Williams professional career included teaching at the College

of the Virgin Islands, the City College of New York, Sarah Lawrence College and he was a professor of English at Rutgers University.

Williams received the Syracuse University Centennial Medal for Outstanding Achievement. He is also a member of the Nation Institute of Arts and Letters.   Williams also won the 1998 American Book Award for Safari West.  Williams has written about 21 fiction and non-fiction books.

Williams retired in 1994 from Rutgers University, where he was Paul Robeson Professor of English. He lives in Teaneck, N.J., with his wife, Lori. He has three sons, Gregory, a pharmaceutical executive in Philadelphia; Dennis, an author and administrator at Georgetown University; and Adam, the guitarist for the rock group Powerman 5000.

True to form, John A. Williams is exhaustive and accurate in his historical research of the significant role played by African Americans in the military.  Captain Blackman is a U.S. soldier in Vietnam who becomes seriously wounded.  As he drifts in and out of consciousness he hallucinates back in time as a soldier in each of America's wars from 1775 to 1975. 

Sons of Darkness, Sons of Light: A Novel of Some Probability
(Click to order via Amazon)

Format: Paperback, 279pp.
ISBN: 1555533965
Publisher: Northeastern University Press
Pub. Date: May  1999

An AALBC.com Review by Thumper

Sons of Darkness, Sons of Light: A Novel of Some Probability is not only good; it's off the hook! I feel a little strange reviewing a book that is almost as old as I am, the novel was originally published in 1969 and I was born in 1965, because the novel has already been through the baptism of fire, time, and emerged as a novel worthy of being read, fully comprehended and enjoyed 30 years after its initial publication. Sons of Darkness, Sons of Light can now be considered a classic. If this review serves as an introduction to those of you who are unfamiliar with Sons of Darkness, Sons of Light and/or John A. Williams, it is to the good. Sons of Darkness, Sons of Light is just as timely today as when it was originally published in 1969.

Sons of Darkness, Sons of Light is a novel that depicts one act of vengeance and how this singular event caused a chain reaction that reverberates through the whole country. A white police officer, Sergeant Carrigan, shot and killed an unarmed black youth in 1973. Eugene Browning, a former college professor now a higher-up executive in the Institute for Racial Justice, through a former Mafia don, contracts an assassination on Sergeant Carrigan. The novel traces Browning’s reasoning, motivation behind this act of violence that brought a retired Mafia don, a former Israeli terrorist, and a militant sect of black revolutionaries into a violent circle that would cripple the major cities of the US. It’s a sad commentary on this country; our generation, that a book could be written in 1969 and the identical situations are still unfolding in the beginning of a new century, a new millennium.

The action that Eugene Browning set in motion could very well happen today. Goodness knows police brutality, a federal government that is still falling down on the job, and racial injustice is alive and well. It’s also true that many of us have grown more than a little tired of the bull. Racism is still prevalent. Even though we have a growing black middle class, more highly educated black folk than ever before, we still have to deal in the same mud puddle that our ancestors believed would one day dry up with the promise that a decent opportunity and education would give their children. There’s members of the black middle class who love to pretend, deny, ignore that racism doesn’t exist; or that their financial status, residential location, or professional career will immune their hides from the disease of racism; from the overt, blatant racism to the subtle forms of it. Sons of Darkness, Sons of Light is a novel that gives rise for one to question his true position in our society.

I’m going to put it out there; I’m a huge, HUGE, fan of John A. Williams. The Man Who Cried I Am, Clifford‘s Blues, and Captain Blackman are all excellent, powerful novels. There’s little chance that I wouldn’t love this book. In Williams, I get an author and a historian, a 2-for-1. The three main characters; Browning, the AA civil rights worker; Itzhak Hod, the former Israeli terrorist; and the aging Mafia don are three dimensional, so much so I declare if I saw the three walking down the street I could identify each one. The story sent me through a few unexpected dips and curves, which kept the book moving, exciting as well as educational. With the inclusion and interweaving of historical facts and events, the novel is rooted in reality. It’s also plain to see the need for many to have this book under wraps. *smile* Can we talk about giving somebody ideas? *big smile* Instead of destroying our own homes and neighborhoods, someone resorts to the "an eye for an eye" mentality when the enforcer of brutality or injustice against AA life is violently eliminated. It leads me to ponder if with the riots, uprising, non-violent civil disobedience accomplished the first important steps in reach equality, or were we spinning our wheels? "'But why haven't they (AA) done something about this before. I think it's because up until recently they (AA) had more faith in what this country is supposed to stand for than any other people,' Mickey said." Isn’t it time to stop the gullibility-nobility quotient? We have worn the Go down Moses; let my children go tip to death. Are we re-enacting, replaying history when the Lord freed the slaves through Moses? Didn't the children of Israel stay lost in the wilderness for 40 years, afterward had to fight their way into the Promise Land that flowed with milk and honey? If we are lost, how much time is left on our 40 years?

