Freedom (American newspaper)

Last updated
Freedom
Freedom, May-June 1955-06.jpg
Front page of Freedom newspaper,
Vol. 5, No. 5, May – June 1955
Editor Louis E. Burnham
Staff writers Paul Robeson
Lorraine Hansberry
Alice Childress
Thelma Dale
Lloyd L. Brown
John H. Clarke
Photographer Inge Hardison
Categories African-American newspapers
FrequencyMonthly; bimonthly in 1954–1955 summers
Format Tabloid
PublisherFreedom Associates
Founder Paul Robeson
W. E. B. Du Bois
First issueNovember 1950;73 years ago (1950-11)
Final issue
Number
August 1955 (1955-08)
Vol 5 No 6
Country United States
Based in New York City
Language English language
Website dlib.nyu.edu/freedom/
OCLC 904283253

Freedom was a monthly newspaper focused on African-American issues published from 1950 to 1955. [1] The publication was associated primarily with the internationally renowned singer, actor and then officially disfavored activist Paul Robeson, whose column, with his photograph, ran on most of its front pages. Freedom's motto was: "Where one is enslaved, all are in chains!" [2] The newspaper has been described as "the most visible African American Left cultural institution during the early 1950s." [3] In another characterization, "Freedom paper was basically an attempt by a small group of black activists, most of them Communists, to provide Robeson with a base in Harlem and a means of reaching his public... The paper offered more coverage of the labor movement than nearly any other publication, particularly of the left-led unions that were expelled from the CIO in the late 1940s... [It] encouraged its African American readership to identify its struggles with anti-colonial movements in Africa, Asia, and the Caribbean. Freedom gave extensive publicity to... the struggle against apartheid." [4]

Contents

History

Freedom was planned as a joint venture by Robeson and W. E. B. Du Bois. It was named after Freedom's Journal , the first Black newspaper published in the United States. [5] Louis Burnham, the former executive secretary of the Southern Negro Youth Congress (SNYC), was the Managing Editor of Freedom. Burnham was responsible for getting the monthly started. [6] George B. Murphy Jr. (vice chairman of the American Committee for the Protection of Foreign Born and vice president of the International Workers Order), was the general manager. The monthly shared office space and staff with the Council on African Affairs. [7] Each issue cost $0.10; a subscription for a year was $1. [8]

When Lorraine Hansberry, later a Tony award-winning playwright but then (in her own description) a confused 21 year old, went to work for Freedom soon after its founding, she found "an office furnished with two desks, one typewriter and a remarkably enthusiastic working staff of two": Louis Burnham, the editor, and Edith Roberts, the office manager. [9]

The periodical became a magnet for primarily African-American leftist activists and artists, including Esther Cooper Jackson, former SNYC executive Edward Strong, historian Herbert Aptheker, members of the New York Negro Labor Council and members of the Committee for the Negro in the Arts, including Ossie Davis, Ruby Dee and Harry Belafonte. [10] It promoted African-American culture, showcasing, among others, playwright Lorraine Hansberry, playwright and fiction writer Alice Childress (whose novel Like One of the Family first appeared serially in Freedom), novelists Lloyd Brown, Julian Mayfield, and John O. Killens, and poet Frank Marshall Davis. [11] Alice Childress recalled "Eslanda Robeson bringing in the works of young artists, introducing them to the editor, asking him to give them an opportunity to present their talents in Freedom." [5]

It supported the working class and the labor movement, as well as a variety of international issues, including world peace, human rights in Latin America, and the anti-colonial freedom struggle. It advocated for third-party politics. [6] A rarity among American newspapers, Freedom consistently opposed the Korean War, linking the conflict to colonialism, discrimination against Black people in the armed forces, and Jim Crow laws at home. [12] Presciently, in a front page Freedom column, "Ho Chi Minh is Toussaint L'Ouverture of Indo China," Robeson asked [emphasis in the original]: "Shall Negro sharecroppers from Mississippi be sent to shoot down brown-skinned peasants in Vietnam—to serve the interests of those who oppose Negro liberation at home and colonial freedom abroad?" [13]

Women on the editorial board, and among its contributors, brought a proto-feminist viewpoint to Freedom, which published pieces expressing those views. Among these women were Vicki Garvin, whose article in the first issue began, "If it is true, as has often been stated, that a people can rise no higher than its women, then Negro people have a long way to go before reaching the ultimate goal of complete freedom and equality in the United States." [14] Lorraine Hansberry started at Freedom as a subscription clerk, and subsequently worked as receptionist, typist, editorial assistant and ultimately associate editor. Hansberry covered local, national, and international stories that involved both national and international travel. Other contributors included Childress, Dorothy Burnham and Eslanda Goode Robeson. Thelma Dale worked at the monthly. Shirley Graham Du Bois was part of the "Freedom Family" [7] as the paper's associates referred to themselves. [15]

