Path Press, one of the first Black-owned publishing companies in the United States, was formally launched in Chicago in 1969. The press had been in the works since as early as 1961, when Bennett J. Johnson and Herman C. Gilbert (the late author of The Negotiations)—along with novelist Frank London Brown and the journalist Gus Savage, who later became a member of Congress—first began discussing the venture. A business prospectus was written in 1962, and the press was incorporated the next year in 1963.