I used to watch The Today Show before leaving for high school. Dave Garroway was the host, and they had a mascot, a monkey called J. Fred Muggs. White authors appeared on the show regularly. I wrote a letter asking why no Black writers were ever booked. Shortly afterward, John A. Williams and two other Black writers appeared. This was the first I’d heard of these writers.

In 1962 in Buffalo, New York, I was hanging with a group of Black nerds, actors, and artists in the apartment of Phillip Wooby, a former classics professor at Howard University. I noticed an article from the New York Herald Tribune about how John A. Williams had been awarded the Prix de Rome only to have it rescinded. Williams fictionalizes the rejection in his most outstanding novel, The Man Who Cried I Am. “Dear Mr. Ames: I am writing to inform you that the American Lyceum of Letters has chosen you as the recipient of a Fellowship to the American Lykeion in Athens for the year June 1947–June 1948, subject to the approval of the American Lykeion in Athens.” The New York Herald Tribune article mentioned that one other Black writer had previously received the award. Casually Wooby said that it was him. He had received the Prix de Rome in March 1951. When I met John Williams, he was still obsessed over the slight. He blamed the rejection on the influence of Ralph Ellison. When I interviewed Ellison, he denied the charge. Williams and I became friends during my last summer in New York. It was 1969, and I had returned to New York after spending about two years teaching in Seattle and Berkeley. My partner, Carla Blank, and I were then living on one of New York’s historic blocks, whose residents at one time included Leon Trotsky. Our next-door neighbor was a writer who influenced me, W. H. Auden. Among the visitors to our apartment were filmmaker Brian De Palma and artists like Larry Rivers, Peter Bradley, Walter Bowart, Gerald Jackson, Algernon Miller, Joe Overstreet, and writers like Richard Brautigan, Cecil Brown, and Lionel Mitchell.

It became a gathering place for the Black downtown art and white counterculture scene. Our neighbors were always trying to bust us for smoking pot.

One night we threw a party attended by critic Addison Gayle, Jr., and John Williams. John and I hit it off. Soon afterward he picked me up for a trip to the Yale University Library where we found photos of writers of the Harlem Renaissance, including Zora Neale Hurston and Langston Hughes. He said it was for a magazine called Amistad, which he and editor Charles F. Harris, who had recently joined Random House from Doubleday, were going to publish under the auspices of Random House.

John and Charles wanted me to play a role in Amistad and arranged a press conference I was supposed to attend from the West Coast, after moving to Oakland in 1969. I was a no-show. I got cold feet because I didn’t want to be considered a token. I’d seen tokens eaten alive in New York in a fierce competition among Black writers. This is why I turned down appearances on NBC, and on ABC where the late Hughes Rudd was a fan of mine. Amistad lasted only two issues because of disagreements between John and Charles. Neither one would tell me the nature of the dispute. Harris’s most significant triumphs were publishing Arthur Ashe and founding Amistad Press, which he sold to HarperCollins in 1999. Williams continued writing novels.

Williams’s mentor, Chester Himes, admonished Black writers to “think the unthinkable and say the unsayable.” This was Williams’s writing guide. Williams told the truth no matter at whose feet it landed.

In a letter to me, Williams expressed his despair at the reception he received for exposing Martin Luther King’s sloppy private life in The King God Didn’t Save: Reflections on the Life and Death of Martin Luther King, Jr. (1970). Tom Wicker and others had already referred to King’s promiscuity, but a different standard was applied to a Black writer addressing it. Like members of other ethnic groups, Blacks were expected to give the group’s icons a lot of slack.

Ken McCormick, the legendary Doubleday editor, told me that my nonfiction would be judged more harshly than my fiction. This rule applied to Williams’s The King God Didn’t Save. No critics noticed, however, that he had earlier put on display King’s immorality in The Man Who Cried I Am, through the character of Paul Durrell, based upon King. When the novel’s protagonist, Max Reddick, becomes the president’s speechwriter, Durrell and other Black leaders rely upon Reddick to connect them to the president (a thinly disguised JFK).

Readers were much quicker to notice the novel’s headline news: the existence of a contingency plan (called King Alfred) in the event of widespread racial unrest in America to muzzle Black intellectuals by threatening to release sensitive materials in government dossiers, among a number of other, more extreme measures to “terminate, once and for all, the Minority threat to the whole of the American society, and, indeed, the Free World.” Though critics still dismiss the King Alfred plan out of hand, the existence of a CIA plan to impose martial law and suspend the Constitution during a national emergency was verified in the Iran Contra hearings. And in his book F.B. Eyes (2015), William J. Maxwell exposes the FBI’s decades-long surveillance program targeting African American writers, including the placement of a dozen African American authors “on a dubiously legal ‘Custodial Detention’ list, an index of prominent dissidents subject to summary arrest and military confinement in case of national emergency.” That book still hasn’t been reviewed by The New York Times, nor has any organization like PEN America—which does good work when advocating for writers abroad—commented on the policing of Black writers by the government. Max Reddick moves through The Man Who Cried I Am with rectal problems, a metaphor for the daily humiliations and injustices endured by Black people, and more particularly by Black writers and intellectuals. Morphine helps to alleviate the pain. The book exposes the persecution of writers like Richard Wright and others who chose exile rather than remain in a country where, as Richard Wright relates from his own experience in Black Boy, a Black person had to lie to check a book out of the library. When I traveled to Chattanooga, the city of my birth, in 1956, I was barred entrance to the main library. From 1942 to 1960 the FBI closely followed Richard Wright’s personal and professional progress, targeting his passport and keeping him on the Security Index of major threats to the U.S. even after his expatriation. Wright was highly conscious of FBI surveillance and police power more generally, addressing both in his still-unpublished Paris novel, Island of Hallucination (1959), and in the pained but humorous poem “The FB Eye Blues” (1949). Two members of Joseph McCarthy’s staff, David Schine and Roy Cohn, conducted a much criticized tour of Europe in 1953, examining libraries of the United States Information Agency for books written by authors they deemed to be Communists or fellow travelers. Die Welt of Hamburg called them Schnüffler, or snoops. Williams creates a scene where the snoops interrogate Harry Ames/Richard Wright.