In an early issue of The Rag, there was a warning: “Gentle Thursday Is Coming.” Only it wasn’t so much a warning as it was an invitation, first appearing in a one-inch section of the paper and then gradually taking up more space in subsequent issues until it ran across a full page.
Gentle Thursday, true to a countercultural gathering organized in the late 1960s, was intrinsically anti-war. Primarily, though, the event served as a “love-in,” Thorne Dreyer, one of The Rag’s lead editors, said in On the Ground (2011), an oral history book consisting of stories from the Underground Press of the 1960s and 70s. The purpose of Gentle Thursday “was just let’s love each other—let’s have fun.”
And so, in the fall of 1966, they hosted a celebration. Locals brought their kids, music instruments, balloons, lunches, and dogs aplenty onto campus. The University of Texas, however, saw love as a threat, especially when expressed at events such as this one, hosted by Austin’s underground paper and co-sponsored by Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). The university “freaked out,” Dreyer noted, and Gentle Thursdays were banned.
“Suddenly it was a radical thing to have this love-in,” Dreyer shared in On the Ground. Institutional repression does not bode well, especially with groups following an anti-establishment politic. Come springtime, the second Gentle Thursday was even bigger, more enthusiastic, and overtly political (and also coincided with national mobilization against the Vietnam War, which included campus appearances by figures such as Stokely Carmichael and Allen Ginsberg and protests at the Texas Capitol amid a visit from then-vice president Hubert Humphrey). In this way, Gentle Thursdays illustrated how The Rag attracted and engaged its participants. In On the Ground, Dreyer reflects:
I don’t think that there is such a thing as objectivity. We just thought we were advocacy journalists, but we made our biases clear. One of the important things about the underground press was that it was a collective, communal experience, and everybody came in and got involved and became a part of it, and got politicized through the process.
Surely it was a quick and easy process for people to become politicized; everything was, is, and has always been political. Honing in on this sentiment and growing youth dissidence, the Underground Press Syndicate resonated nationwide, spanning from Chicago to Los Angeles, New York City to Austin, and many stops in between. The network of self-supporting, community-based papers—The Rag among them—gave voice to the countercultural, dissident movements of the 60s and 70s through zines, broadsheets, newsletters, and bulletins. That is, until the US government launched a campaign to kill it. The banning of Gentle Thursdays, and of The Rag itself three years later in 1969, was simply a moderate glimpse into the countless attacks waged against the Underground Press.
The state-sanctioned campaign wasn’t a singular, unified effort “coordinating the control of writing and reading,” according to Geoffrey Rips, an investigative journalist who worked as a coordinator for PEN America’s Freedom to Write Committee. Rather, they were “disparate operations” based on “the demands of particular presidential administrations” and “dependent upon the needs, interests, spheres of influence, and methods of [federal, state, and local law enforcement] agencies themselves,” Rips wrote in a report in which he compiled alternative press archives, records from Senate and House hearings, and files acquired via the Freedom of Information Act.
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.
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.
“Every Party member was required to sell the Black Panther Party newspaper every week that it came out,” Jennings said in On the Ground. And in Buffalo, New York, police continuously arrested members selling the paper under a “criminal-anarchy” statute. But, as abolitionist thinkers have long taught us, not everything deemed “criminal” by the state is actually harmful, and vice versa. Statutes of this kind were false flags, instituted so as to further construct an enemy—a criminal—out of the Black Panthers, out of those confronting the state. And if we know anything about the US empire, it does whatever it wants to those or that which it deems criminal. As Rips wrote:
The FBI forged anonymous letters and sent them to school officials protesting the presence of the paper in the library and classrooms. In 1969, a federal grand jury ordered Sherry Bursey and Brenda Joyce Presley, Panther newspaper staff members, to disclose confidential information about the management of the newspaper. The two refused, and they were later upheld by an appeals court. In 1970, a House subcommittee investigating the Black Panthers asked Frank B. Jones, a former managing editor of the paper, to furnish details about circulation, distribution and finances.
