“The arts saved my life,” says Haki Madhubuti as he takes a visitor past original paintings on the walls of the Third World Press, located in a former rectory on Chicago’s South Side. He pauses before a painting of Malcolm X. “He was one of my mentors even though we never met. He freed me intellectually,” says Madhubuti, 65, who keeps in touch with Malcolm X’s family. “Real art transcends time.”

Equally important to Madhubuti is the library that spans two rooms on the building’s main floor. Yes, the arts, including jazz music and paintings, saved his life, but books are where it all began. Madhubuti says a copy of Black Boy by Richard Wright, which he found in the Detroit Public Library, initiated his mental and physical escape from a life of poverty more than 50 years ago.

This is the 40th anniversary of Third World Press (TWP), one of two African-American owned publishing houses in the country. Madhubuti – poet, publisher, educator, institution builder and community activist – remains on his grind. Once an impoverished child and teen engulfed by anger, Madhubuti now unapologetically works for the betterment of Black people of all cultures.

A winding staircase leads to Madhubuti’s dark, wood-paneled office. Dressed in his signature button-down shirt and sweater vest, Madhubuti settles into a comfortable leather couch. Above him is an oversized self-portrait representing the days when his pen and birth names were the same: Don L. Lee.
He changed his name in 1973 to Haki Madhubuti, which translates from Swahili to mean just, precise, accurate and dependable.

Today, the neat afro in the portrait has been replaced with thinning, cropped, curly hair. Standing 6’1”, Madhubuti has filled out a bit from his youth, but he keeps in shape thanks to regular yoga classes, bicycling and a strict vegan diet. His focus on what he considers “wellness living” began in the late 1960s, when he reassessed his life intellectually, philosophically and materially. “In the early days, we worked 16 hours a day,” he recalls. “I had to find a way to write and do everything else without losing it.”

Madhubuti drew on the discipline he learned between 1960 and 1963 when he was in the U.S. Army, a time marked by firsts, including eating three meals a day, which was a big deal for someone who grew up in extreme poverty. Before that, school lunch often was his only meal of the day, and he paid for it by cleaning up his school cafeteria. The military provided mental nourishment as well. He read a book a day, concentrating on Black and African history and political science, and he listened to jazz greats like Miles Davis. Reading and music provided a refuge from the harshness of a newly racially integrated military.

Forced to conform in the military, Madhubuti emerged a critical and singular thinker and more committed than ever to empowering people. He chose poetry as the vehicle to drive the change, in line with the Black Arts Movements of the 1960s. “I’m a poet first,” Madhubuti says of the anchor that gave him his early start in publishing and continues to ground him. He used money collected from poetry readings to buy a copy machine, and in 1966 he started printing books from his basement apartment at 63rd and Ada streets in Chicago. A year later, Third World Press was born.

Since then, TWP has published more than 300 books in a wide range of genres, including history, political commentary, economic development, psychology, education, biography and poetry. At least four TWP books have sold more than 50,000 copies. Madhubuti has written 28 published books of his own, including a 1991 book of essays, Black Men: Obsolete, Single, Dangerous?: The Afrikan American Family in Transition, which sold a million copies. The Covenant with Black America, edited by talk-show host Tavis Smiley, became a New York Times bestseller in April 2006 – the first title by an African-American book publisher to reach the top position in the 60-year history of the New York Times’ list. But Madhubuti is most proud of publishing the work of acclaimed poet Sonia Sanchez and his 33-year mentor, Gwendolyn Brooks, Illinois poet laureate from 1968 until her death in 2000. “I don’t measure turning points only in monetary terms,” Madhubuti says.

TWP has been the only viable option for some African-American scholars and researchers wanting to publish serious work. Take, for instance, The Sanity of Survival: Reflections on Community Mental Health and Wellness by Dr. Carl C. Bell. Other publishers weren’t interested in a book about African-American mental health needs. TWP answered the call and published Bell’s book in 2004.

