Freedom Engendered? From ‘the Black Blacklist’ to the Black Feminist Literary Renaissance

When Freedomways began its 25-year run in the spring of 1961, the quarterly journal joined the project of Black freedom in the US to anticolonial liberation movements around the world. Co-founded and co-edited by Black women on the left, it provided an outlet for women who organized in the 1940s and endured political repression in the 1950s and an early venue for the creative work of writers like Audre Lorde, Nikki Giovanni, Alice Walker, and Angela Davis. If Freedomways was never exclusively feminist in orientation, it staged a multi-generational, multi-genre, often combative conversation about the complex dynamics of gender in the Black freedom struggle. This paper reads Freedomways as a messy but sustained work of feminist theory, asking how writers, artists, and activists, whose political coming-of-age reflected different problem spaces, analyzed or figuratively conveyed their political aspirations and disappointments across that pivotal quarter century. How did they metabolize moments of hope and crushing setbacks into works of fierce analysis and beauty? What do their visions of freedom bequeath to feminist thinking/creating/acting today?