From 1961 to 1985, a period of massive social change for African Americans, Freedomways Quarterly published the leaders and artists of the black freedom movement. Figures of towering historical stature wrote for the journal, among them Paul Robeson, W.E.B. Du Bois, President Kwame Nkrumah and Julius Nyerere. Three Nobel Prize laureates appeared in its pages—Dr. Martin Luther King, Pablo Neruda, and Derek Walcott—and several Pulitzer Prize winners—Alice Walker and Gwendolyn Brooks. No other journal could boast such a long list of names from the civil rights movement: Freedomways was like no other journal. It was unique.Yet despite the well-known names, few Americans have heard of this national treasure. Why? Simply put, the United States was not ready for this journal in 1961. Today, many Americans cannot remember a United States where racial segregation was legal, but in 1961, many of the battles for integration were still to be won.This book is subtitled Prophets in their Own Country because the editors and contributors to Freedomways were not honored at the journal's inception. Eventually, however, much of their vision did come to pass. Until now, these documents, which show the depth and breadth of the struggle for democracy, had been lost to the public. The publication of the Freedomways Reader restores this lost treasury. It contains what amounts to an oral history of the liberation movements of the 1960s through the 1980s. Through the reports of the Freedom Riders, the early articles against the Vietnam War and South African apartheid, the short stories and poems of Alice Walker, and the memoirs of black organizers in the Jim Crow south of the Thirties, one can walk in the footsteps of these pioneers.

A selection of articles from "Freedomways," a journal that published the writings of African-American leaders and artists of the freedom movement, from 1961 to 1986.

In this richly detailed firsthand history of the contemporary Women's Liberation Movement (WLM), scholar-activist Carol Giardina argues against the prevalent belief that the movement grew out of frustrations over the male chauvinism experienced by WLM founders active in the Black Freedom Movement and the New Left. Instead, she contends, it was the ideas, resources, and skills that women gained in these movements that were the new and necessary catalysts for forging the WLM in the 1960s. Giardina uses a focused study of the WLM in Florida to tap into the common theory and history shared by a relatively small band of Women's Liberation founders across the country. Drawing on a wealth of interviews, autobiographical essays, organizational records, and published writings, Freedom for Women brings to light information that has been previously ignored in other secondary accounts about the leadership of African American women in the movement. It also explores activists' roots in other movements on the left. Comprehensive, serendipitous, and carefully formulated, Giardina's work is a vivid portrait of the people and events that shaped radical feminism.

This book deals with the forgotten history of the civil rights movement. The American Left played a significant part in the origins of that movement, whose history has traditionally been focused on the later 1940's and early 1950's. This approach needs serious re-thinking in light of what took place in the later 1930's with the organization and activity of groups like the Southern Negro Youth Congress that brought both African-American and white workers and students together in the fight for economic and social justice. Thanks to the post-World War II Red Scare such groups as well as Left African-American leaders like Esther and James Jackson have been overlooked or excised from an exciting, controversial, and important story. With all due credit to the churches which played such a pivotal role in finally winning Blacks their civil rights, the early history involving the Left, workers of both races, and the labor unions must be assimilated into America's memory, for there were important continuities between what they did and the later church-based struggle. This book was published as a special issue of American Communist History.

An authoritative collection of writings from a prominent public intellectual.