Don Freeman, a lifelong educator and revolutionary giant, has died at the age of 86. His legacy as a courageous fighter endures in Cleveland politics and the Black Liberation Movement.
The formative encounters of a revolutionary
Freeman was born on Feb. 16, 1939 in Cleveland’s Outhwaite Homes, one of the nation’s first public housing complexes. He came of age in the crucible of racist housing policy, providing Freeman an early education in America’s structural violence. This would have a considerable influence on Freeman’s understanding of Black America.
His lifelong commitment to education brought him early to the revolutionary ideas of Marx, DuBois, and the Bandung Conference — providing foundations that persisted throughout his life. “I strived diligently to be a knowledgeable radical. The object of my diligence was understanding the ideas and actions of previous Marxist, leftists, socialist, and communists, in order to apply their relevance to my praxis, implementation of theory into practice,” he wrote. It was at Western Reserve University (now Case Western Reserve University) where his revolutionary thinking entered the realm of revolutionary action.
The historic 1960 sit-ins in Greensboro, NC lit a fuse for Freeman, when the campus chapter of the NAACP decided to hold a support demonstration. “The foregoing rally and march” he later reflected, “marked the beginning of my political activism in opposition to American Racism”. The intensifying fervor to bury the political dictatorship of the Jim Crow South inspired many Black Americans, like Freeman, to join the Civil Rights Movement throughout the 1950s and 60s.
Involvement with the Students for a Democratic Society, the Socialist Party, the Socialist Party – Socialist Democratic Federation and the Young People’s Socialist League would strengthen his resolve that revolutionary transformation was necessary – and that such lasting change could only be accomplished through socialism. The CIA’s criminal assassination of the Congolese liberation leader, Patrice Lumumba, and its failed Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba, both in 1961, further fueled his antipathy to U.S. imperialism. Freeman began to understand the oppression of Black America, not just within the context of the United States, but within the broader colonized world.
Revolutionary Action Movement and the Afro-American Institute
In 1961, expelled students and veteran activists at Ohio’s Central State University — drawn from SDS, Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and Congress of Racial Equality — formed Challenge, a radical study group focused on Black political education. The group drew inspiration from Robert F. William’s work in Monroe, NC, as well as Harold Cruse’s 1962 essay “Revolutionary Nationalism and the Afro-American.”
Freeman and fellow student organizer Max Stanford envisioned the group’s transformation into an organization which was capable of forwarding a truly revolutionary program that effectively fused Black nationalism, anti-capitalism, and anti-imperialism. The Revolutionary Action Movement would become the first of its kind. RAM drew specific influence from Lenin’s formulation of party-building: it was composed of highly dedicated, disciplined, and class-conscious revolutionaries.
In October 1962, Freeman founded the Afro-American Institute as RAM’s Cleveland outpost, the city’s first secular Black nationalist organization since Marcus Garvey’s UNIA. Under Freeman’s leadership, the Institute offered political education courses, forums on African history and culture, and lectures. Its newsletter “Afropinion” became a popular outlet for revolutionary ideas, challenging the politics of urban renewal, national oppression, U.S. militarism, and the erasure of Black history.
The AAI played a leading role in the defense of the prolific civil rights leader Mae Mallory, who was being held in the Cuyahoga County Jail for her ties to Robert F. Williams. Freeman and his comrades petitioned the governor, marched on the jail, and linked her case to the broader repression of Black radicals. The AAI also campaigned for better healthcare for Black patients and pushed the Cleveland public schools to include African and African American history in the curriculum.
By 1964, as RAM continued its growth in both influence and activity, and KKK terror campaigns intensified in the South, the need for a national organization became clearer, disciplined by tight ideological and political lines, to carry out the struggle for Black liberation in the North and South. RAM provided indispensable support to SNCC and others in the movement for self-defense in the South. RAM provided Malcolm X with security after his break with the Nation of Islam. Malcolm later joined RAM as the organization’s international representative, due in large part to his relation to Stanford and Freeman.
Though RAM would go on to become one of the first casualties of the FBI’s Counter-Intelligence Program (COINTELPRO), ultimately shuttering in 1968, its influence persisted far beyond its operational years or membership. The ideas introduced in its publications — Soulbook, Black America, and RAM Speaks — made their way across the country and held unrivaled political sway for decades thereafter. These publications forwarded a distinctive synthesis of new strategies and conceptions of Black liberation while preserving the institutional memory provided by mentors like Harry Haywood and Queen Mother Moore. Members and close associates such as Bobby Seale, Huey Newton, General Baker and Mutula Shakur went on to populate nearly every major radical group of the late 1960s and 1970s.
Freeman maintained great respect within the organization as an ideological anchor, always encouraging members to situate their thinking within the broader global context, often at great personal and financial costs.
A resolute radical
As a teacher in Cleveland Public Schools, Freeman placed the same premium on Black history and revolutionary pedagogy. This stint was short lived. A 1965 Cleveland Plain Dealer exposé, revealing Freeman and RAM’s associations with Malcolm X and Kwame Ture (sensationally headlined “Teacher Tied to Negro Rebels”), triggered his immediate removal from Kennard Junior High. The administration’s decision revealed an underlying fear among the ruling class that with the influence of educators like Freeman, education might be seen as a tool for liberation. Notably, the public attack came the same week Malcolm X was assassinated.
Having stepped back from RAM in 1966 and forced out of his career in education, Freeman turned to writing and local organizing. For decades until his death, Freeman stood resolutely on the side of the oppressed. With his late wife Norma, he co-founded Vibrations magazine to amplify the ongoing issues besetting Black America and the world. When a mob of 60 Cleveland police officers chased and surrounded Timothy Russell and Malissa Williams in 2012, firing 137 rounds and killing both unarmed Black victims, Freeman protested from the front lines. When Cleveland Officer Timothy Loehmann gunned down 12-year old Tamir Rice in 2014, Freeman joined the millions throughout the country demanding an immediate end to Racist police violence. And in the face of the multifaceted crisis facing Cleveland’s public school system, Freedman led the charge on education reform.
The death of Don Freeman marks the passing of a great champion of the oppressed. We honor his life, legacy, and the generations of warriors who fought before us, by recommitting ourselves to the struggle for Black liberation. We must understand too, as Freeman emphasized for over 60 years, that the fight for socialism is inseparable from the struggle for Black liberation: that “a system that enslaves you, cannot free you.”
