Aware of political surveillance, early on in the paper's history, staff voted to remove the staff masthead for security reasons but not until after the paper's contributors became known to the FBI and local police. ''Berkeley Tribe's
two editorial and production offices, located on old Grove Street, were firebombed and subjected to sniper fire on several occasions during its publication heyday in the late 1960s. Tribe
staff were forced into self-defensive measures, barricading its taped windows with double stacks of unsold issues to protect working employees. Other underground press around the country were in similar danger; in May 1972 the offices of The Great Speckled Bird'' in Atlanta were destroyed by firebombs; and
Space City News in Houston was also firebombed. By the time
Tribe formed, students and residents had organized
People's Park. The final issue of the pre-strike
Berkeley Barb publicized this new movement as
Let a Thousand Parks Bloom, a play on Chinese premier Chairman
Mao Zedong's dictum in
The Little Red Book, over Scherr's objections and, in part setting the stage for the mass staff walkout.
Tribe carried the public banner and cause of People's Park from that point forward. In May, prior to the founding of the
Tribe, collaborative work between students, residents and Barb staff culminated in the planting of People's Park on nearby vacant University property. This
expropriation of property was counterpoint to the earlier
eminent domain process the university had initiated in 1967 as part of its campus expansion plans; bound with this novel dialectical approach to community-University relations were the continuing issues of
free speech and neighborhood services (from which the community control of police election issue would arise). During violent confrontations with local police over the next few days, 128 students were reported shot; one student,
James Rector, was killed and another (Alan Blanchard) blinded by a shotgun blast. At one point, the campus was overflown with helicopters dispensing airborne tear gas. The local sheriff,
Frank Madigan admitted that some of his deputies (many of whom were Vietnam War veterans) had been overly aggressive in their pursuit of the protesters, acting "as though they were
Viet Cong". Riots during the long hot summers of 1969 and 1970, along with the
Kent State killings and shootings at
Jackson State, assassinations of
Black Panther Party members and growing national unrest over the
Vietnam War consumed the editorial staff, who printed issue after provocative issue in reaction. It was after one polemical issue that Berkeley police used pepper gas on the offices of
Tribe injuring staff members. As with many underground and alternative publications,
Berkeley Tribe was graveyard-produced with new issues delivered mid-week. Political direction and advertising policy was determined by a three-person editorial board who acted as co-editors-in-chief, rotating semi-annually by majority vote of
Tribe staff. Many of the paper's articles consisted of wry commentaries on war, civil rights, politics, police and city government and other social justice issues of the day. Each issue averaged 36–48 pages (its largest edition) with about 55% of page space devoted to display advertising, the bread and butter of all newspapers, daily or weekly. The newspaper published a weekly barometer of drug prices around the country and the world, which was syndicated through the Underground Press Syndicate, as well as recipes for
Molotov cocktails, later reprinted in
The Anarchist Cookbook, and tele
phone hacking, also reprinted in
Steal This Book. Interleaved with editorial diatribes, news reporting, drug prices and anarchist recipes were cartoons by
Robert Crumb and
Gilbert Shelton including
serials from
Zap Comix. In late 1969, some record companies (
Capitol and
Columbia Records) began to cancel display advertising contracts and
Berkeley Tribe started losing $7,000 in monthly revenue, making it more difficult to make $1100 weekly payments to their printer. In the meantime, a sharp drop in readership occurred with sales plummeting from a high-point of 60,000 copies to 29,000 in the space of a single month in November, according to
Tribe business manager Lionel Haines. and, finally, a highly controversial cover --
Blood of a Pig—creating yet another schism and the departure of the majority of editorial staff in protest of the newspaper's new militancy,
feminist tilt and pro-
Weatherman stance. A few weeks earlier the newspaper's front page consisted of a single quotation in large type from
Ronald Reagan (at that time governor of California): "If it takes a bloodbath, let's get it over with" and Governor Rhodes responded with bullets in Ohio.
Berkeley Tribe continued publishing through mid-1972 but, by the end, arcane North Korean style revolutionary political jargon had come to dominate the
underground newspaper, alienating much of ''Tribe's'' former audience. == Radical feminism, male chauvinism and staff divisions ==