Black Liberator Magazine and Visual Arts

This blog post shares another highlight from Black Cultural Archives, which I have been exploring as part of my research into the Periodicals collection. This time, I’m looking at a radical Black Power magazine and particularly thinking about the insight it offers into the overlaps between activism and art. Since BCA holds the personal archives of several of the creators of the magazine, the archive offers a unique opportunity to dig further into the worlds of those who made it.

The Black Liberator: Theoretical and Discussion Journal for Black Revolution was published over eight issues between 1971 and 1978. It was edited by Alrick ‘Ricky’ Xavier Cambridge, a protégé of Claudia Jones, a former member of the Communist Party of Great Britain and a founder of The Black Unity and Freedom Party (BUFP), from which he would later be expelled. Cambridge would be joined by an editorial committee including sociologist Colin Prescod and activist Cecil Gutzmore, a key figure in the Brixton Defence Campaign against racist policing.

As the title suggests, the journal blended grassroots organising with highly theoretical analysis of the systemic roots of oppression and militant plans for its overthrow. Drawing on thinkers and revolutionaries from George Jackson to Louis Althusser, the first line of the opening editorial approvingly quotes Mao Zedong. Leafing through an issue, a reader might encounter an article by Angela Davis, extensive interviews by Cambridge with the Metro Four (a 1971 case where Black activists were harassed by the police) leading to analysis of structural racism in the British state, or an essay by Gutzmore ‘Carnival, The State and Black Masses in the United Kingdom’ which traces the state’s violent repression of popular Caribbean cultural practices as an extension of colonialism. 

Black Liberator had a significant influence on some of the most celebrated cultural theorists in Britain. Alongside the magazine Race Today, it is extensively discussed in Policing the Crisis, Stuart Hall and colleagues’ important account of how the media and authoritarian politicians create scapegoats of migrant communities. Similarly, Black Liberator was central to Thinking Black: Britain, 1964-1985, Rob Waters’ study of the development of Black radical political culture. After the death of Cambridge, Paul Gilroy, author of The Black Atlantic Modernity and Double Consciousness, tweeted about the importance of the journal, ‘Black Liberator should not be forgotten.’

Front covers of Black Liberator magazine from the BCA collections

Black Liberator wasn’t without internal dissent. Contributors, including Stella Dadzie and Colin Prescod, became frustrated with how unintelligible much of the journal was to ordinary people, which they regarded as key to any liberatory struggle. As Dadzie recalls in her oral history (held at BCA) and other interviews:

“I found myself standing out in Brixton Tube station. Brixton is a very Black community in England, in London, and feeling like, ‘What am I doing here?’ Even I, with three or four years at university, was finding it difficult to engage in the language with some of those articles. So to me, it is really important that whatever I did was based in community practice and engaged ordinary people who are the people whose lives are most affected by this shit.”  (Identifier: ORAL/1/12)

One aspect of Black Liberator which is rarely discussed is the involvement of artists, which shows the overlap of activism and culture in the late 1970s. The photographer Lance Watson’s image of the violent over-policing of the Notting Hill Carnival graces the cover of the final issue. In keeping with the liberatory themes of the journal, the photograph captures the police being forced to retreat. In 1976, Watson was a founding member of the Black Photographers Collective, a precursor to Autograph (The Association of Black Photographers), which continues to exist today. In the same issue, the Philippine-born artist David Medalla, a key figure in the 1960s and 70s counterculture and founder of Artists for Democracy, contributes his series ‘African Liberation Drawings’, depicting scenes from anti-colonial struggle in Angola, Mozambique and Zimbabwe. Artists were also part of the social circle formed around the magazine. John Akomfrah, founding member of The Black Audio Film Collective, was part of a Black Marxist reading group run by Black Liberator editor Alrick Cambridge, which would influence his approach to filmmaking.

Perhaps the most extraordinary artistic contribution was from the St Lucia-born artist Llewellyn Xavier. His George Jackson (Soledad Brother) series of collages was produced by mailing his artwork to the incarcerated Black Power leader and incorporating his responses. This was produced in 1971, in the final months of his life before Jackson would be fatally shot by prison guards. Foretelling his tragic death, a poignant handwritten note from Jackson appears in one of the collages, which simply reads ‘Not the result of chance.’

You can explore digitised content from Black Liberator via the Black Cultural Archives’ partnership with Google Arts and Culture here. https://artsandculture.google.com/story/nwXR-hY1vj13Kw

If you want to dig deeper, you can book to visit BCA and request material, including

·      Journal: Black Liberator, c. 1970 (Identifier: DADZIE/2/4/1/2) https://collections.blackculturalarchives.org/repositories/2/archival_objects/163

·      Papers of Alrick Cambridge (Identifier: CAMBRIDGE) https://collections.blackculturalarchives.org/repositories/2/resources/60

·      Papers of Cecil Gutzmore (Identifier: GUTZMORE) https://collections.blackculturalarchives.org/repositories/2/resources/62

·      Papers of Stella Dadzie (Identifier: DADZIE) https://collections.blackculturalarchives.org/repositories/2/resources/6

·      Interview with Stella Dadzie, March 2009 (Identifier: ORAL/1/12) https://collections.blackculturalarchives.org/repositories/2/archival_objects/1791

In partnership with the University of the Arts London, Black Cultural Archives recently delivered a public study day bringing together people interested in exploring arts and activist magazines from the collection. A recording will soon be made available via the BCA’s YouTube channel.

By Nicholas Brown, PhD candidate at UAL

Nicholas Brown is a librarian and PhD candidate at the University of the Arts London, researching Black British artists and print culture, with particular attention to independent magazine publishing. His research examines how magazines produced by and about Black artists and writers in the 20th century functioned as key sites of contestation, fostering new positions and understandings of how visual arts intersect with issues of race, class, gender, sexuality and the legacies of colonialism. He has formerly managed several university, gallery and cultural institution libraries, most importantly The Stuart Hall Library at Iniva (the Institute for International Visual Art). Over the last four months, he has undertaken a placement at Black Cultural Archives. A recent article is available here -  Publishing as insurgency: Black and South Asian women artists transforming feminist magazines (Journal of Gender Studies, 2025)

This piece was developed with curation support from Harlynn Homan, Archives Manager