[Freedomways, the African American journal of politics and culture
chronicled the civil rights and Black freedom movements starting in
the early 1960s.] [[link removed]]

A NEW CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT, A NEW JOURNAL  
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Geoffrey Jacques
February 17, 2021
jstor
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_ Freedomways, the African American journal of politics and culture
chronicled the civil rights and Black freedom movements starting in
the early 1960s. _

From the cover of Freedomways, Volume 20, Issue 3, 1980,

 

_Freedomways_, the African American journal of politics and culture
[[link removed]] that
for nearly a quarter century chronicled the civil rights and Black
freedom movements beginning in the early 1960s, started in 1961, a
year that was a kind of transitional one for the civil rights
movement. The sit-ins that had begun in early 1960, and the continuing
demonstrations and emerging fervor, had made national headlines, but
the movement hadn’t yet achieved the national stature that it would
a couple of years later. Nevertheless, the civil rights movement was
still a significant, if not yet overwhelming, news media story. The
1961 Freedom Rides, in which Black and white movement volunteers
tested a recent Supreme Court decision outlawing segregation on
interstate bus travel by sitting together on trips through the South,
brought headlines, photographs and television news footage of racist
mobs, burning buses and bloodied civil rights activists.

In addition to this, the Cold War still raged. John F. Kennedy had
been elected on a platform of liberal policies at home and
anti-Communist assertiveness abroad. The war in Vietnam was a set of
kindling getting ready to blaze. Domestic McCarthy-era persecutions of
American Communists and those who associated with them had not yet
abated. Several political prisoners remained incarcerated.
Anti-Communist trials of political activists were continuing. The
Communist Party itself would be indicted under the McCarran Act, which
demanded that the Party plead guilty to being the government’s
almost cartoonish caricature of the organization and register itself
and its members under those terms or face draconian fines and prison
sentences. Yet despite all this, the winds of change were in the air.
One example involved one of the country’s most prominent political
prisoners, the Black American Communist activist Henry Winston
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who had been convicted under the Smith Act a decade earlier. He had
been blinded in prison due to medical neglect, and an international
campaign was mounted demanding his release. In July, 1961, President
Kennedy would commute Winston’s eight-year prison sentence. Winston
would go on to lead the Communist Party, USA as its chair for two
decades.

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At the same time, a new generation of nationally prominent Black
artists, not content to portray themselves as apolitical figures,
embraced the new freedom movement. Some of these artists would become
associated with _Freedomways_ over the years. Among them were
Lorraine Hansberry, whose A Raisin in the Sun was the first prominent
Broadway drama written by a Black writer; actors Ossie Davis, Ruby
Dee, and Harry Belafonte; visual artists like Margaret G. Burroughs,
Charles White, Jacob Lawrence, Elton Fax, Romare Beaden, Elizabeth
Catlett Mora; pioneering cartoonists Brumsic Brandon, Jr.
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and Ollie Harrington; musicians like drummer and modern jazz pioneer
Max Roach, as well as trumpeter Bill Dixon, saxophonist Archie Shepp,
and their cohorts in what was called the jazz avant garde; and a host
of new writers, led by novelists James Baldwin, Alice Childress, Rosa
Guy, John Oliver Killens, and Julian Mayfield, and including a host of
poets (Alice Walker published some of her earliest poems and stories
in the journal), essayists, and political analysts. My own
contributions to the journal came late in its run, with a couple of
book reviews, and, in 1984, with an article on jazz
[[link removed]].

The foregoing history was the setting in which a small group of
African American left wing activists, headed by the then-legendary and
notorious W.E.B. Du Bois, founded yet another Greenwich Village-based
little magazine. _Freedomways_ was unusual even in the world of
little magazines of the era, where what may have looked unusual to
mainstream society was actually, in the diverse intellectual world of
the Village in the late 1950s and early 1960s, quite commonplace. But
what distinguished this magazine were qualities that came not only
from its editorial personnel and outlook, but from its history as
well.

Key Figures

Within the context of the domestic Cold War, the African American
community was one of the few places where the organized left still
enjoyed a reservoir of good will as well as personalities that
commanded widespread respect. Among the top Communists tried and
jailed by the federal government at the end of the 1940s was New York
City Councilman Benjamin J. Davis, one of the most important Black
elected officials in the country. Du Bois, who was arguably the most
highly educated American of his generation, had spent more than half a
century pursuing a career that splendidly blended activism and
scholarship. He was a guiding figure in the effort to create the
philosophical and political framework for the civil rights movement.
Yet the federal government had indicted and tried him on charges of
being an unregistered agent of a foreign power for the “crime” of
heading an effort that collected 2.5 million signatures to ban the
atom bomb. Du Bois was acquitted. Others, such as Trinidad-born
Claudia Jones, who had been one of the leaders of the country’s
youth movement during World War II and became a prominent Communist
leader, were deported. Still others, like Paul Robeson, had his
passport revoked and was hounded and harassed by Federal authorities
throughout the 1950s.

