4
Rebellion or Revolution

The Challenge of Black Radicalism

Black Nationalism in America lapses into romantic and escapist moods so long as it depends on emotional slogans, the messianic complex for a leader, or empty militant aggressiveness. Nationalism the world over is being expressed and must be expressed through economic, political, and cultural institutions to make them conform to nationalist aspirations. That these questions are not understood among Negroes is more than obvious. But the ability of the Negro movement to proceed beyond its present impasse depends on the solutions to these problems.

—Harold Cruse, “Rebellion or Revolution, II” (1964)

Maintaining a handle on the tempo of African American, Afro-diasporic, and Africa liberatory energies was no small task. While numerous world events, notably the Vietnam War, loomed large over this period of political activities, African independence remained at the center of Liberator’s perspective toward global solidarity. Though uneven and often difficult to predict, African nations’ efforts to thwart colonialism gained persistent support from the magazine’s crusading, aggressive style of journalistic commentary. Coupled with its attention to the racial and class oppression faced by U.S.-based African descendants, the magazine’s writer-activists amplified the contours of an internationalist-oriented black radicalism. In the mid-1960s, Liberator matured as a critical site of news, information, and analysis. It tackled as many of the major issues, campaigns, and personalities of the day as necessary to its relevance.

Alongside Dan Watts’s furious efforts to establish broad circulation for the Liberator and Pete Beveridge’s passionate consistency to the cause, the timely additions of Askia Touré, Larry Neal, Harold Cruse, and others to the core staff of writers would help catalyze the magazine into a periodical regarded with high esteem in these years. Cruse would emerge as a major theorist of black revolutionary thought in this period, though he, like most, posed more questions than answers to the challenges of black liberation. His discomfort with the organizational approaches taken by both civil rights and radical groups fueled Cruse’s efforts to develop fierce, unapologetic, and often-scathing critiques of any and every one claiming justice work as their vocation. Liberator’s pivotal role in advancing debates, staging panels, and above all publishing a monthly magazine demonstrates the sheer amount of energy devoted to black radical futures, and yet it also reveals how deeply contested definitions and practices of radicalism were in this period.

Pete Beveridge would play a signature role in figure prominently in the first half of Liberator’s run. Though he helped establish the magazine with Watts, by 1965 he had left the editorial staff due to growing tensions in the liberation movement concerning the reliability of interracial alliances. His departure resulted in the placing of all aspects of the magazine’s production under the direction of Watts. The middle years of the 1960s also witnessed other shifts that would impact Liberator’s diverse clientele of supporters and associates, if not its reputation. Ossie Davis and James Baldwin, early associates who supplied the periodical with moral support and institutional credibility, would eventually sever ties as a result of growing controversy surrounding the magazine’s hard-charging radicalism. Their relationship with the periodical indicates the ways Liberator sometimes strained friendships, and drew the scorn of critics, often as a result of its unpopular (and sometimes unwieldy) positions. At the same time, it was one of the few outlets for both up-and-coming radical authors and seasoned activists who were critical of the political mainstream represented by civil rights leaders and disenchanted with or distrustful of the Communist Party, even as it can be viewed as part of a New Left milieu. In this way, Liberator crafted a unique black radical politics that at times converged with and diverged from the radical perspectives available in this period.

In some ways the arc of James Baldwin’s association with Liberator is instructive of the trajectory of the magazine during the mid-1960s, when its momentum steadied. Baldwin’s return to the United States was just in time to be reenlisted in the social justice struggle. Having been an associate of the magazine at its inception, Baldwin later distanced himself from Liberator and its main staff writers amidst charges of anti-Semitism leveled at the magazine. Though that controversy hampered the magazine’s public reception for a moment, it did not derail the magazine’s significant articles on black nationalism and black peoples’ economic development by well-known political commentators such as Harold Cruse and less known but equally capable writers such as C. E. Wilson. By the end of the decade, many of the magazine’s writers would find themselves looking for other outlets, though for myriad different reasons.

These years would also prove especially significant for Cruse as he utilized the Liberator network to publish his tour de force, Crisis of the Negro Intellectual, the book that would define his legacy. In it he leveled his heaviest criticism against black leadership, especially those on the left. Liberator, its editors and staff, also drew Cruse’s scorn. Liberator’s iconoclastic politics made it a natural fit for Cruse for a time, though in his search for a successfully autonomous radical politics, the periodical, like all others, fell far short of his vision. Cruse’s other important collection, Rebellion or Revolution?, an assemblage of his writing on African American politics and culture dating from the early 1960s, included articles that he had first introduced in Liberator.

Malcolm X’s political evolution also loomed large in this period, significantly influencing the publication. Malcolm’s separation from the Nation of Islam in 1964 was intriguing for many and portended his broader political engagement with the civil rights movement. His assassination a year later, however, left many—especially radicals—angered and disillusioned. The founding of the short-lived Organization of Afro-American Unity (OAAU), Amiri Baraka’s Black Arts Repertory and Theater School (BARTS), the radicalization of Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and the Congress on Racial Equality (CORE), and the emergence of the Revolutionary Action Movement (RAM) comprise significant organizational signposts for the flowering of black radicalism in this period. Liberator writers were equal partners in these struggles to articulate and activate black radical politics. Not content with merely expressing their dissent from the mainstream, these writers searched diligently for an analysis of structural changes that would undermine racism and colonialism in the United States and abroad.

______

In January of 1963 the Liberation Committee for Africa incorporated as the Afro-American Research Institute, nearly two years after it circulated its “Liberation” pamphlet denouncing U.S. complicity in Lumumba’s assassination. That the New York Times would publish such an announcement in perhaps indicative of the lingering attention paid the organization following the 1961 UN disruption.1 The organizational name and structure changed but the radical outlook and content it began to fashion remained. Over the next the four years, Liberator would prove to be a defining voice of black radical politics and culture.

As a collective of thinkers engaged in both political and cultural (but not necessarily popular) discourse, Liberator writers exemplify what Grant Farred calls the vernacular intellectual tradition.2 Farred’s description of vernacular practices informs my discussion of the role of the Liberator magazine as a site of critical dialogue concerning the strategies of black liberation politics. Yet the black radicals who defined the period were not merely intellectuals. Many were also cultural producers, namely, critics, playwrights, novelists, poets, singers, musicians, vocational education specialists, public school educators, and in Watts’s case, even architects. Nearly all Liberator associates had day jobs, as the magazine was never in a position to financially compensate writers for their submissions or energy spent circulating the magazine around New York City.

These writer-activists combined both politics and culture in a practice of antiracist, anticolonialist, and antiwestern intellectual discourse and activism. As Farred writes, such intellectuals “vernacularize. [They] explore and explicate the links between the popular and the political. [They] never underestimate the capacity of the popular to elucidate the ideological, to animate the political, [they] never overlook the vernacular as a means of producing a subaltern or postcolonial voice that resists, subverts, disrupts, reconfigures or impacts the dominant discourse.”3 Though he employs language commonly found in postcolonial studies,4 his description is useful in examining the relationship between culture and politics, as demonstrated by the Liberator staff writers and the social milieu in which they operated. Moreover, it draws attention to the very political culture the magazine grew out of and helped to shape. As Farred asserts, “Within the terms of the vernacular, no minority or anticolonial struggle can be sustained if it does not contain in it a cultural element.”5 Indeed, Farred’s description helps contextualize the political nature of cultural work, highlighting the dialectic between theory and praxis that fueled the political labors of many black radicals. Liberator’s brand of what can be called political expressive culture adds to the understanding of how the Liberator emerged in this period as a formidable site of radical Black Arts politics and arts criticism.

James Baldwin, Harold Cruse, and Liberator: Allies into Adversaries

The Liberator began 1963 with an unsigned editorial, likely written by Beveridge, announcing the nationwide expansion of the magazine’s distribution. Liberator’s print number of 15,000 may have seemed small, but its impact and reputation were far outpacing concerns about circulation. Watts tirelessly advocated for the magazine, using his editorial page as a bully pulpit, while planning and speaking on a number of panels and conferences. Transforming the magazine from a local outfit addressing the concerns of a loose collective of radicals to a nationally circulating publication would require a lot of support.

It is important that the magazine was deemed valuable enough that it could assemble an advisory board that included local and national radical and left luminaries, including Ossie Davis, Richard B. Moore, Lewis Michaux, George B. Murphy, Selma V. Sparks, and former Garveyite, Hugh Mulzac. Of all these figures, perhaps none were as nationally renowned as James Baldwin, who was listed on the magazine’s advisory board up to June 1966. The cover of the 1963 centennial issue displayed a close-up photo of Baldwin looking intensely in the direction of the camera shot. Above his right shoulder were the words, “Not 100 Years of Freedom,” marking the title of Baldwin’s article in this issue, and signaling to readers the continuation of African Americans’ struggle for justice in the ten decades since the signing of the Emancipation Proclamation.6 At the height of the civil rights movement, two years after the Freedom Rides and one year after the Supreme Court ordered the University of Mississippi to desegregate, African Americans wanted to remind the American mainstream of its captivity. Baldwin, who by this time was arguably the most important and widely known African American writer having eclipsed Ralph Ellison and Richard Wright,7 began the article with a personal reflection of the meaning of the hundred-year anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation. “I myself do not feel that the nation has anything to celebrate this year—certainly not one hundred years of Negro Freedom,” he wrote. “Rather, I feel that we should use this year, which so harshly illuminates our failure either to end the Civil War or to recognize the Negro as a human being, as an opportunity to take a delicate and arduous inventory.”8 Baldwin, ever holding up a mirror to the country, suggested that America take a long, close look at itself.

Like many avid black internationalists of his day, having participated in the Negro Writers conferences of the late 1950s, he located African Americans’ struggle for dignity and rights in the context of the struggles around the world.9 As did a host of other homegrown activists, he wanted the government to honor African Americans’ right to live free as human beings. “Is it too radical to hope that a statement can come from the White House saying, flatly, that desegregation is right and that ignorance, violence, and bloodshed are wrong?” he asked. Baldwin’s words captured the sentiments of many. Why was it so difficult for the government to protect the lives of its African derived citizenry? Baldwin contrasted the rhetoric of progress with America’s unwillingness to change, and argued that the country lacked the courage to deal with the demand of the moment to change.

A towering literary figure of his time and product of Harlem, Baldwin was well versed in the literary and political culture of New York City. Baldwin lent his name to Liberator’s advisory board throughout the first seven years of the magazine, though it is not clear if he had any specified role in the magazine’s production.10 Baldwin had previously spoken at events sponsored by the magazine’s parent organization, the Liberation Committee for Africa, as early as 1961. He was scheduled to speak at a Negro History Week event at St. Luke’s Church in Harlem in February 1963, which was also sponsored by the Liberation Committee for Africa (LCA), but writer Carlos Goncalves and literary comet Lorraine Hansberry spoke instead.11 It is interesting that, for all of the early support Baldwin provided the LCA, the only article he published in the magazine was, “Not 100 Years of Freedom.” Though he was an early supporter of the magazine, by 1966, a controversy over a series on black-Jewish relations written by Eddie Ellis would strain Baldwin’s ties to the periodical. Nonetheless, throughout the remainder of that year, Baldwin or his writings and public speeches would continue to be the subject of debate, evaluation, and critique by Liberator writers and subscribers.12

Eddie Ellis was an original member of the New York chapter of the Black Panther Party and former Harlem Youth Unlimited (HARYOU) staff worker.13 It appears his article was intended to provide a thoughtful if critical analysis of the resentment brewing between African Americans and Jews, with a focus on Harlem. Yet, the tone of the articles he composed—indeed, the tone of the Liberator generally—was decidedly provocative and unapologetic. As a forewarning, he penned a short article to announce the series and provided an explanation of his reasons for initiating “a discussion of Semitism in the ghettoes,” which appeared as a three-part series in January, February, and April 1966. The series was Ellis’s and, perhaps, Watts’s attempt to publicly discuss the resentment developing between African Americans and their Jewish neighbors and no doubt provoke debate no matter the cost.

In January 1966 the series began with Ellis explaining a general sense of distrust that increased as a result of the recent killing of an unarmed black man named Nelson Erby by a white policeman named Sheldon Liebowitz. Though a case was brought against the officer, the grand jury found that he had “acted in justifiable self-defense.” To worsen matters, the Shomrin Society, a Jewish fraternal organization within the New York Police Department, shortly thereafter named the presiding judge “Shomrin Man of the Year” in November 1965. From Ellis’s vantage point this was high-level collusion that warranted public criticism and protest. Such events overshadowed Jewish solidarity with civil rights struggles. It was but a short step to connect such incidents to a history of economic control and political powerlessness.

Rev. Albert Cleage, Man of the Year, Liberator, December 1963. Courtesy of Pete Beveridge.

Many people perceived the Jewish community to be complicit in the economic colonialism that black people felt was practiced at their expense, an issue Ellis took up in the second part of the series in February. Contentiously, in this segment of the series he sought to distance African Americans from any guilty feelings regarding the Holocaust. “Black people did not build or operate the labor camps … or operate the concentration camps,” he contended. Therefore, it followed that “if there are any people free of guilt on the Jewish question, it is the Afro-American.” In April, the third part of the series appeared and identified several Jewish foundations that underwrote the activity of the major civil rights organizations. According to Eills, this example of economic control over black political agency at once spoke to African American economic dependence and fertilized the need for political and social autonomy. In his view black people did not even control the defense of their own civil rights.

The Ellis series is indicative of several turning points in the liberation movement as a whole in this period. On the one hand, African American radicals were engaged in a general reevaluation of the roles whites would play in and around black organizations. On the other hand, black activists who had worked or had personal relationships with whites began to reconsider these relationships as part of the imperative of an increased awareness of one’s black heritage. At the same time, for many people, the lived experience between African Americans and Jews was generally one of tension and distrust, even though there were plenty of examples of interracial marriage, especially on the left and a long history of Jewish membership in civil rights organizations. As far as personal examples stand, Dan Watts was married to a Jewish woman of Russian heritage.14 These facts did little to curtail the magazine’s critique of Jewish-black relations, however.

On February 28, 1967, New York Times reporter Homer Bigart penned a column announcing changes to the Liberator advisory board. The article “Baldwin Leaves Negro Monthly,” announced the formal and final separation of Baldwin and Ossie Davis from the magazine.15 The article explains the departure of the two cultural and political stars as a result of the magazine’s alleged anti-Semitism stemming from the Ellis article series. That Baldwin chose that moment to distance himself is ironic considering his own outspokenness on the so-called Jewish Question that put him at odds with many intellectuals and writers, black and white, at various points in his career. According to biographer Herb Boyd, who dedicates a full chapter in his work to Baldwin’s associations, confrontations, and perspectives on black-Jewish interactions, Baldwin was at times empathetic and at other times scathing in his recollection of personal interactions with Jews. This issue is arguably one of the defining aspects of Baldwin’s legacy as a writer and social philosopher. According to Boyd, the Ellis series was a turning point in Baldwin’s struggle with the Jewish Question as it forced him to apply greater nuance in his analysis of such ethnic tensions.16

For his part, Ossie Davis submitted a letter to be published in Liberator stating the reasons for the separation and fully disclosing his dissatisfaction with the anti-Semitism series. Watts, however, refused to publish it, stating in an interview that he was not going to let Davis and Baldwin disassociate themselves from the controversy so easily. “Now I refused to publish the two letters of protest that Mr. Ossie Davis and James Baldwin wanted me to publish on the grounds of principle,” he argued in an interview, indicating that their protest to the series stemmed from pressure from the American Jewish Committee. He continued stating in an expectedly stubborn manner: “But under no circumstances was I going to rescue James Baldwin and Ossie Davis from the Jewish community wrath because Baldwin and Davis and people like that—they have made it and they have not turned back one penny, one dime to the black community to help their brothers and this was the reason why I refused to publish their articles.”17 Watts’s stance on Baldwin and Davis partially stemmed from his impatience with accepted civil rights leadership. Although these two stars of the Harlem community and American cultural landscape had provided support to Watts’s efforts to distribute an alternative view on black liberation, Watts exhibited little tolerance for their efforts to distance themselves in the face of controversy. A man of Watts’s personality relished the conflict.

