In the Classroom

Octavia Butler, the premiere Black female sci-fi writer

By HERB BOYD

Special to the AmNews

When it comes to Black female writers in science fiction, Octavia E. Butler is singularly unique and incomparable. During her extraordinarily productive career she was a multiple recipient of the Hugo and Nebula awards, given to only the most accomplished authors in the sci-fi genre, and as a further testament to her talent, she was the first science-fiction writer to receive a MacArthur genius fellowship.

She was born on June 22, 1947 in Pasadena, California and raised by a widowed mother and grandmother in a very religious household. An extremely shy child, she spent hours in the library reading, mostly fantasy books and science fiction. These readings stimulated her desire to create her stories and she began writing as a teenager. During the Black Power era, she was a student at a community college and later enrolled in the Clarion Workshop where the focus was on science fiction. In the late 1970s she became reasonably successful as a writer, earning enough money to devote full-time to her craft. At first it was her short stories that commanded attention and soon she was the recipient of various awards, at the same time teaching in writer’s workshops. Meanwhile her writing flourished, much of it completed on the same Remington typewriter her mother bought her when she was 10 years old.

On one occasion she was watching a movie called “Devil Girl from Mars” (1954) and decided she could write a better story. She gained inspiration from the Black Power Movement and she later parlayed the spirited activism she experienced into novels that defied being subservient. Her first attempts at writing a novel took fire and in the late ’70s came a string of fairly successful books, including “Patternmaster,” “Mind of My Mind,” and “Survivor.” With the publication of “Kindred” her reputation was firmly established. “Wild Seed” followed in 1980 and “Clay’s Ark” in 1984.

She garnered her first Hugo Award in 1984 with “Speech Sounds,” a short story, and a year later won the Hugo Award with “Bloodchild,” as well as the Locus Award, and the Science Fiction Chronicle Award for the Best Novelette. Her next endeavors were far more adventurous and resulted from her travels in the Amazon rainforest and the Andes Mountains. “Dawn,” “Adult Rites” and “Imago” were her creations from the experience and arrived in the late ’80s and named the “Xenogenesis” trilogy. Her fame was solidified in the early ’90s with the publication of “Parable of the Sower” and “Parable of the Talents,” and subsequently paving the way to the MacArthur Foundation Fellowship, a prize of $295,000.

All the news wasn’t good, and in 1999 her mother died and Butler moved to Lake Forest Park, Washington. More awards were soothing and she continued the series of “Parable” books. However, the process became too stressful and she shifted to writing something lighter and thus began “Fledgling,” her last book, a vampire novel.

It should be noted that in the early days before becoming deeply absorbed in sci-fi, she was a voracious reader of comic books. This was disclosed during a panel discussion at MIT in 1998 with Samuel R. Delany, another esteemed sci-fi writer. They exchanged views on various topics and both later shared their love for comic strips and books. “When I was a kid,” Butler began, “I lived on comics. My mother actually went into my room one night or one day when I wasn’t home and ripped all my comic books in half. A familiar experience, I suspect, for anybody growing up when I was because they were supposed to rot your mind. When I was reading comics, comics had a lot more language, a lot more words, and a lot more story. It wasn’t just Jack Kirbyesque people swatting other people and standing with their legs four feet apart. And gradually, it became just that, so that there were fewer and fewer and fewer words, less and less story, and a lot more people beating each other up or wiping each other out.

It’s hard to imagine Butler ever having writer’s block and depression, but they led to medication, which only exacerbated her problems. Even so, she managed to forge ahead with teaching and was later inducted into the Chicago State University’s International Black Writers Hall of Fame. She died outside of her home in Lake Forest Park on February 24, 2006 at 58. It was reported that she had suffered a stroke, and another account said she had fallen and hit her head.

Over the years she had maintained a relationship with the Huntington Library and bequeathed her papers and manuscripts, photographs, and other memorabilia to the library. The collection totaled nearly ten thousand pieces in 386 boxes, along with a sundry other personal items, all of which was made available to scholars and researchers.

ACTIVITIES

FIND OUT MORE

Several anthologies on Black female writers have profiles on Butler, and there’s a wealth of material online, particularly as it relates to sci-fi.

DISCUSSION

Not much is available about her personal life and apparently she was never married and had no children.

PLACE IN CONTEXT

A Baby Boomer product, her career was sparked by the Black Power Movement and she lived to see dramatic changes in American life.

THIS WEEK IN BLACK HISTORY

Sept. 12. 1913: Olympic great Jesse Owens was born in Cleveland. He died in 1980.

Sept. 12, 1977: Steve Biko, a stalwart in the fight against Apartheid in South Africa, died while in police custody.

Sept. 12, 1992: Dr. Mae Jemison was the first African American female in space.

gang database or what you get—dragnets that pull in Black and brown young people, surveil them over police centers and set up risk to incarceration.”

In 2019, ex-Police Commissioner Dermot Shea admitted 99% of the database was composed of Black and brown New Yorkers while he was still serving as NYPD Chief of Detectives.

“It is not an accident that the gang database is 99% non-white,” said The Legal Aid Society’s supervising attorney Anthony Posada. “It is by design that a prosecutor relied on that label to request higher bill so that somebody can be sent to Rikers Island to languish and be treated in that dehumanizing system. It is also not a coincidence that you do not need to commit a crime to be entered into the gang database.”

