Wiley, Ralph 1952–

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Ralph Wiley 1952–

Writer

Ralph Wiley’s boisterous writings on racism in America have drawn praise as well as scorn. In two of his books, Why Black People Tend to Shout: Cold Facts and Wry Views From a Black Man’s World and What Black People Should Do Now: Dispatches From Near the Vanguard, Wiley intimates that AIDS (acquired immune deficiency syndrome) was created to destroy black people; draws attention to the racism in boxer Mike Tyson’s rape conviction; and attacks Pulitzer Prize-winning author Alice Walker. Though his opinions anger some readers, the Los Angeles Times noted that “the often heated responses to Wiley send the author into raptures…. He’s riled you. But more importantly, he’s gotten you to think, maybe even moved you to action.”

Born on April 12, 1952, in Memphis, Tennessee, Ralph Wiley grew up in a large, successful black family. Though his father, night watchman Ralph H. Wiley, died when he was young, Wiley had strong male role models. Both of his grandfathers were Methodist ministers, one uncle was a mortician, another a maitre d’hotel, and a third a prize fighter. Wiley’s mother was also accomplished; she held a master’s degree from Northwestern University and taught at the Baptist Owen College in Memphis.

Wiley excelled academically. In high school, he was placed in the gifted and talented class. “Until I was 18,” he told Essence, “to begin to hate; I never slept where I couldn’t reach my hands from my bed to a bookcase.” Wiley’s high SAT scores won him a scholarship to Brown University, but he chose instead to attend Knoxville College, a small, black college in Knoxville, Tennessee.

Wiley had run track and played football at Melrose High School in Memphis, and started college with an eye toward playing football. But after injuring his knee, he focused his energy on his studies. Majoring in business, Wiley left college with a strong sense of self worth. “When people ask me what I learned, it’s what I didn’t learn,” Wiley wrote in What Black People Should Do Now. “I didn’t learn to begin to hate myself.”

Learned to be a Writer

Wiley’s writing career had a slow start. While at Knoxville, he reported on sports for the local Knox County News’ black edition, the Knoxville Spectrum. Although it was a good learning experience, Wiley commented in his book Serenity: A Boxing Memoir, “I wrote terrible stories and

At a Glance…

Born April 12, 1952, in Memphis, TN; son of Ralph H. Wiley (a night watchman) and Dorothy Brown (a professor; maiden name, Taylor); married Brenda Joysmith (divorced, 1978); married Holly Anne Cypress, 1982; children: Colen Cypress Wiley, Education: Knox-ville College, B.S., 1975.

Writer. Oakland Tribune, Oakland, CA, reporter, 1975-76, sportswriter, 1976-79, columnist, 1979-82; Sports Illustrated, New York City, began as feature writer, became senior writer, 1982-91; Heygood Images Productions, Inc., Landover, MD, founder and chairman, 1987—.

Addresses: Office —Heygood Images Productions, P.O. Box 1336, Landover, MD 20785. Agent— Phillip Spitzer, 788 Ninth Ave., New York, NY 10019.

worse columns.” His experience in Knoxville did not land him a job directly after college. He spent three months in Chicago where he was rebuffed in his efforts to work for a black publisher.

His career started in Oakland, California, where he worked as a copy boy for the Oakland Tribune. As a copy boy, he wrote in Serenity, he “learned what was considered news and what was not.” After working at the Tribune for a year, the sports editor gave Wiley a chance to write an article. The National Basketball Association and the American Basketball Association were about to merge, and the paper needed an article about Julius “Doctor J” Erving. Wiley’s success with his “Doctor J” story won him a position as the paper’s prep sports writer. After working the city beat from 1975 to 1976, he was transferred to the Tribune’s sports department to cover boxing.

By 1979 Wiley had his own column with the paper. He covered the Oakland Raiders football team and the Oakland A’s baseball team and travelled the country to report on championship boxing. It was Wiley who coined the term “Billy Ball” for the way Billy Martin managed the Oakland A’s. His boxing reports captured some of the best bouts in history. He wrote about Larry Holmes’s defeat of Muhammad Ali, the title fights between Sugar Ray Leonard and Roberto Duran, and Tommy Hearns’s loss to Sugar Ray Leonard. About the Hearns and Leonard fight, he wrote in Serenity that he “never saw a better fight.”

Wiley left the Tribune to join the staff at Sports Illustrated in 1982. “I almost didn’t make it past the first year at the magazine,” he wrote in What Black People Should Do Now. Wiley felt his editors disliked him but he could not tell if they disliked his writing or his race. “I was having a difficult time of it,” he noted. “Eventually their disdain and my discomfiture with my inability to create what they wanted began to take its toll on me because I had to divine who was telling me the truth and who was telling me I was a nigger.” Over time however, Wiley found friends at the magazine who appreciated his writing. He was named senior writer and penned cover stories and features on numerous professional and collegiate athletes, including Bo Jackson, Patrick Ewing, Muhammad Ali, and Raghib “Rocket” Ismail.