A year earlier, Ruby Dee and Ossie Davis graced the cover of the Negro History Week issue of the magazine and its editors wrote glowingly about them and their contribution to the arts. Praising Davis’s 1961 play, Purlie Victorious, and even quoting lines from it, the Liberator celebrated Dee and Davis for their black pride. And for the December 1963 issue, Davis sat for an interview with staff writer Charlie Russell.18 The anti-Semitism series (it was entitled “Semitism and the Black Ghetto” but described what he perceived as “anti-Semitism” in Harlem), however, challenged Davis’s support for the magazine. Though Watts refused to publish Davis’s letter, the longtime radical journal Freedomways, then edited by former LCA associate John Henrik Clarke, was willing to do so. In the letter, Davis wrote that he felt the series “went beyond the bounds of Black nationalism.”19 Davis, who had long considered himself a Black Nationalist, thought the article failed to critique structures of exploitation that communities like Harlem suffered under but instead used the Jewish community as a scapegoat.20

Baldwin was quoted in the New York Times article saying Watts’s decision to publish the series was “incredibly naïve.” Ultimately, Ossie Davis asserted: “I felt it was racist and said so to the editor, a man whom I still respect, Dan Watts. But ‘Semitism in the Ghetto’ blows it for me, but good and definitely.”21 It is important to note that Watts, the magazine’s editor in chief, though considered by many to be a curmudgeon, had a very generous publishing policy. This is not to excuse his axe grinding of issues relating to Jewish Americans, however. Known for his intransigence, Watts was quoted saying, “The object of my publishing the articles, was hopefully, to start a dialogue between Jewish leaders and the black community. The chief exploiters in the black ghetto are the Jewish merchants and landlords.”22 Though he stood by these and other comments, he was by no means alone in expressing such views. This was a popular line of critique that circulated with great frequency among those with nationalist proclivities, and who questioned existing power relationships governing urban communities. Some would later fine tune their analyses or recant them altogether, but Watts was hardly the lone voice on this issue.

Yet, Watts’s personal anguish over this issue probably stemmed from his interracial marriage, which seemed to contradict his staunch defense of militant black political agency and must have weighed heavily upon him. As Muhammad Ahmad recalled, Watts’s marriage kept many young radicals from developing a closer relationship with Watts even as he, unlike many of his generation, sought and took seriously their perspectives on black political struggle.23 This incident was forever burnished into Watts’s memory, and affected the legacy of the magazine. Writing in the spring of 1969—roughly two years after the series—he recalled the conflict in a lengthy editorial where he expressed his contempt for black and white forms of liberalism and provided a play-by-play account of the episode.24 Labeling both Davis and Baldwin “house negroes,” he argued that they saved their careers at the expense of a truthful dialogue about black-Jewish relations. He asserted that “a lot of ‘good brothers’ were being squeezed by publishers, producers and editors” who objected to the Ellis series, leaving some black writers to pressure Watts into retracting the articles. Watts, who was by nature intransigent and blusterous, would not budge. In his mind, pressure from the Jewish community was the chief reason many of the more famous writers ceased their relationship to the publication. The lone exception, Watts indicated, was Langston Hughes.25 Watts believed that the magazine’s penchant for discussing controversial issues inspired the attack on the magazine, which he took personally. As such, he would continue to fight the good fight regardless of anyone he had alienated or offended. He was not he concerned with the bridges that turned to ash as a result of his crusading brand of journalism.26 It should also be pointed out that Watts had also spoken about the historic oppression of the Jews. In the editor’s note to an earlier article discussing whether Germany would gain nuclear weaponry, Watts wrote, “I believe it is important for us to remember the horrors of the concentration camps and gas ovens which the efficient Nordic supermen used for the extermination of 6 million Jews.”27

Ellis’s articles on anti-Semitism among black urbanites should be viewed in this context of freethinking black political expression, which was held in high regard by Liberator contributors and readers alike. The Liberator series is indicative of that sentiment. Yet the debate had actually started years before. The radical historian and Liberator advisory board member Richard B. Moore penned an article in the July 1963 issue, entitled, “Criticism Is Not Anti-Semitism,” in which he lent support to Selma Sparks’s articles on discrimination in the Jewish-led International Ladies Garment Workers Union. In a vein similar to that taken by Baldwin and others, Moore sought to focus on the issue of discrimination rather than charges of anti-Semitism. Rather than belabor the distinctive histories and experiences shared by African Americans, Puerto Ricans, and Jews in New York City, Moore sought to use the occasion to raise the question of whether a sense of common struggle could be fashioned out of the particular ethnic history of each group. “We should all recall and reflect deeply upon the atrocious repression and wholesale massacre of Jews in Hitler’s Nazi Germany. Similarly, we should ponder upon the frightful lynchings and mass murders which have been perpetuated against Afro-Americans in this country … obviously then, unity of all oppressed minority groups, classes and peoples is their only sure hope for salvation and liberation.”28 In the August issue of that year, a writer named C. Black (likely one of Watts’s pseudonyms) noted that the charge of anti-Semitism was an aggressive weapon used against black people “to avoid dealing with problems of common interest, housing, education, political appointments, [and] city services.”29

Several scholars have examined historical relationships and points of contention between the two groups, often highlighting that African Americans and Jews have had a long history of interaction, sometimes as allies and at other times as adversaries. In the heated atmosphere of the late 1960s, these tensions were heightened due to the exigencies of the day.30 Again, Baldwin’s departure from the Liberator on this issue is somewhat ironic considering that he himself, as a Five College Consortium professor at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and affiliated institutions, would be at the center of a controversy concerning the historic relationship between black and Jews in the mid-1980s.31 It is interesting that this controversy came over a decade after Baldwin edited a book that sought to address and ameliorate tensions between Americans of African and Jewish ancestry.32

Watts regularly offered space to the letters to the editor that were compiled in the final pages of each issue, and he often published his own responses or the responses from the author of the article that the letter referenced. In this way he encouraged open community engagement with the relevant and often controversial ideas cast in the periodical. One of the letters to the editor that Watts published appeared in July under the heading, “Anti-Semitism in the Black Ghetto.” It was not written in response to the Ellis series, but rather to Baraka’s incendiary poem, “Black Art,” which was published in the January 1966 issue, the first appearance of one of the poet’s most memorable work.33 The author of the letter, Frank Smith, who was writing from California, suggested that Baraka reconsider the language in the poem that depicted Jews, for fear that its hostile stance be used “as a pretext for discrediting you and the struggle that all true libertarians are engaged in, namely to end the reign of the white power structure and bring about the dawn of a New Day.”34 Throughout the remainder of the year, Liberator seemed to have escaped the vitriol that would come as a result of the Semitism series, as no other letters to the editor were published in response that year.

In May 1967, Watts published a letter from a New York City reader named Umoja Kwanguvu, whose response to the Semitism series cut to the core of the matter. He wrote: “As for most of the inmates (voluntary and involuntary) of the black ghettos, their feelings aren’t really anti-Semitic, but anti-exploitation and anti-domination which are not any more plausible just because they are kosher.”35 Though Baldwin’s arc from ally and advisor to adversary shows how charged racial politics were, he was hardly the only intellectual concerned with openly debating interracial alliances. Harold E. Cruse, the equally controversial theorist of black nationalism, also wrestled with this issue throughout his writing career.

In his tour de force, Crisis of the Negro Intellectual, Harold Cruse came down hard on the Liberator for a variety of reasons, with a central point of his criticism being its alleged lack of ideological coherence.36 Yet perhaps the writer Carlos Russell’s recollection is more palatable in evaluating the impact of the magazine than Cruse’s boldfaced dismissal of the publication and its crew. As a longtime member and staff writer, he argued that the Liberator was “eclectic.”37 By this he meant that though they all shared the commitment to black liberation, its writers consisted of people of divergent backgrounds, experiences, motives, aspirations, and ideological perspectives. Their coherence came through a commitment to first understand the transnational situations black people faced and their sharing of an acceptance of the responsibility to black liberation struggle through a commitment to antiracism, anti-imperialism, and deep critiques of capitalism. The resulting eclecticism was arguably its most significant attribute as it called into focus the diversity of black radical thought among activists and intellectuals in this period, although in the heat of a raging movement for justice, this may have been a nuisance for some. As the publication grew in popularity throughout movement circles and at bookshops, it thereby attracted more up-and-coming writers.

As mentioned, many of the writers in Liberator’s heyday, including Amiri Baraka, Larry Neal, and Askia Touré, would become major theorists of the ensuing Black Power/Black Arts Movement. These figures played increasingly significant roles in affirming and emphasizing African Americans’ nonwestern cultural heritage and values.38 What is important is that their work in many ways reflected and extended Harold Cruse’s call for cultural revolution. For Cruse, culture provided the soil on which liberatory politics would emerge. Cultural institutions would not only reflect black aesthetics, they also would protect and reinforce the desires and political vision of autonomy and independence. Highlighting some of the generational differences that surfaced among Liberator staff, Askia Touré commented, “Larry and I were ‘young Turks’ working with our elders. So from time to time minor differences would occur, as in any family.”39 Touré, for example, published a number of influential articles employing ideas from Cruse’s writings, but also developing his own analyses. These include, “The New Afro-American Writer,” published in October 1963; “Toward Repudiating Western Values,” published in November 1964; “Afro-American Youth and the Bandung World,” published in February 1965; and “Malcolm X: International Statesman,” in February 1966. These articles highlight Touré’s contribution to the internationalism at the heart of black radical politics among younger activists in this period. In 1964, Touré had written to John Henrik Clarke asking whether his report on the National Afroamerican Student Conference would be published in Freedomways. Clarke does not seem to have been able to convince his associate editors to publish the piece, replete as it was with denunciations of “Bourgeois Reformists” who failed to see black people as “colonial subjects or slaves,” as opposed to “second-class citizens.” Touré’s attacks on existing civil rights organizations may have been a bit too heavy-handed for Freedomways but it is a clear indication of important transitions that underscored changing attitudes.

Touré’s report from the Nashville convening summarized speeches made by Max Stanford, Donald Freeman, Obi Wali, of the Pan African Student Organization in America, and Len Fraser Jr., of the Angolan Refugee Rescue Committee. According to Touré, the conference left attendees with four essential points: (1) bourgeois reformism (their description of civil rights efforts) must be repudiated; (2) African descendants in the United States should openly espouse “Pan-African Socialism” or “Revolutionary Black Nationalism” as their philosophy; (3) they should adopt former NAACP leader Robert F. Williams as “the leader of militant Afroamerican youth”; and (4) there should be black solidarity with revolutions in Africa, Latin America, and Asia.40

While ambitious in scope, this platform would largely remain the operating outlook of small collectives of radicals than the governing vision of a general black community. These issues would be hotly contested in the weeks, months, and years following the student conference. Though he had almost single-handedly influenced a host of young radicals, the figure at the center of nearly every dispute concerning black nationalism was Harold Cruse. Despite his disagreements with Dan Watts, Cruse offered penetrating analyses on the state of African American progress and published several seminal articles in Liberator from 1963 to 1964. His three-part series, “Rebellion or Revolution?,” was published from October 1963 to January 1964. In this series Cruse called for a cultural revolution in which black people would acquire ownership of the American cultural communication infrastructure, “i.e. films, theatres, radio and television, music performing and publishing.” Most nationalists, including Malcolm X, promoted a similar desire as critical to liberation and power. This, Cruse argued, was the only way that African Americans could move the struggle from a civil rights–based rebellion to a full-fledged revolution. As had occurred in revolutions throughout the Third World, the revolutionists seized ownership of the communication technologies. Cruse held that the same would be required of revolutionary-minded African Americans fighting for freedom in the United States.

In the November 1963 issue he wrote an article entitled, “Third Party: Facts and Forecasts,” which analyzed the viability of forming an all-black political party and the possible effects on the American political landscape. “The Roots of Black Nationalism” was published in two parts in March and April 1964. Cruse also penned the two-part series, “Marxism and the Negro,” in May and June of that year. And his last series, “The Economics of Black Nationalism” was published in July and August. In these articles, Cruse attempted to provide a critical appraisal of the movement as a whole, both thematically and systematically. He also intended to give the black intellectual community a historical context of its predicament. Cruse’s Liberator analyses of American society and black liberation formed the skeletal structure of his book, Rebellion or Revolution?41 Yet his experiences working as a staff writer for the Liberator would form the basis of his discussion of the magazine in The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual, wherein he offered a highly charged historical analysis of the shortcomings of all black leadership.42

Though Cruse’s Liberator contacts made Crisis possible, in the book he nonetheless excoriated the publication as a journalistic example of the failure of the movement as a whole.43 According to Cruse, until the movement could resolve such questions as, “What is integration? What is nationalism? What is Marxist Communism, and how does it relate to the first two ideas?,” the Liberator could not offer a program or direction of its own. Moreover, he claimed that the magazine did not maximize its ability to clarify these questions even while publishing Cruse’s own theoretical work.44 Ironically, his articles attempted to tackle the very questions he posed in the Crisis. And though these issues were discussed at great length, many of the questions remained.

By basing his critique of the magazine on Beveridge’s pivotal relationship with the periodical, Cruse demonstrated his impatience with interracial coalition politics. However, he omits his relationship with James Finkenstaedt, who was an executive at Morrow Publishing and was responsible for Crisis of the Negro Intellectual seeing the light of day. It is not clear if he consulted Watts, or anyone else for that matter, before going to his editors with the manuscript. Nor did he have to. His credentials, political experience, and analytical sophistication made him an expert among amateurs. Although he could be exhaustingly argumentative and difficult to work with at times, Cruse commanded the respect of his peers, such as C. E. Wilson and Clayton Riley, and young upstart radicals such as Askia Touré and Muhammad Ahmad (Max Stanford). In this sense, Touré argued that too much is made of the generation gap in this period, as figures such as Cruse, Killens, Jimmy and Grace Lee Boggs, John Henrik Clarke, and Dan Watts often served as mentors in their own ways.

Touré recalled that these figures “nurtured young writers,” affectionately calling them “radical mentors.”45 He described Cruse as a one-man “encyclopedia of the movement,” who frequently took time to sit and talk openly with activists and intellectuals, young and old. Touré, unlike many people, appreciated Cruse’s forthrightness. Many of the sections of Crisis were elaborations of conversations Cruse had with people around him. Cruse’s outspokenness and intellectual boldness often drew the ire of colleagues. Killens, for one, did not take kindly to Cruse’s no-stone-unturned analytical approach, and he was so upset that he challenged Cruse to a fistfight. Before it came to fisticuffs, however, it was suggested that a more respectable course be followed. Both men agreed to fight it out intellectually through a public debate, but such a meeting never took place. As far as Touré is concerned, Cruse won by default because no one was willing to stand up and issue a real challenge to Crisis.46

Like Baldwin, Cruse struggled publicly with black-Jewish relationships. His attitudes, which had been shaped by negative childhood experiences with people of Jewish ancestry that carried into his adult life, became a chief target of analysis as he matured as a self-trained scholar and committed theorist.47 A related issue for Cruse was the Liberator’s ties to the Old Left. Though many in the Liberator circle interacted on some level with members of the Communist Party, only he, Beveridge, and Richard Moore had been members of the Party. Yet it is clear that some members of Liberator’s advisory board, such as former Freedom editor George B. Murphy, for example, had ties to the Communist Party at certain points in their career. Though Cruse decided that his tenure with Liberator was over by 1964, his writings made a lasting impression on the periodical’s audience and on the theoretical formulations within black radical politics. His departure is not as unfortunate when one considers that he and Watts both had huge egos, which may have foreclosed any long-term association. When asked who influenced his intellectual approach to the movement, C. E. Wilson indicated that in addition to the work of Caribbean activist-theorist Frantz Fanon, Cruse’s ideas were instrumental to his own understanding of history and political struggle.48

Several years after Cruse had left the publication to pursue other politically worthwhile projects, Liberator reviewed Crisis in its pages. Writer Lynn Wheeldin, who up to this point had never written for the periodical, authored the review. None of the feature writers or longtime associates saw fit to answer Cruse’s monumental undertaking. Wheeldin, then, played the part of untainted, nonpartisan analyst who could at once attempt an objective reading of the book and dodge Cruse’s fiery response. After reviewing and summarizing the main sections and points raised in Crisis, Wheeldin noted the “smell of vindictiveness” in Cruse’s book, which, she argued, could only come from direct participation in the movements and organizations that came under his stiff rebuke. Though she urged readers to read the book for its “historical tie-ins,” his proximity to his subject detracted from the effectiveness of the critique. To cite an example of Cruse’s vindictive stance, Wheeldin states, “One glaring example in point is his ridiculous attempt to discredit Liberator by giving completely erroneous information as to that magazine’s circulation—information ‘gleaned’ from a conversation with an uninvolved white man. The black editor/publisher was never consulted.” Here the reviewer reveals herself as a partisan critic, though her allegiance is balanced by her suggestion that the book be read: “It is a long book, but for the historical tie-ins alone it is worth reading.” Concluding, she added, “Although Harold Cruse does not offer any creative program of his own, he does point some directions.”49 Cruse would remain a controversial figure throughout his lifetime, and though many have critiqued certain elements of Crisis or disagreed with his thesis entirely, the book has, on the whole, maintained its status as a seminal text of the period for raising important and difficult theoretical questions of black politics, even if he himself could not provide the answers.

