Art Kunkin

Arthur Glick "Art" Kunkin (born 1928) 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 in New York City, 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 (including Raya Dunayevskaya, Martin Glaberman, Grace Lee Boggs and James Boggs) were concentrated in the auto industry in Detroit, where they worked to recruit black workers and gain influence inside the auto workers' unions.