moment for the journal, for my father, and for the relationship between the two men, the start of a close professional and personal partnership that lasted over 40 years. It was as a political activist that Robert Allen had first visited Cuba, early in 1972, where he built houses, demonstrating the on-the-ground solidarity with Global South communities for which he had advocated in that first Black Scholar article of February, titled on “Black Liberation and World Revolution."
These interlocking examples of scholarly and physical labor, organizational initiative, revolutionary culture-building (both domestic and international), are the hallmarks of Robert’s contribution to the Black Scholar journal. He was at once extremely practical and visionary; his leadership, editorial, and managerial activities came from an exceptional, selfless dedication to the needs and ends of the collective.
There’s both a remarkable range and a striking intellectual consistency to his journal publications. 1972 presents a dialectical understanding of the worldwide dynamics of colonialism, expressed in Robert’s twinned articles on “Black Liberation and World Revolution” and on “Black Liberation and the US Presidential Election." This vision had informed his landmark 1969 Black Awakening in Capitalist America; he was to revisit and reflect on that work in a special issue of the journal in 2010. During the 1970s, too, we see him reckoning with the impact of racist U.S. governance, reporting on the Bakke case and its implications for affirmative action. There’s a through line from this to his later decades’ articles on reparations, and on the Port Chicago Disaster. We see also in the 1970s, Robert’s Tricontinental orientation, with articles on “China since the great cultural revolution," on U.S. Banks’ economic support for apartheid South Africa, and, of course, on Cuba. This transnational orientation gained a hemispheric flavor when he travelled to Panama in 1980, to participate and report on the Congress of Black Culture in the Americas, and when he went to Nicaragua with Robert Chrisman, in 1983, to cover its revolution for the journal. The topics of gender, patriarchy, and feminism form another through line. As an editor, Robert addressed these during the 1970s, not least in the celebrated 1979 Black Sexism Debate issue, and as an author he foregrounded these issues in the 1990s, with articles on pornography and the Million Man March.
I want to point out how prescient all of his Black Scholar articles were—they continue to speak to our present moment, powerfully. I also want to point out how lacking in academic ego his articles are—that selflessness again—and how adept Robert is at blending political economy, history, sociology to create a rigorous understanding that is always geared towards the priorities of political transformation. He was also an amazing investigative journalist, as his Port Chicago research makes abundantly clear.
The affinities and strong, effective partnership between my late father and Robert Allen are the reason for the success of the journal, its intellectual innovation and leadership, its ability to withstand economic precarity and the demands of institutional life. The two men complemented each other with their respective disciplines and interests—my father, the poet and cultural critic, Robert Allen, the social scientist. Their shared social-political values—including their belief that the journal should be a forum for multiple perspectives—gave their editorial vision stability. Their partnership underwent an evolution that we can trace in their continued publications on Cuba. Their first collaboration, the 1973 article “The Cuban Revolution: Lessons for the Third World” is neutral blend of their two voices. After a subsequent trip to Cuba in 1979, however, they determined instead to publish two separate yet intertwined accounts of their return. My father’s details his reading poetry to and with Nicolas Guillen, and the cultural dimensions of the trip. Robert Allen’s, in contrast, details his return to Los Naranjos, where he had built houses in 1972, and the socio-economic dimensions of Cuba’s development. Both men write with enthusiasm about the same social event at the Bodeguita del Medio, a cafe featuring mojitos and Cuban creole food; both men observe that many mojitos were consumed. But unlike my father’s account, Robert Allen’s account circles back to his personal origins, as a Black man from a Southern U.S. state:
"Our group could just as easily have been sitting on a front porch in Sparta, Georgia, on this humid summer afternoon. The meandering conversation, now serious, now jocular; the gestures and laughter; the rocking chairs—a flash of deja-vu. But we weren’t meeting in Georgia. Not yet."
By the time that Robert Allen writes this, he can evoke his own home as a young man, he can evoke the homes that he built for Cubans, and he can celebrate and participate in a Black diasporic community forged across and through many connected spaces. In effect he made the Black Scholar into one of his life’s homes, and he made the Black Scholar into a home for its broad community of readers.