Expanding Circles and the Angry Generation

As a site of radical black politics Liberator carried stories of protests and local movements taking shape nationwide as well as those it followed that were occurring internationally. But most important, this period is one that witnessed the explosive fusion of cultural and political work. Artists and writers held forth on a number of explicitly political issues and were perhaps better suited than the activist to move into the popular realm.50 The periodical approached national events with a sense of dedication that held allowed a consciousness of simultaneous struggles internationally. In the spring of 1963 the magazine featured a West Coast organization known as the Afro-American Association. And in the fall of that year it carried a short write-up on director and playwright Frank Greenwood’s Afro-American Cultural Center Committee, a group dedicated to cultural awareness and African American history-inspired education, which was based in Los Angeles, California.51 This marked the first occasion that Liberator’s coverage of the national racial justice struggle that was occurring on the West Coast.

Enthused by civil rights protests around the country and especially in the South, the Afro-American Association began as a study group in 1960 on the campus of the University of California at Berkeley.52 In his article, “The California Revolt,” organization leader Donald Warden wrote about the emergence of the group and its perspective on the civil rights movement.53 Warden, who was educated at Howard University, identified several aspects of the liberation struggle that help explain the radicalism in this period. The association, according to Warden, sought to buttress the reforms promulgated by civil rights leaders and organizations, which at this time hung on the acquisition of voting rights in the South. Warden and the association called attention to the equally important emphasis on history, culture, and economic development. The association interpreted social change along the lines of education and economic self-sufficiency. They viewed voting rights as one step toward meaningful citizenship, but by itself it would not end discrimination and hostility toward black life. “The extension of voting rights does not necessarily produce power,” Warden wrote. Rather than focus on voting rights, Warden suggested an emphasis on education. But though education was central to Warden, he did not discuss it in relation to desegregation. Rather, education should instill pride, purpose and dignity. Desegregation, he submitted, would not guarantee that those sentimental aspects could be achieved. To achieve the pride, purpose, and dignity he envisioned, black people needed to recognize the importance of their African past. “Our sense of dignity must be based upon our African past, and now is a most opportune time to strengthen our ties with our African brothers.”54 A connection to African history is a central characteristic of most cultural forms of black nationalism. Here, Warden echoes a perspective popularized by Cruse, which tied black liberation to cultural revolution.

On the economic front, however, Warden’s prescription was more conservative. Rather than calling for the construction of alternatives to capitalism, Warden asserted that black businesses should be created around the country. In all fairness, he sought to address the black community’s inability to produce a thriving business class. Yet his plan did not move beyond the black business model that first emerged under Reconstruction, when such approaches circulated with some voracity following the Civil War. This part of his program can perhaps be compared to that of the Nation of Islam’s effort to curb black people’s spending habits by encouraging frugality and thrift. Warden wrote of the capital that could be created to build black businesses should black people use their funds wisely, stating: “The capital for such industries also is available from our own community, if it could be diverted from the consumption of alcohol, bleaching creams and preachers’ Cadillacs.”55 It is interesting that Warden’s analysis of black peoples’ predicament was not focused on systematic inequality or systemic barriers to black peoples’ ability to generate wealth, but rather on a notion of black pathology. “Most of the crimes we commit are against ourselves; with a feeling of real dignity and group respect we can attack our basic problems,” he asserted.56

With skillful usage of the slogans “Buy Black” and “Act Black,” Warden hoped to inspire a sense of direction and purpose toward the development of black communities nationwide. Though these slogans would be insufficient as corrective measures, they could be used to galvanize support for the more detailed program for change offered by the association. As historians Peniel Joseph and Donna Murch write, the Afro-American Association, with its emphasis on cultivating pride in African American history and culture, had a significant impact on the radicalization of black students in California, influencing black college students attending the University of California at Berkeley, Merritt College, and San Francisco State University and inspiring future Black Power–era radical activists such as Maulana Karenga and Huey P. Newton.57

That Liberator would publish the writing of a relatively small West Coast organization is a significant commentary on its outreach efforts. Fashioning itself as a meeting ground of black radical political ideals, the magazine used its meager resources to expand its circle of contacts to cover regional, national and international movements and events. It is uncertain how exactly the New York–based magazine knew of the Afro-American Association, or vice versa. The staff writers traveled widely, and many moved in and out of radical and/or Black Nationalist circles. One explanation may be found in the Robert F. Williams support committees that sprung up throughout the country in the early 1960s.

A related possibility is the formation of the Fair Play for Cuba regional committees, which were also represented on both coasts in the early 1960s. It is likely that the globe-trotting of black left-wing journalists such as William Worthy may have led to the reception of the magazine in cities outside New York, since Liberator consistently reported updates on Worthy’s legal battles. An additional explanation may be found in the strategic role that black bookstores and reading groups played in circulating black journals, publications, and newspapers. It appears that a combination of these factors contributed to the Liberator staff’s plan for national distribution. Through its expanded distribution, it attracted more writers, many of whom were making names for themselves in other literary, political or cultural efforts taking shape in other parts of New York City or around the country. One such aspiring black writer was University of San Francisco (USF) graduate Charlie L. Russell.

Russell’s writing, beginning with a short excerpt from a novel-in-progress entitled Dark to Dark, first appeared in Liberator’s May 1963 issue.58 Born in Monroe, Louisiana, Russell migrated with his family to the West Coast, relocating to Oakland, California. For many black families leaving the South during the World War II era, Oakland was an attractive locale to find work and a relatively less hostile place to raise a family.59 Russell then relocated to New York City to pursue his writing career. He had been encouraged to consider a career in writing by one of his instructors at Santa Rosa Junior College, about an hour north of Oakland, where he took classes before transferring to USF. His writing instructor pulled him aside one day after class and told him that he should consider taking his writing more seriously and possibly becoming a professional writer. As Russell recalls, “He said: ‘go where writers go, and do what writers do.’ In my mind I conjured up the image of New York.”60 An admirer of the writings of James Baldwin, Russell decided to write a story of his own after reading Baldwin’s “Sonny’s Blues.” From that moment he began fashioning himself as a writer, though he found it was difficult adapting to the discipline it required. After attending Santa Rosa Junior College and then USF, he left the Bay Area for New York. Arriving in New York around 1960, he contacted John Henrik Clarke, who among his numerous activities was an editor of the widely read Freedomways magazine. Clarke, himself an anthologist of short stories, told Russell about the Harlem Writer’s Guild after Russell sent him a sample of his writing.61

As did Russell, a number of writers cut their teeth in the pages of the Liberator, among other publications. One such young writer was Rolland Snellings, who later changed his name to Askia Muhammad Touré,62 an indication of the personal and political transformations accompanying the period. In one of his earliest Liberator writings, Touré published a long poem entitled, “Cry Freedom,” which he dedicated to two young activists named Matthew Meade and Mustapha Bashir who had participated in the Lumumba UN protests. Throughout the poem Touré uses the refrain. “I am not an invisible man,” distancing he and his generation from the notion of invisibility and unseen marginality of Ellison’s novel with broad streaks of nationalism. Indeed in the first full stanza of the poem he pronounces the emergence of a “fighting spirit” of determination, embodied by an

Angry Generation, Lonely Generation, Black Renaissance,

New Negro, Black Nationalist, etc., etc.

Classify me, hypnotize me, ostracize me;

Will me away from your sight

Hide me from the watchin’ world; the 3/5 colored watchin world

They see and hear; they care …

I’m not an invisible man

My anger stalks on ghetto legs

I’m not an invisible man.

My song, like

Rain, is universal.

Listen while I blow my horn.63

Touré had enlisted himself as a standard-bearer for a new generation of radicals. Characterizing the new spirit described by John Henrik Clarke in his influential essay, “The New Afro-American Nationalism,”64 Touré referenced Malcolm X twice in this poem, signaling the growing relevance of the Muslim leader to the liberation movement as a whole and his attractiveness to young black radicals. Although originally from North Carolina, Touré spent much of his youth in Ohio and was “reborn on Brooklyn’s teeming streets,” along with Tom Dent, Calvin Hernton, Sarah Wright, Ishmael Reed, Rashidah Ismaili-Abu-Bakr, Baraka, and others who belonged to the Lower East Side multicultural black artist milieu in the early 60s.65 With the presence of Touré, Neal, Riley, and others, Liberator not only represented the New York City politics and arts scene but also symbolized the political and cultural linkages evident in the Black Arts Movement as a whole.

Though he is not always credited with being a key barometer of the transition away from civil rights protest and toward black internationalist militancy, Touré published several seminal pieces in Liberator that typified broad generational and cultural shifts occurring in this period. One such article was “The New Afro-American Writer,” which was published in the October 1963 issue. Here Touré identified the militant shifts taking place among a younger generation of writers who were college-educated and increasingly race-conscious, yet stuck between existing civil rights programs and organizations on one hand, and the militancy and radicalism of the Nation of Islam on the other. Arguing in favor of increased education about African Americans’ African past, and opposed to liberal leadership, whether black or white, Touré wrote, “A militant new generation has arisen.” Positioning his critique of liberalism, he argued against the general and generational fear of nationalism, and asked, “Why does nationalism seem to disturb and frighten the white applauded ‘Negro intellectuals’ and self-appointed ‘spokesmen of the race’?”66

Born in 1938, Touré, like many of his political cohort, was a very young man when he decided to deeply immerse himself in radical politics. Politically precocious, he wrote articles that were at once critical, driven by pivotal moments in Afro-diasporic history, and celebratory. His report from the National Afroamerican Student Conference clearly identified the restless mood among young radicals. His article, “Unchain the Lion,” which was published in Liberator in July 1964, struck an apocalyptic tone (“unchain your hero … and gird yourself to meet the gathering storm!”) and warned of an ominous “final confrontation.” In it he spoke favorably of the place of the lumproletariat, “who make up the angry, exploited masses,” and their potential as a revolutionary force in the movement. Strengthening his critical stance toward American society, Touré penned the influential article, “Afro American Youth and the Bandung World” in the February 1965 issue.67 In this article, he again imagined an inevitable war between white America and the colonized black nation within the United States. The piece contained several themes that mark the period and typify the militant tone that many younger activists advocated, including especially relating black suffering to patterns of colonialism.

Touré imagined a long, resilient line of radical activism whenever he put pen to paper. Pointing to the Garvey movement and the influence of the Nation of Islam as historic and contemporary exemplars, Touré stressed the urgent necessity of black nationalism. He surmised that black youth were more prepared than many of their elders to envision the relevance of the “multi-colored” anticolonial movements in places such as Vietnam, the Congo, Panama, Venezuela, and India for the situation facing black people in the United States. The youth—or as he called them, the “children of change”—saw the world as awash in anti-imperialist ferment. At once invoking the Du Bois, Hunton, and Robeson era of internationalist black radicalism, and anticipating Fred Hampton’s Rainbow Coalition, which he expressed within the context of the Black Panther Party’s position on the potential of multiracial and multiethnic alliances,68 Touré spoke against the philosophy of integration, writing, “As brothers and sisters of the ‘Bandung’ peoples, it would be downright immoral for our people to seek integration into a society which thrives on their plundering; because in doing so, we would be asking for our ‘share’ of the loot.”69 Social transformation, he argued, involved more than African Americans fitting into an imperialist system.

Touré spoke of the need to revisit black history and provided a brief overview of the conflict between Marcus Garvey and W. E. B. Du Bois at the turn of the century, ultimately calling for a synthesis between the two approaches. The antiracist, anti-imperialist, anticolonial, anticapitalist, pro-black outlook espoused in the article captured a resurgent radical internationalist vision of black nationalism in the United States at a time when it seemed that domestic issues were viewed in isolation from the efforts of freedom struggles around the globe. The importance of this article can also be found in the influence of Harold Cruse on Touré’s discussion of “the oligarchy of imperialism” that “controls the economics of the United States.” Perhaps taking a cue from Cruse, he argued for an analysis of the economic structure of the country as the backbone of the political order. Yet it was Touré’s advanced sense of black radical internationalism that distinguished him among his peers. His strategic invocation of Bandung as a template for a youth-led revolutionary vision was a unique contribution to black radical thought in this period. Though the signature contributions of his close friend and comrade Amiri Baraka may have overshadowed his own, Askia Touré played a catalytic role documenting, theorizing, and reworking an outlook of insurgency among his generation of writer-activists.

______

On both the cultural and political fronts, the magazine continued the diligent and prodding coverage of local, national, and international events that readers had learned to appreciate. Locally, the periodical took on issues of equal education, poverty (and government-sponsored antipoverty programs), youth (especially programs such as HARYOU), economic development, and police harassment of everyday working people. In addition to these policy issues, the magazine also examined the role of local elected black leadership, most notably Adam Clayton Powell Jr. Local leaders in cities outside New York, such as Detroit’s Albert Cleage and Cambridge, Maryland’s Gloria Richardson, also received special recognition. In fact, Cleage was named “Man of the Year” by the magazine in December 1963.70

Nationally, the chief concern of Liberator writers was how to make sense out of the direction of the black freedom movement. “Which Road to Freedom?” asked staff writer Rose Finkenstaedt in an article in which she examined several issues confronting African Americans’ search for freedom, including interracial alliances, integration in residential communities, electoral politics, and the formation of an independent black political party. “In the frenetic crisis of this age,” she wrote, “only the black man has endurance and depth to create inspired leadership for the lost and forgotten peoples of this land. If he has been the symbol of enslavement, he can be the world-wide symbol of the struggle of all men for liberty.”71 Though it is unlikely that she penned these words in prophetic anticipation of the historic election of the first African American president of the United States, she nonetheless seemed to endorse the perspective that black leadership could be instructive for the nation as a whole. Finkenstaedt’s reasoning here reveals the contestation and frequent consternation among whites concerning black national leadership. She was one of the few people who insisted that nothing short of an upheaval of the status quo would bring about the necessary improvements in the lives of black communities throughout the country.

African American radical formations sprang up all around the country, defined by presence alone the multilayered elements of, and approach to, black liberation. It is important that many people began placing greater emphasis on the distinctions between an assertive black nationalism, revolutionary nationalism, and civil rights reformism. Outfits like Liberator knew which side it was on and directed its bully pulpit to shape alliances among radical Black Nationalist individuals and groups. It can be argued that this goal set the magazine apart from publications such as Freedomways, which were much more ideologically focused as an organ of the remaining black members of the Communist Party’s militant integrationism. Part of the strength and relevance of Liberator, especially in the bridge years between civil rights militancy and Black Power (roughly 1963–1967), was its ability to accumulate and articulate a wide range of Black Nationalist thought.

As evidence of this approach, another group emerging outside New York that attracted the magazine’s attention was the Afro-American Institute, in Cleveland, Ohio. This organization, not to be confused with either the Afro-American Association in Oakland or the Afro-American Research Institute, under which Liberator was published, was led by Donald Freeman and was essentially another front organization of the Revolutionary Action Movement (RAM).72 Freeman’s organization typified the radical coalition politics reflected in Liberator. Formed in Cleveland in 1962, the organization proudly based its approach to black liberation on “Awareness, Agitation and Action,” which was reminiscent of Marcus Garvey’s protest politics that instilled pride in African heritage in the 1920s. Like most other formations in this period, Freeman’s Afro-American Institute was concerned with politics, education, economics, and what they termed “social independence and maturity” among African Americans. In many ways, the institute was a consortium of different groups and individuals working in solidarity.

