Race & Class

History

The journal was established in 1959 as Race, before obtaining its current title in 1974 (when it was subtitled Journal for Black and Third World Liberation). The new editor, Ambalavaner Sivanandan, rejected what he saw as the arid scholarship of its predecessor, calling out instead to the "Third World intelligentsia, its radicals and political activists, its refugees and exiles".

Race & Class covered events that shaped the 1970s, specifically the period's widespread and rapid social and political changes, liberation struggles and the installation of popular governments in some of the newly independent countries of the Third World, the phenomenon of Black Power, and the Movement of Non-Aligned Countries. The journal was opened to radical scholars and activists, three of whom were so closely involved in the liberation movements they wrote of – Orlando Letelier, Malcolm Caldwell and Walter Rodney – they were killed in the pursuit of their realization.