“[I]n the brick-and-mortar New Day Book Store, and in a half-dozen and more unmentioned projects, Dingane Joe Goncalves sought to determine unrealized territory. And this territory wasn’t just conceptual, or artistic, if you take either to mean immaterial.” Above: cover, book catalogue, ‘New Day Book Store: Books by for & about Black People Everywhere,’ 1970. Courtesy of the Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley.
In an apartment on Masonic Avenue in San Francisco, the same year Huey Newton and Bobby Seale founded the Black Panther Party across the bay in Oakland, poet and Black Power activist Dingane Joe Goncalves (b. 1937) started the Journal of Black Poetry (1966–1975), “the poetic Bible of the ’60s Black Liberation/Black Arts Movement.”[1] A literary magazine of poetry, essays, art and news, ranging from the West Coast to Africa and the Caribbean, the journal encouraged a “political paradigm” for poetic aesthetics — “an unapologetically Black paradigm,” as Kalamu y