Black activists from Cleveland’s organized labor community, individuals who worked with Cleveland’s Monroe Defense Committee, members of Cleveland CORE, as well as notable figures such as Max Roach and William Worthy all expressed support for the Afro-American Institute. Locally, according to Freeman, this solidarity contributed to the creation of “a Black United Front of Cleveland protest groups.” The Soul Circle, which was the institute’s policy-making unit, sought local alliances as a part of a vanguard strategy, though they were quick to distance these efforts from overtly Marxist or socialist organizations. “The Institute’s Soul Circle declares that white socialists and Marxists do not possess the solutions to the ills of Black America,” he wrote.73 Instead, an alliance of black organizations could begin to address the political, social, and economic needs of black communities locally and nationally.

The emphasis on independent thought, strategy, organization, and action also contained traces of Harold Cruse’s theories of autonomous leadership.74 The alliance viewed “African American groups throughout the nation such as the Afro-American Association in California and RAM in Philadelphia as a potential vanguard in Black America’s liberation, along with the Black Muslims.” The institute placed great importance on developing “effective communication and cooperation between itself and similar oriented black organizations throughout the United States,” as that would be in the best interests of African American political progress domestically, while also providing a basis for pan-African international solidarity globally.75 The Afro-American Institute of Cleveland was among a number of radical organizations seeking to unify the black left and work toward collective goals. It is indicative of the many localized efforts to raise consciousness and empower black communities while fighting established structures of state power. Though Freeman’s style of radical coalition politics gained some traction, the liberal and labor coalitions of civil rights organizations nationally overshadowed such efforts. And although numerous alternative political ideas, such as those found in Liberator, were heavily circulated in the early 1960s, for most African Americans and supportive whites, the main issue was how to gain political advances in the mainstream of American society without abandoning principles of black self-assertion, cultural awareness, and political autonomy in organizing. Such questions were center stage for Liberator’s radical writers as the mainstream leadership of the civil rights movement prepared to descend on Washington, DC, and announce their demands to the world.

The “Farce on Washington”

Talk of the March on Washington dominated the news that fall. The stand against nonviolence and civil rights gradualism on the part of Liberator’s staff writers and many of its associates placed the magazine at odds with civil rights establishment leaders such as Martin Luther King Jr., James Farmer of CORE, and Roy Wilkins of the NAACP. Mocking their leadership, Liberator pictured them on its August cover under the headline, “August 28th Will They March?” Though the magazine was critical of the march, the editorial penned by Beveridge and Watts was an endorsement of a march on Washington, as opposed to what they thought would be a march in Washington. Doubtful that the announced march would bring the significant change that many envisioned, and convinced that it would not move beyond its symbolic impact, the Liberator staff planned to attend the proposed march as witnesses to the affair. The editorial warned, “The integrationist, non-violent leaders of the major civil rights organizations in this country have grabbed a lion by the tail in committing themselves to mobilize 100,000 people in Washington, D.C. on August 28 in support of the Administration’s admittedly inadequate civil rights bill.” It criticized the announcement made by King, Farmer and Wilkins that the march would be orderly, stating that the leaders of the march were more concerned with order than getting African Americans’ issues addressed.

Though they had a number of reasons to criticize the march, Beveridge and Watts nonetheless encouraged readers to attend. “In spite of all these negative factors, we say that Washington, D.C. is the place to be on August 28,” they urged. “Let us make the March IN Washington into a March ON Washington in spite of ‘our leaders’ efforts.” The march made a tremendous impact on the civil rights struggle if for no other reason than the large numbers of people, totaling over 200,000, who responded to the call to descend on Chocolate City. Indeed, the march was one of the watershed moments in American history.76 Staff writers Carlos Russell, Charlie Russell, and C. E. Wilson; art critic Clebert Ford; photographer Leroy McLucas; and editor in chief Dan Watts traveled to Washington to witness the march. It is interesting that the September issue of the magazine did not include any reports or articles assessing the march as might have been expected. In this issue, they did, however, publish an article that spoke in contrast to the integrationist tone of the March on Washington by Progressive Labor organizer Bill Epton. Still, for the time being it was the only piece that dealt directly with the march.

______

In his Autobiography, Martin Luther King Jr. characterized the March on Washington as “a shout which awoke the consciousness of millions of white Americans and caused them to examine themselves and to consider the plight of twenty million black disinherited brothers.”77 On the heels of President Kennedy’s civil rights proposal and Medgar Evers’s assassination, the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom symbolized the desire of many people to end the brutality and violence toward African Americans and served as a collective protest against the federal government’s unwillingness to protect black lives. He acknowledged the historic nature of the gathering. “The Negro Revolution in the South had come of age,” King wrote. “It was mature. It was courageous. It was epic—and it was in the American tradition, a much delayed salute to the Bill of Rights, the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Emancipation Proclamation.”78 King’s delivery of his “I Have a Dream” speech is arguably the most remembered event of the march. “To the extent that any single public utterance could,” wrote Harvard Sitkoff, “this speech made the black revolt acceptable to America.” Yet not all people believed in the brotherhood between white and black that King envisioned would transform America. Some defiantly opposed King’s passionate belief that America could be made anew through black struggle. Nation of Islam leader Malcolm X, who was in many ways antithetical to King and his dream, famously referred to the march as the “Farce on Washington,” putting voice to a sentiment of doubt shared by many. In any case, the march was not the power move many radicals envisioned.79

The Liberator gathered its coverage and criticism of the march in its October 1963 issue. In many ways, this issue was a turning point in the magazine’s impact. A quick perusal of the issue’s table of contents reveals a magazine of serious black politics and aesthetics. Boasting an eight-person executive board and a thirteen-member advisory board, it was a publication that commanded attention. Important as well was the magazine’s coverage of domestic events and issues, alongside those occurring on the international scene (especially African political events and personalities), which demonstrated black radical politics and aesthetics. Articles in this issue included “Ghana Speaks Out” and “The Pilgrimage,” both of which discussed the March on Washington; Askia Touré’s “The New Afro-American Writer”; Cruse’s “Rebellion or Revolt”; “Du Bois an African Patriot,” which was written in tribute to the recent passing of the pan-Africanist writer, philosopher, and activist; “Thru Women’s Eyes,” which marked an emergent feminism in black radical politics; and “An All Black Party,” marking the renewed search for an independent black political agenda. Also included in this issue was a review of Baraka’s Blues People. Collectively, the articles indicated the wide range of subjects that the magazine would cover over its ten-year history and simultaneously identified some of the salient aspects of an emerging, broad-based black radical critique that encompassed issues of politics, economic, education, and culture.80

Following what had by now become a traditional pattern, the October 1963 issue opened with an editorial penned by Dan Watts. Recounting several murders that had occurred within weeks of the March on Washington, Watts called readers’ attention to the fact that black lives remained in danger, despite the dream of a new America that was being celebrated as a result of King’s speech. In addition to the murders of Cynthia Wesley, Addie Mae Collins, Denise McNair, and Carol Robertson, the victims of Birmingham’s Sixteenth Street Baptist Church bombing, Watts pointed to Johnny Robinson, a sixteen-year-old black youth shot by Birmingham police, and thirteen year-old Virgil Wade, a black boy who was the victim of two white boys. Watts’s editorial indicted several public figures for not protecting the lives of African Americans while they urged the African American community to maintain hope for greater inclusion and dignity in American society. Watts directed his “finger of guilt” at the perpetuators of the crimes, first and foremost, noting, for example that “as we go to press, there have not even been any arrests for the Church massacre.” He then charged Alabama governor George C. Wallace, FBI director J. Edgar Hoover and “his racist cohorts,” attorney general Robert Kennedy, president John F. Kennedy, and King “for false leadership of black people; for continuing to preach a policy of non-violence and love in spite of the daily toll of humiliation, blood and life which this policy has cost his people.”81

Watts did not stop there, however. His last assignment of guilt was to “Afro-American people themselves,” for their blind faith. Watts, like many others, believed that African Americans had given support to King and other civil rights leaders undeservedly. They were the tacit followers of leaders who had duped them into thinking American racial history could be overcome by sacrificing their bodies, dreaming, and loving their enemies. Watts believed that instead, black people should teach and practice strategies of survival, including most seriously methods of self-defense. “We must wake up to the fact that the issues of jobs, education, desegregation, and civil rights are only small parts of the basic problem of survival,” he wrote. Watts’s version of the crisis went counter to the peace doctrine practiced by King: “If we do not organize for survival, we will not be here to enjoy the fruits of equality. We must demand our leaders recognize the reality of our struggle and responsibly organize for physical self-defense and abandon all irresponsible reliance on the tragically demonstrated ineffectual powers of love and conscience.” The caustic tone of Watts’s editorial is indicative of Black Nationalist radicals’ impatience with civil rights liberalism. Lives were at stake and government officials seemed to be taking their time in guaranteeing protection or capturing perpetrators if they were willing to do so at all.82

Editorial board member and staff writer C. E. Wilson penned an appraisal of the March on Washington in a four-page article entitled, “The Pilgrimage,” which identified critical aspects of the march.83 Wilson intended to critically examine the importance of the march, but like many on the left, he took the position that the march alone was not enough to bring about the desired change in African American experiences in the United States. Throughout the essay, Wilson, known for his wit, described the march as “a pilgrimage,” a “picnic” replete with thermoses and lunch baskets, and “a commencement” exercise. He wondered why the police feared violence would erupt at the gathering since the army they anticipated was made up of aging mothers and their children. Of those gathered he wrote: “their uniforms—white shirts, ties and their frightening battle hymns were We Shall Overcome and Freedom.” Though President Kennedy eventually endorsed the right of the marchers to assemble, it was only after King and others guaranteed that there would not be violence. With those assurances given, Wilson wondered why the police presence was so thick. Perhaps, he suspected, American authorities wanted violence to ensue so as to provide a reason for the assembled to be sent back to their homes, beaten, jailed or killed and then blamed for it.84

While admitting the importance of the march, Wilson took the position that the gathering left many of the pressing issues such as poverty and state sanctioned racial violence unaddressed in terms that would encourage structural changes. From Wilson’s vantage point the march symbolized the hope of many African Americans in the Constitution and their assertion of citizenship. It was indicative of a growing impatience toward the pace of social change in the country. “America was given a bit longer to pay off the debt [to African Americans],” he wrote, “but was served notice that the debt will have to be paid.” Echoing Baldwin’s landmark essay, he wrote, “to wit: Negroes gave America the rainbow sign. They want payment or the fire next time.” Wilson did not want to focus on the gathering alone, but also what the march actually stood for: the demand for freedom and jobs. He wanted to keep the focus on the socioeconomic demands that the march represented.85

Tellingly, he did not mention Dr. King directly in this initial write-up. If Lincoln’s statue was honored by “the pilgrimage” and heavy police presence typified “the picnic,” King was referred to as “the class valedictorian” of the commencement, who “eloquently spoke of the future and clearly enunciated what should be the dreams and hopes for the future of all Americans.” Wilson, who was clearly wrestling with the meaning of the gathering, questioned the notion of appealing to America’s conscience. As King’s signature strategy aimed at changing as many hearts as minds, Wilson identified the contradiction inherent in such an appeal, when he asked: “Does a nation that thinks in terms of the fast-buck, misleading advertising and sloganeering have a conscience?” He, like many other radicals believed that America’s conscience—if the country did indeed possess one—should have already been shaken at the number of fatalities that black communities throughout the country had suffered since emancipation, and therefore was impervious to such an appeal. It would not have been necessary to march in the first place if America possessed a conscience, he argued. Rather than the march standing as a symbol of progress as a nonviolent demonstration, Wilson intimated that the problem of jobs and freedom for African Americans was only getting worse not better. And though he could state that the march “was neither a complete triumph nor a complete bust,” he noted somberly, “The pilgrims came back from Washington empty handed.”86

Wilson was among a number of black radicals who were doubtful about the march’s impact. For example, writing at the end of 1963, Baraka called the march a “sham gesture.”87 Recalling the deflation of swelling pressure on the government leading up to and during the march, former Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee activist James Forman wrote, “Somewhere along the line, the church and labor people had been told that this was a march to support the administration’s Civil Rights Bill, which was passed in 1964, after Kennedy’s death. Who did this and how it happened, I do not know. But people all over the country thought they were marching for jobs and freedom when in actuality the sellout leadership of the March on Washington was playing patsy with the Kennedy administration as part of the whole liberal-labor politics of Rustin, Wilkins, Randolph, Reuther, King, the Catholic and Protestant hierarchy.”88 If this period represents the increased radicalization of black protest politics, the march also marked a generational shift of another sort. W. E. B. Du Bois, the esteemed scholar-activist, passed away on the eve of the historic gathering after having relocated to Kwame Nkrumah’s Ghana. The Liberator’s October issue carried a dedication entitled, “Du Bois, an African Prophet,” which was reprinted from the Ghanaian Times, and accompanied by a portrait by illustrator Leo Carty of a middle-aged Du Bois dressed in a shirt, tie, and vest.89 And the brief article, “Ghana Speaks Out,” which featured W. Alpheus Hunton, Julian Mayfield, Maya Angelou, Alice Windom, and others of the African American expatriate community in Ghana, recorded their support for the March on Washington and the simultaneous collective mourning of Du Bois’ passing. The expatriates marched to the American embassy in Ghana and delivered a message to President Kennedy via the consulate. After Hunton delivered the letter, the marchers picketed with signs that read, “Remember Lumumba and Medgar Evers”; “Stop Mad Dog Attacks”; “Down with American Apartheid”; “W. E. B. Du Bois 20th Century Prophet”; and “Remember South Africa in Washington.”90 This is evidence of the wide support the march received and the balance of radicalism meant that activists supported the march on symbolic terms while marking the limits of relying on such a dramatization to generate the full range of black political and economic desires.

Adam Clayton Powell, cover, Liberator, July 1964. Courtesy of Pete Beveridge.

Though the expatriates and supporters around this group were largely more progressive in their political outlook, Mayfield reported on a certain type of expatriate he dubbed “homo tomo Americanus,” who serviced U.S. interests in Ghana.91 “Uncle Tom Goes to Africa” told of the aloofness of some black travelers to the continent, a type who was a self-made radical in Africa but would not take even the most basic stand against the status quo in America. As Mayfield put it,: “Back home you could probably not get his signature for a petition defending the right of women to have babies, but once on African soil he becomes a vociferous advocate of ‘socialism,’ not lowering his voice or even looking over his shoulder.” Mayfield wanted to highlight the difference between the African Americans in Ghana working actively for African independence and opportunists merely exploiting the moment. Though the traveler in Mayfield’s description used radical terms, he “never does or says anything that might annoy the local U.S. embassy.” From Mayfield’s point of view, the earnest supporter of African independence was not afraid to disturb government officials if that was what was required for change or at least to heighten government awareness of black dissent.

Charlie E. Wilson, the son of immigrants from Barbados, grew up in New York City. Though he had a sense of the importance of African independence, he did not travel to Africa until well after his Liberator days were over.92 After serving a stint in the army, where he and Beveridge met, he made good use of the G.I. Bill and enrolled in classes at St. Francis College, located in Brooklyn Heights and later at City University of New York, Brooklyn. Around this time he joined the Brooklyn chapter of the NAACP and served a term as chapter president. After leaving the army in 1955, he worked at an industrial screw manufacturing company while taking civil service exams in order to apply for municipal jobs throughout New York City. These exams qualified him to take jobs at the New York State Employment Service and later the New York Department of Education, where he worked as a vocational education councilor for the physically handicapped. Later, he would enroll in New York University’s master’s degree program in audio communicative disabilities.93

Wilson remembers that Beveridge often worked closely with Rosetta Gaston (1885–1981). Mother Gaston, as she was affectionately known, was a local activist who served as president of the Brooklyn chapter of the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History, of which Beveridge was a member. Wilson and Beveridge lived around the corner from one another and often traveled in similar company. Beveridge, who by this time had connected with Watts on the idea of starting a magazine, asked Wilson if he would be interested in writing articles. According to Wilson, “I thought I knew a few things, so I started writing articles.” One of the earliest members of the staff, Wilson would use his expertise in public education and New York City’s civil service and welfare politics in all his Liberator writings. Beyond ideological commitments to a new social order, writers like Wilson brought the magazine an astute, in-depth criticism of government policies precisely because in some cases their day jobs required them to implement these policies. As such, when Wilson took up the subject of education or welfare policy he did not have to guess; his employment put the evidence right in his lap.

