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W. Paul Coates is the founder and director of Black Classic
Press, which specializes in republishing obscure and significant works by and
about people of African descent. A leader in the field of small publishers,
Coates founded BCP Digital Printing in 1995 to produce books and documents using
digital print technology.
Coates formerly served as an African American Studies reference and acquisition
librarian at
Howard
University’s Moorland-Spingarn Research Center. He is a graduate of
Clark Atlanta University (M.S.L.S.), and
Sojourner-Douglass College. A former member
and Maryland State coordinator of
The
Black Panther Party, he was instrumental in the establishment of the Black
Panther Party Archives at Howard University.
Coates is co-editor of
Black Bibliophiles and Collectors: Preservers of Black History (Howard
University Press, 1990). He formerly owned and operated The Black Book (1972 –
1978), a Baltimore based bookstore. His experience with the purchase, sale and
collection, and publishing of books by and about Blacks is a love affair that
has continued for more than three decades.
Related Links
Black Classic Press books on AALBC.com
http://aalbc.com/writers/blackclassic.htm
 The
Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to
Manhood
Click to order via
Amazon
by Ta-Nehisi Coates (Paul Coates' Son)
Read an AALBC.com Book Review
ISBN:
0385520360
Number Of Pages: 240
Publication Date: May 06, 2008
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
An exceptional father-son story about the reality that
tests us, the myths that sustain us, and the love that saves us.
Paul Coates was an enigmatic god to his sons: a Vietnam vet who rolled with the
Black Panthers, an old-school disciplinarian and new-age believer in free love,
an autodidact who launched a publishing company in his basement dedicated to
telling the true history of African civilization. Most of all, he was a wily
tactician whose mission was to carry his sons across the shoals of inner-city
adolescence—and through the collapsing civilization of Baltimore in the Age of
Crack—and into the safe arms of Howard University, where he worked so his
children could attend for free.
Among his brood of seven, his main challenges were Ta-Nehisi, spacey and
sensitive and almost comically miscalibrated for his environment, and Big Bill,
charismatic and all-too-ready for the challenges of the streets. The
Beautiful Struggle follows their divergent paths through this turbulent
period, and their father’s steadfast efforts—assisted by mothers, teachers, and
a body of myths, histories, and rituals conjured from the past to meet the needs
of a troubled present—to keep them whole in a world that seemed bent on their
destruction.
With a remarkable ability to reimagine both the lost world of his father’s
generation and the terrors and wonders of his own youth, Coates offers readers a
small and beautiful epic about boys trying to become men in black America and
beyond.
———————————
Biographical Statement, sourced from
http://www.blackclassic.com/coates.html on May 28, 2006
Photo, AALBC.com, LLC, taken May 19th
2006 at the African American Pavilion at
Book Expo America
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