Reaching for Black Heights

On Columbia’s Black literary magazine history

By Muni Suleiman

Illustration by Jorja Garcia

The 1970s were a meditative time for Black literature. If the ’60s were a revolution advocating for Black social consciousness and political change, Toni Cade Bambara, among other Black writers, referred to the ’70s as a “retrogression” and a time of “healing, study and self-development” alongside revolution. 

The decade would witness the start of the Black Women’s Literary Renaissance and Black literature, like Alex Haley’s Roots, reaching the mainstream through climbing bestseller lists. Toni Morrison’s debut novel The Bluest Eye would be published in 1970, and Alice Walker’s essay “In Search of Zora Neale Hurston” (later retitled “Looking For Zora”) would be published in Ms. Magazine in 1975, highlighting Hurston’s underrecognized contributions to the Harlem Renaissance. Callaloo, the longest continuously running Black American literary magazine, would be established in 1976. And in the fall of 1979, Black students at Columbia and Barnard would make their own Black literary history.

Running for about a decade, Black Heights was the first and longest running Black literary magazine at Columbia. The exact end date and reason for stopping publication remain unknown. Other publications such as The Black Student (only a 1966 issue survives), The Black Experience: A Record of Summer Forums (1968), and Black Forum (1972–1973) predated Black Heights, yet these publications were short-lived and did not label themselves magazines. Black Heights joined the ranks of other developing Black literary magazines at predominantly white institutions such as The Drum (1969–1988) at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and Diaspora (1976–1982, 1990–?) at Harvard. The Crown and Marigold Magazine, both founded in 2023, are Columbia’s active Black publications.

The Black literary magazine remains an elusive form for scholars. Mary Fair Burks, TC ’75, highlights two reasons: Black publications often were not differentiated from each other until the late 1800s, and several have been lost to time due to institutional and scholarly neglect. A rare Black literary magazine to merit scholarly attention is Fire!! (1926), founded by the Niggerati literary group of the Harlem Renaissance, which included writers such as Zora Neale Hurston, BC ’28, Langston Hughes, and Gwendolyn B. Bennett. Named in the revolutionary spirit of igniting conversations about topics such as queerness and colorism, Fire!! lived up to its name. The magazine garnered poor reception from Black elites, concerned about how those then taboo topics would hurt their image, and was a financial failure; its physical quarters burned down after its first and only issue. 

Scholars agree that Black American literary magazines have importantly charted changes in the Black American identity, recording discourses and cultivating community. The challenge is finding them. 

Much of my time here has been spent with undergraduate literary magazines. As co-editor-in-chief of Quarto—the literary magazine of Columbia’s undergraduate creative writing department—I’ve collected collegiate magazines at festivals and read copies of Quarto dating back to 1950. It once felt like I couldn’t be more surrounded by literary magazines. It was all the more frustrating, then, to call into the archives for Black literary magazines and receive little to no responses. Eventually, I localized my search to Columbia. 

In my four years at Columbia, the University’s understanding of its Black literary history has felt constrained to (mainly) Hughes, (sometimes) Hurston and Audre Lorde, LS ’61, and (rarely) Ntozake Shange, BC ’70, and June Jordan. The University has remained unwilling to acknowledge how it served as a source of strife for these writers. As the first Black student at Barnard, Hurston faced significant challenges with residential life. Racism was also an insurmountable factor in Hughes dropping out of Columbia—His autobiography The Big Sea opens with him throwing his Columbia books overboard while on a ship to Africa. Much like Hughes’s books off the coast of Sandy Hook, Black literary culture at Columbia has felt scattered and diasporic, compared to readily identifiable and categorizable white literary histories. As a fellow Black English major once asked over lunch: “Where are our Beat Poets?”

She didn’t necessarily mean that we need Black writers on campus to walk the same path as Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsbeurg, CC ’48, and Lucien Carr. In the literary spaces I’ve been in at Columbia, the “Beats” frequently act as a shorthand for a concentration of white literary talent on campus. If a Black student wanted their own Beats, what would they say? Would they be the Niggeratis who, like the Beats, succeeded in spite of the University? Where is the collectivity and cogency in Black literary history here? 

Black students at Columbia in the late ’70s asked similar questions. Black Heights’ founding Managing Editor Clarence Waldron, CC ’79, JRN ’80, introduces its inaugural issue as a “showcase of the finest literary and artistic talents nurtured on our Morningside Heights campus,” intended to restore the lost and beautiful heritage of “the great heights of success that Blacks have achieved in the arts.” Its arts reviews and original poetry and prose were penned by students and alums across all undergraduate schools; the inaugural and 1980 issues also featured poetry from Joe Soto, a Barnard security guard.

To say that Black Heights’ inaugural issue did well would be an understatement. Months before she would speak at Barnard’s 1979 commencement, Toni Morrison participated in a February fundraiser and sat for an interview with the magazine. Waldron identifies Morrison as the first major Black literary figure to take a vested interest in the magazine’s development. Other supporters, per Waldron, included poet Gwendolyn Brooks and actor James Earl Jones, and Shange contributed the inaugural issue’s opening poem. 

Students began to treat the magazine as a space to wrestle with similar sociopolitical questions as we do now: What makes art Black? Is Black art inherently political? What type of Black representation is good representation? Does that even matter? A prime example of a piece asking these questions is the essay “Black Theatre: Where Do We Go From … ?” in Black Heights’ 1981 issue. The essay, written by Jeanette Toomer, BC ’79, is also a prime example of how such conversations cycle through time: her essay shared the same themes as a piece I wrote for this very magazine two years ago. This inundated me with a particular sense of deja vu.

