The Berkeley Tribe was a radical counterculture underground newspaper published in Berkeley, California from 1969 to 1972. After a staff dispute with publisher Max Scherr split the Berkeley Barb in July 1969, about 40 members of the Barb staff resigned and started the Tribe as a rival paper, after putting out a one-shot issue called Barb on Strike. They called themselves the Red Mountain Tribe, after a favorite brand of cheap California wine. The Tribe quickly positioned itself as both more radical and more countercultural than Scherr's Barb, and was initially successful, with a circulation of 53,000 copies. The Tribe was published weekly from its first issue in July, 1969 until February 1972, when it went biweekly for its final issues, folding in May.[1] Like the Barb it was sold on the streets of San Francisco and Berkeley by hippie street vendors. It belonged to both the Underground Press Syndicate and the Liberation News Service.
One of the paper's early managers was Lee Felsenstein, a Barb staffer who had joined the general exodus to form the Tribe. Felsenstein later left to return to UC Berkeley and finish his degree in engineering, becoming one of the inventors of the personal computer.[2]
In November 1969, record companies began to withdraw their advertising and the Tribe lost $17,000 a month in revenue, making it difficult to pay both their printers and their street vendors. In the meantime a sharp drop in readership occurred, with sales plummeting from 60,000 copies to 29,000 in the space of a single month in November, according to Tribe business manager Lionel Haines.[3] This was followed by a staff split in December, with about 14 of the more pacifistic, culturally oriented hippie staff leaving, after a fight with the more confrontational New Left staff who were pushing to make the paper more political, along the lines of the Weather Underground. The reorganized staff published communiques from the Weathermen and a special Black Panthers edition. In the 6 March 1970, issue the Tribe informed its readers in a collective editorial that the time had come to "pick up the gun" to combat police and military oppression, urging its Berkeley readers to buy weapons and form "People's Militia" units for self-defense.[4][5][6] A few weeks later the newspaper's front page consisted of a single quotation in large type from Ronald Reagan (at that time governor of California): "If it takes a bloodbath, let's get it over with." The Tribe continued publishing until 1972, but by the end the arcane, jargon-ridden North Korean style[7] revolutionary politics that by then dominated the paper had alienated much of the Tribe's former audience.