Freedom put on pageants celebrating African-American history. To commemorate the newspaper's first birthday, Hansberry wrote the script for a rally at Rockland Palace, a then-famous Harlem hall, [16] on "the history of the Negro newspaper in America and its fighting role in the struggle for a people's freedom, from 1827 to the birth of FREEDOM." Performers in this pageant included Robeson, his longtime accompanist Lawrence Brown, the multi-discipline artist Asadata Dafora, and numerous others. [17] The following year, Hansberry and Childress, an already produced playwright, collaborated on a pageant for Freedom's Negro History Festival, with Harry Belafonte, Sidney Poitier, Douglas Turner Ward and John O. Killens providing narration. [18]

Freedom ceased publication after its July–August 1955 issue, which included an appeal for financial support on its front page. [19] Ultimately, the monthly failed due not only to financial difficulties, but also to anti-communist FBI harassment. [10] Because of McCarthyism, most Blacks were reluctant to have any association with Robeson or his publication. Although buying a Robeson concert ticket often included a subscription to Freedom, the FBI photographed attendees and recorded their license plate numbers, which would also especially discourage government employees. State and city governments prevented large venues from hosting Robeson, further limiting concert attendance to smaller facilities such as churches and union halls. [12]

Legacy

Following the failure of Freedom, many of those associated with it were able to initiate another periodical, Freedomways . The new quarterly, energized by the revival of the Civil Rights Movement, maintained Freedom's anti-imperialist and anti-Jim Crow stance, while continuing to support Black culture and feminism. [11] In its final issue, the editorial in Freedomways acknowledged the importance of its predecessor Freedom: "The titles of two ventures in publishing helped inspire our name—most significantly, Freedom Newspaper, published by Paul Robeson and edited by Louis E. Burnham, which made such a valuable contribution to our movement in the ’50s." [20]

See also

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Lorraine Hansberry</span> African-American playwright and author (1930–1965)

Lorraine Vivian Hansberry was an American playwright and writer. She was the first African-American female author to have a play performed on Broadway. Her best-known work, the play A Raisin in the Sun, highlights the lives of black Americans in Chicago living under racial segregation. The title of the play was taken from the poem "Harlem" by Langston Hughes: "What happens to a dream deferred? Does it dry up like a raisin in the sun?" At the age of 29, she won the New York Drama Critics' Circle Award — making her the first African-American dramatist, the fifth woman, and the youngest playwright to do so. Hansberry's family had struggled against segregation, challenging a restrictive covenant in the 1940 U.S. Supreme Court case Hansberry v. Lee.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Roy Wilkins</span> American civil rights leader (1901–1981)

Roy Ottoway Wilkins was a prominent activist in the Civil Rights Movement in the United States from the 1930s to the 1970s. Wilkins' most notable role was his leadership of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), in which he held the title of Executive Secretary from 1955 to 1963 and Executive Director from 1964 to 1977. Wilkins was a central figure in many notable marches of the civil rights movement. He made valuable contributions in the world of African-American literature, and his voice was used to further the efforts in the fight for equality. Wilkins' pursuit of social justice also touched the lives of veterans and active service members, through his awards and recognition of exemplary military personnel.

<i>Negro World</i> Defunct American newspaper

Negro World was the newspaper of the Marcus Garvey's Universal Negro Improvement Association and African Communities League (UNIA). Founded by Garvey and Amy Ashwood Garvey, the newspaper was published weekly in Harlem, and distributed internationally to the UNIA's chapters in more than forty countries. Distributed weekly, at its peak, the Negro World reached a circulation of 200,000.

John Henrik Clarke was an African-American historian, professor, prominent Afrocentrist, and pioneer in the creation of Pan-African and Africana studies and professional institutions in academia starting in the late 1960s.

Alice Childress was an American novelist, playwright, and actress, acknowledged as "the only African-American woman to have written, produced, and published plays for four decades." Childress described her work as trying to portray the have-nots in a have society, saying: "My writing attempts to interpret the 'ordinary' because they are not ordinary. Each human is uniquely different. Like snowflakes, the human pattern is never cast twice. We are uncommonly and marvellously intricate in thought and action, our problems are most complex and, too often, silently borne." Childress became involved in social causes, and formed an off-Broadway union for actors.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">New Negro</span> Term popularized during the Harlem Renaissance

"New Negro" is a term popularized during the Harlem Renaissance implying a more outspoken advocacy of dignity and a refusal to submit quietly to the practices and laws of Jim Crow racial segregation. The term "New Negro" was made popular by Alain LeRoy Locke in his anthology The New Negro.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">African American newspapers</span> Newspapers serving African American communities

