The Seattle Liberation Front, or SLF, was a radical anti-Vietnam War movement, based in Seattle, Washington, in the United States. The group, founded by the University of Washington visiting philosophy professor and political activist Michael Lerner, carried out its protest activities from 1970 to 1971. The most famous members of the SLF were the "Seattle Seven," who were charged with "conspiracy to incite a riot" in the wake of a violent protest at a courthouse. The members of the Seattle Seven were Lerner, Michael Abeles, Jeff Dowd, Joe Kelly, Susan Stern, Roger Lippman and Charles Marshall III.
The terms underground press or clandestine press refer to periodicals and publications that are produced without official approval, illegally or against the wishes of a dominant group. In specific recent Asian, American and Western European context, the term "underground press" has most frequently been employed to refer to the independently published and distributed underground papers associated with the counterculture of the late 1960s and early 1970s in India and Bangladesh in Asia, in the United States and Canada in North America, and the United Kingdom and other western nations. It can also refer to the newspapers produced independently in repressive regimes. In German occupied Europe, for example, a thriving underground press operated, usually in association with the Resistance. Other notable examples include the samizdat and bibuła, which operated in the Soviet Union and Poland respectively, during the Cold War.
The Los Angeles Free Press, also called the "Freep", is often cited as the first, and certainly was the largest, of the underground newspapers of the 1960s. The Freep was founded in 1964 by Art Kunkin, who served as its publisher until 1971 and continued on as its editor-in-chief through June 1973. The paper closed in 1978. It was unsuccessfully revived a number of times afterward.
The Rag was an underground newspaper published in Austin, Texas from 1966–1977. The weekly paper covered political and cultural topics that the conventional press ignored, such as the growing antiwar movement, the sexual revolution, gay liberation, and the drug culture. The Rag encouraged these political constituencies and countercultural communities to coalesce into a significant political force in Austin. As the sixth member of the Underground Press Syndicate and the first underground paper in the South, The Rag helped shape a flourishing national underground press. According to historian and publisher Paul Buhle, The Rag was "one of the first, the most long-lasting and most influential" of the Sixties underground papers. In his 1972 book, The Paper Revolutionaries, Laurence Leamer called The Rag "one of the few legendary undergrounds."
Maurice Isserman, formerly William R. Kenan and the James L. Ferguson chairs, is a long-time Professor of History at Hamilton College and important contributor to the "new history of American communism" that reinterpreted the role of the Communist Party USA during the Popular Front period of the 1930s and 1940s. His books have also traced the emergence of the New Left and the 1960s. He co-authored a biography of Dorothy Ray Healey and wrote an award-winning biography of the American socialist leader Michael Harrington. Recently, he refocused his work on the history of mountaineering in the Himalayas and the United States. He has contributed editorials and book reviews to The New York Times, The Boston Globe, Newsday, the Los Angeles Times, The Nation, and The American Alpine Review.
Avatar was an American underground newspaper published in Boston, Massachusetts, in 1967–1968. The newspaper's first issues were published from the headquarters of Broadside magazine in Cambridge.
The Paper was a weekly underground newspaper published in East Lansing, Michigan, beginning in December 1965. It was one of the five original founding members of the Underground Press Syndicate.
The Kudzu was a counterculture underground newspaper published in Jackson, Mississippi starting in September 1968. Promising "Subterranean News from the Heart of Ole Dixie" and offering a blend of hip culture and radical politics, it was founded by members of the Southern Student Organizing Committee (SSOC), a student activist group affiliated with SDS. Founding editors were Cassell Carpenter, David Doggett, and Everett Long, students at Millsaps College in Jackson. Despite harassment by police and city officials it survived until May 1972.
Quicksilver Times was an antiwar, counterculture underground newspaper published in Washington, DC. Its first issue was dated June 16, 1969, with Terry Becker Jr., a former college newspaper editor and reporter for the Newhouse News Service, the main instigator in the founding group of antiwar activists. It ran for 3 years, with its final issue appearing in Aug. 1972. Publication was irregular and during the latter part of its run it was publishing once every 3 weeks. It was a member of the Liberation News Service and the Underground Press Syndicate. Quicksilver Times was one of several anti-government underground papers of the period now known to have been infiltrated by government informants.
Hundred Flowers was an underground newspaper published in Minneapolis, Minnesota from April 17, 1970 to April 4, 1972. It was produced by a communal collective, with the main instigator being antiwar activist and former Smith College drama instructor Ed Felien. The 16-page, two-color tabloid was published weekly and cost 25 cents, circulating about 5,000 copies.
Pittsburgh Fair Witness was a radical counterculture underground newspaper published in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania from 1970 to 1973. The first 9 monthly issues were published starting in February 1970 under the title Grok. Beginning with vol. 1, no. 10 the title was changed to Pittsburgh Fair Witness and the paper shifted to publication once every three weeks; starting with the Dec. 3–17, 1971 issue it published on a biweekly schedule until its demise with vol. 4, no. 6. The PFW was staff-owned and published by a collective that called itself "The Commune." An editorial published in the May 26, 1972 issue under the heading "Our Rap" gives the paper's statement of purpose:
"The Fair Witness is published by a non-profit collective and is dedicated to the worldwide movement of people to control themselves—the movement to break down the authoritarian systems of government that are denying us our basic freedoms, that are responsible for needless genocidal wars, the perpetration of minority discrimination, the pollution of our environment and our bodies, the high concentration of power among the wealthy classes, exploitation of the individual, etc. The paper is dedicated to the struggle of all peoples to gain back the right to their own lives, the struggle to raise the consciousness of the world as a whole, the struggle to become independently productive through a working knowledge of the tools at our disposal. As a local paper our most important function concerns the movement here in western Pennsylvania."
