digATL | The Digital Atlanta Portal

The Great Speckled Bird was one of several underground newspapers that appeared in the United States in the 1960s. Published in Atlanta from 1968 to 1976, The Bird, as it was commonly known, was a new, radical voice from the South. The Bird stood out among the alternative press for the quality of its writing, its cover art and its fearless opinions and reporting on a range of topics—national and local politics, the counterculture, women’s issues, gay liberation, reproductive choice, music, art, and more. This Digital Collection includes items from the following collections: all issues of The Great Speckled Bird, including revival issues from 1984-1985 and 2006, digitized from physical copies in The Southern Labor Periodicals Collection; interviews with former staff members of the underground newspaper taken from The Great Speckled Bird Oral History Project Collection; images of Atlanta and its people from the Tom Coffin Photographic Collection. Coffin, a founding member of The Great Speckled Bird and life-long photographer, supplemented his work on the paper with photographs of the counter-culture in the 1960s and 1970s.