Radical Intellect: Liberator Magazine and Black Activism in the 1960s by Christopher M. Tinson (review)

For historians, the radical press constitutes an important stream of dissent to the “official” narrative of any given period. The Left’s independent newspapers and magazines contain ideas, arguments, and opinions that usually run counter to prevailing wisdom or manufactured public opinion. But while radical periodicals typically have been valued as evidence of dissent, a recent development has seen historians examine these periodicals in and of themselves. That’s the case with Christopher M. Tinson’s Radical Intellect, which recounts the ten-year run of Liberator magazine, a monthly forum for black radical politics that spanned the civil rights and Black Power eras (1961–71). Even among radical publications of the 1960s, Liberator isn’t terribly well known. It did not have the ideological consistency of a Freedomways, and its modest distribution was overshadowed by the newspapers Muhammad Speaks and The Black Panther. Yet Tinson makes a compelling case for Liberator as a black-owned and -operated publication that “stood at the crossroads of knowledge production and insurrection” (1). In other words, the magazine was a groundbreaking intellectual enterprise that aimed to bring rigorous critical discourse to bear on grassroots social activism. In its function as a periodical of theory and praxis, Liberator was, as Tinson puts it, Black Studies “before American universities and colleges were forced to embrace the Black Studies and Ethnic Studies movements” (241).

The claim is supported by the fact that Liberator began as the organ of the Liberation Committee for Africa (LCA), an activist group that sought to link “global anticolonial and domestic antidiscrimination politics” in the 1960s (15). Though based in New York, LCA was avowedly internationalist, viewing the push for African independence as part and parcel of blacks’ global freedom struggle. The organization was the brainchild of Daniel H. Watts. An architect by training, Watts had been employed at the prestigious Skidmore, Owings & Merrill. Having failed to earn a promotion there, however, he became disillusioned with his job, resigned from the firm, and formed a group whose aim was to diversify the architectural field. One of the supporters of that group, a white man named Pete Beveridge, would become a key figure in Watts’s next venture: LCA. As Watts turned his attention to full-time activism, he identified an opening for a Left critique of racial liberalism and seeded LCA in the summer of 1960. But it wasn’t until a February 1961 protest at the United Nations against “U. S. complicity in the assassination of Patrice Lumumba,” the first prime minister of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, that LCA had a real platform for its agitation (20). A month later, in March 1961, Liberator was born, led by Beveridge’s article on the so-called Congo Crisis.

After recounting this origin story in chapter 1, Tinson proceeds to document Liberator’s independent run over the next decade. Chapter 2 elaborates on the magazine’s internationalist commitments, showing in particular how Watts brought nuanced discussion of postcolonial state building to a media landscape otherwise dominated by Manichean Cold War rhetoric. Though activists generally praised the magazine’s coverage, the reporting of Richard Gibson, who espoused more moderate views on the legacy of African nationalism, came under fire from LCA’s allies. After a somewhat jarring transition in the book’s argument, chapter 3 recovers the heretofore overlooked contributions of black women to Liberator, from Lorraine Hansberry speaking passionately on LCA’s behalf to Toni Cade (later Toni Cade Bambara) formulating black feminist discourse in her early fiction and literary reviews. We also learn that some of the first published poems by Sonia Sanchez appeared in a special issue dedicated to black women.

In chapter 4, Tinson turns to Liberator’s embrace of a more US-focused black nationalism. Beveridge had left the editorial staff by 1965, as black radicals’ critique of the civil rights movement came...