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Robeson had founded a newspaper, _Freedom_, which gathered many
African American left wing writers. It would only last a few years,
but the group of writers that supported it would go on to become part
of the nucleus for _Freedomways_. Founded as “A Quarterly Review of
the Negro Freedom Movement” (it would later drop “Negro” from
its subtitle, indicating that the Black freedom movement could no
longer be thought of as a strictly parochial affair), the new
journal’s earliest editors included not only Du Bois; Shirley
Graham, an experienced, world traveling novelist, biographer,
playwright, and journalist, served as the journal’s first editor.
She was married to Du Bois. Early editorial board members also
included John Henrik Clarke, the prominent academic historian W.
Alphaeus Hunton, who was a leader in the movement for solidarity with
the newly assertive, and increasingly victorious, anti-colonial
movements in Africa (Hunton would spend his final years in Africa, in
Gambia, Ghana, and Zambia, where he died in 1970), and Augusta Strong,
a linguist, journalist, and educator who had been active in the
Southern Negro Youth Congress (SNYC) of the 1930s and 1940s, a group
that historians credit as having trained many of those who would go on
to play significant roles in the 1960s movements.

What distinguished this periodical was that it was a true tribune and
mirror of the actual freedom movement that was changing the
country’s social reality.
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At the journal’s helm was Esther Cooper Jackson, another veteran
writer and activist, who had been a leader of the SNYC and received
some prominence during the 1950s as the wife of Smith Act defendant
James E. Jackson, a prominent Black Communist who spent several years
a fugitive after refusing to surrender to authorities to serve his
term as a political prisoner. From the very first issue
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Cooper Jackson was its managing editor — in effect the editor in
chief — and would continue in that role during the journal’s
entire 25 year run. She was its main organizer, and it was she who,
most important of all, maintained the journal’s high standards of
literary integrity, its array of prominent contributors from all wings
of the freedom movement, and its enduring relevance.

Her primary collaborator on the journal in this effort was Jean Carey
Bond, an essayist, fiction writer, member of the Harlem Writers Guild,
and the niece of Benjamin J. Davis, who joined the journal in 1962 as
a book reviewer. She continued to write reviews and essays, and she
eventually shared editorial duties with Jackson, first as a
contributing editor before becoming associate editor. Margaret G.
Burroughs, who served for many years as the journal’s first art
editor, was a prominent Chicago artist and a founder of the
institution that is now the Du Sable Museum of African American
History. John Devine, a labor activist from Philadelphia, would
succeed Burroughs as art editor in 1963, and would serve as the only
white member of the magazine’s editorial board. He remained with the
magazine for the rest of its run. Burroughs would also continue
with _Freedomways_ as a contributing editor. Most of the people
named so far in this essay would contribute to the magazine at one
point or another as editors and writers, and the magazine would
produce special issues on Robeson
[[link removed]], Du
Bois
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and Hansberry
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and on topics ranging from Harlem, Africa, Mississippi, the Middle
East, and the Caribbean, to education and the Black image in the
media.

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It would be easy to conclude from this history
that _Freedomways_ was just another staid and dogmatic periodical,
pontificating already digested truths about current affairs while
relying on the certainties of a dubious ideology to make sense of and
simplify the challenges of a complex reality. (This is a conclusion
one can draw from what remains the most significant myth-making
critique of the journal yet published, Harold Cruse’s anticommunist
attack in his widely-read _The Crisis of the Negro
Intellectual_ [1967], an assault best answered by browsing the
journal itself.) Such a description would miss the reality
of _Freedomways_ by a wide mark. For one thing, the magazine
maintained its formal independence from political ideologies and
organizations throughout its existence; and while it is true that many
Communist and other left wing contributors helped solidify its
political identity as a magazine of the left, what also distinguished
this periodical was that it was a true tribune and mirror of the
actual freedom movement that was changing the country’s social
reality.

A Voice of the Movement, a Voice for the Movement

Part of the journal’s strength came from the fact that the voices
one found in _Freedomways_ were the voices of the movement itself.
The first issue contained, among other things, a stunning nine-page
historical essay by Du Bois, tracing the story of “The United
States and the Negro”
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1861 to 1961; a report from Conakry by Alphaeus Hunton on the newly
independent Guinea; John Henrik Clarke’s report on his trip to Cuba
(the same trip that Le Roi Jones, aka Amiri Baraka, famously
chronicled in his “Cuba Libre” essay of the same year); a speech
to the United Nations by Kwame Nkrumah, the president of Ghana; and a
militant, pro-integrationist artistic manifesto by Elizabeth Catlett,
praising the founding the National Conference of Negro Artists (which
still exists as the National Conference of Artists), and denouncing
the forced segregation imposed on Black artists, as well as on all
African Americans at the time. The second issue contained an essay by
one of the Freedom Riders who survived the attack in Alabama that left
his bus a burned out hulk. Joanne Grant was already a well-known left
wing journalist (she was the associate editor of the National
Guardian, the country’s biggest-circulating radical weekly
newspaper, and would go on to publish important work in African
American studies) when she contributed first-hand reporting on
Southern activism
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an early issue. A 1962 letter from Julian Bond
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to “Horace Julian Bond”), then a staff member of the Student
Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), offers readers one of the
first histories of that pivotal organization. Bond, who died in 2015,
also contributed an essay on nonviolence to the Spring, 1963 issue.