African American newspapers are news publications in the United States serving African American communities. Samuel Cornish and John Brown Russwurm started the first African American periodical, Freedom's Journal, in 1827. During the Antebellum South, other African American newspapers sprang up, such as The North Star, founded in 1847 by Frederick Douglass.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Claudia Jones</span> Trinidad-born journalist and activist (1915–1964)

Claudia Vera Jones was a Trinidad and Tobago-born journalist and activist. As a child, she migrated with her family to the United States, where she became a Communist political activist, feminist and Black nationalist, adopting the name Jones as "self-protective disinformation". Due to the political persecution of Communists in the US, she was deported in 1955 and subsequently lived in the United Kingdom. Upon arriving in the UK, she immediately joined the Communist Party of Great Britain and would remain a member for the rest of her life. She then founded Britain's first major Black newspaper, the West Indian Gazette, in 1958, and played a central role in founding the Notting Hill Carnival, the second-largest annual carnival in the world.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Benjamin J. Davis Jr.</span> American politician

Benjamin Jefferson Davis Jr., was an African-American lawyer and communist who was elected in 1943 to the New York City Council, representing Harlem. He faced increasing opposition from outside Harlem after the end of World War II. In 1949 he was among a number of communist leaders prosecuted for violating the Smith Act. He was convicted and sentenced to five years in prison.

Paul Leroy Robeson Jr. was an American author, archivist and historian.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Esther Cooper Jackson</span> Civil rights activist (1917–2022)

Esther Victoria Cooper Jackson was an American civil rights activist, social worker, and communist activist. She worked with Shirley Graham Du Bois, W. E. B. Du Bois, Edward Strong, and Louis E. Burnham, and was one of the founding editors of the magazine Freedomways, a theoretical, political and literary journal published from 1961 to 1985. She also served as organizational and executive secretary at the Southern Negro Youth Congress.

Freedomways was the leading African-American theoretical, political and cultural journal of the 1960s–1980s. It began publishing in 1961 and ceased in 1985.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Baldwin–Kennedy meeting</span> An attempt in 1963 to improve race relations in the United States

The Baldwin–Kennedy meeting of May 24, 1963 was an attempt to improve race relations in the United States. Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy invited novelist James Baldwin, along with a large group of cultural leaders, to meet Kennedy in an apartment in New York City. The meeting became antagonistic and the group reached no consensus. The black delegation generally felt that Kennedy did not understand the full extent of racism in the United States. Ultimately the meeting demonstrated the urgency of the racial situation and was a positive turning point in Kennedy's attitude towards the Civil Rights Movement.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Sojourners for Truth and Justice</span>

Sojourners for Truth and Justice was a radical civil rights organization led by African American women from 1951 to 1952. It was led by activists such as Louise Thompson Patterson, Shirley Graham Du Bois and Charlotta Bass.

Thelma Dale Perkins was an African-American activist. Her maternal uncle was Frederick Douglass Patterson. She was also a member of the CPUSA.

The Associated Negro Press (ANP) was an American news service founded in 1919 in Chicago, Illinois by Claude Albert Barnett. The ANP had correspondents, writers, reporters in all major centers of the black population in the United States of America. It supplied news stories, opinions, columns, feature essays, book and movie reviews, critical and comprehensive coverage of events, personalities, and institutions relevant to black Americans. As the ANP grew into a global network. It supplied the vast majority of black newspapers with twice weekly packets.

Jean Carey Bond is an American writer and activist. A member of the Harlem Writers Guild and Black Arts Movement, she has written for both adult and child audiences. She wrote Brown is a Beautiful Color, a children's book that explores a black child's discovery of how his own skin color is beautiful as he explores, discovering things around him that are the color brown. She was married to architect Max Bond from 1961 until his death in 2009.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Louis E. Burnham</span> African-American activist and journalist (1915-1960)

Louis Everett Burnham was an African-American activist and journalist. From his college days, and continuing through adulthood, he was involved in activities emphasizing racial equality, through various left-wing organizations, campaigns and publications in both the northern and southern United States, particularly in New York City and Birmingham, Alabama.

Camp Unity was a communist-affiliated summer resort for adults located in Wingdale, New York. It was one of the first multiracial camps of its kind in the United States.

Henry O. Mayfield was an American miner and social activist. Mayfield was one of the Black miners who played an active role in forming the new Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) between 1935 and 1955; he also had a leadership role in the SNYC. He served the United States as a soldier in World War II; afterwards, he and other veterans worked to support voting rights. He worked with other Black leaders in the Congress of Industrial Organizations to advocate for the rights of laborers, especially in the southern United States. Mayfield was watched by the FBI and was arrested for his work in the Communist Party and advocacy for civil rights. Mayfield served as chairman of the board for Freedomways Associates, the publishing company for the cultural magazine Freedomways, up until his death.

