Set the Night on Fire. Mike Davis
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of the era, and the most successful, was often a voice of reason, albeit a passionate one. A simple comparison of the coverage of the 1965 Watts uprising reveals a great deal. The first day of the riots, the Times front-page headline read “‘Get Whitey,’ Scream Blood-Hungry Mobs” (an “eyewitness account”), accompanied by an “expert” analysis (“Racial Unrest Laid to Negro Family Failure”) and the editorial “Anarchy Must End.”2
The headline in the Freep read “The Negroes Have Voted!”
Freep editor Art Kunkin declared on page one, “It is time to listen to the Negro.” The problem in Watts, he said, wasn’t the breakdown of “law and order,” but rather the old order itself, which in any case was “doomed.” On the front page, a map of Watts was captioned with a quote from Alexis de Tocqueville: “It is always a great crime to deprive a people of its liberty on the pretext that it is using it wrongly.”3
Meanwhile at the Times, the editorial declared that the “criminal terrorism” in the streets of Watts should not be “dismissed … as the inevitable result of economic and sociological pressures.” The Freep instead pointed to root causes: jobs, education, housing, “a super-disaster situation in the Negro ghetto for years,” Kunkin wrote. “The people are fed up with unemployment, with subsistence on government handouts and Bureau of Public Assistance checks.”
The Times called for a governor’s commission to investigate, but said the number one question they should take up was why the National Guard wasn’t called sooner. And, the editors warned, “the commission should be cautious of irresponsible critics of the Los Angeles Police Department and its chief, William H. Parker.”4
It wasn’t just the editorials in the Times; their reporters in Watts—all white, of course—emphasized the threat from “screaming” mobs of Black “wild men,” who were reported to be shouting, “It’s too late, white man. You had your chance. Now it’s our turn”; “Next time you see us we’ll be carrying guns”; and, “We have nothing to lose.” The reporter concluded that the mood of Black people in the streets was “sickening.”5
The Freep, for its part, published reports of the uprising written by Blacks—its most significant contribution. One, on the front page, described a corner where four cops were beating a Black man with billy clubs, as a Black crowd gathered, shouting, “Don’t kill that man!” Then, “the crowd began to attack the officers.” The cops told them, “Go home, niggers.” The crowd grew; “The officers first attempted to fight but then ran away.”6 In the Freep’s reporting, the Blacks’ target was not “whitey” in general; instead they were retaliating against particular LAPD officers who were acting particularly brutally. Kunkin was able to recruit Black writers, he said, because “I did a lot of work with CORE. I built up personal capital in the Black community, so as soon as Watts happened there were people there writing for the paper.”7
The nation’s first and most successful underground paper of the Sixties, the Freep at its peak in 1970 published forty-eight pages every week, had a guaranteed paid circulation of 85,000, and boasted a “faithful readership” estimated at a quarter of a million. At the time, among alternative weeklies, only the Village Voice, started a decade earlier, had more readers. The Freep’s founder, Kunkin, was not a naïve hippie or flower child, but rather an experienced Old Left journalist. When he published the first issue in 1964, he was thirty-five and already a movement elder. A New Yorker who had gone to Bronx High School of Science, he had become a tool and die maker, and—by then a Marxist—joined the Trotskyite Socialist Workers Party (SWP), working at GM and Ford in the Fifties and becoming business manager of the SWP newspaper, the Militant. In the early 1960s he moved to L.A. and, he says, “went back to school to become a history professor.” A faculty member asked whether he wanted to work on a new Mexican-American newspaper, the East LA Almanac. It published eight pages, once a month, 5,000 copies, and was associated with MAPA, the new Mexican American Political Association, headed by Edward Roybal—the first Latino on the LA City Council, and later the first Latino member of Congress from California. “I was the political editor,” Kunkin said, “listed on the masthead as Arturo, and I’m writing about garbage collections in East Los Angeles.” By that time he had left the SWP, joined the less radical Socialist Party, and become its Southern California chairman: “I was working closely with Norman Thomas and with Erich Fromm, the famous psychologist,” he said. “I wrote some resolutions with Erich Fromm against the Democratic Party drift of the Socialist Party.”8
He started planning the Freep in January 1963, after a visit from the FBI. They had read his criticisms of LBJ in the East LA Almanac, and asked whether he was a Communist and whether he could identify names on a list of suspected Communists. He told them he was a socialist and an anti-communist, and that he refused to talk about other people. Two days later, after the FBI visited the East LA Almanac, he was fired. He had long been complaining to friends hanging out at the Sunset Strip coffee shop Xanadu about the Village Voice: while it excelled at covering the hip scene and ran some strong writing, politically it always supported liberal Democrats. People told Kunkin he couldn’t publish a Voice-type independent paper in L.A. because the city had no Greenwich Village; it was too spread out and fragmented, and besides, it would require at least $10,000 to get started. But Kunkin went ahead anyway, looking for financial backers.9
Meanwhile, he became a commentator at KPFK, producing a show called “What I Would Like to Do with a Newspaper in Los Angeles.” That was two weeks before the station’s annual fundraiser, the Renaissance Pleasure Faire. The volunteer in charge of the fair, Phyllis Patterson, told him “I was going to do a paper for the fair, but I didn’t have time to get it together. Maybe you’d like to do a paper for the fair.” So he sold $200 in advertising, printed 5,000 copies of an eight-page paper, and put together a clever front page, reporting on contemporary issues as if they were medieval news: students holding ban-the-crossbow demonstrations, Shakespeare getting arrested for obscenity, a review of an exhibit of the Mona Lisa.
Inside the “Faire” issue, the distinctive logo appeared for the first time: “Los Angeles Free Press,” and real news: a report on a police bust of a theater manager for showing the soon-to-be-legendary Kenneth Anger short Scorpio Rising (gay bikers apparently offended the DA); a story about Joan Baez’s refusal to pay her taxes in protest of the military budget; and some music reviews—along with a statement that the editors wanted to start a paper like the Village Voice and a subscription coupon. They had a couple of thousand copies left when the Faire ended. So, Kunkin says, “I refolded the paper and put the Free Press pages on the outside.” Those were sold mainly at coffee houses on Sunset Strip, and one of them, the Fifth Estate, run by Al Mitchell, let Kunkin use the basement as an office. “I spent the next month writing a business plan and trying to raise $10,000”—but got only $600. “I started the paper with that,” he said. John Bryan, a one-time mainstream journalist who became managing editor of the Free Press before he quit in protest to start his own weekly, Open City, called Kunkin “a disappointed Trotskyist factory organizer.”10 Indeed, it turned out that Kunkin was much better at running a radical weekly in L.A. than at organizing auto workers in Detroit: he published the Freep every week for the next ten years without missing a single issue.11
The first standalone issue of the Freep was dated July 30, 1964. “A New Weekly,” it proclaimed in a front-page statement, “Why We Appear.” Kunkin opened by declaring that while the paper represented no party or group, “we class ourselves … among the liberals.” Of course, Kunkin himself was not a liberal; he had been a member of the SWP and at the time was a leader of the Socialist Party in L.A., which made it a point to criticize liberals. Apparently he thought that L.A. in 1964 was not ready for a paper that criticized liberals from the left. Kunkin did promise that the Freep would be “free enough to print material disagreeing with liberal organizations,” and indeed the paper would start doing that pretty quickly. But at the beginning, Kunkin declared his goal was “to link together the various sections of our far flung liberal community.” He also said “we do not plan to deal