Authored First Book

Wiley authored his first book, Serenity: A Boxing Memoir, in 1989. Writing from his boxer uncle Charles’ point of view, Wiley populated his book with famous boxers such as Muhammad Ali, Joe Louis, Mike Tyson, Sugar Ray Leonard, Tommy “Hitman” Hearns, and Roberto Duran. He also profiled trainer Emanuel Stewart, meditated on Las Vegas as a boxing town, and recounted the events leading up to the ring death of South Korean lightweight Duk Koo Kim and the suicide of referee Richard Green. Serenity is “as much an autobiography as a survey of the boxing world,” wrote the Los Angeles Times. The book contains Wiley’s recollections of family and friends and his insights into the effects of racism and poverty on boxers and boxing. A reviewer for the New York Times commented, “The book is really about growing up in a world where you had to defend yourself to survive.”

Serenity won qualified praise. Though most reviewers appreciated Wiley’s knowledge of the ring, some faulted his writing style. The New York Times lauded Wiley’s ability to “turn a striking descriptive phrase” and “show us what really happened in a bout.” But Frederick Robinson of the Los Angeles Times commented that Wiley’s “sloppy grandiloquence and sentimentalism … puts one off.” Robinson added that “Wiley’s homiletics on racism and injustice, his paeans to professionalism, seem to spill from the mouth of the cliche demon.”

Commented on Racism in America

Wiley left Sports Illustrated in 1991 and published Why Black People Tend to Shout, a sometimes humorous but more often scathing and sarcastic view of racism in America. In the book he criticized many aspects of American life. “What do you get out of integration?” he wrote. “You get suspected of everything.” He also exposed racist rhetoric: “When they want to say ‘niggers,’ they say ‘crime.’ When they want to say ‘niggers,’ they say ‘welfare.’” Wiley recognized that his views were controversial but wrote, “I like to walk to the edge and look over, and that makes people … queasy.”

Why Black People Tend to Shout turned “a perceptive eye on the black experience/’ according to Publishers Weekly. But Karin D. Berry of Emerge felt Wiley’s essays lacked focus and criticized the book for its “detailed, rambling asides that were distracting.” Wiley recognized the drawbacks to the essay format of the book, acknowledging that “Soliloquies do not cut the mustard.” In addition, he told Essence that “As an essayist, I don’t believe in the fiction of an anonymous observer. Rather than the sham of objectivity, I think you should put your perspective up front. That’s only fair to the reader.”

In 1992 Wiley collaborated with film director Spike Lee on By Any Means Necessary: The Trials and Tribulations of the Making of Malcolm X. Wiley had long wanted to work with Lee and had sent him his books, written him letters, and shipped him prospective film scripts. The product of their collaboration, however, met with criticism because, according to Publishers Weekly, it read “like transcribed interviews.” Wiley took issue with the reviewer’s assessment, claiming he had achieved the effect through his craft as a writer. “The structure of the book was my idea,” he wrote in What Black People Should Do Now. “I wanted his book to read as the story of one mind thinking.”

Wiley mused about racial tension in America again in his 1993 publication, What Black People Should Do Now: Dispatches From Near the Vanguard. His essays focused on a wide variety of topics from Western literature, which he called the “culled ramblings of white men who never saw America,” to Sister Souljah, whose “subtlety” he questioned “rather foolishly, since I too make my living by pissing people off.” The book also contained comparisons of the rape trials of Mike Tyson and William Kennedy Smith. “If Mike Tyson cannot force himself on you,” Wiley wrote, “but William Kennedy Smith or a platoon of soccer players can, where’s the progress, really?”

Wiley noted that black people should stop singing “Ain’t Gon’ Let Nobody Turn Us Around” and “We Shall Overcome,” and start singing “Ain’t Gonna Let Nobody Run a Better Business Than Me” and “We Shall Not Buy From Racists.” Though many of Wiley’s statements were harsh and shocking, his most controversial point in What Black People Should Do Now was that the AIDS virus was created to “destroy the black people, the black men, and intravenous drug users, and gays and anyone who is among the undesirables but most especially the black man.”

Library Journal called What Black People Should Do Now “a searing overview of contemporary African American Society” and “a scathing indictment of racism in America.” Booklist’s Martha Schoolman noted, “His arguments are always provocative and are as likely to make readers groan in irritation as to make them stop in their tracks and examine their own opinions and perceptions.” But Barry wrote in Emerge that the book was “irresponsible and dangerous in its ignorance about AIDS.” Black Enterprise took issue with Wiley’s rambling style and commented that though “the reader will find Wiley sometimes engaging or amusing, this book fails to deliver.”

Wiley continues to work on novels but also contributes to nationally distributed magazines and appears on television talk shows, such as Geraldo and Larry King Live. He has authored a television documentary, The Other Side of Victory, a three-act play, Cardinals, and a screenplay, Knuckle Down.