References

  1. Danky, James Philip; Hady, Maureen E. (1998). African-American newspapers and periodicals : a national bibliography. Mark Graham. Cambridge, Mass. : Harvard University Press. p. 239. ISBN   978-0-674-00788-8.
  2. "Freedom". NYU Libraries. Retrieved 30 June 2020.
  3. Smethurst, James (2005). The Black Arts Movement: literary nationalism in the 1960s and 1970s. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. p. 45. ISBN   0807855987. OCLC   868517353.
  4. Lamphere, Lawrence (2003). Paul Robeson, Freedom newspaper, and the black press (PhD). Boston College. p. 125. Quoted in Rocksborough-Smith, Ian (29 July 2005). "A group of friends" (PDF). Bearing the Seeds of Struggle: Freedomways Magazine, Black Leftists, and Continuities in the Freedom Movement (MA). Simon Fraser University. p. 4. Retrieved 30 June 2020. and Fraser, Rhone Sebastian (August 2012). Publishing Freedom: African American Editors and the Long Civil Rights Struggle, 1900-1955 (PhD). Temple University. OCLC   864885538 . Retrieved 23 August 2020.
  5. 1 2 "By Alice Childress". Paul Robeson, the Great Forerunner by the Editors of Freedomways . New York: International Publishers. 1998. p. 273. ISBN   071780724X. OCLC   38411295.
  6. 1 2 Goodman, Jordan (2013). "But Not Out". Paul Robeson : a watched man. London New York: Verso. ISBN   978-1781681312. OCLC   871707576.
  7. 1 2 Higashida, Cheryl (2011). "The Negro Question, the Woman Question, and the 'Vital Link': Histories and Institutions". Black internationalist feminism: women writers of the Black left, 1945-1995. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. ISBN   978-0252093548. OCLC   767775665.
  8. Washington, Mary (2014). The other blacklist : the African American literary and cultural left of the 1950s. New York New York: Columbia University Press. ISBN   9780231526470. OCLC   1088439510 . Retrieved 3 November 2020.
  9. Anderson, Michael (2008). "Lorraine Hansberry's Freedom Family". American Communist History. 7 (2): 259–269. doi:10.1080/14743890802580131. S2CID   159832248.
  10. 1 2 Rocksborough-Smith, Ian (29 July 2005). "A group of friends" (PDF). Bearing the Seeds of Struggle: Freedomways Magazine, Black Leftists, and Continuities in the Freedom Movement (MA). Simon Fraser University. Retrieved 30 June 2020.
  11. 1 2 Smethurst, James (2008). "SNYC, Freedomways, and the Influence of the Popular Front in the South on the Black Arts Movement". Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture. 8 (1). Archived from the original on 2009-12-08. Retrieved 1 July 2020.
  12. 1 2 Lamphere, Lawrence (2002). "Paul Robeson, Freedom Newspaper, and the Korean War". In Dorinson, Joseph; Pencak, William (eds.). Paul Robeson : essays on his life and legacy. Jefferson, N.C: McFarland. pp. 133–142. ISBN   1476604584. OCLC   1059004452.
  13. Robeson, Paul (March 1954). "Ho Chi Minh is Toussaint L'Ouverture of Indo China". Freedom. Vol. 4, no. 3. Freedom Associates. hdl:2333.1/wh70s346 . Retrieved 28 August 2020.
  14. Garvin, Vicki (March 1954). "Union Leader Challenges Progressive America". Freedom. No. Introductory Issue. Freedom Associates. p. 5. hdl:2333.1/j9kd55h3 . Retrieved 28 August 2020.
  15. Duberman, Martin (2014). Paul Robeson : a biography. New York: Open Road Media. ISBN   978-1497635364. OCLC   894737213.
  16. "The Rockland Palace Dance Hall, Harlem NY 1920". Harlem World. Harlem World Magazine. Retrieved 17 November 2020.
  17. Murphy, George B. Jr. (December 1951). "In the Freedom Family". Freedom. Vol. 1, no. 12. Freedom Associates. p. 3. hdl:2333.1/44j0ztf0 . Retrieved 16 November 2020.
  18. Perry, Imani (2018). Looking for Lorraine : the radiant and radical life of Lorraine Hansberry. Boston, Massachusetts: Beacon Press. ISBN   978-0807039830. OCLC   1080274303 . Retrieved 17 November 2020.
  19. "Answer this Question". Freedom. 5 (6): 1. hdl:2333.1/vhhmgvws . Retrieved 28 August 2020.
  20. "Tracing the Freedom Way: A Tribute" (PDF). Freedomways . XXV (3): 131. 1985. JSTOR   community.28037072. OCLC   819195 . Retrieved 27 August 2020.

Further reading