Creating a Space for Ideological Conversations about Civil Rights

Long after abolitionist publisher William Lloyd Garrison hung up his apron and folded the Liberator in 1865 and decades after the Eastmans’ communist Liberator merged with Workers Magazine, a new Liberator sprang up, in 1960, to speak with an intellectual voice about the economic and social changes needed to translate civil rights movement gains into lasting changes in daily African American life.¹

Tinson calls Liberator magazine “a liberation project untethered from disciplinary forces of racial capitalism and imperialist democracy at home and around the world.” This passage helps demonstrate both the strengths and potential weakness of Tinson’s book. It is and reads like an extended scholarly monograph, deeply researched, carefully imagined, and organized intellectually (versus in a simpler but, in this instance, less appropriate chronological fashion). Tinson makes fine use of primary sources and academic thought on the issues Liberator grappled with and on the magazine’s place and influence in its time. But the dense packaging of the book’s prose style makes it less desirable as a text or reading for, say, an undergraduate class on the black press or the civil rights movement—unless one wanted to challenge said undergraduates, of course. The book is, instead, a place for scholars to find the disparate civil rights movement’s key thinkers captured and explained in nuanced terms.

Thematically organized, Radical Intellect treats five primary topics: voices of anticolonialism and black intellectual culture of the 1960s; Liberator’s theme of African liberation; the space Liberator provided for black women’s activism and its intellectual underpinnings; Liberator’s work to enliven public discussion of local, national, and international developments in civil rights, using black writers and prominent activists; and Liberator’s influence on the arts through its support of black artists and writers. Of particular interest is the theme woven throughout the book—and Liberator magazine—of US civil rights leaders reaching out to African activists and celebrating African culture. This thread, though part of mainstream US culture now, seems to have emerged at least in part from the writers featured in the magazine and from the cultural celebrations it sponsored. Placing these crucial conversations into magazine form gave activists and intellectuals of the civil rights movement a space in which to pause, contemplate, and interact, in the midst of the fast-marching pace of newspapers and the emerging television news format. As Tinson writes, Liberator created space for a “constant conversation about the role of African American culture in black radical politics” (233).

Tinson’s work is a must-read for scholars of black history, the civil rights movement, and the 1960s era. It deserves a place in university libraries as a solidly researched, detailed, thoughtful treatment of the magazine that sought to capture the world of black politics, arts, issues, and influence.