Liberation was a radical pacifist magazine published from 1956 to 1977 in the United States. A bimonthly and later a monthly, it aligned itself with the 1960s New Left.
History Liberation: An Independent Monthly was founded, edited and published by David Dellinger, Bayard Rustin, Sidney Lens, Roy Finch, and A. J. Muste out of New York City and from a small anarchist community in Glen Gardner, New Jersey where Dellinger lived. In the first issue, which appeared in April 1956, the editors included a kind of mission statement titled "Tract for the Times"; it concluded with this paragraph:
Muste brought funding from the War Resisters League. For Rustin, Liberation represented a major commitment of his time and energy as he worked to raise money and also was meeting regularly with Muste. Rustin contacted Martin Luther King Jr. to encourage him to write for the magazine. The June 1963 issue contained King's "Letter from Birmingham Jail", the first time it was printed in its entirety and under that title. Besides its appearance in Liberation, King's letter was also printed that year in full or in part in the New York Post, The New Leader, The Christian Century, and in the August 1963 issue of The Atlantic magazine under the headline, "The Negro Is Your Brother".
The magazine's editorial positions were comparable to those of Studies on the Left. Dellinger backed the 1959 Cuban Revolution (which caused a rift at the magazine and resulted in Roy Finch resigning as an editor) and later published articles sympathetic to the Castro regime. Reprinted in Paul Goodman's anthology, Seeds of Liberation (1965). The magazine supported Students for a Democratic Society and opposed the Vietnam War.
Liberation provided assistance to Fellowship of Reconciliation (FoR) organizers, and the magazine's editorial offices at times served as a clearinghouse for activists conducting non-violent resistance.
Liberation occasionally ran investigative journalist pieces. In early 1965, it printed two long articles by Vincent Salandria challenging the Warren Commission's findings on the JFK assassination. A follow-up article, "A Philadelphia Lawyer Analyzes The President's Back and Neck Wounds", appeared in the March 1965 issue. In 1975, the magazine published an exposé by Fred Landis, which accused the CIA of waging psychological warfare against Chile prior to the 1973 coup d'état.
A poem by Louis Ginsberg, father of Allen Ginsberg, was published in Liberation. Children's book author Vera Williams created the artwork for many of the covers.
By 1977, Dellinger had moved on to launch a new magazine called Seven Days. Liberation was being edited by Jan Edwards and Michael Nill out of Cambridge, Massachusetts, but it ceased publication not long after Dellinger's departure.
Legacy Liberation, together with Dissent, anticipated changes in the 1950s-60s American political left, such as the early civil rights movement and the use of nonviolent protest.
In 1965, Paul Goodman edited an anthology, Seeds of Liberation, that included a selection of editorials, articles, poems, and reviews from the magazine's first decade. In his Preface, Goodman noted how often the magazine had been prescient about trends, social movements, etc., stating at one point that "the 'news' has been catching up to Liberation".
References
Bibliography
Further reading
Review of Seeds of Liberation.