Introduction

Voices From the Underground: Radical Protest and the Underground Press in the “Sixties”

“The Sixties,” a chaotic period in United States history, which actually spilled into the early to mid Seventies, were witness to a youthful rebellion unprecedented in this country. Millions of young people swelled enrollments at institutions of higher learning during a period of mid-century affluence. Advances in communications brought television into the living rooms of the vast majority of Americans, enabling nearly instantaneous coverage of worldwide events. And a crippling war in a remote country called Vietnam galvanized activists who had seen earlier successes in exposing racism in the South, resulting in the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

These and other converging events resulted in “an important rebellion against the accumulated rigidities of oppressive puritanism, commercialized culture, corporate power, war making, and race, class and sex prejudice.” (Armstrong)*

Denied access to conventional media such as newspapers or network television, anti-war and counter cultural activists took advantage of technological innovations in printing processes to create media of their own. Beginning with a handful of “underground” newspapers, such as the Los Angeles Free Press, The Berkeley Barb, and The Realist, the underground press rapidly found wide audience, resulting in a proliferation of copies available in virtually every major city and university campus in the country. By 1969, at least four hundred underground newspapers flourished, most united in spirit by opposition to the Vietnam War, and advocating rejection of traditional American values, while embracing rock music, experimentation with drugs, and a breakdown of sexual barriers.

This exhibit displays select samples of alternative publications in the Alternative Press Collection, which is part of the permanent holdings of Archives and Special Collections of the Thomas J. Dodd Research Center.