Freedom (American newspaper)

Freedom
Front page of Freedom newspaper,
Vol. 5, No. 5, May – June 1955
EditorLouis E. Burnham
Staff writersPaul Robeson
Lorraine Hansberry
Alice Childress
Thelma Dale
Lloyd L. Brown
John H. Clarke
PhotographerInge Hardison
CategoriesAfrican-American newspapers
FrequencyMonthly; bimonthly in 1954–1955 summers
FormatTabloid
PublisherFreedom Associates
FounderPaul Robeson
W. E. B. Du Bois
First issueNovember 1950 (1950-11)
Final issue
Number
August 1955 (1955-08)
Vol 5 No 6
CountryUnited States
Based inNew York City
LanguageEnglish language
Websitedlib.nyu.edu/freedom/
OCLC904283253

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]

  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.

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