Freedomways

FREEDOMWAYS. For much of its lengthy publication life (1961–1985), the most distinguished African American political-cultural journal, Freedomways was also something that the Left had lacked since the 1930s: a forum for some of the most prestigious American intellectuals to meet and mingle with Marxists.

Freedomways might be described as the most successful and well-connected of the artistic publications at the fringe of a once highly dynamic but much-collapsed Communist Party (CP) milieu. Other such publications prominently included Monthly Review, The Hollywood Review, Mainstream, and Sing Out!. The National Guardian newsweekly had many of the same contributors and subjects of interest. Each struggled to distance itself from the CP’s sectarian demands and dogmatic expression, seeking ways to adapt leftwing ideas to new audiences while retaining familiar readers. Among these publications, Freedomways alone possessed a lineal predecessor: Freedom (1950–1955), founded by W.E.B. Du Bois himself, a notable effort and an early Cold War casualty. The demise of Freedom cruelly deprived Paul Robeson in particular of a major literary outlet for his talent, during the depth of his forced exile from public life. Louis Burnham, Freedom’s main editor, moved on to the National Guardian, where for years, Du Bois remained a prolific contributor. Contributors John Killens, Lorraine Hansberry, Shirley Graham, Julian Mayfleld, Ruby Dee, John Henrik Clarke, and W. E. B. Du Bois, among others, would carry on to Freedomways.

The organization of Freedomways required much time and effort. The Committee for Negroes in the Arts swung behind the prospective publication. Opening its doors in the more hopeful period of the early civil rights movement, it had vastly more opportunity to succeed both financially and editorially. Freedomways’s founding editorial proclaimed “we are African-American” and promised to “explore, without prejudice or gag, and from the viewpoint of the special interests of American Negroes … the new forms of economic, political, and social systems now existing in the world,” and “to offer a medium of expression for serious and talented authors.” W. E. B. Du Bois contributed the opening essay, “The United States and the Negro.” Shirley Graham and Esther Jackson served as founding editors, joined by Schomburg librarian Ernest Kaiser, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference’s J. H. O’Dell, and an array of contributing editors that in later years included Ruby Dee, Angela Davis, Alice Walker, and Selwyn R. Cudjoe among others.

Freedomways distinguished itself by linking culture to politics. It published many important special issues on leading figures, including Du Bois, Robeson, Hansberry, and artist Charles White, on such select topics as the Caribbean people (with such contributors as C. L. R. James, Eric Williams, and Derek Walcott) and the crisis in education. It conducted a pioneering effort at the public recognition of African American women, in particular black women writers, from its earliest issues onward. Special issues highlighted many key problems, bringing together writers from far and wide. And it effectively promoted African American art in many forms, at one point establishing its own management bureau to arrange lectures and public performances. Its keen editorials, mostly the unsigned work of Jack O’Dell, pinpointed the issues of the day and discussed how best to mobilize around or against them.

Perhaps most impressive, however, was Freedomways’s breadth of prominent commentators from African American life, and the diversity of its political discussion. A short list of noted contributors would include Ossie Davis, Harry Belafonte, Nikki Giovanni, Richard Hatcher, Vincent Harding, Shirley Chisolm, George W. Crockett, Jr., Ron Dellums, Jesse Jackson, James Baldwin, John O. Killens, Sterling Brown, and Wyatt Tee Walker. Critics sometimes charged that Freedomways had little expressed empathy for separatism or militant black nationalism (at least until Malcolm X was assassinated in 1965), remaining generally true to a political perspective formed in the orbit of the 1940s Popular Front. But the magazine nevertheless radiated an openness sufficient to draw New Leftists and even an occasional black political veteran such as C. L. R. James, earlier linked with Trotskyist dissent from the Left mainstream.

Freedomways’s circulation, peaking at 6,500 or so, rarely sustained the magazine unaided. A generational gap and a crisis of funds generally overtook staff regulars, at a time when the proliferation of newer black publications such as the Black World and the Black Scholar offered alternatives for the younger reader in particular. Top leaders of the CP, Gus Hall in particular, were said to resent the publication’s independent-mindedness. Jack O’Dell’s reports on the Rainbow Coalition, an insider’s look at the foremost movement of the day, reflected the magazine’s keen sense of the magazine’s vitality at its last moments. Nevertheless, Freedomways passed from the scene in 1985, leaving a considerable vacuum in its wake.

Jackson, Esther Cooper and Connie Pohl, eds., The Freedomways Reader: Prophets in Their Own Country. New York: Basic Books, 2000.

Kaiser, Ernest. “25 Years of Freedomways.” Freedomways 24 (third quarter 1985).

Singh, Nikhil, ed. Climbin’ Jacob’s Ladder: the Black Freedom Movement Writings of Jack O’Dell. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012.

Freedomways, 1961-1985. Independent Voices. Open Access Collection of an Alternative Press. https://voices.revealdigital.org/?a=cl&cl=CL1&sp=IBJBJF&ai=1&e=-------en-20--1--txt-txIN---------------1