Toni at Random: The Iconic Writer’s Legendary Editorship
By Dana A. Williams
Amistad | 368 pages | $21
Some brief tales of scholarly success:   

Angela Davis, a member of the Communist Party USA and of the Black Panthers, was tried in 1971 for supplying weapons for a courtroom takeover that ended in a bloodbath. After beating the rap, she won the Lenin Peace Prize and spent decades on the faculties of UC Santa Cruz, Rutgers, Vassar, and UCLA.
Amiri Baraka (formerly LeRoi Jones), the Maoist revolutionary who was called “the primary theorist of the Black Arts Movement” – one of his theories being that “most American white men are trained to be fags” and that white women therefore secretly want to be raped by black men” — became Poet Laureate of New Jersey and a tenured professor at Stony Brook. 
Maulana Karenga (a.k.a. Ron Karenga), who invented Kwanzaa and co-founded the violent Black Nationalist group US Organization, was sent to a California prison in 1971 for felony assault, torture, and forced imprisonment. Now 83, he is the chairman of the Africana Studies Department at Cal State Long Beach. 

These are, of course, only three of many black radicals who, after the ferment of the late 1960s and early 1970s, took their activism from the streets to the campus, where they were selected over infinitely more qualified competitors for academic perches from which they inculcated students in anti-American revolutionary thought while leading exceedingly comfortable American lives. 
One more story, this one a little longer. 
Toni Morrison (born Chloe Ardelia Wofford), whose novels, published between 1970 and 2015, would eventually win her the Nobel Prize, taught English at Texas Southern University and at Howard University between 1955 and 1964. But while Davis, Baraka, and Karenga spent their middle and later years preaching revolution from the front of a classroom, Morrison, during the years 1967-83, was taking on the white man from behind a desk at Random House, where s...