About Us

Whether it be celebrities like Terry McMillan, winner of The American Book Award, or Oscar winner Lou Gossett or newcomers like Brynn Saito or Alex Maynard, since 1990, Konch has been publishing American and international writers of the highest merit. Konch is sustained by Ishmael Reed, Tennessee Reed and our readers, granting us an independence that those zines with corporate sponsorship lack. Contributors to Konch have submitted work that is innovative and serene, but we reserve the right to be rowdy. The Jim Crow Media and literary Scene Have Failed Us.

Editorial

From The Publisher

In 1954, I worked at a drugstore on William Street in Buffalo, New York. My boss was Carl Pratter, a Jew who came to the United States from Ukraine when he was eleven. Carl Pratter inspired me. His formula for a good life was to find something you loved and be driven. It was Pratter who designed the model for the modern drugstore chain. Pratter always encouraged me to develop my intellectual skills, the kind of encouragement I wasn't getting elsewhere. I was sixteen. My job with Carl Pratter ended when another great man offered me a job commensurate with my development as an intellectual. I didn't see Pratter again until around 1961. My young wife and I ran into him on Main Street in Buffalo. He was glad to see me. I was embarrassed because I was poor and a failure. He'd expected much more from me.

The man who led me to quit my job at the drugstore didn't live to see me realize my potential either. I won't forget the night I met him. An old car stopped before the drugstore, and the man told me to get in. He needed someone to help deliver newspapers, which were stacked in the back seat of the car. I helped A. J. Smitherman deliver the newspapers to Black businesses lined along William Street. He told me that I could have the job every week. I worked at the office of his newspaper for about a year. A. J. Smitherman even permitted me to write a column. This was my first appearance in print. His son Toussaint ran the linotype machine, and Mary Cosby wrote a weekly column. Cosby is part of Buffalo's history. She lived until 100. A. J. Smithernan, like Carl Pratter, was driven. He made sacrifices to publish his newspaper, the Empire Star Weekly. Sometimes, he would fall asleep on the way to his office from the printing plant. He worked in the office located in his shabby storefront. I should have realized his importance because some of Buffalo's most prominent citizens would visit, including Rev. J. Edward Nash, Sr. (1868-1957), whose church on Michigan Avenue was a refuge for runaway slaves en route to Canada. I stopped working at the Star because Smitherman couldn't afford to pay me. If I had known who he was, I would have continued to work there without compensation. Ironically, after Smitherman died, I returned to work at the Star without compensation. I helped Joe Walker, who was 27 then, put out the newspaper. It's because of my association with the Star that I met Malcolm. I didn't realize that A.J. Smitherman, the man with whom I'd spent many hours, was an American hero. Or that President Biden would mention him in a speech. He had to keep quiet about his background as the editor and publisher of the Tulsa Star because the white settlers blamed him for the 1921 Race War that erupted in Tulsa, Oklahoma after some armed Black men sought to rescue a Black teenager from a lynching. They hated Smitherman. First, he deprived them of the loot that enriched them when they posed as guardians of Indian and Black children who were eligible for millions in oil revenue. The scam proposed that their parents were incompetent. He beat these fake "guardians."

In 1917, when a white mob burned at least twenty African American homes in Dewey, Oklahoma, Smitherman reported the episode directly to Gov. R.L. Williams, resulting in the arrest of thirty-six white perpetrators, including the mayor of Dewey.

He intervened in at least two threatened lynchings, at great physical danger to himself. The demons vowed to get revenge on this arrogant nigger. They got their chance when Smitherman and some armed Black men decided to prevent a mob of the wicked from lynching a Black kid named Dick Rowland.

On May 31, 1921, over 5,000 armed whites, many of them KKK and hundreds of them deputized by the police, descended on Greenwood for 36 straight hours.

Utilizing the power of the press, Smitherman warned Black citizens of the likely fate of attack and encouraged them to be ready to defend themselves for the holocaust to come. On the night of the massacre, while Smitherman defended Greenwood, his wife, and their five children hid in the basement while the KKK doused their house with kerosene and lit it on fire. They narrowly escaped with their lives but could never return to Oklahoma for fear of being lynched.

During the carnage of May 31 and June 1, 1921, that destroyed Tulsa's "Black Wall Street" and resulted in the deaths of countless hundreds, Smitherman and his family were forced to flee Oklahoma. They lost property and belongings worth more than $40,000 at that time. Further, Smitherman was charged with inciting the riot and threatened with extradition to Oklahoma. For a short time, he remained in hiding, but true to the character of this courageous man, within a year, he emerged to decry the atrocities of this horrific incident in an epic poem entitled "Tulsa Riot and Massacre" and in other writings.

Andrew Jackson Smitherman was born on 12-27-1883 in Talladega, Alabama, and died on 6-20-1961 while writing at his desk. He went out on his shield. He refused to be broken. His granddaughter Raven Williams is a fighter, too. She wants the evil people in Tulsa to compensate her family for destroying the Smitherman home and business. She has chosen television to inform the public of what is happening. Black men and women fought back and took casualties. Like the Ukrainians fighting Putin, they couldn't overcome the superior weapons owned by the state, including a bombardment from the air.

