Page 6 - Black History Poems-1

HAKI R. MADHUBUTI (DON L. LEE)

Born in Arkansas as Don Luther Lee, he was reared
by his mother in a Detroit ghetto, where he learned
about “pimps, whores and Cadillac doors” from the

city’s streets. His mother worked as a cashier, maid,
janitor, and, eventually, prostitute, dying of a drug
overdose when Madhubuti was fifteen. He then
moved to Chicago to live with relatives; he recalled
his teenage years there in the mid-1950’s as a time
when he was “very poor and very frightened” but
also a time when he discovered Richard Wright’s

1945 autobiography Black Boy—the first book he
had read, he later commented, that was “talking
about me” without being demeaning.