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INTRODUCTION
The sixties and seventies were a time of great cultural, social, and political change in the United States. Events including civil rights demonstrations, anti-war protests, environmental movements, and gender rights sparked activism among students and young people across the country. In order for American youth to mobilize, they turned to alternative media outlets to disseminate information about their causes. The Great Speckled Bird (commonly referred to as The Bird) was an example of such an alternative newspaper that was published in Atlanta, Georgia from 1968-1976 and reported on student and youth activism concerning the Vietnam War, LGBTQ issues, race, environmental matters, and corporate and political corruption.
The Bird serves as an important historical record of student activism in Atlanta and the Southeast during the sixties and seventies. Historiographical focus on student and youth demonstrations during the mid-twentieth century "perceive the United States as a cultural entity defined by the West Coast and Northeastern seaports, with points in between consisting of Ann Arbor, Chicago, and Madison" (Heineman 1993, 4). As a result, there has been "little interest in exploring the rest of the country, let alone examining less prestigious universities and their communities" (Zaroulis and Sullivan 1984, 77). Although Zaroulis and Sullivan (1984) contend that Southern cities were "hardly hotbeds of radicalism for speeches outside of Washington," (77), Jeffrey Turner (2010) argues that the South was "the epicenter of a national debate over fundamental moral and political issues" such as racial segregation, voting, education reform, and political enfranchisement on the local, state, and federal levels (5). As a result, analysis of The Bird's reporting of these issues, as well as the response to these reports by local and school officials, can provide deeper insights about the role students in Southern cities such as Atlanta had in participating in major social movements during the 1960s and 1970s.
Through examination of the Georgia State University Labor Archive's digitized collection of The Bird and oral history interviews with paper founders and staffers, the purpose of this research is to analyze how articles in The Great Speckled Bird serve as a historiographical record of student and youth activism in Atlanta, Georgia and the Southeast during its publication run from 1968-1976 and examine how matters concerning free speech in mainstream...