The most useful way to understand Black Flag is to begin before the title existed. The paper started life in July 1968 as the Bulletin of the Anarchist Black Cross, not as a general countercultural zine and not yet as the broader anarchist newspaper it would become. The archive compiled at libcom places that chronology very clearly: volume 1, from 1968 to 1970, was the Bulletin; the title changed to Black Flag with volume 2, issue 1, in January 1971. Albert Meltzer later described that transition as a response to a growing demand for an anarchist paper as activism expanded in the late 1960s.
That origin matters because it explains the paper’s initial priorities. Stuart Christie, interviewed in 2010, said that after his release from prison in Spain one of his main concerns was the lack of a pro-prisoner defense group in Britain; he and Meltzer revived the Anarchist Black Cross, and “the result was Black Flag,” first as a duplicated bulletin and then as a more substantial printed paper. Christie also recalled the early production chain in unusually material terms: duplicated sheets, then an offset-litho printer, first premises in Coptic Street, then King’s Cross, then the Centro Ibérico in Haverstock Hill, with much of the cost carried by Meltzer himself. Meltzer’s memoir corroborates the basic sequence, recalling that the publication began when he still had a Gestetner/Gestelith offset machine and that the bulletin initially came out regularly while he and Christie were working long hours elsewhere.
In that first phase, the publication was tied closely to prisoner support and to the wider anti-Franco anarchist milieu around the revived Anarchist Black Cross. Christie’s post-prison activism was directly bound up with solidarity for Spanish anarchist prisoners, and Freedom News’ retrospective on Meltzer and Christie describes their partnership as producing a linked set of projects: the revived Anarchist Black Cross, Black Flag, and later Cienfuegos Press. The paper’s roots, then, lay in a practical network of defense, correspondence, and solidarity rather than in the looser lifestyle journalism often associated with the underground press.
What changed around 1970 and 1971 was not just the masthead. Meltzer’s own account is explicit that the bulletin had originally been meant to note the activities and existence of the Black Cross, but that “the spread of anarchist activism in the sixties made us the focus.” In the same passage he says there was demand for an anarchist newspaper because Freedom had become, in his words, “bourgeois pacifist,” and because the older editorial world around Vernon Richards no longer represented the militants around Meltzer and Christie. That split was not merely personal. Recent scholarship on postwar British anarchism describes the same fault line as a struggle between more gradualist or liberal-intellectual currents and more militant, class-focused ones.
This is where Black Flag became historically consequential. It gave a durable print form to a more combative version of British anarchism at exactly the moment when the older cultural map of the movement was breaking apart. Alex Honeywell’s study of British anarchist traditions places Christie and Meltzer among the figures associated with a more fiercely class-war version of anarchism, and Rich Cross’s work on British anarchism under Thatcher says Black Flag stood “firmly” in the revolutionary class-struggle tradition, in contrast to Freedom’s wider libertarian and more cultural readership. Benjamin Franks traces that same strand across several decades, linking Black Flag to a syndicalist or class-struggle current that runs forward to the Direct Action Movement and later organizations.
Seen in that light, Black Flag’s impact was not only that it reported on anarchist activity. It changed what an anarchist paper in Britain could be. Earlier libertarian publications had often mixed politics with a broader cultural or intellectual agenda. Black Flag narrowed the frame. Its pages prioritized prisoners, trials, police operations, anti-fascist work, labor disputes, and arguments over tactics. Even its internal structure reflected that emphasis: repeated legal updates, prisoner addresses, reprinted correspondence, polemics, and practical reports. Christie later said the paper’s original concern was simply to “get the next issue out” while doing the other work around it. That comment sounds modest, but it helps explain the paper’s tone. The publication was less a magazine standing back from events than one part of the machinery that kept campaigns, contacts, and arguments moving.
The paper’s middle years show how far it had moved beyond a narrowly defined prisoner bulletin while keeping that emphasis in view. Libcom’s chronology records the publication as monthly through much of the 1970s, then as a monthly and later fortnightly in the 1980s, with subtitles that shifted from Bulletin of the Anarchist Black Cross to Organ of the Anarchist Black Cross and later to For Anarchist Resistance. The cover lines and issue summaries from the archive show a paper following the changing terrain of British conflict: miners’ strike coverage in 1984–85, Brixton in 1985, Wapping in 1986, surveillance and databases in the late 1980s, alongside the older prisoner-support role and international reporting. That range helps explain why Black Flag mattered outside a narrow anarchist readership: it became one of the places where a class-struggle anarchist view of Britain’s crises was being printed continuously, issue after issue.
Its impact on counterculture is best understood through this shift in tone and function. Black Flag did not replace the 1960s underground press, but it did mark a departure from its softer edges. Franks notes that by the mid-1960s the rift between class-struggle anarchists and a more liberal, countercultural anarchism had become clearer, with Freedom and Anarchy moving toward policy, culture, and white-collar readerships while militants such as Christie pushed toward more direct engagement with working-class opposition. In that context, Black Flag helped define a different post-1968 sensibility: less interested in lifestyle, less invested in respectable dissent, and more prepared to center prisoners, repression, labor conflict, and direct action. Its contribution to counterculture was therefore not decorative. It helped harden one part of the British underground into a print culture of commitment, where reading was closely tied to organizing, correspondence, and practical solidarity.
That hardening had limits as well as influence. Rich Cross notes that even with Black Flag and other organizations in place, formal British anarchist publications remained politically marginal by the end of the 1970s, and later activists around Class War sometimes criticized both Freedom and Black Flag as remote from ordinary working-class readers. Those criticisms are important because they stop the history turning into self-mythology. Black Flag did not become a mass paper. What it did become was a durable reference point for a specific current inside British anarchism: anti-state, anti-prison, anti-pacifist in orientation, and willing to bind intellectual dispute to practical campaigning.
Its longevity underlines the point. Meltzer wrote in the mid-1990s that the paper had battled misinformation and police and press hostility for decades; the archive chronology shows repeated format changes, relaunches, and new editorial arrangements rather than a single stable identity. By 1990 it had reached issue 201; by 2007 it was relaunched again; in 2021 it returned as an online journal. That long run does not mean continuity in every political detail. It means that the publication kept providing a recognizable place for a particular anarchist voice in Britain long after the circumstances of its founding had passed.
[Image suggestion: a spread pairing an early Bulletin page of prisoner support with a mid-1980s Black Flag cover on Brixton, Wapping, or the miners’ strike.]
The strongest way to summarize Black Flag is to say that its history runs from prisoner support into political definition. It began as the Bulletin of the Anarchist Black Cross in 1968, became Black Flag in January 1971, and over the following decades served as one of the main print organs of a militant, class-struggle version of British anarchism. Its impact lay in the way it connected those things: the prisoner list, the polemic, the strike report, the riot analysis, the anti-fascist argument, the internal movement quarrel. Read across time, the paper gives a history not just of one publication but of a whole current trying to make itself durable in print.