Black Dialogue Magazine editors/contributors, Left to Right: Aubrey LaBrie,
Marvin X, Abdul Sabry (Gerald LaBrie), Al Young, Arthur Sheridan, Duke Williams
Black Dialogue, the second of the California little magazines to materialize, emerged from a rivalry its supporters had with the editors of Soulbook. In the fall of 1964, black students at San Francisco State founded their own campus organization and decided that one of its primary objectives would be the creation of a revolutionary little magazine. Many of the students disagreed with some of Bobb Hamilton's and Kenn Freeman's understandings of black journals. Wanting a periodical which could serve a wide variety of opinions, they labeled their own effort "Black Dialogue" in an attempt to provide a forum for open discussion of literary and political questions.
They secured the following staff, which released the first issue of Black Dialogue in the spring of 1965: Arthur A. Sheridan as editor; Abdul Karim (Gerald Labrie), as managing editor; Edward S. Spriggs as New York editor; Joseph Seward as African editor; Aubrey Labrie as political editor; Marvin X as fiction editor; and Joe Goncalves as poetry editor.
Abdul Sabry (Gerald LaBrie), a leader of the Bay Area Black Arts Movement
We received word today that Abdul Sabry (Gerald LaBrie) has joined the ancestors. Surely we are from Allah and to Him we return!
When we graduated from Oakland's Merritt College and transferred to San Francisco State College/University, 1964, Abdul was a member of the Negro Students Association that soon became the Black Student Union. The founding editor of Black Dialogue Magazine was Arthur Sheridan but he was eventually replaced by Abdul Sabry when Black Nationalism became the magazine ideology.
Eldridge Cleaver and Alprintice Bunchy Carter, former
Soledad Prison inmates, co-chairs of the Black Culture
Club at the prison, upon release joined the Black Panther
Party.
Abdul was part of the Black Dialogue staff that visited Soledad Prison's Black Culture Club, chaired by Eldridge Cleaver and Bunchy Carter. According to prison movement historian or griot Kumasi, the club was the beginning of the American Prison Movement.
Abdul was an early follower of Imam Warith Din Muhammad when he turned from the teachings of his father, Elijah Muhammad, and became a Sunni Muslim.