Summer '68
Anti-Vietnam War Movement
"Draft resistance organizing in Boston, a Boston organizer's trip to North Vietnam -- a G.I. coffeehouse in Texas, Newsreel's take over of Channel 13 in New York -- following the production of the Rat's special issue on Chicago -- and Chicago during the Democratic Convention, the planning and carriage out of five days of protest. Each section focuses on an organizer central to each project -- the attempt is to define the nature of commitment to "the Movement" against a backdrop of 1968's summer activities." (Roz Payne Archive) <iframe width="640" height="470" src="https://player.vimeo.com/video/112328836" frameborder="0" webkitallowfullscreen="webkitallowfullscreen" mozallowfullscreen="mozallowfullscreen" allowfullscreen="allowfullscreen"></iframe>
<p><a href="https://vimeo.com/112328836">SUMMER'68 - Newsreel</a> from <a href="https://vimeo.com/user2384966">john douglas</a> on <a href="https://vimeo.com">Vimeo</a>.</p>
Newsreel Films
Vimeo
Center for Digital Research in the Humanities, University of Nebraska-Lincoln
1968
film
After the 1968 Chicago Convention at the County Fair (45 images)
New Left
Photographs of activists at the County Fair following the 1968 Chicago Democratic National Convention. It is unclear which county, as the Cook County Fair appears to have stopped in 1948.
Roz Payne
Roz Payne
Center for Digital Research in the Humanities, University of Nebraska-Lincoln
August 1968
RAT Subterranean News, issue 15, October 29-November 18, 1970
New Left
RAT Subterranean News was published in New York, starting in March of 1968 and was edited by Jeff Shero, Alice Embree and Gary Thiher, who had come North from Austin, Texas, where they worked on The Rag, another important underground paper. Whereas the East Village Other represented the counterculture point of view, RAT had a left political orientation. This issue covers a wide range of topics, including baking bread; a critique of the Weather Underground; Angela Davis; George Jackson; Quebec independence; working-class white women; American "concentration camps"; abortion; welfare rights; the Young Lords; the West Side Women's Center; a report from Asia; Black Power poetry.
RAT Subterranean News
Roz Payne
Center for Digital Research in the Humanities, University of Nebraska-Lincoln
October 29-November 18, 1970
underground press
RAT Subterranean News, May 22-June 4, 1970
New Left
RAT Subterranean News was published in New York, starting in March of 1968 and was edited by Jeff Shero, Alice Embree and Gary Thiher, who had come North from Austin, Texas, where they worked on The Rag, another important underground paper. Whereas the East Village Other represented the counterculture point of view, RAT had a left political orientation. This issue covers a wide range of topics, including media and revolution; Joan Bird and Dionne Donghi; a labor walk-out at Bell Telephone in New York; the police killing of six black men in Augusta, Georgia; police killing of two students at Jackson State; street-fighting between Puerto Rican youths and police on the Lower East Side; poetry; the role of women in the labor movement; brief reports on anti-colonial struggles in Portuguese’s African colonies; corporate repression of indigenous people in Brazil; 9 days of global activism in May; revolutionary feminism; squatting; “The Woman-Identified Woman”; How to…; emergency first aid for street warfare; ads and personals; repression against marijuana advocates; letters to the editor.
RAT Subterranean News
Roz Payne
Center for Digital Research in the Humanities, University of Nebraska-Lincoln
May 22-June 4, 1970
underground press
RAT Subterranean News, June 5-19, 1970
New Left
RAT Subterranean News was published in New York, starting in March of 1968 and was edited by Jeff Shero, Alice Embree and Gary Thiher, who had come North from Austin, Texas, where they worked on The Rag, another important underground paper. Whereas the East Village Other represented the counterculture point of view, RAT had a left political orientation. This issue covers a wide range of topics, including reflections on Vietnam; a Weather Underground communiqué; women’s oppression in Puerto Rican culture; an interview with FBI informant George Demmerle; organizational structure and principles of The Feminists; brief reports from Ceylon and France; a review of the case of Sam Melville, Jane Alpert and Dave Hughey; a Sylvia Plath poem, “The Jailer”; gynecology and sexism; labor politics in Argentina; feminism and the media; report from the Conference for Women event, titled, “Liberation – from What?”; political prisoners; city planning on the Lower East Side of New York; Dionne Donghi; American Indian Movement seizure of B.I.A. land; Panther 21 trial; ads and personals; poetry.
