NEW YORK, NY.- When Lisa Lucas was hired in the summer of 2020 to take a big job at the country’s largest book publisher, there was a sense that things were finally starting to change in what has long been an overwhelmingly white industry.

Lucas, who became the publisher of Pantheon and Schocken, imprints within Penguin Random House, was an unusual choice for the job. Executives in the book business often spend decades working their way up the ranks. While Lucas was a well-known figure in the literary world — she had previously been the executive director of the National Book Foundation, which administers the National Book Awards — she had never worked in corporate publishing.

Lucas’ hiring was written up in major news outlets as evidence that publishers were committed to diversifying. As the first Black person to run Pantheon in its 80-year history, and one of the few Black women to head a major publishing division, she faced enormous pressure. Not only did she need to learn quickly on the job and succeed as a publisher, she was also saddled with expectations that she would help drive change at a moment when publishers faced calls to diversify their catalogs and companies.

“There’s pressure on you when you’re one of few,” Lucas said in an interview this summer. “That was a lot to lay on me.”

This May, Lucas was abruptly let go, informed of her firing just a few hours before it became public. The news stunned some in the literary world who saw Lucas, 44, as a tastemaker and rising talent, and as someone who could help discover and champion writers of color.

She was also among a small but influential group of Black women editors and executives who were hired around 2020, when nationwide protests over racial inequality led publishing houses to pledge that they would recruit more people of color. Now, as Lucas and other prominent Black women in publishing have lost their jobs, or quit the business entirely, their departures have led some in the industry to question publishers’ commitment to racial inclusion.

Dana Canedy, who became the publisher of Simon & Schuster’s eponymous imprint in 2020, left the company after two years and is now managing editor at The Guardian U.S. LaSharah Bunting, who was hired as an executive editor at Simon & Schuster in 2021, left in 2023 and now runs the Online News Association. (Both Canedy and Bunting previously worked at The New York Times.) And Tracy Sherrod, an industry veteran who was hired by Little, Brown in 2022 with a mandate to publish fiction and nonfiction by Black authors, was among a small group of editors at the imprint who were recently laid off.

The effects of their departures may be widely felt in the book world, where top editors and publishers hold enormous sway as cultural gatekeepers who can jump-start writers’ careers and set literary trends and movements in motion.

“These Black women who were brought in, publishers looked at them as disposable rather than creating industry titans, which is what they deserve to be,” said Dhonielle Clayton, a novelist and the board chair of the organization We Need Diverse Books.

“Someone like Lisa Lucas, she’s an industry tastemaker,” she continued. “If you remove these tastemakers, you remove an ability to bring in new voices and conversations and books, and we’re going to see that ripple out.”

Black people have historically been underrepresented in publishing, and a recent report showed that little has changed since 2020. A demographic survey of the industry showed that between 2019 and 2023, the percentage of Black employees in the book business remained at around 5%, even as diversity overall grew, with the percentage of white workers falling from 76% to 72.5%.

At the executive levels, white people accounted for nearly 77% of the jobs in 2023, a roughly 1% decline since 2019. During that time, the percentage of Black executives barely budged, hovering around 4%.

In an interview, Lucas argued that the failure to address racial imbalances in the industry is not just a moral issue but also a commercial blunder. It is a sign, she said, that major publishing houses have still not developed scalable strategies for marketing and selling books by nonwhite authors or reaching nonwhite readers.

“For a person of color in this industry, a lover of books, the fact that not one mainstream publisher has come up with a long-term plan to capture minority dollars is insane to me,” Lucas said. “It’s hard to be reminded by an entire industry that investments in your people will not be made, and that when investments are made, they’re provisional.”

To Lucas, the recent string of departures feels like a disheartening repeat of past diversity “boom and bust” cycles, she said. In the 1960s, trailblazing Black editors were hired in the wake of the Civil Rights Movement. In the 1990s, publishers saw the potential commercial impact of books by Black writers after novels by Black women — among them Toni Morrison, Terry McMillan and Alice Walker — landed on the bestseller lists. At those moments, publishers took steps to diversify their companies and lists, but often returned to the status quo once the pressure subsided or literary trends shifted.

“A bunch of people of color come in because something interesting happens, and then the marketplace or political landscape changes, and a lot of us are gone,” Lucas said.

Lucas — in her first media interview since she was fired — declined to comment on the circumstances of her departure, other than to say it was a surprise. A company memo said that Lucas — and Reagan Arthur, the publisher of Knopf — were let go to make way for a more “nimble, concentrated leadership team” that “is necessary for our future growth.” Since Lucas and Arthur were let go from Penguin Random House in May, Arthur was hired by Hachette Book Group to start and run a new imprint there.

The current atmosphere is a stark shift from 2020, when protests over racism broke out in the wake of George Floyd’s murder, and publishing came under scrutiny for its history of undervaluing Black employees and writers. That June, more than 1,000 publishing professionals signed up to participate in a “day of action” to protest, among other things, the industry’s “failure to hire and retain a significant number of Black employees.”

Many Black writers and professionals spoke out about racial disparities in the book world. In response, major publishers recruited and promoted Black editors and launched new imprints devoted to books by nonwhite authors. Publishing companies said they would diversify their workforce and the books they publish, and created new diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives. Editors acquired books that addressed race and racism, many of which sold well.

Four years later, there is a growing sense that the momentum has stalled. Some agents and editors say that publishers’ appetite for books about race and racism has waned after sales for some of the titles they rushed to acquire failed to meet expectations.

Writer and publisher Roxane Gay, whose imprint at Grove Atlantic focuses on underrepresented voices, said that while the industry has done more to promote Black authors and editors in recent years, it has not made the meaningful or lasting changes that some hoped for.

“It’s important to acknowledge progress, or else why stay in the fight,” she said. “But it feels like the progress we made is the first thing to be sacrificed for the bottom line.” (Gay is also a contributing writer for the Times opinion section.)

Jennifer Baker, a former senior editor at Amistad, a HarperCollins imprint that focuses on Black writers, said it was dispiriting, but not surprising, to see prominent Black editors leaving the industry.

Baker, who hosts a podcast called Minorities in Publishing, worked in the book world for around two decades. She was hired at Amistad in February 2021, and in her first year and a half acquired nearly 20 books. Her position was eliminated in the summer of 2022, before any of the titles she was working on had been published, she said. HarperCollins declined to comment on the elimination of Baker’s job at Amistad — a decades-old imprint that continues to publish significant works of fiction and nonfiction by writers of color — noting that the company does not comment on personnel matters.

“More Black people were hired, but were they mentored, were they trained, were they given a sense of what the industry is, if they’re new to it? Were they provided a five-year period to see how their books will do?” Baker said. “If not, then why isn’t that happening?”

Publishing companies say they remain committed to diversifying their staff and their books.

Penguin Random House held its first multicultural marketing summit in January and is creating a program to address “professional challenges that may exist as a result of demographic underrepresentation.” Other major publishing conglomerates — Simon & Schuster, HarperCollins, Hachette and Macmillan — have also developed programs to recruit employees from diverse backgrounds and to publish nonwhite authors.

Lucas said she is unsure whether there will be a place for her in corporate publishing in the future. But she is still convinced that publishing will change, and she cited the work of Black executives like Dawn Davis, publisher of Simon & Schuster’s imprint 37 Ink; Chris Jackson, publisher of the Random House imprint One World; and Erroll McDonald, vice president and executive editor at Knopf.

“There have always been people of color in this business and they have done enormous, incredible work,” Lucas said. “People who think about the future are there, and they’re fighting for it.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.