THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW 13YOU COULD ALMOST SAYthese novels predicted their
own fates. A telling bit of dialogue appears midway
through “Operation Burning Candle,” Blyden Jackson’s
1973 thriller about a Black disciple of Jungian psycho-
analysis who fakes his death in Vietnam and returns to
America with a group of other veterans to take down the
white establishment.
“You may get to write one book, maybe two,” a student
activist warns the Jungian revolutionary, Aaron Rogers.
“But they’ll get you because they have to. Your ideas are
just too damn dangerous for them.”
In this exchange, Jackson foretold not only his charac-
ter’s future but his own as an author, as well as that of
the literary subgenre to which he belonged: the revolu-
tionary Black thriller of the civil rights era. Composed of
equal parts pulp fiction and radical politics, a series of
novels by Black writers in the late 1960s and early 1970s
fantasized about dismantling American police depart-
ments, the media and even the government itself — a
marriage of form and content that landed them in the
small oval of the Venn diagram where Fred Hampton
and Frederick Forsyth overlap.
Some of the novels found popular and critical acclaim;
one author was hailed in The New York Times as
“among the best of contemporary novelists.” But their
books soon vanished. Either the audience dried up or
publishers got skittish about the radical content and
moved on. The authors moved on too — to new topics or,
more often, new careers.
These days, the books are tough to find. They’re avail-
able as mildewed paperbacks on Bookfinder.com, in
small-run reprints from university presses or as hard-to-
read bootleg PDFs. Yet their themes and plotlines —
featuring corrupt police officers who take their cut from
drug dealers’ profits, and institutionalized racism that
pays only lip service to equal opportunity — remain
distressingly relevant. Together, the trajectories of the
books, their heroes and their authors offer a cautionary
tale about the struggle to achieve lasting progress on
civil rights in America, as well as about the danger of
creating speculative fiction that’s a little too truthful for
comfort.
Blyden Jackson was a Marine drill instructor who
worked in the ’60s as an organizer for a New York
branch of the Congress of Racial Equality, where he
embraced the tactics of civil disobedience to draw atten-
tion to inequities in education. In 1964, he helped stage a
sit-down protest, tying up traffic on the Triborough
Bridge. For a time, he was romantically involved with
Eleanor Holmes Norton, who would become a nonvoting
delegate to Congress, representing Washington, D.C.
One wonders if she inspired “Elaine,” the young activist
in “Operation Burning Candle” who tells Aaron his ideas
are too dangerous to get away with more than a book or
two.
Elaine’s prophecy proved accurate. Notwithstanding a
rave review from Mel Watkins — the first Black editor
on the staff of The New York Times Book Review —
Jackson published only one more novel: “Totem” (1975),
an African quest story that’s even harder to find than his
debut. Jackson went on to a comparatively anonymous
existence as a husband, father, emergency medical tech-
nician and president of an ambulance squad in Middle-
bury, Vt. When he died in 2012, he left behind an unpub-
lished novel: “For One Day of Freedom.”
Uncanny parallels exist between his first book, “Oper-
ation Burning Candle,” and the Black radical thriller
“The Spook Who Sat by the Door” (1969), by Sam Green-
lee. I was reading Greenlee’s book on a bench in the
103rd Street subway station when I noticed a stocky
man looming over me. He had a big beard, long dreads
and a United States Army jacket buttoned up all the way.
“That’s a good book, man,” he said, then made a solemn
Black Power fist and strode off.
This is the sort of book you want to discuss with
strangers. In it, Dan Freeman, a seemingly mild-man-nered, jazz-loving Chicago intellectual, becomes the
C.I.A.’s first Black employee and uses the techniques he
learns at the agency to train gang members in his home-
town to start a revolution he won’t survive to witness.
Greenlee based the novel partly on his experiences as an
information officer working overseas for the United
States Foreign Service. Even more than 50 years after it
was published, the book feels thrillingly incendiary, as if
it, like its hero, were only pretending to play by the rules
while actually providing a blueprint for revolution. “No
one could imagine that Freeman, tame, smug and self-
satisfied, would ever rock the boat; much less suspect
that he planned to sink it,” Greenlee writes.
