Magazines: Black Anti-Semitism

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Few people ever heard of Liberator, a monthly magazine aimed at black nationalists, until Writer James Baldwin and Actor Ossie Davis gave it some recent notoriety. Both resigned from the staff with a blast at Editor Daniel Watts. "I think it is immoral," said Baldwin, "to blame Harlem on the Jew." Said Davis: "This is where I get off."

Ever since it was founded in 1960, Liberator has been building up to antiSemitism. From white-baiting, it passed to the baiting of moderate Negroes and finally to Jew-baiting. Jewish merchants exploit Harlem Negroes, screams Liberator; Jewish liberals have sold out the civil-rights movement.

Dan Watts, 43, started putting out pamphlets, which later turned into a 35¢ magazine, when he got tired of working as a "Negro architect" with Skidmore, Owings & Merrill. His hatred for whites as well as many of his fellow Negroes is apparently inexhaustible. On the other hand, his love knows no bounds for the likes of Mao Tse-tung, Malcolm X, Gamal Abdel Nasser, and Adam Clayton Powell.

Whites are to blame for everything. One article solemnly accused the white power structure of keeping Negroes from playing quarterback in professional football. No matter that Negroes filled all other positions, said the magazine, a black man is not allowed to be in a "leadership position over whites." In another piece, a spokesman for the Revolutionary Action Movement, the group charged with plotting to blow up the Statue of Liberty in 1965, blamed the murder of Malcolm X on the CIA.

Liberator now claims a circulation of 15,000, mostly in Harlem. Its only importance, as far as Negro Psychologist Kenneth Clark is concerned, is that it shows "Negroes are no more immune to racial hatred and anti-Semitism than are whites."