Forging unity within the Black Columbia community was key to Black Heights’ early success, with its first four issues each dedicating pages to endorsements from the Black Students’ Organization, the Barnard Organization of Black Women, and the National Society of Black Engineers of Columbia.But with “the tide of the country, the tide of Columbia, the students really wanted to hit some hard-hitting news,” said Waldron. In his memory, that is what Black Heights soon became. “That’s fine, but I started it just to be an arts and entertainment magazine.” 

The first indication of Black Heights’ increased politicization emerges in the editor’s note by Derek H. Suite, CC ’85, JRN ’87, in the 1982 issue—the first to explicitly address political tensions at Columbia. Referencing the absence of a Black Studies department, the lack of Black faculty, and looming financial aid cutbacks, Suite asserts that “it should come as no great surprise that the tone of the literature in this issue of Black Heights” is “understandably more cultural, more political, and perhaps even more militant than in any other previous issue.” Still, that issue’s theme was unity, and the subsequent address, written by Stirling Phillips, CC ’83, notes “a tough year for the magazine.” Despite political turmoil, “it is vitally important that we as Black students push to preserve our cultural heritage and history” through “literary expression and excellence.” 

Subtitled “Apartheid At Home,” the fall 1985 issue is much less occupied with literary excellence and much more engaged with writing as documentation. The issue, which consists of journalistic articles, photographs, political cartoons, and only one poem, instead draws parallels between Black life at Columbia and in apartheid South Africa. The magazine explored what it means to advocate for Blackness across the diaspora: Its pages are filled with coverage about divestment rallies, activism for a Black Studies department, and the Columbia clerical workers’ strike. Editor-in-Chief Winston Grady-Willis, CC ’87, promised that despite the issue’s deliberate limitation of literature, there would be a literary anthology and an issue with both news and literature later on. If either materialized, they are lost to time. 

If the 1985 issue endorses Black activism in any form deemed necessary, the 1987 issue’s opening work, Raphael Smith’s “Essay on Student Activism,” critiques the status of Black political life at Columbia by the decade’s end. “I feel that the conflicts in ideology and the attempt to create one solitary Black voice of the black student body without being sensitive to the diverse needs of the Black students is counterproductive,” Smith, CC ’90, writes. “As students we have to open a forum for dialogue amongst ourselves, discussing the issues which are most personal to us as Black men and women.” The literature in that issue seems to operate as the “more personal and humanistic” forum Smith advocates for. It also might have been the last of its kind for the foreseeable decades.

Black Heights now resides in a small manila folder in the Barnard Archives and Special Collections, alongside a container housing other small college publications of Columbia’s past. Three issues, 1979, 1982, and 1985, are digitized; Barnard holds seven in total. At least two issues, 1984 and 1986, and the cover for 1987’s issue remain lost to time. According to Martha Tenney, director of Barnard’s archives, some copies were gifts from the class of 1980, others are mysteries, but most were a 2022 donation from former Black Heights Editor-in-Chief Anita Harris, BC ’80. 

If I had dug into the archives just two years earlier, I would have missed a critical period in the history of Black literary culture on campus, which has hardly felt comprehensive. I’m not the only one who has this impression—The Crown refers to itself as Columbia’s first Black student magazine in its promotional materials. Black Heights’ archival absence, despite its significant tenure and general positive reception, hints at the University’s neglect of its Black literary history. 

Even when he launched the magazine, Waldron wasn’t certain that Black Heights was the first Black literary magazine on campus. “We didn’t have the research to double check it,” he said. What was important to him was that he had identified an absence at Columbia: the infrastructure and lexicon to talk about Black art on campus. 

Call it a graduating senior’s burden, but I’ve been thinking about how what I write at Columbia will contour the future. Most of what I’ve written for The Blue and White have covered aspects of the Black experience here unarticulated by other publications, driven primarily by the question “If I don’t, who will?” It never really felt like an active decision to write in this way. These were my experiences. It was my life as a Black student here. Someday, some student might go searching for The Blue and White’s archives much like I did with Black Heights, looking for archival answers to experiential questions.

I had assumed that finding a collection of Black literature at Columbia would provide a cohesive literary lineage, easily categorizable in its intents and influence. Not collectivizing the Black voices in Black Heights, however, allows us to consider the manifold manifestations of a Black student body trying to find where they belong. The beauty of Black Heights resides in the second half of Waldron’s original statement: its ability to shed light on lost and forgotten Black literary heritages. Black Heights and its context have since become part of the lost and forgotten. The digital era has only helped highlight the potential significance of print magazines. But the importance of a print magazine lies in its indeterminate impact, how it can circulate between hands for decades and its acute sense of its temporality. The complexity comes in that something so tangibly and materially real can also be ephemeral.

Reading through Black Heights, I felt the joy of being able to hold these stories, these histories even, in my hands. Black Heights contains a record of interpersonal and institutional conflict, but its existence also holds an implicit promise: to cherish Black expression at Columbia in a society that would otherwise allow these distinct stories to be forgotten or erased. 

In my eyes, a lot of the hope for a Black literary lineage at Columbia comes from a desire for assurance or healing that Black creatives were seeking in the ’70s. Or perhaps it lies in some type of sign that, despite the sociocultural conflict that Black students might experience at a PWI, we will make it through with our voices intact. In reaching for and holding these issues of Black Heights, Black Heights is holding me too.