The Liberator brought together a number of individuals, each with their own area of interest and knowledge. In Wilson’s words, “It brought together all these different strands; it represented the tremendous frustration of non-citizenship.”94 Though both he and Watts were born and raised in New York City, the immediacy of their Caribbean roots added a layer to their critique of the United States as an unwelcoming and hostile place for African descendants. The same can also be said of Carlos Russell, whose Afro-Panamanian heritage influenced his engagement in black radical politics in the United States, although he was not born in New York City.

Wilson argued that the magazine played a critical role in the civil rights discourse. “It gave a voice to the people who don’t say ‘yessah boss’ ” he contended. Liberator writers were “the ones who asked ‘what is this democracy that they’re talking about?’ The Liberator asked the question: ‘Can you work within to change these institutions?’ ” Like many radicals of the period, Wilson was greatly influenced by the writings of Frantz Fanon. Among his thirty articles and reviews published in the magazine, was a book review of the classic revolutionary text, The Wretched of the Earth, in the May 1965 issue. For Wilson, Fanon provided a clear definition of the evolution and function of racism. “He helped me put into perspective Ellison’s invisibility.”95 In his review, he wrote, “Fanon’s book is a radical document because it goes to the root of the problem. Western opulence is built on slavery. Nothing is legitimate about the murder for profit, brutality, or exploitation.”96 Radical anticolonial thinkers such as Fanon held particular importance for activists in search of theory to apply to their own analyses of the state of black life in the United States. His works were quickly added to the analytical arsenal of black radicalism. His searing, if at times clinical, diagnoses of colonialism, revolutionary culture, and African revolt struck a chord among an array of black activists. Fanon’s theorizations were second only to the one-man battalion, Malcolm X.

Malcolm X as Quintessential Liberator

If Fanon was the theorist of the revolution, Malcolm X was the revolution’s charismatic general. An important thread connecting the various strands of radicalism in the magazine specifically and in the period generally was the role of Malcolm X and the Nation of Islam (NOI). Beginning with religious scholar C. Eric Lincoln’s pioneering work, The Black Muslims in America (1961), and followed by E. U. Essien-Udom’s Black Nationalism: A Search for an Identity in America (1962), scholars have long noted the impact of the NOI on the cultural and political landscape in this period. The NOI was responsible for the radical transformation of many individuals and organizations, an impact also felt among mainstream civil rights and Christian organizations. More recently historian Jeffrey Ogbar wrote, “The NOI was the chief benefactor of the Black Power movement.”97 Its doctrine of race pride, economic autonomy, and self-defense proved a direct challenge to civil rights integrationist and nonviolent approaches. Although “The Messenger,” Elijah Muhammad, provided the organizational and philosophical foundation on which the Nation stood, much of its historic impact can be attributed to Malcolm X. According to Ogbar, Malcolm’s twelve-year tenure in the NOI (1952–1964) helped grow the organization from roughly 400 in 1952 to as many as 300,000 nationwide members by 1964, though the exact number of actual members is difficult to precisely quantify.98 In his Autobiography, Malcolm states that he was directly responsible for the growth of the Nation from 400 to 40,000 members. According to historian Michael Gomez, however, scholars must also account for the “thousands (if not millions) who agreed with Malcolm, who enthusiastically received his message, and who regarded him as a leader while never formally joining his organization.”99

Drawn to a variety of Harlem’s local leaders and organizing efforts, the Liberator was one of a number of black publications that took notice to Malcolm X. In this sense its writers were among those “who regarded him as a leader,” although they were uncomfortable with his specific role as representative of a religious organization and not an expressly political one. But because of their proximity to Harlem’s Muslim Mosque No. 7, Liberator’s writers were in a position to witness Malcolm’s ascendance. Though historian Harvard Sitkoff could write, “In death, Malcolm X achieved a far greater eminence and a larger following than he had in life,” such statements fail to fully appreciate Malcolm’s importance for black radicals in the early 1960s.100 As the writers of Liberator would have it Malcolm was the quintessential liberator. Coverage of Malcolm in Liberator reveals his impact on an assortment of radical thinkers and activists in this period.

The earliest mention of the Nation of Islam in Liberator occurred in July 1961 when the Liberator was little more than a seven-page pamphlet. John Henrik Clarke, a friend of Beveridge through activist and educational circles, penned a celebratory review of Lincoln’s Black Muslims in America. According to Clarke, Lincoln’s book underscored the rapid and expanding influence of the organization and their historical importance, noting: “The Black Muslims in the United States have created what is essentially a proletarian movement. This is the largest movement of this nature to emerge among Afro-Americans since the heyday of Marcus Garvey and the collapse of his ‘Back to Africa’ dream.”101

Discussion of Malcolm X first appeared in the magazine in May 1962. In an unsigned article culled from national news sources, the magazine carried a story about a young man named Ronald Stokes, the secretary of Los Angeles Mosque No. 27. Aptly calling it a “barbaric incident,” the article pointed out the “brutal and unprovoked attack” on the mosque’s members by seventy-five policemen, which resulted in the shooting death of Stokes and left at least fifteen other Muslims wounded. Malcolm was dispatched to Los Angeles to launch the NOI’s own investigation of the killing. Stokes, who was only twenty-nine years old at the time of his death, was shot when a police-induced scuffle broke out between them and members of the mosque.102 After a quick appraisal of the damage to both victims and police, the New York Times opened its report on the incident with police chief William H. Parker’s comments that the Muslims “were a hate organization dedicated to the destruction of the Caucasian race.”103 Parker, who was well-known throughout the Los Angeles black community for his antiblack racist views, sanctioned the brutality, believing the NOI to be a threat to the white community.104 Parker’s views toward the NOI received support from the city’s mayor, Samuel Yorty, who called upon the “fine leaders of our Negro community” to deal with the Muslims. Malcolm called a press conference to present the Nation’s interpretation of the shooting. In his statement, Malcolm emphasized the fact that those who were wounded in the police-inspired melee went without medical treatment for hours, possibly worsening their injuries. Moreover, he denounced the “Gestapo tactics and false propaganda” of the police department and the mayor’s office; and placing the responsibility on the city, Malcolm proclaimed Stokes’s death a “police-state murder.”105

According to historian Peniel Joseph, this event catapulted Malcolm into the center of heightening national debate over black militancy, police abuse, and civil rights protest although, under orders from the Nation’s spiritual leader, Elijah Muhammad, he was not allowed to use this event to initiate a nationwide militant movement, as he had intended.106 The Liberator, which (it must be noted) repeatedly misspelled Malcolm’s name in this article, also saw fit to publish what it thought could be learned from this incident. “Malcom X [sic], as the most vocal and public figure of the Muslim movement must reconcile his militant talk with the non-militant action of his followers,” they wrote, seemingly critiquing Muhammad’s instruction not to retaliate. And continued: “If he wishes to continue fearlessly to speak the truth about the savagery and uncivilized nature of the white man—an activity in which we wholly support him, he should realize that his followers will need more substantial weapons than the truth of Allah to defend themselves against the wrath of the Los Angeles police—and others.” At first glance, it appears that the Nation missed a golden opportunity to defend black humanity from the state power. Known for their willingness to defend their members at any cost, the Nation could and often would use whatever means at their disposal to retaliate against transgressors. In this instance, under orders from Elijah Muhammad, the Nation could not retaliate for the killing of Stokes. Whether The Messenger’s decision hung on his belief that a war with the Los Angeles Police Department could not result in a favorable outcome, or whether he was pressured by Los Angeles mayor Sam Yorty to calm NOI members who were prepared to fight fire with fire remains unclear. We can be certain, however, that this incident, and especially the tepid response from Muhammad, left many NOI members disillusioned and angry. Many subsequently left the organization. For those who stayed on, every attempt was made to catapult Stokes’s case to national, if not international, attention. This incident would remain an issue of tension between Malcolm and Elijah Muhammad.107 And it was indicative of growing fissures between the two men, which would continue to widen over the next two years.

Though forced to stand down in the aftermath of the Stokes case, Malcolm’s fiery rhetoric endeared him among those already critical of civil rights nonviolence. His increasing importance to radicals would place him alongside Fanon, Robert F. Williams, and Patrice Lumumba as pivotal figures in defining and reshaping black radical perspectives in this period. From 1962 through his assassination on February 21, 1965, the Liberator tracked Malcolm’s evolution and growing alienation from the Nation of Islam, followed many of his speeches, invited him to debate, and pressed him to explain his ideas concerning the way forward for African descendants in the United States and abroad.

In the June 1962 issue, the black radical historian Richard B. Moore issued an open letter to the editor responding to the Stokes article. Moore, who had been involved in a number of radical circles dating back to the 1920s, was an advisory board member until its dismantling in the wake of the Eddie Ellis controversy. An active participant and observer in black radical politics, Moore told the editors of Liberator that he approved of the attention paid to the Stokes case and its catalytic potential. At the time of his letter, Moore had initiated a formation called the “Committee to Present the Truth about the Name ‘Negro’ ” and urged the black community to embrace the term “Afro-American,” which seemed a more historically accurate descriptor for African descendants in the United States.108

Moore urged black leaders and organizers to form a united front that would work toward the protection of the basic needs of the African descendant populace in the country. Once unity was achieved, he asserted, then collective policy decisions could be effected. The united front he envisioned included nationalist, labor, civil rights and religious individuals and organizations. He thought radicals could take a page from the black abolitionist Frederick Douglass, who in identifying the need for broad-based alliances toward abolition, stated, “I would help all and hinder none.” Though he supported the Liberator’s editorial challenge to Malcolm, Moore argued against any insinuation of warfare against all whites. Striking a pragmatic note, he argued that the Liberator editors, and by extension the united front, should distinguish between “all European Americans” and “white supremacists.” His letter also counseled against the Garveyite idea of repatriation to Africa. Though some African Nationalist and Black Nationalist groups might have been at odds with such an approach, Moore continued calling for a “basis of unity” among all groups concerned with the progress of the black community. Finally, Moore noted that the “separatism” versus “integration” dichotomy was “fruitless.” He recommended that a Centennial Emancipation Convention be convened as an initial step toward collective organizational unity. Concluding his letter, he wrote: “To prepare such a Convention properly, we must urge the principal organizations and leaders, especially NAACP, CORE, Liberation Committee for Africa, and the Youth Movement, the followers of Elijah Muhammad, as well as the African and Black Nationalist Groups, the Negro Labor Committee, and other Afro-American labor groups, to take the initiative in the speedy setting up and capable staffing of broadly representative United Centennial Emancipation Convention Committee. We dare not fail to meet the present challenge; let us rise to the occasion!”109 LCA chairman Dan Watts attached a small note of agreement below Moore’s letter, which read, “We at LCA support the analysis and conclusion of Mr. Moore’s open letter, calling for the uniting of all forces engaged in the civil rights struggle: To the liberal white community, we say join us, not lead us, work with us, support us.” Though Watts appeared willing to work across racial lines, he grew increasingly distrustful of multiracial cooperation in subsequent years.110 Moore continued to publish articles in the Liberator, and expanded his view of the importance of Douglass in a four-page article commemorating the Centennial of the Emancipation Proclamation and entitled, “Frederick Douglass and Emancipation,” which appeared in the February 1963 issue.

As the NOI grew in public recognition and as Malcolm’s public recognition increased, the Liberator grew in its support for his ideas. An equally important political figure to the Harlem community was Adam Clayton Powell, whose career in politics experienced a meteoric rise as well as an embarrassing demise. These two men and their outspokenness on questions of race and power struck a chord with Harlemites in search of identity and methods of resistance. Powell and Malcolm frequently shared podiums and pulpits, with their assertive denunciations of white supremacy, shocking their supporters and enemies alike. Additionally, they were both tragic figures: Malcolm suffered death by gunfire while Powell experienced political death in his expulsion from Congress.

Seemingly, as Malcolm’s political philosophy evolved, he grew increasingly at odds with the apolitical position of Elijah Muhammad—a process that has been well documented. His evolution is perhaps the central theme of his legacy.111 Liberator coverage of Malcolm reveals his increasing appeal among radicals. In the March 1963 issue, Rose L. H. Finkenstaedt, the wife of Morrow Books publisher James Finkenstaedt, penned an article entitled, “Never on Christmas: A Black Muslim Story.”112 Rose, a Columbia University graduate student, had been asked by Malcolm to schedule a speaking engagement at the school after she had contacted him.113 Her subsequent article supported the Muslim struggle against the police and encouraged readers to support it as well. She also emphasized the religious importance of the group’s existence in Christian white America. “The fact is that the Black Muslims are an indication of what can be done against another power structure in America,” she wrote. A picture of Malcolm X sporting a scarf, long coat, and fedora accompanied the article. Malcolm, and at least a hundred other Muslims from his New York mosque, were pictured outside the courtroom where two NOI members, Hugh X. Morton and Albert X. Reese, were being arraigned following their arrest for “disorderly conduct and simple assault,” while selling copies of Muhammad Speaks on December 25 of the previous year.

Liberator reported that the members of the Mosque attended the court hearing in hopes of insuring the protection of their brothers. One of the arrested men received forty-six days in jail and the other was let go. An attempt to arrange a meeting between Mayor Robert Wagner (who was in office from 1954 to 1965) and Malcolm X to discuss “police oppression against Muslims” was also considered as a result of the hearing.114 In the publication’s May issue, Malcolm is pictured on the cover seated on a rostrum smiling as Congressman Adam Clayton Powell is shown emphatically addressing the crowd at a Harlem rally. The editorial of this issue revealed appreciation to Powell for maintaining contact with his base of support in Harlem. However, Powell was a controversial figure throughout his career. As John Henrik Clarke wrote in the Introduction to one of several Harlem anthologies he compiled, Powell was “the creator of a political mystique and a dramatic enigma. This mystique and this enigma stand in the way of every attempt at making an objective appraisal of the adventurous career of Rev. Adam Clayton Powell.”115 Still, in the political history of 1960s Harlem, Malcolm and Powell are almost inseparable.116

Toward the end of 1963, with many people still pondering the impact of the March on Washington, others continued to push for substantive change. First introduced to mainstream audiences through Mike Wallace and Louis Lomax’s documentary, The Hate That Hate Produced, which aired in 1959, the Nation began to receive more national attention in the vacuum left by the march.117 Though viewed as a force to be reckoned with, if not feared, the Nation of Islam still carried the badge of uncertainty among some radicals. The Liberator writers paid close attention to the Muslim movement with a degree of skepticism even as they were drawn to Malcolm X. Doubt in the Muslim program was vividly displayed in Charlie Russell’s article, “Black Muslims in Crisis,” in which he strongly criticized the Nation, calling it an “intellectual wasteland” bordering on “naïveté” and “unable to present a concrete method for reaching [its] goals.”118 “Because of the growing disenchantment on the part of the black masses,” the article began, “the Muslims, as potential leaders of the Negro movement, now find themselves in the unenviable position of a rookie on a last place team: they must produce quickly or be sent back down to the minors—in their case it would mean they would become just another religious sect.”119 Naturally, such a statement angered the Nation members and sympathizers who saw the article. Carlos Russell recalls being confronted on the street by members of the Fruit of Islam who mistook him for Charlie Russell after the edition had hit the stands. After some cajoling and explaining that the other Russell wrote the piece and that the two were not blood relatives, the Muslims backed down. Of course, it did not help matters that Watts and Beveridge mistakenly assigned Carlos credit for the piece in the table of contents.120

The title “Black Muslims in Crisis,” written boldly across the front cover of the magazine, easily garnered the attention of passersby, much to the chagrin of both Russells. Though Charlie Russell’s critique employed very provocative language that drew the ire of some Muslims, the article pressed for an increased role of the Muslim movement beyond the realm of religion and stopped far short of denouncing it. In any case, the misunderstanding did not sever the relationship between Carlos and Charlie; nor did it lessen the critical attention the magazine paid to Malcolm X and the Nation of Islam. Equally significant is the fact that Malcolm himself continued to stay in communication with the black radical press, including Liberator. This can partially be explained by Malcolm’s growing weariness with the narrow platform of the Nation of Islam. His eagerness to join the broader civil rights fight with his presence, even while not fully accepting its philosophy, stemmed from an expanding interest in revolutionary politics that kept black peoples’ needs front and center, leaving scholars to appreciate Malcolm’s evolution from Black Nationalist to Revolutionary Nationalist.121

A significant turning point in Malcolm’s career, prior to his “chickens coming home to roost” comment regarding Kennedy’s assassination and the disciplining that ensued, was the Northern Negro Grassroots Leadership Conference in Detroit, which was held November 8, 9, and 10, 1963. This conference demonstrated the potential of a black radical united front to counter the civil rights established leadership headed by King.122 Four months later, on March 8, 1964, the New York Times noted the occurrence of a split between Malcolm X and Elijah Muhammad. On March 12 Malcolm called a press conference offering the public portions of a letter he sent to Elijah Muhammad officially announcing the separation.123

Carlos Russell interviewing Malcolm X, 1963. Photographed by Al Hicks. Courtesy of Carlos Russell.

