'70s | New Journalism Project

ISBN 978-1-4357-7113-0

Edited by Alice Embree and Carlos Lowry

New Journalism Project Publishing is proud to announce the publication of Collected Art of Solidarity: Austin, Texas, 1974-89. This 96-page book features color reproductions of posters and leaflets that highlight the diversity of activism in Austin, Texas in the 1970s.

Austin, Texas was a hotbed of progressive organizing in the 1970s. Women, lesbians, and gays targeted sexism and homophobia and created new organizations and alternative institutions. The Brown Berets organized against police violence, the Town Lake boat races, and gentrification of vibrant East Side neighborhoods. The Austin Committee for Human Rights in Chile defended human rights in that country, exposed the horrors of the military dictatorship, and protested U.S. complicity with the Chilean coup.

The editors felt fortunate to have participated in much of this insurgency, as printers and designers of leaflets and posters. Fly By Night Printing Collective, and its later incarnation, Red River Women’s Press, allowed us to spread messages of solidarity with printed material and colorful silk-screened posters that marked major events. The union bug of Red River Women’s Press is visible on much of this work. Other artists contributed their talents and are credited in the captions for this collection.

This is not a comprehensive collection of artwork. It is gathered from material the editors have collected, leaflets and posters we had a hand in creating. Some of this material has an archival home with the University of Texas Briscoe Center for American History.

Edited by Thorne Dreyer, Alice Embree, Cam Duncan, and Sherwood Bishop

ISBN: 978-1-312-16267-9

New Journalism Project is proud to announce its new book, Exploring Space City!: Houston’s Historic Underground Newspaper. A companion to Celebrating The Rag published in 2016, Exploring Space City! is a 376-page exploration of Houston’s groundbreaking publication to be released December 7, 2021. In the words of historian Robert Cottrell, “This lovingly crafted compilation captures the spirit of the New Left and the counterculture.” Purchase the book at Lulu.com.

Space City! was an underground newspaper published in Houston from June 5, 1969 to August 3, 1972. Though it was relatively short-lived, the paper – which was continually under assault from the Ku Klux Klan – was widely acknowledged to be one of the very best of the ’60s-70s underground newspapers that had significant impact on mainstream journalism. Space City! covered news not otherwise reported and helped pull together a widespread and diverse countercultural and New Left community in Houston.

Exploring Space City! features both articles and artwork from the original Space City! as well as essays written specifically for the book by its editors and others, designed to look back on the historical importance of the paper and to add contemporary perspective. The original Space City! included coverage of Black, Chicano, and white activists, the police shooting of Black leader Carl Hampton, the war in Vietnam and the movement against it, and the women’s and gay movements. And the paper did in-depth power structure research on who rules Houston, and extensive coverage of the cultural scene with features on Janis Joplin and Muhammad Ali and more. And it’s all in the book.