Art Kunkin

Who is Art Kunkin?

Art Kunkin is an American journalist, political organizer, machinist and New Age esotericist best known as the founding publisher and editor of the Los Angeles Free Press. Born Arthur Glick Kunkin in New York City in 1928, he attended the prestigious Bronx High School of Science and the New School for Social Research, eventually becoming a tool and die maker and joining the Trotskyite movement as an organizer for the Socialist Workers Party, where he was business manager of the SWP paper, The Militant.

Beginning in the late 1940s Kunkin was associated with C.L.R. James and the radical Marxist Johnson-Forest Tendency. During the 1950s he was Los Angeles editor of their journals Correspondence and News & Letters, while working as a master machinist and tool and die maker for Ford and General Motors. During this period a number of theoreticians and organizers of the Johnson-Forest trend were concentrated in the auto industry in Detroit, where they worked to recruit black workers and gain influence inside the auto workers' unions.

In 1962 Kunkin left General Motors to go back to college and work toward a graduate degree. Soon afterward he had his first experience with a local newspaper on the staff of a Mexican-American paper in Los Angeles called the East L.A. Almanac. "For the first time in my life I was writing about garbage collection and all kinds of community problems," he later recalled. Meanwhile he was also doing political radio commentaries for KPFK Pacifica Radio while serving as the Southern California district leader of the Socialist Party.