TWP hasn’t embraced the popularity among Black readers of urban novels and titles lending  street credibility–titles such as Street Love, Get Money Chicks and It’s Like Candy: An Urban Novel. Madhubuti says he doesn’t want to help glorify what he calls “street culture,” which he believes keeps Black folks mentally and physically in bondage.

Holding fast to the conviction that when you know better you do better, Madhubuti aims to be a “cultural father” to youth, especially those at risk. It’s a concept he writes about in his 2002 book, Tough Notes: A Healing Call for Creating Exceptional Black Men. He writes that if he were the father of slain rap stars Biggie Smalls and Tupac Shakur, they would still be alive. “Cultural fathers stop bullets, just like available jobs stop bullets,” says Madhubuti. “And my sons are alive and they’re doing well.”

One of his three sons, Akili Lee, 27, is a spitting image of Madhubuti in his younger years. A vegan like his father and just as tall, with locks that hang below his shoulders, Lee is the director of the Digital Youth Network at The University of Chicago Center for Urban School Improvement. “There’s a responsibility we have to give back to the community,” says Lee, echoing his father but emphasizing that Madhubuti didn’t push his philosophy on his six children. “It’s just the natural thing to do.”

Lee says his parents, who have been married for more than 30 years, set high expectations for their children. (Their mother, Dr. Carol D. Lee, also known as Safisha Madhubuti, is a professor at Northwestern University.) These high expectations were reinforced by the Madhubutis’ friends and co-workers, many of whom taught at the Institute of Positive Education, a group of community-based schools which they founded together in 1969.

Madhubuti’s success is in striking contrast to his start. He mother, Maxine Graves Lee, died at the age of 35 when he was 16. “My mother was in the sex trade and she was an addict,” he says. “There was nothing I could do about it.” His father was alive but not involved in the family, so Madhubuti was the man of the house and worked multiple jobs to help support his mother and sister.

With nowhere else to turn, Madhubuti joined the Army. He sent half his pay to his sister, Jacklyn, who had three children before the age of 20 and six by the time she was 30. Madhubuti writes about both his sister and mother’s extreme beauty in his 2006 memoir, YellowBlack: The First Twenty-One Years Of A Poet’s Life. He also writes candidly about his mother’s alcohol and drug addiction. “I had become stone as my mother’s condition worsened each day,” Madhubuti writes in YellowBlack. “The lowest season of my remembrance was when she stole my bank and used my savings to feed her habit.” No wonder Madhubuti avoids both alcohol and drugs.

After the army, Madhubuti enrolled in college, transfering between various Illinois schools before completing his bachelor’s degree and then earning an M.F.A. from the University of Iowa. He began teaching English at Chicago State University in 1984 and helped establish the school’s M.F.A. Program for Creative Writing, the only one of its kind centered on Black literature, as well as the Gwendolyn Brooks Center for Black Literature and Creative Writing.
He is still on faculty at Chicago State, currently teaching a class called “Writers at Work.” It’s all part of Madhubuti’s commitment to consciously surround himself with everything good. “Most people hate going to work and they work for people who don’t even like them,” he says. “But I don’t hate anything I do.”

Madhubuti has touched the lives of an extraordinary range of contemporary African-American artists. At the recent 40th Anniversary Gala for Third World Press, held in September 2007, Madhubuti was feted by family, community supporters and local and national celebrities. Author Walter Mosley shared the stage with actress and community activist Ruby Dee. At an October 2007 event called “Verbs & Vibes” at Chicago State University, Madhu­buti was accompanied by flutist Nicole Mitchell and her band, Black Earth Ensemble, as he read his poetry. Mitchell recalls how Madhubuti allowed her to work a flexible schedule as a graphic designer while she completed undergraduate and graduate studies, and also moonlighted as a musician. Now a music professor and full-time performer, she says Madhubuti inspired her to create her own music label, Dreamtime Records.

“A lot of people can have ideas, but to be able to actually manifest those dreams and have continual longevity is a different challenge,” Mitchell says. “Haki’s institutions have stood the test of time.”