Editor and publisher Charles F. Harris, who "pushed commercial and academic presses to embrace black writers, explore black issues and court black readers," died on December 16, the New York Times reported. He was 81. Harris began his publishing career at Doubleday & Company in the mid-1950s, and moved to Random House in the late 1960s. From the early 1970s until the mid-1980s, he was the chief executive of Howard University Press, "the first black university press in the country, where he published about 100 books, most in the social sciences and the humanities," the Times noted. In 1986, Harris founded Amistad Press, which he sold to HarperCollins in 1999 while remaining editorial director of the imprint until 2003.
