World Festival of Negro Arts Hoyt Fuller Ebony Magazine

HOYT Due west. FULLER, A LITERARY CRITIC AND EDITOR OF BLACK PUBLICATION

https://www.nytimes.com/1981/05/13/obituaries/hoyt-due west-fuller-a-literary-critic-and-editor-of-black-publication.html

HOYT W. FULLER, A LITERARY CRITIC AND EDITOR OF BLACK PUBLICATION

• May xiii, 1981

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Hoyt Due west. Fuller, literary critic, editor of several black intellectual publications and a leading proponent of the concept of a blackness literary esthetic, died Mon evening in Atlanta post-obit a eye attack. He was 57 years old and lived in that urban center.

The Fulton County Medical Examiner'south office said that Mr. Fuller complanate and died on International Boulevard and Williams Street in downtown Atlanta.

Mr. Fuller was managing editor of Black World, a monthly literary journal and afterward editor of First Globe, his own publication, which published articles and fiction past black writers. Began With Negro Assimilate

He came to prominence in the early on 1960'due south every bit editor of Negro Digest. Founded in 1942 by John H. Johnson, the Digest had at starting time been an unabashed false of Reader's Digest. With the successful Ebony and Jet on the newsstands, the unprofitable Negro Assimilate ceased publication in 1951. Mr. Johnson revived information technology in 1961, with Mr. Fuller, equally managing editor, giving information technology a new direction. The magazine was renamed Black World in 1970 and ceased publication in 1976.

Mr. Johnson said yesterday that Mr. Fuller was ''an unusually gifted journalist who used the power of his intellect and talent for the education and enlightenment of others.''

After Blackness World closed, Mr. Fuller moved to Atlanta and with a grouping of blackness intellectuals created the First World Foundation to publish Start Earth.

During Mr. Fuller'south tenure as editor of Negro Digest, he ''turned the magazine into the voice of the new blackness motion.'' according to Paula Giddings, the writer and poet. Addison Gayle, professor of English language at Baruch College, said, ''For the 1960's and 1970's Hoyt was the vocalisation of young blackness writers across the country who dared to differ esthetically and politically with what had been the mainstream of American literature.''

Negro Digest often published series such every bit ''My Near Humiliating Jim Crow Experience,'' but after Mr. Fuller gave more than attention in the magazine to black peoples' efforts to ''command their own images.'' Black Esthetic Movement

Professor Gayle said yesterday that Mr. Fuller ''was probably the founder of the blackness esthetic movement and articulated - in his writings and lectures - its aims, positions and goals better than anyone else.'' Professor Gayle described the black esthetic as ''basically a literary movement that suggested that inside black culture there were those norms from which literature could be analyzed and evaluated.''

Writing in The New York Times Book Review in 1969, Mr. Fuller said: ''From the very beginning, black writers in America were discouraged from dealing honestly with their own experiences in the language and style which were natural to them. Fifty-fifty in the slave narratives which the missionaries and abolitionists encouraged equally fuel for their campaigns, the writers were cautioned to tell their stories 'considerately,' and without anger or excitement.''

He also said in the same publication at a later on appointment: ''The writers of the Black Consciousness movement are rejecting even those blackness writers and critics who seek to impose upon blackness literature 'universal' standards of judgment, for 'universal' in the American disquisitional context is synonymous with 'white.' ''

Mr. Fuller'south volume ''Journey to Africa,'' an business relationship of his travels in West Africa, was published past the Third World Press. He taught Afro-American literature at Wayne State, Northwestern and Indiana Universities. He was N American zone vice chairman of the second World Black and African Festival of Arts and Culture in 1977.

There are no survivors.