Black Mask, No. 10

New York: Black Mask, [1968]. 10 x 13 in. Offset tabloid; single sheet folded to form [4] pp.

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

This issue reports on Berlin Dada, prints a letter from prison by H. Rap Brown, and prints an essay by a Black Mask member entitled “Revolution As Being.”

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, cutting the fence at Woodstock, and - around the time of this publication - gathering trash from the Lower East Side and dumping it in front of Lincoln Center during the 1968 Garbage Strike.

The group - which shared an ideological affinity with the Situationists and took inspiration from the philosophy of Wilhelm Reich - 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.

“The garbage heap affectionately called America by some, is disintegrating into its component piles of crap.”

Horizontal line from folding; otherwise, near fine.