Though “The Spook Who Sat by the Door” was
adapted into a film in 1973, Greenlee, like Jackson, pub-
lished only one other novel: “Baghdad Blues,” in 1976. It
follows a disillusioned Black Foreign Service worker
during a coup in Iraq, where Greenlee was posted in the
1950s. With its suspicion of Western imperialism and its
skeptical hero, who finds more in common with theIraqis than with his fellow Americans, the novel is a
spiritual cousin to Graham Greene’s “The Quiet Ameri-
can.” Its attitude is neatly summed up in an observation
that appears while the coup is taking place outside the
United States Embassy: “I walked through the gloomy
halls, watched the frightened white faces and inside I
laughed like hell.”
By contrast, Barry Beckham’s 1972 novel “Runner
Mack” is much more phantasmagorical and impression-
istic. There are echoes of Malamud and portents of “Da
Five Bloods” as it tracks the misfortunes of a baseball
phenom drafted into the Army. There he meets the char-
ismatic Runnington (Runner) Mack, who hatches a
quixotic plan to bomb the White House. But Mack’s fate
— dead by suicide — and that of Beckham’s career as a
literary writer fit the pattern of the genre’s other radical
Black authors and novels. Feted with raves for “Runner
Mack,” Beckham had a varied career, editing college
guides for Black students, writing nonfiction, teaching
creative writing at Brown and Hampton universities and
starting his own publishing company. But his next novel,
“Will You Be Mine?,” didn’t appear until 2006, and then
via his own Beckham Publications Group.
Julian Moreau’s 1967 “The Black Commandos,” in
which a group of highly skilled fighters battle bigots, fly
a saucer to Washington, D.C., and take over America, is
a utopian revenge fantasy that can be seen as a precur-
sor to modern novels, graphic and otherwise, featuring
Black superheroes. John Edgar Wideman’s 1973 “The
Lynchers,” about a group of Black men who plan to lynch
a white police officer, is doleful and ambitiously literary,
anticipating Wideman’s distinguished writing career.
Both novels share with the others an intensity, an imme-
diacy and a timeliness, despite being consigned to ob-
scurity decades ago.
Near the end of “Operation Burning Candle,” Aaron
Rogers flags down a cab. He’s been shot in the gut by a
cop after having launched an attack on the Democratic
National Convention at Madison Square Garden. The
driver wants to take him to the hospital.
“Can’t go to the damn hospital,” Aaron says. “Take me
to Harlem!”
The driver drops him off at 116th and Lenox, and he
staggers into a playground. Racked with pain, he deliri-
ously imagines that he is being dragged onto a slave
ship. But in his dying moments, he looks up: Lights
flicker in apartments across the way. People have lit
candles, expressing solidarity with the revolution he has
started.
“Everywhere there were burning candles!” Jackson
writes. “Aaron lay back down. He was glad.”
Today, if you walk to the intersection where Aaron
exited his cab, it’s hard to say which playground Jackson
had in mind. Two are equidistant from the corner of
116th and Lenox Avenue. One is named for Sojourner
Truth, the other for Martin Luther King Jr. On a recent
Saturday morning, you couldn’t see any candles in the
windows, but on three of the four street corners, vendors
sold Black Lives Matter T-shirts and face masks; some
had “I CAN’T BREATHE” printed on them. Juneteenth
parade marchers chanted slogans and carried black, red
and green American flags and pictures of Harriet Tub-
man and Frederick Douglass. And, if you looked up, you
could see signs in some windows. One said “BLM.” An-
other was a sheet of paper cut into a heart. 0Essay/The Radical Black Thriller/By Adam Langer
Beginning in the late 1960s, a flourishing subgenre married revolutionary politics with pulp fiction.
PHOTOGRAPH FROM ASSOCIATED PRESSADAM LANGERis the author of a memoir and five novels. He is
the senior editor of The Forward.Police remove Blyden Jackson from a 1962 protest in New Haven.