As state violence attempted to eat away at the Party and its paper into the early 1970s, other alternative presses were barred from access to the trials of Party members—yet another tactic, Rips noted, that illustrated “a ‘conspiracy’ of the Nixon administration, the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the State of Connecticut” to target and silence dissent. But while conspiracies expire—or are brought to light and to task—dissent is an exercise in endurance.
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Within ten years or so, the Underground Press died off. A variety of factors contributed to its dramatic decline, including the war’s end and “a changing economy,” as well as “inexperience, bad management, self-indulgence, and political naivete,” within the network, as Rips wrote. Additionally, the fact that, despite claiming to challenge the cis-heterosexual, white male mainstream press, the Underground was predominantly run by straight white men certainly played a significant role.
This was the Underground Press at its best: hyper-local movement journalism that began with only a few newspapers until there were hundreds and hundreds, each focused on how their localities fit into the broader scheme while growing in readership thanks to the communities they were a part of.
However, often omitted from accounts and analyses of the network’s decline, Rips argued, were the impacts of the state’s campaign against it, which operated with “pragmatic immorality” so as “to crush the constitutional rights of a large sector of the American populace which had found it necessary to dissent.” But while the campaign succeeded insofar as the formal dismantling and criminalization of an alternative news network goes, its success stopped there. In all of its power and influence, US imperial superstructure remains morally desolate, no match for the enduring valence of its dissidents. Decades after the Underground Press dissolved, its spirit persists. As Alice Embree, a founding member of The Rag, contributor to New York’s Rat Subterranean News, and an early SDS Austin participant, put it in On the Ground:
The importance of Rag and the underground press movement was that it was the connective tissue; it spread the news of what was happening from here to other places. It brought the news of, say People’s Park or whatever was going on in Berkeley or New York, back. Through the Liberation News Service it was shared, it became common news, and I think it was a huge organizing instrument.
It was worldwide. We felt connected to the students in Mexico—enough to do a pamphlet, go down and talk to them. We felt connected to the Zengakuren in Japan, and then the French. There was a level of protest—not just here, but all over—that was just huge and mind-boggling.
Such a far-reaching movement couldn’t simply die off. Its politic, like its spirit, went on. Reflecting on the end of the era in On the Ground, Harvey Wasserman, a founder of the Liberation News Service, directed some choice words to architects of the campaign against the Underground, including the FBI and its then-director J. Edgar Hoover: “‘Fuck you! We’re still going.’”
In more recent years, the state’s campaign against dissent has shifted to account for and employ the Internet and perpetually advancing technologies. But alternative press and media makers, too, have evolved.
For some, that means engaging with print journalism as previous alt-presses did so as to hold papers of record and tradition to task, this time in the face of a digital-first landscape. Created in October 2023 in response to Israel’s increased bombardment of Gaza, Writers Against the War on Gaza gathered media, cultural, and academic workers into an organizing coalition for Palestinian liberation and against Zionism and the US empire. One of their projects, a protest newspaper called the New York War Crimes (NYWC), takes aim at The New York Times for its coverage of Palestine—namely how, The Times, though not unique in its manufacturing of consent for genocide, is truly exemplary in its bias for Israel and demonization of Palestine. NYWC, through its content and design, injects itself into, onto, and atop mainstream media, and in doing so disrupts the domineering narrative, delegitimizes The Times and its peers, and creates an alternative that could have very well been a part of the Underground Press. (Indeed, the threads attach. Rips had dedicated Unamerican Activities to “writing judged unfit to print in The New York Times.”)
Other contemporary examples include micro publishers such as Sojourners for Justice Press (SJP), founded in 2020 by abolitionist organizer and educator Mariame Kaba and co-directed by Neta Bomani. Rooted in Black feminist and abolitionist philosophies, SJP centers its work on zines and zine-making as a way for communities to take ownership of their education and news consumption, sharing intellectual, political, and emotional knowledge that promotes mutual welfare and reimagines the world beyond colonial, capitalist frameworks.
