Julius Bernard Lester (January 27, 1939 – January 18, 2018) was an American writer of books for children and adults and an academic who taught for 32 years (1971–2003) at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Lester was also a civil rights activist, a photographer, and a musician who recorded two albums of folk music and original songs.
Early life and family
Born on January 27, 1939, St. Louis, Missouri, Julius Lester was the son of W. D. Lester, a Methodist minister, and Julia (Smith) Lester. In 1941, the family moved to Kansas City, Kansas, and then to Nashville, Tennessee, in 1952. In 1960 he received his BA from Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee, with a major in English and minors in Art and Spanish.
In 1961 he moved to New York City where he was a folk singer and a photographer for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee.
Lester married Joan Steinau in 1962. They had two children, Jody Simone (1965) and Malcolm Coltrane (1967). They divorced in 1970. In 1979 he married Alida Carolyn Fechner, who had a daughter, Elena Milad. Fechner and Lester had a son together named David Julius. They divorced in 1991. He married Milan Sabatini in 1995. His stepdaughter from this marriage is Lián Amaris.
Civil rights years
During college, Lester became involved in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). Among his major efforts in those years was participation in the 1964 Mississippi Summer Project. His experiences during "Freedom Summer" were documented in a 2014 documentary The Folk Singer, which aired as part of the American Experience series on PBS. Lester also traveled to North Vietnam with SNCC to photograph and write about the damage caused by U.S. bombing missions there.
During his New York years, Lester hosted Uncle Tom's Cabin, a radio show on WBAI-FM (1968–75); and co-hosted (with Jonathan Black) Free Time, a television show on WNET-NY (Channel 13), for two years. He taught guitar and banjo and worked as a folk singer "singing at rallies, and hootenannies and fundraising events in New York for SNCC." He recorded two albums of traditional and original songs for Vanguard Records: Julius Lester (1966) and Departures (1967). And he performed on the coffeehouse circuit. A compilation of songs from both albums was released on a CD, Dressed Like Freedom, on Ace Records in 2007.
Lester's 1966 essay "The Angry Children of Malcolm X," is considered one of the definitive African-American statements of its era. As his reputation grew, Lester wrote Look Out, Whitey! Black Power's Gon' Get Your Mama! (Dial, 1968), which he characterized as the "first book about the black power movement by someone inside the black power movement".
Conversion to Judaism
In 1982 Lester converted to Judaism. He has said that his conversion journey began when he was seven and learned that his maternal great-grandfather, Adolph Altschul, was a Jewish immigrant from Germany, who married a freed slave. He adopted the Hebrew name Yaakov Daniel ben Avraham v’Sarah. He was a leader of the Beth El Synagogue in St. Johnsbury, Vermont, from 1991 to 2001.
Academic career
From 1968 to 1970, alongside his activities as a radio host in New York, Lester taught Afro-American history at the New School for Social Research. In 1971 he began teaching at the University of Massachusetts Amherst as a visiting lecturer in the Afro-American Studies department; he became an associate professor in the department in 1975 and a full professor in 1977.
In 1988, Lester came into conflict with his colleagues in the Afro-American Studies department upon the publication of his book Lovesong, which chronicles his conversion to Judaism. In the book he refers to a lecture at the university by the renowned author James Baldwin several years earlier, and characterizes certain remarks that Baldwin made as antisemitic. In March 1988, in a unanimous step, the Afro-American Studies faculty wrote a letter to the university administration recommending that Lester be reassigned to a different department. Following negotiations that involved the chancellor of the university, the dean of the faculty, and Lester himself, Lester transferred to the Judaic and Near Eastern Studies department (where he had held a joint appointment since 1982), and remained there for the rest of his university career, until his retirement at the end of 2003.