RAT Subterranean News
Roz Payne
Center for Digital Research in the Humanities, University of Nebraska-Lincoln
June 5-19, 1970
underground press
RAT Subterranean News, February 6-23, 1970
New Left
RAT Subterranean News was published in New York, starting in March of 1968 and was edited by Jeff Shero, Alice Embree and Gary Thiher, who had come North from Austin, Texas, where they worked on The Rag, another important underground paper. Whereas the East Village Other represented the counterculture point of view, RAT had a left political orientation. In early 1970, women’s liberation activists took over RAT and turned it into a women-only periodical to challenge sexism within the New Left. This issue is the first after the take-over of RAT and covers a wide range of topics, including Afeni Shakur and the Panther 21; letters to the editor; women’s take-over of RAT; feminist critique of the New Left; the ambush of New York police in Harlem; the emergence of strong women leadership in the Weather Underground; Kathleen Cleaver in Algeria; sabotage; theft and activism; Boston students protesting a lecture by S.I. Hayakawa; Berkeley women take-over of karate class; a Gay Liberation Front protest at a San Francisco radio station; gas masks; women challenging doctors on abortion; sex and sexism; “Are Men Really the Enemy?” exam; John Sinclair release from prison; Palestinian women and armed struggle in Jordan; obscenity trial against Che; women in China; a Stockton, California, housewives strike; poetry; film review of “Prologue…”
R.A.T. Publications, Inc
Roz Payne
Center for Digital Research in the Humanities, University of Nebraska-Lincoln
February 6-23, 1970
underground press
Whose Alternative Media?
Alternative Media
A flyer for an alternative media conference in New York
a coalition of left media groups, including American Documentary Films, Blue Bus, Liberation News Service, New York Media Project, Newsreel, Committee to Defend the Panther 21, Paradigm Records, Rat Subterranean News, The Guardian and Theater of Southpaws
Roz Payne
undated
mimeograph
leaflet
RAT Subterranean News, February 14-20, 1969
New Left
RAT Subterranean News was published in New York, starting in March of 1968 and was edited by Jeff Shero, Alice Embree and Gary Thiher, who had come North from Austin, Texas, where they worked on The Rag, another important underground paper. Whereas the East Village Other represented the counterculture point of view, RAT had a left political orientation. This issue covers a wide range of topics, including a student demonstration in Linden, New Jersey; a protest against Playboy by the Women's Liberation Front at Grinnell College in Iowa; a Yippie reply to Jerry Rubin; and an article with the complete transcript of the indictment against Clay L. Shaw for conspiring to kill John F. Kennedy. A portion of the issue also highlights local poetry readings and includes advertisements for "swinger" services.
R.A.T. Publications, Inc.
Roz Payne
Center for Digital Research in the Humanities, University of Nebraska-Lincoln
February 14-20, 1969
underground press
Rat Subterranean News "Up Against the Wall"
New Left
This button was created by Rat Subterranean News, the second of two major underground newspapers coming out of New York City and features the paper's mascot. Rat was published from 1968-1970. It gained notoriety for its reporting on the siege of Columbia in 1968, the take-over of SDS by the Weather Underground, the Panther 21 trial in New York, the take-over of Alcatraz Island by the American Indian Movement and early ecology reportage. Several Rat contributors were arrested after a series of non-lethal bombings of corporate offices and military targets in late-1969 and the newspaper was overtaken by radical feminists in 1970 because of its sexism. According to an FBI report on the underground newspaper written shortly after its founding, “Only a handful of the papers strike me as having a distinct character, useful, original material, and rich, imaginative writing… The paper, named after the small, tough, and durable rodent of the underground, defined itself in a first anniversary editorial last March as an ‘experiment in participatory journalism.’”
RAT Subterranean News
Roz Payne
Center for Digital Research in the Humanities, University of Nebraska-Lincoln
1968
Button
Physical Object
Crazies
New Left
During the late-1960s, the Crazies was a small, anarchist, New Left cell in lower-Manhattan that included Sam Melville, a former engineering technician known as “the mad bomber”; anti-war activist and writer for RAT, Sharon Krebs; Krebs’ partner, Robin Palmer, an “ex-Navy, ex-porn star, ex-deep-sea diver” turned radical; and, George Demmerle, a FBI informant who called himself “Prince Crazy” and known for wearing a purple cape and pink Roman centurion’s helmet. Members of the Crazies believed it was necessary to “bring the war home” by staging political stunts, instigating disorder and bombings. They were critical of “corporate imperialism,” specifically the US involvement in the Vietnam War, as well as social and racial inequality. They referred to these actions, which were not aimed at taking life but destroying property, as “responsible terrorism,” patterned on the actions of IRA members in Ireland and FLQ members in Canada. Members of the group helped Canadian FLQ members, who had bombed about a dozen targets over a six-month period, including the Montreal Stock Exchange, flee the country and hijack an airplane to Cuba. In 1969, they also infiltrated a $200 a plate political fundraiser at the Waldorf Astoria in New York. Disguised as waiters, Palmer and Krebs stripped naked and presented pigs’ heads on platters to the dining politicians and wealthy donors. Some members of the group also participated in the theft of explosives from a warehouse in the Bronx, which were then used by Melville and others in a series of 8 bombings in New York City in 1969 and 1970, including United Fruit, Chase Manhattan, Standard Oil and an army headquarters, among other sites. Some members of The Crazies were also connected to the Weather Underground and other radical organizations during this period. Sam Melville, who was arrested and imprisoned at Attica, was killed during the Attica Prison Uprising.
The Crazies
Roz Payne
Center for Digital Research in the Humanities, University of Nebraska-Lincoln
late-1960s
Button
Physical Object