Black Mask, No. 8

New York: Black Mask, 1967. 10 x 13 in. Offset tabloid; single sheet folded to form [4] pp.

The eighth issue of the short-lived newspaper published by Ben Morea, Osha Neumann, Dan Georgakas, Ron Hahne and others, and distributed on the streets of the Lower East Side in the late 1960s.

Black Mask and their later iteration, the Up Against the Wall Motherfuckers (U.A.W.M.F.), ran free stores and crash pads around the L.E.S., occasionally provided security for the Black Panthers, and engaged in a number of high-profile actions including shutting down the Museum of Modern Art, gathering trash from the Lower East Side and dumping it in front of Lincoln Center during the 1968 Garbage Strike, and cutting the fence at Woodstock. Around the time this issue was released in January 1968, they shot blanks at poet Kenneth Koch, who fainted - audience members reportedly initially thought he had actually been murdered.

The group would dissolve the following year and Morea would go into hiding for several decades, engaging in organizing and activist work somewhere in the Southwest before reemerging in the 21st Century.

Horizontal line from folding; otherwise, near fine.