According to Posada, he’s seen over 500 people submit public records requests to find out if they’re labeled as ganginvolved. He says every single one was denied. El Grito de Sunset Park co-founder Dennis Flores says he was placed on a gang database in the ’90s due to his affiliation, not to organized crime, but with grassroots advocacy groups.

“We began to get active in social justice, in protesting against police brutality,” he said. “And because of that, we began to get surveilled by the police. Our lives were turned upside down. There wasn’t surveillance by the police prior to us becoming active in social justice. It was because we got involved. It was because of the activism that then we became a threat.

“They didn’t give a sh— about us if we were out there fighting each other, killing each other. But when we began to organize against police abuse, and support parents [whose] kids were murdered by police, that’s when the surveillance intensified.”

“It's operated without due process, due diligence, or transparency,” said Public Advocate Jumaane Williams over email. “The gang database is a black box built on racial profiling that creates lifelong and serious consequences. It does not fundamentally enhance public safety, and it has no place in our fight to end gun violence and keep our city safe.”

At Brooklyn Borough Hall, the activists were operating with a home court advantage. Current Brooklyn Borough President Antonio Reynoso penned a bill attempting to abolish the gang database last year while he was still a council member. This past Tuesday, the NYPD promoted Oleg Chernyavsky, a proponent of the gang database, to chief of staff.

During the rally, Council Member Avilés called the database useless and said the time, money and energy would be better spent towards quality education, health and well-being. Plus, she’s not a fan of lists.

“I don’t really know what the fascination is in our country with lists,” she said. “Everytime we make lists, they’re definitely for nefarious purposes—they’re to isolate people, they’re to stigmatize people, they’re to imprison people, they’re to keep them down.

“So we need to make sure we get rid of all these arbitrary lists that ensures our oppression. And the gang database is definitely one of those things.”

Crime stats

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long-term investigations focused on those few New Yorkers willing to pick up guns and use them.”

Shootings were down by 30.3% last month compared to August 2021. The Bronx, southern Queens and northern Brooklyn saw the largest improvement in decreases in gun violence. According to the NYPD, last month marked the fourth-lowest number of shootings in any August since CompStat was introduced in the mid-90s.

This news comes as a welcome after July’s crime numbers skyrocketed in almost every category. But there’s still room for improvement. Every other major crime was up compared to August 2021 except rape, which matched last year’s exact count. There were 449 more robberies and 322 more burglaries.

Some communities are taking matters into their own hands. In Greenwich Village, a block association is paying armed security guards to protect businesses. Burglaries more than doubled this year in the precinct, although the neighborhood is completely untouched by gun violence, according to CompStat. In Ozone Park, a volunteer street patrol organization formed to deter hate crimes received $90,000 in state funding. State Assemblywoman Jenifer Rajkumar handed the Cityline Ozone Park Civilian Patrol the check earlier this week.

Credited for the decrease in shootings and murders by the NYPD are larger police presences, summer programs… and illegal ATV seizures. When recently asked about how tougher enforcement could lead to mass incarceration for people of color, Mayor Eric Adams doubled down, even arguing a correlation between fare evasion and gun violence during his time as a police officer. “Quality of life is not a trade off,” he said. “Public safety and justice, they are the prerequisite to our prosperity. We must be safe as a city. What we did in our city in previous years, we eroded the things that allowed us to become one of the safest big cities in America and that’s quality of life.”

Metro Briefs

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Sickle cell disease, an inherited red cell disorder that is most common among Afri-

Jersey

Continued from page 4

as a former public school teacher, founder of a New Jersey public charter school, leader of previous New Jersey advocacy organizations, and a statewide policy expert who served as chief turnaround officer at the NJ Department of Education.

“Like so many parents throughout the state, my own children had diverse interests, aptitudes and needs and I fought hard for them to be fully served in the public education system,” said White. “I have always seen myself as an advocate for children— first my own and those in thousands of families across the state.” can Americans, impacts about 10,000 New Yorkers. Sickle cell disease patients rely on blood transfusions to stay healthy, often needing them every few weeks and requiring very closely matched blood products because their bodies make antibodies directed towards transfused red blood cells.

JerseyCAN has served as a state leader pushing to improve high quality school options and better education outcomes for all New Jersey students. For nearly a decade, the organization has been led by Janellen Duffy and Patricia Morgan, who first launched and then grew JerseyCAN’s brand and mission throughout the state, cultivating relationships with key elected officials to best serve the education needs of families.

The announcement follows a planned transition in leadership that began over the summer. Both Duffy and Morgan will stay on in a consulting capacity through the transition to support White with her policy priorities and the parent and teacher fellowships.

Tandy Lau is a Report for America corps member and writes about public safety for the Amsterdam News. Your donation to match our RFA grant helps keep him writing stories like this one; please consider making a tax-deductible gift today by visiting: https://tinyurl.com/fcszwj8w

Tandy Lau is a Report for America corps member and writes about public safety for the Amsterdam News. Your donation to match our RFA grant helps keep him writing stories like this one; please consider making a tax-deductible gift today by visiting: https://tinyurl.com/fcszwj8w

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