Petey Greene: Radicalizing Racial Discourse

I just finished watching the PBS documentary Adjust Your Color, on the life and times of Washington, D.C., radio and TV talk show host Petey Greene (RIP). Greene's story is remarkable: an ex-con and hustler turned community activist and self-proclaimed voice for the black community. Especially notable for me was the overlap between Greene's life story and that of the black pulp fiction icon Donald Goines, whom I wrote about last year. Both men emerged out of prison to take advantage of media opportunities that allowed them to address the ghettos out of which they had emerged. (Tragically, both men died young too.)

Here's a clip of Greene's most famous televised broadcast, in which he talks about the politics of black people eating watermelon. It's at once side-splittingly hilarious and dead-on serious. Above all, Petey Greene didn't like anyone -- black or white -- to "front," and pussyfooting around the issue of eating watermelon only distracted folks from consuming a fine piece of fruit meat.

Petey Greene (1931-1984)
From Petey Greene's Washington, D.C.
"Be Yourself" (1982)

Introducing Donald Goines

I recently wrote a brief review of Eddie Allen's Low Road: The Life and Legacy of Donald Goines. The book is a solid biography of the man seen by many to be the father of African American pulp fiction, the cheap, mass-market paperbacks whose hard-boiled stories of the street and life in the ghetto were penned by former hustlers, pimps, and "users" themselves. The history of the rise of black pulp fiction in the 1960s and '70s is the subject of my Ph.D. dissertation at Duke University.

National Public Radio host Tony Cox interviewed Allen about his book and Goines's life (and tragic death by shooting) back in 2004. Follow this link to access that interview and to get a taste of the kind of writing Goines spawned in his brief but shockingly productive literary career (16 novels in five years).