On the cover of the June 15, 1972 issue, Space City! staffers put on their finest for a photo marking the paper’s third anniversary. Thorne Dreyer, who helped found and edit the paper, is seated in a chair in the center.
At 2:30 a.m., June 8, 1971, artist Kerry Fitzgerald was standing at his drawing table working on an elaborate quasi-psychedelic cartoon for the next issue of Space City!, Houston’s underground newspaper, when night riders shot several steel pellets into an upstairs office from a passing car, barely missing Kerry. As Space City! reported it, “Kerry hit the floor until the shooting was over, and then calmly resumed his work.”
The night riders had their own version of an “underground newspaper.” An occasional mimeographed throwaway called the Rat Sheet — published by the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan — often compiled and distributed names and addresses of those it considered to be “enemies.” The Rat Sheet called Space City! “a vulgar… hippie-type newspaper filth sheet,” and revealed that it “had reason to believe that these misfits, biocruds, and outpourings of a cesspool, are now using their money to stockpile arms and ammunition with which to instigate a revolution.”
Hate groups, it’s worth recalling, had ways of spreading their messages well before the advent of the internet.
Looking back, what can we learn from this history? I was a founder of Space City! and, to be honest, the world’s changed so much that I’m not sure of the answer. Our country today is as divided it was in the ‘60s and ‘70s, with the added element of delusionary conspiracy theories, a rejection of science as a basis for understanding the world, and an inability to agree on the most basic facts. Politics is sharply divided — as it was then — with the inability of the two parties to agree on almost anything and with one party marked by fear-mongering and cowardice and the other by a lack of backbone. Maybe that’s where the old underground newspapers can offer two key lessons: Don’t be afraid and don’t isolate yourselves.
One night, Space City! staffer Sherwood Bishop — who lived in the newspaper’s office — was looking out the upstairs window when he saw police cars pull up on each side of the house. Then a car moved in between them and stopped in front of the office. The driver thrust a crossbow out the window and shot an arrow into the front door. It had a sticker that said, “The Knights of the Ku Klux Klan is Watching You.”
The Klan bombed the Space City! offices, firebombed a car on the street, shot up businesses that advertised in the paper, and once drove by and shot bullets over the heads of a group sitting on the steps outside. Space City! wasn’t the only target. Pacifica radio’s transmitter was bombed off the air twice by Klansmen who were later indicted for the acts. A local peace activist, Fred Brode, covered the façade of his house with sandbags, because it was shot up so many times.
The local Klan also shot bullets into my parents’ art gallery, Dreyer Galleries, run by my artist mother Margaret Dreyer and her husband Martin, a reporter and feature writer for the Houston Chronicle. My parents opposed the War in Vietnam, supported human rights and exhibited the work of Black artists. A special issue of the Rat Sheet called the Dreyers, including yours truly, the “Infamous Dreyer Rats.”
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As far as Martin Dreyer was concerned, the Rat Sheet said to “look for the most ultra-lib or leftist-slanted article the Houston Chronicle has to offer in its Texas Magazine. About “little Thorne,” the Rat Sheet was concise: “Now here’s a rat if there ever was one.”
National publications like Newsweek and the New York Times finally reported on the Klan’s exploits in Houston, bringing embarrassment to the city’s reactionary leadership. Newsweek referred to it as a “civil war.” The magazine’s Hugh Aynesworth wrote, “Not surprisingly, the beleaguered leftists are coming to regard the police as much a part of the enemy as the Klan.” Warren White, Harris County assistant district attorney at the time, denied any collusion between the police and the Klan.
A newly published book I edited with Alice Embree, Cam Duncan, and Sherwood Bishop, “Exploring Space City!: Houston’s Historic Underground Newspaper,” features more than 100 articles and classic artwork from the original paper, as well as contemporary essays that tell the story of one of the most important of the ‘60s-‘70s alternative publications. But the book is also a cautionary tale, with its many parallels to our society 50 years later.