Sons of Darkness, Sons of Light should stand as another remarkable literary work by John A. Williams who does NOT receive the just acknowledgement and praise that he deserves.

Clifford's Blues  

Format: Paperback, 1st ed., 309pp.
ISBN: 1566890802
Publisher: Coffee House Press
Pub. Date: April 1999 Paperback, 1st ed., 309pp.
ISBN: 1566890802
Publisher: Coffee House Press
Pub. Date: April 1999 Format: Paperback, 1st ed., 309pp.
ISBN: 1566890802
Publisher: Coffee House Press
Pub. Date: April 1999

If there is an undiscovered aspect of the black experience, it will be found by John A. Williams, one of the founding members of the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s and 1970s. In his newest of twelve novels, Williams presents the fictionalized narrative of a black jazz musician imprisoned in Dachau who keeps himself alive by working as the band leader of a group of prisoners who play jazz at a nearby officers' club. Clifford's Blues penetrates a hidden portion of African American history, and the hidden reserves of the heart.

Told in journal form, this novel is the story of Clifford Pepperidge, a gay musician performing in Europe during the thirties. After he is caught in a compromising situation with a American diplomat, Clifford spends the duration of Hitler's reign in Dachau. He escapes the worst horrors of the camp by working as the houseservant to an SS officer.

The impetus to write Clifford's Blues came in 1965 when the author saw a photo of two black prisoners in the Dachau museum. Over the years they recurred to him until, unable any longer to forget them, he began researching the history of black prisoners from the U.S., Europe, Africa, and Germany. Finding confirmation, he fictionalized his material, he says, "to both enlarge and personalize the events of that time."

This novel explores the resilience of the human will, as well as the instincts and tools we draw on to survive persecution. On witnessing one day the execution of a friend, Clifford later writes: "I thought of Revelations: 'I was dead and now I am to live forever and ever, and I hold the keys of death and of the underworld. Now write down all that you see of present happenings and things that are still to come."

Paperback - 74 pages (February 1998)

With the publication of Safari West, John A. Williams turns to poetry, his first love, while never straying from his exploration of the African-American experience and the issues he's examined since writing The Angry Ones in 1960.

The poems range in time from 1953's "The Cool Ones" and "The Age of Bop" through 1997, reminiscent at times of Langston Hughes or Robert Hayden, but always John A. Williams: the observant, telling detail; the visceral image that plays off the measured meter and structured rhymes; the consistent and insistent voice that cries 'I am.'

Many of the poems included in Safari West appear here in print for the first time, including four, "Many Thousand Gone: Version 95," "John Brown," "Nat Turner's Profession" and "Moremi," from the libretto of Williams' opera, Vanqui.

Safari West is a powerful collection of poetry, one of resonance, one of importance, from one of the great voices in African-American letters.

Title:  The Man Who Cried I Am
Click Title to Order
Publisher:  Thunder's Mouth Press
Date Published:  April 1985 (first published 1967)
Format:  Trade Paper

This best selling classic was selected by the AALBC for their on-line reading group for September 1998.

Title:  The Angry Ones
Click Title to Order
Publisher:  W. W. Norton & Company, Incorporated
Date Published:  April 1996
Format:  Trade Paper

Read Chapter One of this Book

From The Publisher:
The Angry Ones is a powerful story of the hidden and (unacknowledged) racism that faces an educated black man in the professional world and the painful truths that warp interracial sex. Steve Hill, a young black army officer, travels east from California to New York in search of a simple dream: a secure job with a future. He lands a position as a publicity director for a vanity press, and his experiences soon rip the facade of hypocrisy and condescension from a liberal and superficially hip society with its own peculiar political and sexual agendas. Based on the author's own experiences, The Angry Ones is a searing look at the hidden conflicts and compromises underlying black-white relations.