African American History and Civil Rights: Freedomways Issues on the Caribbean, W.E.B. Du Bois, and Black Political Culture, 1964 to 1969

Freedomways African American Literature

Book

Jackson, Esther Cooper (managing ed.). Freedomways, three issues published from 1964 to 1969, documents the journal’s combination of Civil Rights Movement politics, Black internationalism, literature, and cultural criticism during a period encompassing the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the expansion of Black Power politics, and the emergence of the Black Arts Movement. Founded in 1961 by a group of Black left-wing writers and activists, with Esther Cooper Jackson serving as managing editor throughout its publication, Freedomways connected the African American freedom struggle to anticolonial movements in Africa and the Caribbean while publishing writers, artists, historians, and political organizers. These three issues include a special number on the Caribbean, a reprinting of W.E.B. Du Bois’s analysis of imperial competition in Africa, and Kathryn Jackson’s study of LeRoi Jones, later Amiri Baraka, and the new Black writing of the 1960s.

Freedomways. New York: Freedomways Associates, Inc., 1964–1969. Three issues: Summer 1964, Vol. 4, No. 3; Winter 1968, Vol. 8, No. 1; Summer 1969, Vol. 9, No. 3. Octavo. Original color wrappers with photo-illustrations.

[1] Jackson, Esther Cooper (managing ed.). Freedomways. Vol. 4, No. 3. New York: Freedomways Associates, Inc., 1964. Summer issue devoted to “The People of the Caribbean Area,” with nineteen contributions addressing Caribbean history, colonialism, slavery, political independence, and contemporary conditions. Literary contributions include work by Ernest Carr, George Lamming, and Derek Walcott, placing Caribbean poetry and criticism beside political and historical analysis and demonstrating the journal’s sustained treatment of Black freedom beyond the United States.

[2] Jackson, Esther Cooper (managing ed.). Freedomways. Vol. 8, No. 1. New York: Freedomways Associates, Inc., 1968. Winter issue includes W.E.B. Du Bois’s “The African Roots of War,” first published in 1915, which locates European conflict within imperial competition for African land, labor, and resources. Its republication in Freedomways more than fifty years later placed Du Bois’s earlier critique of colonialism before readers confronting African decolonization, the Vietnam War, and contemporary debates over American foreign policy.

[3] Jackson, Esther Cooper (managing ed.). Freedomways. Vol. 9, No. 3. New York: Freedomways Associates, Inc., 1969. Summer issue includes Kathryn Jackson’s “LeRoi Jones and the New Black Writers of the Sixties,” an extended critical examination of Jones, later Amiri Baraka, and the transformation of Black literary politics during the decade. Jones’s work had become closely associated with the Black Arts Movement following his establishment of the Black Arts Repertory Theatre/School in Harlem in 1965, and Jackson’s essay examines his changing writing within the larger emergence of a politically militant generation of Black authors. The issue also addresses international politics, including the Nigerian crisis, continuing Freedomways’ coverage of African affairs alongside African American cultural and political debate.

Published through nearly a quarter century of the postwar Black freedom struggle, Freedomways brought Civil Rights Movement reporting into direct conversation with African and Caribbean anticolonial politics, literature, visual art, and historical scholarship. Its contributors over the course of its run included James Baldwin, Alice Walker, and artists such as Charles White, while its editorial circle drew on activists and intellectuals whose political work extended from the interwar Black Left into the movements of the 1960s and 1970s. Tight bindings and crisp pages; very good condition. Three issues showing the journal’s geographic and intellectual range through Caribbean political and literary writing, Du Bois’s anti-imperialist analysis, and contemporary criticism of the emerging Black Arts movement.

Item #16368

Price: $285.00