His writings have been published in Negro Digest,[1] American Dialog,[2] New Black Poetry,[3] Natural Process[4] and Freedomways.
[6] He also became a staff writer for the underground newspaper the East Village Other,[7] and an editor of Umbra, a poetry journal based in New York.
[8] In his journalism Raphael has explored the relationship between black West Indian immigrants to the United States and the longer established African-American community.
It reopened after a judge ruled that the play was protected by the free speech provisions of the First Amendment to the United States Constitution.
[12] In February 1970 the Manhattan Criminal Court found Raphael, along with the cast, producer and set designer, "guilty beyond any reasonable doubt of participating in an obscene performance which predominantly appealed and pandered to prurient interest and went beyond the customary limits of candor in presenting profanity, filth, defecation, masochism, sadism, masturbation, nudity, copulation, sodomy and other deviate sexual intercourse".