In April 1964, Liberator pictured Malcolm on its cover with the heading: “Brother Malcolm X: Self-Defense vs. Submission.” The majority of the magazine’s contents, however, spoke to broader issues. An article by Liberator Man of the Year Rev. Albert Cleage entitled “Struggle for Survival;”124 James Tillman’s “Exiles No More,” which critiqued American ideas of citizenship by arguing that African Americans were really exiles in America; and the second part of Harold Cruse’s series, “The Roots of Black Nationalism,” also drew readers’ attention. The significance of Malcolm’s presence on the cover pertained to a sympathetic editorial penned by Dan Watts, which briefly commented on Malcolm’s position on self-defense. Watts, who had also attended the meeting of radicals at the grassroots conference in Detroit, had pushed for a viable alternative to the leadership of the civil rights establishment. Meanwhile, he remained wary of the Nation of Islam. Once Malcolm began to develop a political viewpoint independent of that of the Nation, many radicals, including Watts, perceived this as an opportunity to build a radical alliance. Watts’s editorial referenced the March 12 press conference, where Malcolm had said “out loud what many Americans of African descent had been saying for years.” Malcolm’s mention at the press conference of forming “rifle clubs” to protect black lives was confirmation among the civil rights establishment of Malcolm’s distance from their less outwardly confrontational efforts. Watts then turned his attention to Malcolm’s exit from the Nation. Interestingly, Watts appeared subdued in his mention of the importance of the break. His editorial ended as follows:

In splitting with the Brotherhood of Muslims, Malcolm X announced that he was going to pursue a more activist program by participating in the civil rights movement in such areas as the political, economic and social arena. Nothing was spelled out by him, but the fact that he recognized the present struggle in terms of an all-out assault on the white power structure was a welcome breath of fresh air in contrast to the crawling, cringing, begging, pleading leadership of our present professional Negro leaders. One man cannot make a revolution; Malcolm is going to have to come up with a program and organization, if he is to take his place in the leadership ranks of the black revolution.125

Watts was not an easily impressed man. It is hard to know if there were ever any leaders whom he felt he could unconditionally support. An unwieldy independent skeptic to his core, his support of Malcolm’s positions on self-defense, black nationalism, and civil rights criticism was as close as Watts came to fully and consistently endorsing any leader. Yet once Malcolm’s break became public, the Liberator, like many other radical groupings, followed his efforts more closely. Many radical groups lined up to see who could create solidarity with Malcolm before another group might take advantage. This does not detract from the sense of genuine support that many radicals gave Malcolm; it only serves to suggest that many people were anxious to assess the type of evolution he had experienced and whether it confirmed or alienated their own appraisals of his trajectory. But it was clear that if black activists conjured up a prototype leading light, Malcolm X was it.

In another article, published in May 1964, Pete Beveridge noted the type of attention paid to Malcolm and other New York leaders by fearful authorities in New York City, including Harlem rent-strike leader Jesse Gray and Bronx CORE leader Herbert Callender.126 Pointing to the fact that the police were more concerned with determining a black leader than they were catching real criminals (i.e., banking institutions and housing authorities), Beveridge wondered why white state and local officials were more frightened by a possible uprising than the concerns and conditions precipitating social unrest, such as the persistence of police brutality, poverty, and the denial of expansive political power. New York City police commissioner Michael Murphy’s statements that publicly referred to Malcolm X as a threat to social order for refusing to follow a more “sincere” and peaceful course in favor of violence, caused Beveridge to remark sarcastically, “He is perhaps referring to the efforts to resolve job discrimination in the construction industry or educational discrimination and de facto segregation.”127

The Liberator, being attentive to the ebb and flow of national civil rights politics and international anticolonial struggles, was one of the earliest radical publications to note Malcolm’s transition. In the month following Watts’s editorial endorsement, Liberator published Malcolm’s interview with staff writer and editorial board member Carlos Russell, which sought clarity on Malcolm’s program. At least one of Malcolm’s writings was published in the magazine while he was on his second trip to Africa. Writing and references to Malcolm in the Liberator reveal the extent to which radicals identified with and incorporated aspects of Malcolm’s vision and how much their insistent probing may have influenced his.

Sitting Down with the Minister

Following Malcolm X’s much publicized, contentious departure from the Nation of Islam, Carlos E. Russell arranged for an interview.128 In his subsequent article, Russell pressed Malcolm for a clear definition of his program. As his perspective evolved, Malcolm strained to give a precise explanation of the direction he was headed in. Russell seemed eager to get at the core of Malcolm’s thinking. It is interesting that he did not ask him about the controversy with Elijah Muhammad. Russell probed Malcolm for a blueprint, raising questions about his definition of black nationalism, whether he had a position on socialism as a possible solution for black people’s needs, and whether a coalition with the civil rights establishment was worth the effort.

Malcolm discussed the necessity for like-minded Black Nationalist leaders to come together and “formulate the best approach towards this end. It will not be unilateral.” Finding himself unsatisfied with this answer in the transcribed version of the interview, after Malcolm’s response, Russell editorialized his criticism: “It became apparent to me that the Minister, like all of the present Negro leaders, is caught in just this trap: the ‘how’ to achieve their aims. The problem of the black man in America has become a cliché, but the solution is still forthcoming. This is the real tragedy of the black struggle—it borders on futility.”129 Russell’s comments indicate some of the rising expectations that came with Malcolm’s separation from the Nation of Islam. Many people anticipated sweeping changes, a program that could be quickly implemented, or an organization that could begin the work Malcolm identified. Having just left the maelstrom of the Nation and facing the uncertainty of the future, request for a precise definition from Malcolm was a remarkably tall order.

During the interview, Russell, perhaps anticipating Malcolm’s swift rejection of a socialist answer to black oppression, asked directly, “Speaking of socialism … how come neither you nor any of the other leaders ever use the term socialism as an alternative?” Malcolm responded by hinting that socialism might, in fact, be an answer, but one that people were not prepared to contemplate, much less organize toward. Russell went on to ask Malcolm why he saw fit to join the civil rights struggle and if this was contradicting his anti-interracialist perspective toward social transformation. Malcolm replied that he intended to demonstrate the ineffectiveness of fighting for civil rights in America, and since civil rights were denied in America, the United Nations perhaps afforded a better opportunity, a more appropriate stage on which to indict America’s practice of procedural discrimination of black people. Malcolm’s internationalist vision concluded that the condition of black people in the United States was a violation of human rights, that is, the rights belonging to people as human beings, and not merely civil rights, that is, those belonging to people as citizens of a given nation. This human rights approach was a hallmark of Malcolm’s internationalist perspective; his worldview held that black people were a part of a world community of struggling people of color fighting for an end to their social, political, cultural, and economic subjugation under imperialism, colonialism, and American racism.

At the conclusion of his meeting with Malcolm X, Russell editorialized: “Reflecting on Malcolm’s remarks, I felt that there was much truth in what he said; yet, somehow, something was lacking. He gave answers, but they were slogans, ready remarks. He knew the problem, but I felt that he was struggling with the solution. One thing is sure—Malcolm X is indeed a charismatic leader; if he were able to fully integrate all of the loose ends which, at the moment, seem to escape him, in terms of economics and politics, he would indeed become the most formidable leader black people have ever known. Secondly, he is badly in need of an organization; his mosque will not suffice.”130 These comments reveal that Russell, an admirer of Malcolm, was not afraid to call Malcolm’s approach flawed. Malcolm was evolving but he had not formed a clear path toward liberation by this point. This interview also reflects the growing interest in Malcolm among many radicals. Many seemed to disparage his commitment to Islam, perhaps viewing such ties as a religious distraction from a broader fight for black liberation. At the same time, however, many also recognized the strength of Muhammad’s movement. For example, writer Shelby Sankore wrote an article in the form of a letter directed to Muhammad Ali (who had recently changed his name from Cassius Clay), in which he displayed his appreciation for the transformative methods of the Nation. “Judging trees by their fruit,” wrote Sankore, “America has produced nothing else to rival the Muslims in transforming people into well behaved citizens, and morally dedicated men and women—so often deriving these results from the most degraded elements in society, ‘hate’ or the lack of it notwithstanding.”131 As many writers have noted, considering the effectiveness of its recruitment activities, the Nation’s success transforming the formerly incarcerated is perhaps its greatest and most unparalleled achievement.132 Russell’s interview with Malcolm did not discuss the Nation’s “Fishing” program (as recruitment was called), however. Russell sought to extract a sense of direction for black liberation. The importance of this interview is that it is not a celebration of Malcolm’s outspoken activism and charisma, but rather a serious attempt to understand Malcolm’s approach to the substantive change that would lead to the respect and recognition of black humanity in America. Russell’s conversational inquiry ran the gamut from prospects of socialism to definitions of black nationalism, from participation in the civil rights efforts to the role of the black middle class and questions surrounding African independence.133

Malcolm, who frequently referred to himself as a Black Nationalist, explained to Russell his view of the cornerstones of the concept: “I mean by Black Nationalism that the Black man must control his own community. We must control the radio, the newspaper and the television for our communities. I also mean that we must do those things necessary to elevate ourselves socially, culturally, and to restore racial dignity.” Defining the concept broadly, Malcolm envisioned a united front of Black Nationalists to detail the specific program. Marking his break with the religion-centered program of the Nation, Malcolm, exhibiting a characteristic blending of religious and secular approaches, expressed a willingness to work with civil rights, but this too was a stage in a series of efforts to inspire a united front, and not an end in itself. It also did not signify a complete reversal. Malcolm genuinely wanted to meet the people where they were not where he hoped they would be. The master recruiter who had honed his skills in the leadership ranks of one of black nationalism’s most polarizing organizations, relished this newfound aspect of his work though he was deeply uncertain about its outcome.

At once, measuring the distance between himself and King, Malcolm quipped that King’s explanation of “Social Disruption” was more similar to his own frequent use of “Bloodshed” in describing revolution than many people were able to admit. King, according to Malcolm, used “big words” like “social disruption,” whereas he is more “direct and to the point; this is what the white man doesn’t like. I say violence and I mean violence,” he told Russell. The united front was needed to make revolution real, Malcolm added, pointing up that black people at all levels of society had a role to play in overturning the power structure of America, emphasizing, “We need the alley Negro, the Harlem Negro, the middle class Negro; we need them all.”134 Having established the Muslim Mosque, Inc., two months prior to the interview with Russell, Malcolm seemed to relish his newfound latitude in participating more fully in the broader struggle for black liberation. This meant he could also redefine the principles and terms on which his political activities would stand, including identifying the tenets of his Black Nationalist political outlook.

Numerous scholars have traced the evolution of Malcolm’s ideas.135 According to chronicler George Breitman, Malcolm was evolving in his definition of black nationalism throughout the last year of his life and ultimately arrived at a more internationalist sense of black solidarity, in distinction from the more-or-less separatist philosophy of the Nation of Islam that he had espoused throughout much of his time in the public eye. A basic yet important shift that Breitman identified was the description Malcolm gave to his two organizations, the Muslim Mosque, Inc. (MMI), and the Organization of Afro-American Unity (OAAU). According to Breitman, when Malcolm founded the MMI in March 1964, he used the term “black nationalist,” which was more in line with earlier definitions he held while a member of the Nation. In contrast, upon returning from his second trip to the continent and the formation of the OAAU in June 1964, notes Breitman, Malcolm significantly decreased his usages of the term. Breitman points out that no mention is made of black nationalism in either the organization’s “Statement of Basic Aims and Objectives” or its “Basic Unity Program.”136 Equally significant is Muhammad Ahmad’s description of Malcolm’s evolving perspective. A founding member of RAM, a group for which Malcolm was to serve as international spokesman, Ahmad writes that Malcolm had “successively progressed from revolutionary Pan-Africanism to one of third world internationalism. At the time of his death he was moving to a position of revolutionary socialism.”137 Whether or not Malcolm had made a turn toward the civil rights struggle, he brought with him a firm sense of black political possibility, a feeling of black peoples’ need to control their own lives and look with self-assured pride on who they were. These were real issues that impacted black peoples’ ability to navigate American society with their wits intact. Moreover, Malcolm sought to bring all black people who were potentially drawn to the ideals of the civil rights movement closer to his vision of justice.

Although Russell expressed a degree of skepticism in his conversation with Malcolm X, he admired Malcolm and, like many other black radicals questioned the effectiveness of nonviolence as a practical philosophy in the face of violence. “It is time that the black man in the United States re-evaluate the efficacy of non-violence,” he wrote in August 1963.138 “I say this in all honesty, for I believe that the practice of this doctrine is not the real means with which to combat racism in America.” Russell’s perspective on nonviolence placed him in agreement with Malcolm X and the Nation of Islam, and Robert F. Williams. It is clear from this article that Russell disagreed with the strategy of moral suasion: “One cannot morally persuade those who intend to enslave, for by definition they are devoid of morality.” Russell saw the issue of violence and nonviolence as a matter of defending black dignity. Echoing the fiercest rhetorical moments of Williams and Malcolm X, Russell argued for “Dignity, love of self and people, cries for action. Action which the white racist can feel. He has to learn that he cannot strike and expect no retaliation; he must feel and smell his own blood, hot and sticky, mingling with the dust, the same as the black man whose skull he cracked.”

The Liberator monitored Malcolm’s radical moves with increasing support. Staff writers continued to refer, with a degree of admiration, to his break from the Nation of Islam and his public criticism of white and black liberals. Once his break was final, it gave many people the hope that an effective united front could be achieved. After padding his credentials as an international representative of African Americans fighting for freedom, Malcolm headed to Africa on July 9, 1964, traveling throughout North and West Africa until November. As would be expected, he sent many letters and postcards to family, friends and allies while abroad. One of the letters he mailed back to the states arrived in time to be published in the Liberator’s July 1964 issue after he had visited Cairo, Egypt, Beirut, Lebanon, Nigeria, and Ghana.139 While in Nigeria, he wrote that a Caribbean visiting professor at the University of Nigeria, Ibadan, had publicly challenged his lecture and was summarily shouted down and thrown out by the students. Otherwise, Malcolm was treated with admiration wherever he traveled, meeting with and speaking to as many students as possible and at least fifteen ambassadors from Africa, Asia, and Latin America. The Muslim Student’s Society of Nigeria welcomed him “home” and gave him the name “Omowale” which, he noted, means “a child has returned.”140

Ecstatic about being on the ancestral soil of Africa, this time untethered and on his own itinerary, Malcolm’s letter spoke of Nigeria’s world power potential, owning to its abundant natural resources. He noted the rapid modernization of Ghana and spoke proudly of the “very progressive intellectual atmosphere” of the African American expatriate community there, which included Julian Mayfield, George Padmore, Maya Angelou, Leslie Lacy, Alice Windom, and Shirley Graham Du Bois, among numerous others invited from the diaspora by Prime minister Kwame Nkrumah to help build the new nation. While there, Malcolm spoke to members of the Ghanaian House of Parliament, lectured at both the University of Accra at Legon and the Kwame Nkrumah Ideological Institute at Winneba and had an hour-long private meeting with Nkrumah.141 Though Malcolm spoke highly of the new country under the direction of veteran pan-Africanist Nkrumah, he could not have known the pressure the Nkrumah was under from constituents and adversaries alike.

