• Back To Book Reviews--CLICK>>

The Best Of Emerge Magazine.
By George E. Curry (Editor).
One World/Ballantine.
667 pages. $19.95.

Reviewed by Todd Steven Burroughs

Todd Burroughs

The nation's premiere Black mainstream journalists-those Black Baby Boomers who fought to desegregate the nation's elite newsrooms in the late 1960s, making their white metropolitan newspapers and national magazines correctly cover the peak and eventual decline of the Black Power Movement in the 1970s and the anti-apartheid movement and Jesse Jackson's two presidential campaigns of the 1980s-had so many important national stories to tell, from their own Black perspectives, using Black reference points. But because there was no Black equivalent of Time, Newsweek, U.S. News And World Report and Mother Jones, there was no consistent, hard-hitting, national, elite public space for telling such stories on Black terms. From October 1989 to June 2000, Emerge magazine-the monthly periodical that will be forever known for its cover portrayals of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas first as a handkerchief-head and, later, a lawn jockey-fulfilled that need for its approximately 200,000 readers.

Wilmer C. Ames Jr. was the publication's founding editor-in-chief. Ames' successor, George E. Curry, has compiled a tome of some of the magazine's best articles. The vast majority of the articles included in the book are from Curry's term as editor. (Curry and Managing Editor Florestine Purnell steered Emerge from 1993 until its closure in 2000.) The book contains a careful mix of contributions from these veteran, pioneering Black journalists as well as Emerge staffers, many of whom ranged in age from their mid-20s to early 30s when they wrote these pieces. All of the major Black "players" of the 1990s-including Ward Connerly (the affirmative action opponent in California), the late Ron Brown (President Bill Clinton's commerce secretary), Johnnie Cochran, Cornel West and Henry Lyons (the disgraced former leader of the National Baptist Convention)-are profiled or discussed.

Some of the writing in The Best Of Emerge Magazine is the best writing available anywhere. Reginald Stuart's spectacular "Kemba's Nightmare" series fully tell the story of Kemba Smith, a young Black woman who was victimized by both an abusive, drug-dealing boyfriend and indifferent, draconian mandatory drug sentencing laws. (Clinton pardoned her when he left office.) Curry's article on the 40th anniversary of the Emmett Till murder is as chilling and thorough as it is sad and haunting. Ralph Wiley writes about Black athletes' alleged "superiority" in a way that should still generate on-air discussion. Joe Davidson's profile of Fred Shuttlesworth tells a great insider story of the Civil Rights Movement from the perspective of an unsung and overshadowed hero. These articles, coupled with Scott Minerbrook's essay on his father, Lori S. Robinson's painful and painstaking recollection of her rape while she investigates a rape of a Black female student at her alma mater, Spelman College, and Gerald Early's attempts to teach her daughter how to drive are nothing less than classic 20th century magazine work and mandatory reading for every American journalism class.

But all too often, these articles are the exceptions. In an apparent attempt to be eclectic and inclusive, The Best of Emerge Magazine spends too much space presenting its newspaper-like journalism than its much-superior thematic, nonfiction literature. Many articles do not surpass the quality of Op-Ed and "daily magazine" features common in major metropolitan newspapers because there is no sense that the non-staff contributors spent extended time with their subjects. This reality is not directly the fault of the magazine or its editors and writers. The majority of Emerge's contributors, fulltime staff writers and editors at the nation's major newspapers and newsmagazines, did not have the luxuries of corporate expense accounts, spending months of time on a profile or investigation, and the assistance of several researchers and "stringers" (on-scene writing assistants), a la the national white newsmagazines and national white "literary nonfiction" magazines such as The New Yorker, Esquire or Rolling Stone. (Emerge, never well advertised by its primary owner, Black Entertainment Television, was considered a money-loser.) In addition, it's also important to point out that during the Clinton years, there was a comparative lack of social friction that major Black movements had always created-and in which long form, narrative nonfiction thrives. In an era absent of sustained Black movements, Emerge's primary editorial goal was both the examination of contemporary issues affecting, and the profiling of prominent Black Americans influencing, Black America during the 1990s. It was extremely successful in this regard, representing well Black progressive perspectives.

But the book's other, and more important, shortcoming was preventable: Curry and his Ballantine/One World editors fail in giving the reader easy access and context to the articles. There is no "About The Contributors" section, so only a very small crop of writers is identified. There is no index-a much-needed item in this current affairs anthology. By using the original Emerge headlines without descriptive sub-heads in the book's table of contents, the reader either has to either go exploring or remember the article's topic from its original publication. There are no "Editor's Notes" introducing the articles, so any socio-historic context-including whatever possibly fascinating "story-behind-the-story" account exists in the minds of the editors and reporters-is lost to the uninitiated. (To his credit, Curry tries to provide some of this material in the book's introduction; unfortunately, it's not enough for those who, for example, may not fully understand how Kemba Smith's jailing fits in to history of Blacks as victims of America's political justice system before having to read Stuart's long main article.) And it's a tragedy that all of the narratives dealing with past and current Movement figures are not in one chronological section. The superb quality of the articles on the assassinations of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King and Curry's extraordinarily detailed and penetrating portrayals of the contemporary successes and failures of Benjamin F. Chavis, Louis Farrakhan and Jesse L. Jackson Sr. (with a sort of Farrakhan postscript provided by Trevor W. Coleman's heartbreaking article on the tribulations of the late Betty Shabazz, Malcolm X's widow) demanded as much correlation as the (unnamed) 38-page "Kemba's Nightmare" section.

Some will find these imperfections minor, since The Best Of Emerge Magazine is nothing less than a remarkable achievement in the 176-year history of Black American journalism. It is a most welcome addition to Black journalism's historic shelf of compilations of The Crisis, Opportunity, The Messenger and Freedomways magazines-all publications which were the most significant, if not popular and profit-making, Black periodicals of the 20th century. Like the magazine from which it is derived, Curry's tome easily deserves full membership in such a historical club.

Todd Steven Burroughs, Ph.D., is a lifelong student of Black media history. A freelance researcher and writer based in Hyattsville, Md., Burroughs is writing a biography of Death Row journalist Mumia Abu-Jamal. He was a charter subscriber to Emerge magazine. He can be reached by emailing tburroughs@jmail.umd.edu.