Philadelphia Free Press

Originally an unimaginative, pictureless two-page paper, the Free Press grew under doctoral candidate Bill Baggins and his activist staff to a colorful sixteen-page format including coverage of local, state and national movement news.

The Free Press was more political than its local underground competition, the Distant Drummer, which cost 15 cents and was more interested in covering rock 'n' roll than the antiwar movement.

In early 1970 some of the more culturally oriented contributors, including Art Platt, left to form their own rival paper, the Plain Dealer.

The Free Press ran into a number of difficulties due to its Marxist-Leninist revolutionary politics; the paper was repeatedly harassed by the Philadelphia police under Frank Rizzo, in 1969 the paper was banned from Pennsylvania State University for its use of four letter words, Jim Quinn was briefly expelled (and subsequently reinstated) by Temple, and in 1971 Bill Biggin, a Canadian, was deported by the US Department of Justice.

[4][5] The paper closed in 1972, in part a victim of the winding down of the Vietnam War and the decline of student activism on campus.