One way that SJP organizes around this work is through its Black Zine Fair, an event celebrating Black zine-makers and the Black DIY publishing scene in New York City. SJP and its zine fair exemplify how today’s alternative media builds on the legacy of the Underground Press, shifting focus away from corporatized newsmaking toward a more accessible and adaptable practice where those historically and contemporarily forced to the margins are platformed so as to share their own narratives with full autonomy.
As far as online news goes, just as the Underground Press reminds us, billionaire-owned newsmaking is not our only option. There are plenty of digital media makers, producers, and distributors that cut through the noise of mass media and its myriad ethical crises in innovative and creative ways—ways that harken back to the Underground Press. History Is A Weapon, for example, is an anonymous and defiantly low-tech website that has existed for some two decades. It describes itself as “a left counter-hegemonic education project” focusing on a historical archive of American resistance. Through site maps, reading lists, charts, and crowdsourced materials, History Is A Weapon gathers and posts articles, analyses, agitprop, reports, essays, and other accounts of US history in a way that confronts the dominant view which posits history as a hard and fast rule of fact.
Other alternative media makers include Instagram accounts such as Israel’s Crimes, Land Palestine, Eye on Palestine, Hind’s Call, and Let’s Talk Palestine, all of which post and repost daily informational content about Palestine, the Palestinian liberation movement, and the ongoing genocide committed by Israel and the US. Much of what these accounts put out is largely ignored by mainstream media, from contextual histories of Israeli subjugation of Palestinians, to the US’s aiding and abetting of Israel, to firsthand photos and video footage out of Gaza and the West Bank, to coverage produced by on-the-ground Palestinian journalists such as Bisan Owda, Lama Jamous, Hamdan Dahdouh, and many more.
These contemporary alternative medias—from NYWC to SJP, History Is A Weapon to the various social media citizen journalists—continue the spirit and politic of the Underground Press, shedding the constraints of mainstream outlets in order to not only disseminate information but build solidarity and mobilize action toward a more collective consciousness. The work of today’s alternative media underscores journalism’s essential role in holding power to account, especially when traditional outlets obscure the realities of state violence and oppression (thereby evading their own role in it all). Today’s alternative media makers remind us—as The Black Panther, The Rag, and countless other underground newspapers of the 60s and 70s did—that journalism can and should lead with dissent.
That is easier said than done. A single glance at our media landscape or the news itself and there comes an inescapable pang to the chest—a sinking in the stomach that we’ve all, it seems, grown accustomed to. Why even attempt an alternative? After all, the campaign against dissidence has only continued to expand in ever-sophisticated ways. Kaba addresses this feeling of hopelessness in We Do This ‘Til We Free Us (2021). While discussing abolition and the work toward a world beyond prisons and punishment, Kaba reframes hope as a discipline rather than an emotion:
I always tell people, for me, hope doesn’t preclude feeling sadness or frustration or anger or any other emotion that makes total sense. Hope isn’t an emotion, you know? Hope is not optimism … And I don’t take a short-term view. I take a long view, understanding full well that I’m just a tiny, little part of a story that already has a huge antecedent and has something that is going to come after that. I’m definitely not going to be even close to around for seeing the end of it. That also puts me in the right frame of mind: that my little friggin’ thing that I’m doing is actually pretty insignificant in world history, but if it’s significant to one or two people, I feel good about that. If I’m making my stand in the world and that benefits my particular community of people, the people I designate as my community, and I see them benefiting by my labor, I feel good about that. That actually is enough for me.
The hyper-local then becomes all the more important. It gives way to a newsmaking that might be largely insignificant and is therefore all the more significant, cutting through the apathetic noise of establishment media, which seeks only to inundate feelings of hopelessness with more hopelessness. Instead, this newsmaking transforms those feelings of despair into action through vital criticism, organizing tactics, and practical solutions as offered by papers like The Black Panther.
This was the Underground Press at its best: hyper-local movement journalism that began with only a few newspapers until there were hundreds and hundreds, each focused on how their localities fit into the broader scheme while growing in readership thanks to the communities they were a part of. In Austin, it was just another Thursday—largely insignificant—until it wasn’t.