One singular contribution of _Freedomways_ to the growth in public
awareness of African American history and culture was the “Recent
Books” feature that appeared in the back pages of every issue. This
was an annotated bibliography compiled and written by associate editor
Ernest Kaiser, a Black writer and essayist who was also one of the
best-known librarians of the day. He spent forty years as librarian,
archivist, and research associate at the Schomburg Center for Research
in Black Culture in Harlem. His bibliographies constituted a kind
graduate-level bibliography in Black Studies, long before such studies
became standard university fare.

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Part of the radicalism of _Freedomways_ was its insistence on being
a journal that was edited and managed by Black writers and literary
figures that also welcomed the contributions of white writers. The
poet Walter Lowenfels was the only significant modernist American poet
to be convicted under the Smith Act; he contributed poems and essays
to early issues. Anne Braden, a well-known white activist based in
Louisville, Kentucky, wrote on “The White Southerner in the
Integration Struggle”
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the Winter, 1963 issue. NAACP researcher Herbert Hill contributed a
pair of analytical articles to early volumes of the journal.

Activists that wanted help explaining why it was that the South seemed
so ripe for the emergence of a historic movement for social change in
the late 1950s and early 1960s could look to the theoretical writings
in Freedomways by one of their own. J.H. O’Dell had been a union
activist in Louisiana and staff member of the Southern Christian
Leadership Conference, with duties ranging from fund raising to voter
registration. He had been a Communist until the McCarthy-era
repressions impacted the CPUSA organization and membership in the
South, limiting the organization’s public presence in the region.
The intervention by the Attorney General of the United States, Robert
F. Kennedy, into the movement’s internal affairs illustrated how the
government’s hounding of political radicals was brought to bear on
the movement itself. Kennedy demanded that King fire O’Dell and
other left wingers, or face open, official hostility. King complied.
Nevertheless, O’Dell kept his ties to the movement while becoming
more involved with Freedomways, and his first article for the
magazine, “The Negro People in the Southern Economy,”
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in the Fall, 1963 issue, was a landmark study of its kind.

“The Negro People and the Southern Economy” summed up both the
conditions under which Black people lived in the region, charted how
those conditions had changed in the nearly two decades since the end
of the Second World War, and helped clarify some of the issues that
catalyzed the civil rights movement. O’Dell firmly located the
movement not only in the world of ethical and moral concerns, but in
economic ones as well, focusing on jobs, occupational access, income,
and unemployment. The movement, he concluded, was “crossing the
threshold of its present, and entering a new period in its historical
development.” It should be remembered that this article was written
in the weeks after the 1963 March on Washington. This “_new
period_,” O’Dell said, “_is increasingly marked by the struggle
for economic well-being and greater political power, the two basic
conditions necessary for the full enjoyment of ‘equal rights_’”
(italics in original). Following “The Negro People and the Southern
Economy,” All told, writes Ian Rocksborough Smith, in an invaluable
2003 study of the journal’s history, “O’Dell would have a
tremendous impact on the magazine, penning over sixty percent of the
staff editorials, writing twenty key strategy pieces over the
twenty-five years of the magazine’s existence, and playing a central
role in soliciting materials from activists for publication.”
Freedomways would continue to chronicle, reflect, and advocate for
these concerns, and for others as well. It came out early, for
instance, against the war in Vietnam in 1965 (starting with an
editorial written by O’Dell), published a two-issue special on the
Middle East
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1983, and championed the presidential runs of Rev. Jesse Jackson, for
whom O’Dell would serve as a principal advisor.

This essay has charted the early history of _Freedomways_, but the
breadth, scope, and impact of the journal can hardly be successfully
recounted in this short space. Let this short account serve, then, as
an introduction, and as an invitation to read the entire run of this
extraordinary publication
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When read as a whole, this journal, founded by a small group of left
wing intellectuals who were trying to find their way beyond the
repression of the McCarthy era and contribute to the burgeoning
movement of Black people for civil and human rights, offers an
unprecedented and intimate view into the most important social
movement of our time. By the end of its run, _Freedomways_ had
become something close to a journal of record of the mid-to-late 20th
Century African American freedom movement.

READ THE FULL RUN OF _FREEDOMWAYS_ ON JSTOR
[[link removed]]

_Editor’s note: This essay first appeared as a Reveal Digital blog
post in August of 2018._

Geoffrey Jacques
[[link removed]] is a poet,
critic, and teacher who writes about literature, the visual arts, and
culture. His research interests include modernist poetry and poetics,
African American literature and culture, and the postmodern city.

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