According to Kevin Gaines, Malcolm’s visit to Ghana was less exciting than the pan-Africanist leader from Harlem expected.142 Still reeling from a public feud with his spiritual father, Malcolm longed for a community of activists aggressively defending African descendants’ rights as human beings. While in Ghana, the African American expatriate community that formed there were Malcolm’s natural hosts. Though a hero from home had returned home and there was much to celebrate, Malcolm also wanted an appraisal of the nation’s progress. But the expatriate community, primarily through Julian Mayfield, informed him of the stiff, nearly impenetrable difficulties the new nation was experiencing. Moreover, they attempted to warn him of the corruption that appeared to have seeped into Nkrumah’s government. Unknown to Malcolm, by the time he visited the country it was embroiled in turmoil. Nkrumah had survived an assassination attempt earlier that year and feared that the machinations of CIA disruptive activities were in full swing.143 Malcolm, having been loosened from the weight of the Nation of Islam, had been sufficiently inspired by the formation of the Organization of African Unity (OAU), which was formed in 1963, to establish his own Organization of Afro-American Union (OAAU). In an effort to cement his organizational ties to Africa, he established a Ghanaian branch of the organization.144 The Liberator reported that an information bureau of the OAAU had been established on August 27, 1964. This bureau would circulate information about the African American struggle to Africans and African Americans on the continent as a part of broader efforts to strengthen ties between Africans and their descendants around the globe.145 Though the success of his organizational activities after his NOI membership would not come to fruition, Malcolm made a lasting effect on Ghanaian students, teachers, intellectuals, and workers.146

The politics of black international solidarity that Malcolm experienced demonstrate some of the challenges to building tangible linkages between African Americans and Africans on the continent. Notwithstanding these challenges, however, Malcolm’s capacity to both inspire and frighten complicated his efforts to clarify his evolving perspective, distance himself from the NOI, and build a brand new organization. It can be argued that the Liberator, having been founded to highlight the political and cultural connections between African Americans and African descendants the world over, was brought back to some of its core ideas through Malcolm’s renewed emphasis on and attention to Africa. In the first two years of the periodical’s existence greater attention and space was paid to the continent. Exigencies occurring throughout the American South and North, however, drew its attention closer to home. Malcolm’s assassination, coupled with the little organizational groundwork he was able to accomplish and the instability of African independence, inspired the Liberator to return some of its attention to the continent.

The Liberator, like most other formations on the left, paid close attention to Malcolm’s political evolution. In the July issue, which featured Malcolm’s letter from Ghana, the periodical also ran the first part of Cruse’s seminal series, “The Economics of Black Nationalism.”147 Just below the first page of Cruse’s essay, Watts published an editorial note that sought to locate Malcolm X in the context of Cruse’s discussion of economics. The editorial pointed out that though Malcolm had split from the NOI to the applause and anticipation of many people, his economic perspective, at least as publicly stated, still included the buy-black strategies that had been staples of radical black protest since Reconstruction. As Malcolm could not offer a completely new program or a new set of economic ideas, Cruse’s essay would therefore provide the explanation of the economic aspects of black nationalism, hence the editorial note accompanying the article. Cruse’s article was not a critique of Malcolm’s economic philosophy, however, but rather an attempt to situate Malcolm’s black nationalism within a historic arc that reached back to the days of Marcus Garvey and W. E. B. Du Bois.148 In this way, Cruse demonstrated that both Malcolm and the Nation of Islam belonged to a tradition of black radical protest thought, while at the same time careful not to glorify or discredit the philosophies wholesale. Though the split between Malcolm and the Nation partially recalled some of the larger fissures in the civil rights era, the Harlem Riots of the same year raised the stakes on the direction black political mobilization would take. While black internationalism remained high on the political agenda, the conditions throughout the United States were hard to ignore. As activists doubled back to concentrate efforts on the American scene, urban struggles for justice dramatized the urgent the need for collective organization.

The Harlem Riots, 1964

The Harlem Riots of 1964, which lasted for four long days, began on July 17 with the shooting death of fifteen-year-old James Powell by an off-duty police officer named Thomas Gilligan in the front of Senator Robert F. Wagner Junior High School. Gilligan alleged that the young boy lunged at him with a knife and he was therefore forced to fire three shots at him. One shot hit him in the hand, another in his abdomen, and a third bullet missed its target. When news of this killing reached Harlem, the black community there rebelled. Staff writer Ossie Sykes wrote of the riot as a rebellion by “the downtrodden, who … exploded in a fury of resentment against a society that hates them.”149 Accompanying Sykes’s report on the Harlem rebellion was a cartoon of King dressed in a dark suit with a satchel hung across his chest illustrated by Leo Carty. Across the satchel were the words, “Dr. King’s Tranquilizers: ‘Bleed and Be Happy,’ ” and King is shown handing out pills on a path from Birmingham to Harlem, leaving black folk battered, bruised, and discombobulated along the way. Positioning the cartoon adjacent to Sykes’s report, emphasized how Liberator perceived the question of nonviolence, a theme consistently poked at throughout the magazine. Moreover, it reminded readers that African Americans were victimized and in a perpetual state of war. Indeed, Sykes likened Harlem to South Vietnam and other war-torn sections of the globe, a point Malcolm also made often, though at the time of the rebellion he was still on his African tour.150 Sykes’s article also pointed at one of the flyers distributed during the rebellion. One such flyer, produced by the Harlem Defense Council (HDC), which was likely a front for the Progressive Labor Party, pictured Gilligan in a police uniform with the words “WANTED FOR MURDER” in bold letters above the photo.151 Sykes’s report also displayed a highly incendiary and controversial flyer that instructed how to make a Molotov cocktail, which was also circulated during the rebellion. Though the words, “Harlem Freedom Fighters,” were stenciled across the top of the handbill, it is uncertain if this was an actual organization, and it is more likely to have been an ad hoc group of agitators.152

The HDC was one of several groups that organized the United Council of Harlem Organizations, which consisted of Negro American Labor Council (NALC) members, Muslims, Christians, NAACP representatives, and African nationalist organizations, as well as Parent-Teacher Association members.153 This loosely formed and politically diverse coalition, which was also known as the Unity Council, was headed by NALC leader Joseph Overton, and Livingston Wingate, chairman of the Harlem Youth Opportunities Unlimited (HARYOU) Executive Committee.154 The Unity Council had several meetings with Mayor Wagner, at which they informed the mayor and his staff of their demands. The group, which represented a broad cross-section of Harlem residents’ political opinion, urged the mayor to appoint black police captains to head up several key precincts servicing predominately black areas of the city and to promote other African American officers to ranking positions. They also called for the immediate suspension of Lt. Thomas Gilligan and the formation of a Civilian Review Board. And finally, they demanded the release of all Harlem residents arrested during the rebellion. Out of these the mayor accepted only a disappointing fraction of the group’s proposals.155 On August 15 the New York Times reported that forty-seven-year-old Capt. Lloyd George Sealy had been appointed as the first African American to head up Harlem’s largest police precinct, #28, which was located at 229 W. 123rd Street. Sealy had been on the police force for twenty-one years. The pressure put on police commissioner Michael J. Murphy by Harlem residents accounts for the Sealy appointment. But despite these appointments there remained a heightened degree of tension between Harlem residents and “New York City’s finest.”

From this point on, the Liberator was full of reports and analyses on the crisis facing Harlem’s African American community. The crisis there mirrored the crisis nationwide. The staff appeared energized by its charge to present the facts that were ignored in the mainstream press. C. E. Wilson penned an article in the September issue that, like many others, pointed to a crisis in black leadership. Clayton Riley, taking a break from his analyses of the arts, asked: “What’s Next?” and echoed Wilson’s critique of the impotence of civil rights leadership. Civil rights attorney and Liberator editorial board member Len Holt and Bill Mahoney coauthored an article that was equal parts appraisal and critique.156 Focusing their attention on the police state that formed in the wake of the uprising, they told of the ineffectiveness of government strategies of control, which in addition to the fortress of police also included inept government agencies siphoning money and resources from the black community. They wrote of the many Harlems throughout the country:

Harlem—New York!

Harlem—Philadelphia!

Harlem—Detroit!

Harlem—Los Angeles!

Harlem—Birmingham!

Holt and Mahoney’s article captured the view of many residents, activists, and organizations of Harlem as a northern example of neglect, depreciation, and blight, which were the byproducts of white supremacist attitudes and policies. As a global community, Harlem represented a domestic colony, a position advanced by Cruse, Robert F. Williams, Askia Touré, and Malcolm X, the limitations of the analogy notwithstanding. Indeed, Malcolm consistently urged that African Americans cease calling for civil rights, and instead advance a global-minded defense of human rights.157 Holt and Mahoney concluded their article on a cautiously hopeful yet disturbingly visceral note, writing: “If the recent rebellion in Harlem can stimulate these and other self-help programs of improving Harlem life and making its residents less dependent on the Man and more dependent on each other, the deaths and bestialities will not have been in vain. Otherwise the anguish suffered by black bodies will have been but hot urine cast in the sour milk of Harlem life.”158

In January 1965 the Liberator celebrated its fifth anniversary and received more attention and perhaps recognition for its role as the “intellectual voice” of the protest and liberation movement. Internal controversy also helped in the clarifying of positions. The editor in chief and staff writers were not afraid to jump into a fight, and they often provoked arguments among themselves. C. E. Wilson remembered the evening planning meetings where the contents, themes, and issues to be covered in forthcoming editions would be hashed out. “We would meet on Thursday nights. We would come and argue,” he recalled fondly. “They would argue about what theme we would go for … that was to me a spectacular time.”159 While Watts and his rambunctious crew of scribes grappled with the question of which analyses and topics the periodical would interrogate, the captivating Harlem-based internationalist at the center of so many of their articles was gunned down.

Black Power and the Movement after Malcolm

Malcolm X’s assassination on February 21, 1965, would spark a new level of intrigue in New York City politics and shook the radical community to the core. Immediately, residents asked why Malcolm had not received government protection, given that he had been under government surveillance night and day for the past ten years. This tragedy not only left the OAAU without its leader, it also left radical Black Nationalists without a public figure to relay their positions. Regardless of whether Malcolm was the sole international spokesman for all African Americans, he articulated and stood for many of the principles shared by radicals and nationalists of all stripes. Though many nationalists disagreed with him on the specifics of liberation politics, they generally supported his efforts to publicize the global plight of African descendants.

The March 1965 issue included a photo of a young brown-skinned boy with his hands gently clutching the gate behind which he is sitting. The photo, taken by Harlemite Roy DeCarava, depicts the child’s gaze as one of bewilderment and uncertainty about life in the aftermath of Malcolm’s assassination.160 Dan Watts editorialized the “Unfulfilled Promise” of the slain OAAU leader. Watts used an 1848 remembrance of early abolitionist David Walker written by nineteenth-century emigrationist Henry Highland Garnett as an epigraph to his editorial remarks. “He had many enemies,” it began, “and not a few were his brethren whose cause he espoused. They said that he went too far, and was making trouble, so the Jews spoke of Moses. They valued the fleshpots of Egypt more than the milk of Canaan.”161 Likening Malcolm to Walker was not difficult, for Malcolm had believed that black folk were still enslaved and frequently used slavery as a metaphor to dramatize their continuous struggle for freedom.

Pointing toward a conspiratorial explanation of the murder, Watts echoed the general confusion as to why there was no police protection at the time of Malcolm’s death and blamed “the climate of hate and racism in the United States, a country that has been the graveyard of all the hopes and aspirations of 20,000,000 Americans of African descent” for the murder. He then went on to describe the ensuing void in black leadership. Though many people anxiously anticipated Malcolm’s full entry onto the stage of black leadership occupied by King, many others, including Watts and other Liberator staff members, were as skeptical of the messianic style to which the African American community was drawn. Watts spoke somberly of Malcolm’s slain potential: “It is not what he was but what he was becoming that was destroyed.” Malcolm’s death was a blow to nationalists of all stripes and Watts felt that a moment of unity could be achieved in view of Malcolm’s general importance. He believed it was time to “close ranks” as black people and fight the racism and xenophobia of white America collectively.162

Other Liberator writers were equally moved by Malcolm’s message and life’s work. Ossie Sykes, for example, having met Malcolm through Phaon Goldman, a personal friend, recalls that he seriously considered joining the OAAU prior to Malcolm’s death.163 And Carlos Russell had relished being the first and only Liberator staff member to sit down with Malcolm for a one-on-one interview. Placing aside the critical journalism he had displayed in his interview with the minister, he penned a poetic eulogy whose last stanza read,

Put a torch to the robes of mourning …

For he would not have us weep.

My brothers,

Let not the Lion sleep!

To fight, that he might live,

Is a promise we must keep.164

In April, members of RAM (ostensibly Touré, Neal, and Ahmad) published their analysis on why Malcolm has been killed.165 In this article they identified several reasons why Malcolm posed a threat to the U.S. government, which, they argued, was ultimately guilty of Malcolm’s murder. The RAM scribes emphasized Malcolm’s connection to Marcus Garvey and W. E. B. Du Bois through an undying love for Africa and for the reciprocal role Africans and African Americans played in each other’s political fate. Here again, they stressed Malcolm’s Bandung-inspired global vision, which revitalized the hope for pan-Africanism. They linked Malcolm to Patrice Lumumba and spoke of his efforts bridging an older generation of activists together with younger radicals. He was “going in a direction that would have consolidated both generations towards black liberation. In this context, he was to black America what Lumumba was to the Congo,” they argued.166 Most of all, they noted how Malcolm’s efforts to take the cause of African American liberation to the United Nations also threatened the government’s international image. By this time RAM played a central role on the magazine’s staff, and had showed open support for Malcolm long before his departure from the Nation, if for no other reason than his advocacy of armed self-defense.

Malcolm X holding daughter, Liberator, April 1965. Courtesy of Pete Beveridge.

Back in the January 1965 issue, Ahmad had published the influential article, “Revolutionary Nationalism and the Afroamerican Student,” which offered an explanation of the evolution of black youth consciousness.167 The article is part sociological analysis and, judging by its conclusion, part apocalyptic essay. Ahmad provides an explanation of the contradictions faced by black college-educated youth. Picking up on E. Franklin Frazier’s seminal study, Black Bourgeoisie, Ahmad argued that black college students were faced with the crisis of realizing that their educational attainment would not remedy the problem of racism and discrimination, and that, in other words, the student “leaves school only to find a hostile, savage, white world.” As a result, black students would either withdraw into hedonism in an effort to be hip or would try to imitate whites, with the latter type represented by graduates of black colleges. Both groups refused to face the reality of their predicament. Ahmad and others saw a new consciousness and a new young intelligentsia emerging from the contradictions.

Ossie Sykes and C. E. Wilson penned an equally poignant piece in the May 1965 issue, which attempted a broader reading of Malcolm’s meaning within the history of black political and religious leadership. They argued that Malcolm was a man ahead of his time, whose “death marked the end of prospects that the Negro revolution might become revolutionary. There will now be no spokesman for the wretched bottom.”168 In the same issue, Wilson compiled a number of Malcolm’s sayings culled from press conferences and Carlos Russell’s interview.169 The June issue featured A. B. Spellman’s article. “The Legacy of Malcolm X,” which, echoing Wilson and Sykes, argued that going forward, the black community must organize rather than wait for another charismatic leader. Spellman’s article sought to pierce the cloud of uncertainty after Malcolm: “What the assassination teaches us is (1), from here on it must be organization and not personality. And (2), there are elements within the black community which can be used to do the fascists’ work.”170

Despite the shock rippling through the radical community, during the summer of 1965 the magazine appeared to be at its height in terms of the attention it received. Its editorial board consisted of a combination of older and younger generations of male radicals including Clebert Ford, Len Holt, LeRoi Jones (Amiri Baraka), Larry Neal, Clayton Riley, Carlos E. Russell, Charlie Russell, Ossie Sykes, and C. E. Wilson. Tom Feelings, the esteemed visual artist, served as illustrator alongside Leo Carty, who had produced many of the hysterically satirical caricatures of civil rights activists, U.S. presidents, and others who appeared to stand opposed to Liberator’s brand of radicalism. Harlem stalwarts James Baldwin, Richard B. Moore, and Ossie Davis were still listed as members of the advisory board. As discussed earlier, although two women held staff positions—Kalibala as secretary and Kattie Cumbo as production advisor—the glaring absence of women reflected and anticipated black women’s demands for more visible inclusion in the movement as a whole. The attention paid to the Liberator by a young set of radicals is exemplified by the presence of Neal, and to a lesser extent Baraka. As impatience with liberalism grew, black radicals sought out spaces to communicate their ideas and issue their demands. With Watts’s intention to have the Liberator represent the nationalist and perhaps dissenting voices of the black left, Neal and others saw an opportunity to not only publish their work, but also to situate themselves in a position to move the magazine in a more radical direction.

