In 1981, Rips published this report—which showed evidence of illegal surveillance and harassment committed by the U.S. government, its agencies, and institutions—in Unamerican Activities: The Campaign Against the Underground Press. In the book, he noted that the targeting, harassing, and surveilling was “not simply a matter of history” but “a warning for the future of free expression in this country,” particularly expressions that went up against the US empire—expressions amplified in the Underground Press papers. Rips said this “new journalism” was “partly responsible for the increased political power of the hippies, New Left and anti-war movements.” The Underground brought coverage of the anti-war, internationalist, Black Power, feminist, and LGBTQ+ liberation movements to the masses. As Rips wrote:
Now, once again, revelations about government interference are awakening a new awareness of a need for vigilance. During the 1960s and 1970s, the U.S. Government, through its police and surveillance agencies, made a full-scale effort to silence dissident writing and publishing. Under at least three administrations, it developed highly sophisticated techniques to intimidate the press that spoke for the popular liberative movements of recent decades.
Even more frightening to the state than its coverage, though: alternative newsmakers didn’t see their papers as simply that, newspapers. They were also “an organizing tool,” as Billy X Jennings, a member of the Black Panther Party, put it in On the Ground. Where a mainstream newspaper might only, if at all, report on societal issues, The Black Panther, for example, offered practical, actionable remedies:
It’s one thing to sell the papers on the avenue as people walk by, it’s another thing if you go door-to-door to find solutions at people’s comfort zone…That old lady that goes to church, she might not even talk to you on the street corner, but you get up on her porch, she’ll give you an earful … So they’ll talk to you and that’s how you get that feedback … There were solutions to be found in the Panther paper; it wasn’t just sold for the monetary purpose. It had our ten-point program, it had what we were doing, our social programs, how we were dealing with rats and roaches in the community.
The Black Panther Party’s paper was also one of the most targeted amongst the network. The US government, Rips wrote, saw the Party as the focal point of Black liberatory struggle—and Black liberation is intrinsically at odds with the US empire. Some 233 of 295 authorized COINTELPRO actions against Black groups, Rips’s report noted, were lodged against the Panthers. The FBI kept the Party under constant surveillance—wiretapping, forging defamatory letters, disrupting meetings, provoking dissension, inciting internal conflicts, and assassinating members. The Party’s paper, which served as a primary way to raise money and disseminate information to members, was especially susceptible to these attacks.