Pittsburgh Fair Witness
Encyclopedia
Pittsburgh Fair Witness was a radical counterculture underground newspaper
Underground press
The underground press were the independently published and distributed underground papers associated with the counterculture of the late 1960s and early 1970s in the United States, Canada, United Kingdom, and other western nations....

 published in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
Pittsburgh is the second-largest city in the US Commonwealth of Pennsylvania and the county seat of Allegheny County. Regionally, it anchors the largest urban area of Appalachia and the Ohio River Valley, and nationally, it is the 22nd-largest urban area in the United States...

 from 1970 to 1973. The first 9 monthly issues were published starting in February 1970 under the title Grok. Beginning with vol. 1, no. 10 (Nov. 4-25, 1970) the title was changed to Pittsburgh Fair Witness and the paper shifted to publication once every three weeks; starting with the Dec. 3-17, 1971 issue it published on a biweekly schedule until its demise with vol. 4, no. 6 (June 1973). The PFW was staff-owned and published by a collective that called itself "The Commune." An editorial published in the May 26, 1972 issue under the heading "Our Rap" gives the paper's statement of purpose:
The Fair Witness is published by a non-profit collective and is dedicated to the worldwide movement of people to control themselves—the movement to break down the authoritarian systems of government that are denying us our basic freedoms, that are responsible for needless genocidal wars, the perpetration of minority discrimination, the pollution of our environment and our bodies, the high concentration of power among the wealthy classes, exploitation of the individual, etc. The paper is dedicated to the struggle of all peoples to gain back the right to their own lives, the struggle to raise the consciousness of the world as a whole, the struggle to become independently productive through a working knowledge of the tools at our disposal. As a local paper our most important function concerns the movement here in western Pennsylvania.


The two titles Grok and Fair Witness are both references to the novel Stranger in a Strange Land
Stranger in a Strange Land
Stranger in a Strange Land is a 1961 science fiction novel by American author Robert A. Heinlein. It tells the story of Valentine Michael Smith, a human who comes to Earth in early adulthood after being born on the planet Mars and raised by Martians. The novel explores his interaction with—and...

by Robert A. Heinlein, a popular touchstone of the 1960s hippie counterculture.
To "grok
Grok
To grok is to intimately and completely share the same reality or line of thinking with another physical or conceptual entity. Author Robert A. Heinlein coined the term in his best-selling 1961 book Stranger in a Strange Land. In Heinlein's view, grokking is the intermingling of intelligence that...

" is a form of deep holistic comprehension of any thing or situation (similar to hippie/beatnik slang "dig"); while a "Fair Witness" is a (fictional) service provided by a sort of hired court reporter with an eidetic memory who serves as a bonded eyewitness at any proceeding.

Contents of the Fair Witness were the usual 1960s underground press mix of underground comix
Underground comix
Underground comix are small press or self-published comic books which are often socially relevant or satirical in nature. They differ from mainstream comics in depicting content forbidden to mainstream publications by the Comics Code Authority, including explicit drug use, sexuality and violence...

 (some originating locally in the Fair Witness; others like Crumb, Bode, etc. distributed nationally through the Alternative Features Syndicate), film, music, and book reviews, coverage of drugs, the occult, New Left and antiwar political activism, the Women's Liberation movement, ecology, etc.; along with local advertising and event and switchboard listings. It was a member of the Underground Press Syndicate
Underground Press Syndicate
The Underground Press Syndicate, commonly known as UPS, and later known as the Alternative Press Syndicate or APS, was a network of countercultural newspapers and magazines formed in mid-1966 by the publishers of five early underground papers: the East Village Other, the Los Angeles Free Press, the...

 and the Liberation News Service
Liberation News Service
Liberation News Service was a New Left, Underground press news service which published news bulletins from 1967 to 1981.-History:The Liberation News Service was co-founded in the summer of 1967 by Ray Mungo and Marshall Bloom after the two of them were separated from the United States Student...

. A typical tabloid sized issue ran to about 24 pages and sold for 25 cents.

The Fair Witness was distributed throughout the western Pennsylvania area and locally through a network of about a hundred local shops (head shops, co-ops, record stores, boutiques, book stores, natural food stores, etc.) and was sold on the street by hawkers who kept a dime for every 25 cent copy they sold, picking up bundles for street distribution at The Free People's Store, a co-op on Meyron Avenue in Oakland.
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