The Big Us was a radical underground newspaper published in Cleveland, Ohio starting in September, 1968, appearing biweekly in tabloid format. Its politics reflected the views of SDS. Editors were Carol Cohen McEldowney, a 25-year-old SDS organizer and Cleveland welfare caseworker, and Carole Close, an antiwar activist. The paper's headquarters were in a church coffeehouse/youth center called The Outpost, near the Case Western Reserve University campus. McEldowney left in May 1969 to work in an antiwar GI coffeehouse in South Carolina, and starting with the issue of Oct. 14, 1969 the paper changed its name to Burning River News, commemorating a famous incident in which the toxic waste on the surface of the Cuyahoga River in downtown Cleveland caught fire.
Old Mole was a radical New Left oriented underground newspaper published in Cambridge, Massachusetts from September 1968 to September 1970. Old Mole was continued by a second volume titled The Mole, which published five issues from November 1970 to April 1971. Printed biweekly in a 16-page tabloid format, Old Mole was based for most of its existence in a storefront and basement office on Brookline Street in Central Square. Selling for 15 cents, 47 issues were published in all, with press runs averaging 8000 to 10,000 copies. Subscriptions were free to prisoners and soldiers.
From Out of Sherwood Forest was a Southern California tabloid underground newspaper published biweekly in Newport Beach starting in November 1969. Based not far from the campus of the University of California at Irvine, it was aimed mainly at students, teenagers and hippies, and was known for its inflammatory, take no prisoners rhetoric: "The American government was on trial for crimes against the world. We now find the government guilty and sentence it to death in the streets." In an article entitled "Outlaw Blues" and signed "Robbin' Hood" readers were encouraged to shoplift, making the argument, in an oversimplification of Marxist theory, that "profit is theft," hence all profit-making businesses were stealing from the public and it was not immoral for the people to steal back what was theirs.
The Eugene Augur was a local countercultural underground newspaper published in Eugene, Oregon, United States, from 1969 to 1974. Starting with its first issue dated October 14, 1969, the Augur, produced by a cooperative of left-wing political activists aligned with the antiwar movement, appeared twice a month, offering up a mix of New Left politics and acid rock counterculture to an audience of students, hippies, radicals and disaffected working class youth in the Eugene area. The paper's coverage ranged from antiwar demonstrations, exposing local narcotics agents, and rock festivals, to the growth of backwoods communes in Southern Oregon and the annual Oregon Renaissance Faire. In August 1972, the paper cut publication to a monthly schedule. Staffers included Peter Jensen and Jim Redden, son of a prominent Oregon politician and later a reporter for the Portland Tribune.
Fountain of Light was a hippie underground newspaper of the 1960s published monthly in tabloid format in Taos, New Mexico, from 1969 to 1970. At least 14 issues were published before the paper went under in June 1970.
Thorne Webb Dreyer is an American writer, editor, publisher, and political activist who played a major role in the 1960s-1970s counterculture, New Left, and underground press movements. Dreyer now lives in Austin, Texas, where he edits the progressive internet news magazine, The Rag Blog, hosts Rag Radio on KOOP 91.7-FM, and is a director of the New Journalism Project.
Roger Henry Lippman is an American political activist. He was a member of the anti-Vietnam War groups Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) and the Seattle collective of Weatherman. He is most commonly noted as a member of the Seattle Seven, who was accused of, and tried for, conspiracy charges in 1970.
The New Left was a broad political movement mainly in the 1960s and 1970s consisting of activists in the Western world who campaigned for a broad range of social issues such as civil and political rights, environmentalism, feminism, gay rights, gender roles and drug policy reforms. Some see the New Left as an oppositional reaction to earlier Marxist and labor union movements for social justice that focused on dialectical materialism and social class, while others who used the term see the movement as a continuation and revitalization of traditional leftist goals.
Leviathan was a New Left radical underground newspaper published in a tabloid newspaper format and distributed through the underground press network in the US in the years 1969-1970. Fairly serious in content with a focus on radical organizing issues, it was loosely aligned with the SDS movement. The first issue was dated March, 1969, with two editorial offices in New York, where Carol Brightman, Beverly Leman, and Kathy McAfee were listed on the first masthead, later to be joined by a number of others including Marge Piercy and Sol Yurick; and San Francisco, where the collective included Peter Booth Wiley, Carole Deutch, Danny Beagle, Matthew Steen, Bob Gavriner, Al Haber, Bruce Nelson, Todd Gitlin and David Wellman. Part of the inspiration for the paper was a desire to fill the gap created by the demise of the influential New Left organ Studies on the Left, and the core group included people from the antiwar newsletter Viet Report.