Famous for its social movements—against the Vietnam War, in defense of the planet, demanding Black civil rights, gay liberation, and women’s equality—the 1960s and 1970s were also a fertile time for the underground press in the United States. Reveal Digital’s Campus Underground collection on JSTOR includes more than seventy-five publications, many from college campuses or college towns (often produced by a loose cluster of students and other college-aged young people). The open access digital archive provides an exhilarating glimpse into this creative and politically incendiary period.
The explosion of small publications alongside the political upheaval—the latter of which is documented in a companion collection, Student Activism—is not a coincidence. Historically, an alternative press has thrived when social movements are most active. Political organizing gives the alternative press more material to write about. The movements also produce more readers for such outlets: in politically charged times, more people are open to new ideas and question established news sources.
In the nineteenth century, for example, newspapers like William Lloyd Garrison’s The Liberator, calling for the abolition of slavery, thrived along with the abolitionist movement. By contrast—despite the pervasive racist violence suffered by Black Americans after the Reconstruction—there were few organized mass movements demanding the human rights of Black Americans until the 1930s. As a result, crusading journalist Ida B. Wells, most famous for chronicling the horror of lynching, was a lone voice writing and publishing on the subject, often tragically unheeded and even ostracized in her time.
In the mid-twentieth century, the idea of a “mainstream media,” one that reflected an elite consensus and protected the status quo, emerged with the Nixon Administration’s campaign against media, and the analysis was embraced by many on both the right and the left. Richard Nixon wouldn’t have agreed with the hippies on many issues, but he concurred with their hatred of the elite media. The idea of a mainstream press concealing important knowledge from the public produced a demand for alternatives. The mission of the underground press, then, was to provide these independent sources of news, or, as The Berkeley Barb put it in 1967, “what the dailies didn’t tell.”