Art critic Larry Neal shared Baraka’s belief in the need to create a radical aesthetic practice and revolutionary vision. Neal would take full advantage of developing these themes as arts and culture editor of the Liberator from 1964 to 1966. Neal, like Baraka, Cruse, and others, was equal parts cultural critic, cultural historian, curator, artist, and political agitator. In summer 1965, Neal, at age twenty-seven, was an influential member of RAM which, according to Muhammad Ahmad, saw its role as influencing existing organizations toward a more radical direction from the inside.171 Longtime staff writer and political theorist C. E. Wilson confirmed this stance, stating it as part of the reason he decided to leave the Liberator staff. He observed that Neal, Askia Touré, and Ahmad were attempting to use the Liberator as a platform for RAM-specific political ideals, rather than contributing to a collective of black political thought without specific ideological ties. Though he felt their critique of Malcolm X’s assassination was timely and accurate, he did not believe their open advocacy of violent revolution was advantageous and felt it might do more harm than good.172

RAM represented a brand of black radicalism that it termed revolutionary nationalism, and which combined an unflinching analysis of the capitalist destruction of black life with an assertive embrace of African cultural identity. In line with the general dissatisfaction with liberalist notions of social change, Liberator consistently dedicated its pages to display the shortcomings of liberalism, whether espoused by black or white commentators, as when Neal penned an article sharply critiquing the ideology of integration espoused by longtime pacifist and March on Washington organizer Bayard Rustin. By 1965, the radical turn away from civil rights protest politics had revealed the failures of liberal-integrationism. In fact, many people on the left never believed integration could be a viable solution to political and economic inequality and exploitation. Yet it was mainly the critique of the rhetoric of liberalism and the appeal to international solidarity that distinguished black radicals from the civil rights leadership. For example, in the spring of 1965, the Detroit-based factory worker and radical theorist James Boggs wrote a letter to Liberator editors explaining the main differences between liberal-integrationism and revolutionary struggle. After providing a brief cautionary history of the absorption of the American working class into mainstream America, he concluded, “The more seriously the freedom struggle in this country becomes, both in terms of ideas and in terms of power, the more intimate must become its international ties; while the more integrationist it becomes the more fearful it will be of such ties.”173 Black Power’s emergence at the middle of the decade would also benefit from the critical, historical analysis of Boggs. Liberator readers would become acquainted with Boggs through the widely circulated “Black Power: A Scientific Concept Whose Time Has Come” in two parts in the magazine. He offered a view that forced Black Power proponents to engage the structural, societal questions that went beyond “any special moral virtue in being Black.”174 In many ways, Boggs represented an intergenerational link between Touré’s Angry Generation and longtime radicals who had come of age decades earlier. His would be one of the critical voices providing what he considered historical and dialectical insights into the emergence and expression of Black Power.

Moreover, the existence of religious and spiritual groups such as the Nation of Islam, the Yoruba Temple, and the Moorish Science Temple pointed to the cultural and spiritual alienation many African Americans felt toward western society. One of the key elements of Malcolm X’s attractiveness among African Americans was the consistent attack he leveled at Christianity as the white man’s religion. In the Epilogue to his critique of Rustin, which is entitled, “A Reply to Bayard Rustin: The Internal Revolution,” Neal writes of a desire for spiritual renewal, indicting America as “a society which has abnegated both collective and individual responsibility, a society that is devoid of guidelines for bringing about the necessary internal or spiritual changes which will enable us to move forward towards control of our destinies.”175 Neal, a RAM member who advanced revolutionary nationalism, could equally be regarded as a cultural nationalist, owing to his explicit analyses of the role of cultural production in the black political struggle and RAM’s embrace of African cultural heritage as a force in black identity. Neal’s approach to both the material and spiritual desires of African American liberation politics reveals the fluidity of identity and the limitations of strict labels. “Therefore,” he wrote, “the Muslims represented, at least initially, an important philosophical and religious thrust into the history of our struggle for survival in this graveyard of North America. Coming with a message of spiritual redemption and translating it into physical and objective terms was very inspirational to many of us who are both spiritually and culturally alienated in a society that basically has no way of relating to us.”176

Neal’s critique was in response to a recently published article by Bayard Rustin in Dissent magazine.177 According to Neal, America was experiencing “upheavals … in a whole realm of spiritual, social, and cultural values.” Rustin, who had been the chief organizer of the 1963 March on Washington, had criticized Malcolm X in a Dissent article for lacking a clear program for black people to follow. In reality, however, Rustin foreclosed Malcolm’s program, which eschewed interracial coalitions as a panacea, while Rustin held that such alliances were essential to any program for black political, social, and economic change. Neal challenged Rustin and his coauthor, Tom Kahn, for lacking a viable program as well. For Neal, Malcolm’s rhetoric was far more effective than the integrationist program Rustin espoused. Moreover, in Neal’s mind, Malcolm’s vision for black liberation was closer to the “needs and aspirations of black people” than any strategy offered by Rustin. “Malcolm told the truth,” argued Neal. “He made his commitment to a more soulful world by attacking the whole range of values and psychological barriers which have kept black people in a semi-colonized condition.” “Malcolm’s stance as a black man was itself a program,” he contended.178 For Neal, what distinguished Malcolm from “the Rustins and the Farmers who compete with each other for government favors and white acceptance” was, not, only his rhetoric, but also his efforts to “internationalize” black struggle. In Neal’s words, the Organization of Afro-American Unity “was the first real step toward revolutionary black unity ever taken in this country.” Neal argued that “civil rites” leaders failed to fully understand the global dimension of the domestic struggle against racism and economic colonialism. Referencing Du Bois, Garvey, Fanon, and the Kenya-based Mau-Mau rebellion, Neal argued that the internationalization of black liberation in the United States was the necessary next step in the movement. In other words, the black struggles underway around the globe “illustrate clearly what a people must do to liberate themselves.” Neal concluded by returning to the cultural and metaphysical issues he pointed to at the beginning of his critique. “Malcolm knew that the only real program for black people lay in the area of black unity, black spiritual and intellectual awakening, black leadership and Mau-Mau-like commitment to change.”179

Here, Neal points to the difficulty and limitations of certain labels used to describe the contours of black radicalism. Though Neal considered himself a revolutionary nationalist, a description he and many others believed Malcolm X personified at the time of his death, he also spoke of the spiritual and psychological elements that were often kept out of a strict interpretation of black political struggle. Malcolm therefore represented both an antiwestern spirituality and cultural outlook through his embrace of Islam and an anticolonial stance rooted in global black solidarity.

Like many nationalists of the period, Neal also espoused a masculinist attraction to Malcolm by emphasizing his quintessential manhood in the face of the emasculating features of American culture and global white supremacy, or as he claimed, “a world dominated by beasts of prey.” Neal also expressed a negative concept of masculinity when he derisively claimed that the black community had “gotten bad vibrations from the effeminate projections of the Rustins, the flabby orientation of the Farmers and the shuffling acts of the Kings.”180 Liberator was, however, attentive to King’s anti–Vietnam War position, even if Dan Watts’s editorial still cast King as a peace movement opportunist.181 The appearance of this statement is perhaps evidence of the threat Rustin posed to Neal’s ideal conception of manhood, which was captured and immortalized by Ossie Davis’s oft-quoted line from Malcolm’s eulogy that “Malcolm was our shining manhood.” By taking aim at Rustin’s sexuality (Rustin was an openly homosexual man), Neal attempted to undercut his credentials as a public figure in the civil rights movement. Elsewhere in the article he comments, as if speaking directly to Rustin: “Yes, we remember you Bayard on that day [of the 1964 Harlem uprising] as you came off sounding remote and freakish, the nature of your alienation deeper than even James Farmer’s.” That he would describe Rustin as “freakish” appears to underscore not only Neal’s contempt for Rustin’s political outlook, but also his way of life.182 In other words, Rustin was less of a man than Malcolm, which was one more reason not to trust his politics. To be sure, Neal was one among many in this period who coupled liberation with an ideal vision of black masculinity. Fearing for their survival in the wake of a violent white backlash to the civil rights movement, men and women in the movement often conceived of a nation of strong black men with strong wives raising strong black babies for the revolution. These notions persisted throughout the era, impacting the way black people envisioned community, shaped identity, and imagined revolutionary struggle, until a more pronounced and vocal black feminist movement surfaced in the latter end of the decade to challenge such idealized notions. Thanks in large part to Neal the pages of Liberator would continue the drumbeat Malcolm inaugurated with fervor. In particular, after his death, black radicals placed emphasis on his impact on culture. Neal, alongside Baraka, believed that it was the cultural realm where society was most porous, where Malcolm’s ideas might filter in and inject the world of cultural production with an electrifying sense of commitment to liberation.

Throughout 1966 Neal penned a number of essays that influenced the reception of Black Arts aesthetics and radicalism. Establishing himself as cultural critic and literature expert, he published two essays in the January issue of Liberator that year, “Development of Leroi Jones” and “The Black Writer’s Role—Ralph Ellison.”183 This issue is telling of the new focus on aesthetics and the critical role the magazine played in Black Arts criticism, as the writing of three central Black Arts figures, Neal, Jones (Baraka), and Snellings (Touré), were featured. Baraka was making his name known as a serious writer and standard-bearer of African consciousness and culture. Neal’s article on Jones was important because of the way it situated the new generation of black writers. “Leroi Jones is Black, is thirty-one years old, is a man dedicated to the liberation of his people by any means necessary,” it began. “In this latter he is not unique. There are many others like him. A significant part of the generation born in the mid-[nineteen] thirties feels the same way. That is, they have almost a cosmic desire to tear out of the value system that their parents had so much faith in,” he continued, emphasizing not only the youth of the generation, but its worldview and inchoate system of values.184

Baraka’s life and work are described as having reached a new plateau of critical awareness, of consciousness. Neal wrote that Baraka represented the type of African American writer who was college-educated, of middle-class origins, but who had no illusions about American society. “But for the Negro,” wrote Neal, “education is full of interesting paradoxes. While the system exposes its good face, its ugly one also comes into view.”185 Neal described this educational experience as “spiritually destructive.” Out of this destruction emerged increased awareness and a “unified identity” (perhaps as opposed to the Du Boisian Double Consciousness), which sought to blend spiritual needs with political (i.e., revolutionary) desires, the shared experiences of the African American community and the international community, and “a necessity to bring aesthetics in line with ethics.”186 Neal wrote of a commitment to militancy, especially in the aftermath of Malcolm X’s assassination, which shook the black radical community and gave many people a sense of renewed purpose and dedication. And though Neal described Baraka as a poet who was also politicized, he perceived Baraka’s approach to Black Consciousness as a useful spiritual concept to buttress revolutionary nationalism. “The Task, as Jones sees it,” he wrote, “is to develop ‘Black Consciousness’ [into] a Black spiritual frame-of-reference based on the humanism of the Bandung world (non-white world).”187 Eleven years earlier, the Bandung Conference was convened in Indonesia. American writer Richard Wright attended and was awed by the alliance developing among nonwestern nations gathered at the conference, and his account of the conference and its implications as far as he could discern was compiled in the book, The Color Curtain (1956). Though Wright was uncertain about the future impact such a formation could have on the dominating tendencies of the western world, he was at least inspired by the notion of nations of color attempting political autonomy. Neal, Baraka, and Touré (Snellings), among many other radicals of the period, held Bandung in high regard, no matter the limitations and complexity of building it into a more coherent alliance. For many, Bandung was a signal that the western world did not control the political destinies of nations of color. Though documented by Wright, Malcolm X was chiefly responsible for the popularization of Bandung as inspirational for black liberation. It represented a direct repudiation of the decadent society many believed the West to be.

The Liberator dedicated the February 1966 issue to Malcolm X’s legacy, running articles by Len Holt, Neal, and Touré. Ironically, this issue seemed to be overshadowed by the anti-Semitism controversy discussed earlier in this chapter. Quoting from lines in Baraka’s poem “Black Art,” Dan Watts’s editorial urged readers to carry on where Malcolm had let off and build institutions for “economic survival, political power and cultural inspiration.” Significantly, Malcolm represented a bridge connecting spiritual commitments to political determination, serving to inspire the cultural production and worldview of Baraka, Touré and Neal among countless others.

The following year would witness critically important writing on Black Power. While mainstream press outlets scurried to fill its pages with the most incendiary definitions of the concept, had they wanted a firm and principled understanding of its emergence, they could have turned to James Boggs. In a series of searing articles beginning in January 1967 and continuing again in April and May of that year, Boggs provided perhaps the clearest description of Black Power and its attendant stakes. “Power is not something that a state or those in power bestow upon or guarantee those who have been without power because of morality or a change of heart,” he cautioned. “It is something that you make or take from those in power.” Approaching fifty years of age by this time, Boggs not only theorized revolution, but also welcomed opportunities to mentor younger radicals. He did not counsel against revolt; he wanted black people, especially young revolutionaries to possess a deep knowledge of its emergence in the bosom of racial capitalism. For Boggs, “people of color were not only the wretched of the earth but people in revolutionary ferment.”188 Boggs’s analyses, alongside those of Cruse, cemented Liberator as a premier site where theoretical arguments were explicated as activists grappled with the challenges, opportunities, and political desires of a new day.

______

Larry Neal’s impact on the Liberator was felt even after he left his position as arts and culture editor. Writing in the July 1967 issue, critic C. H. Fuller Jr. referenced Neal in his article, “Black Art and Fanon’s Third Phase,” in which he assessed the role and responsibility of black writers in the liberation movement through the lens of Frantz Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth. Fuller, recalling a debate that emerged forty years earlier during the Harlem Renaissance, criticized black authors for their adoption of western values. Fuller argued that black writers were stuck in those stages, failing to arrive at their revolutionary purpose precisely because of their embrace of westernized concepts of individuality and free expression. “Should our individuality take precedence over their [the black community’s] needs?” he asked. “Some will argue yes, but the fact of the matter is that only when we subordinate our individuality to the struggles of our people do we come to know them and their struggle.” Neal, according to Fuller, correctly perceived the role of the artist in the black community. Rather than place an emphasis on individuality, he notes that an artist should “be one with his [or her] community.” Moreover, “what is felt by the people begins to awaken them and ultimately becomes a part of their revolution.”189

Conclusion

Black radicals were up against the clock. They felt the pendulum of the struggle for justice swinging in their direction and they worked to take full advantage of the moment as the stakes increased. While numerous debates were had and hundreds of public diagnoses of the condition of black communities were offered, black radicals were still shouting from the bottom of the well, as the late scholar Derrick Bell once put it. The talented, highly dedicated, and remarkably focused bunch that put mind to paper were unapologetically vocal agitators, yet they still possessed an extreme deficit in materializing their proposals for change. Yet, their persistent arguments nudged the black liberation effort further than it had ever gone before. Nonetheless, it was still a nudging. American society remained resistant to the prescriptions for a new society put forth by the choir of Liberator antagonists, insuring a bevy of frustrations for those who had dedicated themselves to pushing for social transformation. While many looked outward at an intransigent capitalist racial order governing American society, the movement also took its toll internally. As the environment of an outwardly male-dominant movement sharpened itself against the steel of American politics, it tended to overshadow the work of women who were equally fit and often better equipped to fight against the racial and economic status quo. Liberator, too, performed by a largely male-centered script, yet a cadre of female activist-writers would also mark its pages with their own liberatory vision, at once challenging and fueling black radical politics in this period.

Several other developments serve as critical signposts for the trajectory of the Liberator and the challenge of defining black radicalism in the mid-1960s. The March on Washington; the rise, assassination, and contested resurrection of Malcolm X; the radicalization of, and ensuing splits within, established organizations such as SNCC and CORE; the increased skepticism toward interracial alliances; heightened antipathy toward liberalism and gradualism; the advancement of Black Power in rhetoric and organizational vision; the blossoming of Black Arts expressive culture; the embarrassing demise of the once charismatic Adam Clayton Powell; and the persistence of neocolonialism in Africa, which dashed the hopes of pan-Africanist radicals are but some of the main instances marking the rise in expectations and the crushing disappointments of this period. More challenges lay ahead, and activists would have to count small victories along the way. Liberator’s role shaping of black radical thought left an imprint on a range of activist-intellectual activities. Though much of its work concerned explicit political debates, its openness to the radical cultural work of a class of professional and self-determined artists would perhaps be its lasting contribution to the black liberation era. It is to the radical aestheticians to which we at last turn.