The underground press — or at least the best of it — provided conscience in the face of the corporate-dominated mainstream media, holding it accountable for its failings, including its lack of — or one-sided — coverage of Vietnam and other important issues and movements in the burgeoning counterculture.
"Exploring Space City!: Houston's Historic Underground Newspaper," edited by Thorne Dreyer, Alice Embree, Cam Duncan, and Sherwood Bishop and published by Austin's New Journalism Project, is being released at an informal gathering Saturday, December 11, 3- 6 p.m., at Johnny McElroy's Irish Pub & Patio, 1223 Waugh Drive in the Montrose area. It includes cartoons and design work of Bill Narum, Gilbert Shelton, Kerry Fitzgerald, Trudy Minkoff, and cultural coverage with features on Janis Joplin, Jane Fonda, Muhammad Ali, and the Rolling Stones.
Space City! reported on the right-wing vigilantes and on conservative leadership in Houston politics, and did extensive power structure research to document who ran the city, its major corporations and its universities. And it reported on police brutality, especially against the Black and Chicano communities, and brought into strong focus by the police killing of the city’s most charismatic Black leader, Carl Hampton.
The paper covered the second-class citizenship of women and the emergence of the Women’s Liberation Movement — and supported a woman’s right to reproductive justice. (Space City! was also run by an editorial collective equally divided between women and men.) The paper reported on a society sharply divided over the Vietnam War and it covered an emerging progressive movement in the Democratic Party. All of which have reverberations today.
There are some parallels between the underground papers — which eventually numbered in the hundreds with a combined readership in the millions, according to historian John McMillian — and today’s internet news shops. The internet offers outlets to voices less heard and can get news out lickety-split. But the underground papers were collective operations and served as community centers and organizing foci, while the internet tends to isolate its workers, with little sense of community. Facebook now serves as the internet’s lowest common denominator.
We are losing newspapers by the droves — and those that continue to exist do so with skeleton staffs, virtually no bureaus, and scarce local coverage. We might learn a lot from Space City! and the underground press that could help us in these trying times.
We didn’t just “post content.” The paper helped cultivate community and counterculture institutions like high school underground papers, a drug crisis center, a community switchboard, a free university, and a community-run rock ‘n roll club called Of Our Own — and worked with anti-war GIs.
Of course, we only lasted three and a half years but as Kaye Northcutt, the former editor of the Texas Observer wrote in her blurb for the new book, “Space City! could hardly have chosen three more momentous and disturbing years in Houston on which to report so incisively. Klan, culture, police misconduct, misprision of justice, women’s lib, Latino lib, high school lib, the new assertiveness of Vietnam vets, Roe on the horizon.” She adds, “In retrospect, it seems like politics was moving in the right direction. I wish I could say the same now.”
We have every reason to be worried about the future of this country. But Space City! showed how a courageous low-budget news operation with a largely volunteer staff, can stand up to the powers that be — including those in sheets and hoods — and work effectively for positive change.
Thorne Dreyer, a Houston native, was a founder of underground newspapers The Rag in Austin in 1966 and Space City! in Houston in 1969. Dreyer was an editor of “Celebrating The Rag” and “Exploring Space City!” His book, “Making Waves: The Rag Radio Interviews” will be published by the Briscoe Center for American History, University of Texas Press, early next year.
“Exploring Space City!: Houston’s Historic Underground Newspaper,” edited by Thorne Dreyer, Alice Embree, Cam Duncan, and Sherwood Bishop and published by Austin’s New Journalism Project, is being released at an informal gathering Saturday, December 11, 3- 6 p.m., at Johnny McElroy’s Irish Pub & Patio, 1223 Waugh Drive in the Montrose area. It includes cartoons and design work of Bill Narum, Gilbert Shelton, Kerry Fitzgerald, Trudy Minkoff, and cultural coverage with features on Janis Joplin, Jane Fonda, Muhammad Ali, and the Rolling Stones.
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