If you’ve spent any time on this website at all, you know one of our primary activities is exploring mid-century tabloids—revisiting the stories, detailing the crimes and scandals, and getting reacquainted with yesteryear’s elite celebs, as well as some almost forgotten fringe personalities. We have, beyond doubt, the most extensive online repository of these tabloids, and the imprints range from exploitative to just plain bizarre. As the 1960s wore on publishers became more diverse in an attempt to capture what marketers like to call niche audiences.
So a tabloid focusing on the black experience finally came into being in the form of It’s Happening, whose slogan was “The news others dare not print.” We’ll soon be able to judge that for ourselves, because we ordered some of these via the trusty international mails and will be getting them soon-ish (unless they disappear into some postal vortex like that last batch of Adams we bought). Anyway, if all goes well you can look forward to some detailed looks at It’s Happening in the months ahead. The above cover, which we found at an online auction site, is from October 1969.