Ishmael Reed

Contributors

David Mura's recent books are The Stories Whiteness Tells Itself: Racial Myths and Our American Narratives and A Stranger's Journey: Race, Identity & Narrative Craft in Writing. He's written four books of poetry: After We Lost Our Way, The Colors of Desire, Angels for the Burning, The Last Incantations. His memoirs are Turning Japanese and Where the Body Meets Memory. He is a 2024 Guggenheim Fellow in General Nonfiction.

Professor Pierre-Damien Mvuyekure teaches English, American and African American Literature and specializes in Ishmael Reed’s writings. He is the author of “The Dark Heathenism” of the American Novelist Ishmael Reed: African Voodoo as American Literary HooDoo and Lamentations on the Rwandan Genocide.

Justin Desmangles is chairman of the Before Columbus Foundation, administrator of the American Book Award. A member of the board of directors of the Oakland Book Festival, Mr. Desmangles is also a program producer at the African-American Center of the San Francisco Public Library. 

Born July 22, 1939 in St. Louis, Missouri, Quincy Troupe is an awarding-winning author of ten volumes of poetry, three children’s books, and six non-fiction works; Earl the Pearl: My Story, a memoir of legendary NY Knicks basketball star, Earl Monroe, (Rodale, April 2013) is Troupe's newest non-fiction work. In 2010 Troupe received the American Book Award for Lifetime Literary Achievement. Among Troupe's best-selling works are Miles: The Autobiography of Miles Davis and his memoir, Miles & Me soon to become a major motion picture.

Recently, Raven Williams spent several years researching and writing the biography and tribute to her great-grandfather, A.J. Smitherman, a co-founder of the Greenwood area of Tulsa, Oklahoma known as Black Wall Street. She is considered a subject matter expert on that history as well as the Tulsa Massacre of 1921. In 2021, for the centennial anniversary of the Tulsa Massacre, Raven successfully produced a documentary with Discovery+ and OWN called “The Legacy of Black Wall Street” and an award winning podcast with the History Channel and NPR entitled “Blindspot: Tulsa Burning.”

Dr. Michael LeNoir is a practicing Board Certified Pediatrician, Allergist and Immunologist. Associate Clinical Professor and Past President of the National Medical Association.

Boadiba carries within her the twisty paths and almost empty ravines of Haiti. She dreams about the time when they were rivers on the street corners of her childhood appear orange clay banks where red skinned people paddle dugouts on green mirrors telling the stories she inhabits gives them shape makes you dream and listen to our sacred songs. Boadiba’s writings can be found at Ishmael Reed Publishing, in “Left Curve Magazine” and “Konch Magazine.”

Last child of a large family of eight, Zarrin Ferdowsi had the stamina and determination to stay alive despite all the odds. Growing up in the family that love of books and learning was the flame of their life, finished her father's book collections plus the entire fiction section of local library, by age twelve. Always thought one day she'll have a novel of her own shelved in that library. Though not wanting, the wheel of life took her from the east and south to the west and North. Here after 35 years, is her first print of any sort, about a dentist's mind.

Chris Stroffolino lives in Oakland, teaches English at Laney College and reads books, or plays trumpet. He used to play piano at black-owned cafes like Coffee with a Beat, or the Java House before they were victims of gentrification.

Jack Foley has published 16 books of poetry, 5 books of criticism, a book of stories, and a 1300-page “chronoencyclopedia,” Visions & Affiliations: California Poetry 1940-2005. Well known for his multi-voiced performances with his late wife, Adelle and with his new partner, Sangye Land, he has presented poetry on radio station KPFA since 1988. 

Molly Guillermo is a writer and blogger in NYC. She’s the co-writer of the podcast Calm It Down with Chad Lawson and an Assistant Editor at Barrelhouse Magazine. 

Judy Juanita’s De Facto Feminism: Essays Straight Outta Oakland [EquiDistance, 2016] explores key shifts and contradictions in her own artistic development as it explores black and female empowerment. Her semi-autobiographical debut novel, Virgin Soul [Viking, 2013], features a young woman in the 60s who joins the Black Panther Party.  Her collection of short stories, “The High Price of Freeways,” is a three-time finalist in the Livingston Press Tartt Fiction Award; stories from the collection appear in Oakland Noir, Crab Orchard Review, The Female Complaint, Imagination & Place: an anthology, Tartt Six and Tartt Seven.  Juanita’s twenty-odd plays have been produced in the Bay Area, L.A. and NYC.

Paul Catafago is a US-based Palestinian-Lebanese poet and cultural organizer. He has performed spoken-word poetry at the Nuyorican Poets Café and St. Mark's in the Bowery. He twice participated in the Poetry Project's New Year's Marathon.

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Raven Williams: A Fighter Like Her Great-Grandfather

In This Issue

Spring/Summer 2024