Images provided by Southwest Collection/Special Collections Library. Digitized by Lynn Whitfield. (The Catalyst, Vol. 1, No. 2)
By Urvi Dalal / The Hub@TTU
Once upon a time, after a famous legal case had confirmed public school students’ freedom of speech, a state university tried to ban the publication of a student newspaper. Surprise: a court trashed the ban!
The year was 1970. The school was Texas Tech University.
The newspaper was called The Catalyst, and its first issue published in 1969 featured on its cover the Lubbock Police Department’s “riot tank.” A couple of years later, Lubbock police used the same or a similar tank to subdue a race uprising in September 1971.
Jon Holmes, 74, a Texas Tech student at the time, took the inaugural cover picture by throwing a blanket over a razor wire and climbing over it to photograph the tank. That image was just the beginning of a stream of content that riled up city and university leaders. Almost everyone involved in the publication was threatened with arrest.
“It was a reign of terror,” Holmes said. “They haunted us constantly.”
Abel Cruz, 69, a retired El Paso resident, agreed the stakes were high. A former Tech student who enrolled in the fall of 1972, he knew some volunteers who feared expulsion from the university.
“It took a helluva a lot of guts,” Cruz said. “The risk to your personal safety, emotional health, and mental health is not a good feeling.”
Images provided by Southwest Collection/Special Collections Library. Digitized by Lynn Whitfield. (The Catalyst, Vol. 1, No. 1)
On its cover, The Catalyst proclaimed itself “a special altruistic project for the long-term benefit of the student body.” The paper’s progressive agenda contrasted the political climate of Lubbock and Texas Tech University, which have frequented various “most conservative” rankings’ top spots.
The newspaper covered controversial topics such as The Vietnam War, drugs, civil rights, politics, racism, women’s reproductive rights, and gay rights.
The Lubbock Avalanche-Journal, Lubbock’s only newspaper at the time, offered limited and racist perspectives, according to Holmes, who is now a writer living in Massachusetts. The Catalyst, along with New Morning and The Activist Forum, was among the few sources of alternative viewpoints.
“Revolution for the hell of it; that was sort of what was going on,” Holmes said. “We were all interested in changing the way America was perceived.”
University officials had attempted to ban The Catalyst because its content was seen as a precursor to violence. The court, however, ruled that “uncrystallized apprehension of disruption cannot overcome the right to free expression.”
Unlike The University Daily (now The Daily Toreador), The Catalyst had a limited support and financial structure, said Lynn Whitfield, a Texas Tech archivist. It was run entirely by volunteers.
Alongside some Texas Tech students, Holmes said, many faculty members and the American Civil Liberties Union also supported the paper.
“People from everywhere and every background came together to do this because they were desperate for any type of information,” Holmes said. “We had to do something to let them know that there was another world.”
Copies of The Catalyst were shared throughout campus and sold on street corners. Donations paid for printing costs.
“It was everywhere,” Cruz said. “We’d read it at the Student Union Building or around campus, and that’s how I got connected to it.”
A 1970 story in The Catalyst described police violence against a local civic leader (Vol. 1, No. 2, page 3).
In addition to members of the university community, the local Chicano movement also had a major stake in The Catalyst. Cruz, a childhood friend of Chicano civic leader Bidal “Billy” Aguero, who was one of the creators of The Catalyst, said the newspaper opened his eyes.
“It influenced me,” Cruz said. “It woke me up. It taught me that there is an alternative here. We don’t have to just sit back and not get involved and not see ourselves.”
He was not alone. Many people growing up in Barrio del Guadalupe, Lubbock’s Hispanic neighborhood devastated by the 1970 tornado, looked up to Aguero, Cruz said—and the civic leader’s work on the paper influenced many who felt part of “an invisible community.”
“Some people might argue that it was irreverent,” Cruz said. “Well, sometimes you need to be irreverent; you need to make a little bit of noise so that people will read you and also see it from a different perspective.”
The students working on The Catalyst and those supporting the Chicano movement had first-hand experiences with feeling rejected and discriminated against.
“When you are one of the very few Chicanos to go to college, you’re going to stand out,” Cruz said. “Our parents would be like ‘Hey, you shouldn’t be doing that; you can get in trouble.’ … You were really stepping out of line, and people don’t like that. The powers at be do not like that.”
Intimidation from city and university leaders only fueled The Catalyst’s volunteers.
“I can’t emphasize this enough—when you grew up in this environment and you want to take a different path than the one that was already charted for you, you’re taking a risk,” Cruz said.
Aguero, for instance, had his arm broken by Lubbock police—an incident documented in a story published by The Catalyst in 1970. The same issue covered the arrest of John Fletcher, the newspaper’s editor at the time, who spent a night in jail during final exams for being in possession of codeine cough syrup and antihistamines prescribed by the Texas Tech infirmary.
“The police found the dangerous drugs cleverly concealed in Fletcher’s medicine cabinet,” the news story noted sarcastically.
In the end, winning the press freedom lawsuit brought by the Channing Club, a Tech student youth group organized by the Unitarian Church, was not enough to keep The Catalyst going.
Whitfield said one of the reasons for The Catalyst’s demise is that volunteers were having a hard time finding shops willing to print the papers.
Holmes said the FBI would go to the printers and ask, “Why are you printing this?” The Catalyst’s staff would then have to move printing from, say, Plainview to Amarillo, and shipping costs kept adding up.
“Every issue we printed had to be printed further away from Lubbock,” Holmes said.
Although The Catalyst stopped publication, Holmes said successors carried on the torch.
“It didn’t all go away because The Catalyst went away,” Holmes said. “But we were beat to our knees.”
Digitized copies of The Catalyst are available from Texas Tech’s Southwest Collections and Special Collections Library, which has 26 issues of the underground newspaper.
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