The D.U.B. Community Newsroom

Partner Publisher | Common Notions Press, Making Worlds Cooperative, Inti Media and The Philly Download

Freedom’s Ballad features three stories exploring the theme of Freedom Past, Freedom Now, and Freedom to Come, each showcasing how freedom and safety are woven together in Philadelphia’s past, present, and in the community acts that are seeding freer futures. These stories showcase community building and center collective solutions, lived experiences, and the everyday practices that help communities thrive.

Read the stories:

Freedom Past | Resistance to Racism: The Philadelphia Roots
By Linn Washington, Jr.

Freedom Now | Redemption Songs: How Philly Creatives Are Looking to the Past to Dream of the Future
By Cassie Owens

Freedom to Come | Currents Rising: The Lenape’s Invitation to Friendship and Collective Stewardship
By Malav Kanuga with Adam Waterbear DePaul

Freedom’s Ballad is published by Common Notions Press and Making Worlds Cooperative in collaboration with Philadelphia Safer Journalism Project. Contributors include Samdi Ajangri, Jesenia De Moya Correa, Adam Waterbear DePaul, Amba Guerguerian, Malav Kanuga, Cassie Owens, Sydney Rainer, Anuj Shrestha, and Linn Washington, Jr.

The D.U.B. is a community newsroom project, brought to you by Common Notions Press, Making Worlds Cooperative, Inti Media and The Philly Download. Born out of the Philadelphia Safer Journalism Project, the project relies on the power of narrative convergence and encounter, bring together community-led news organizations and publishers to foster news projects and cultural programming that center community information needs.

This broadside was made possible with support from the Philadelphia Safer Journalism Project, The Philly Download and the People’s Media Fund.

Published in the month of Black August; on the anniversary of the Haitian Revolution,the slave revolt led by Nat Turner, the Watts Rebellion, andin memory of George Jackson and Johanna Fernández.

Daniel Tucker
Josh MacPhee

Art & Culture / Abolition / Urban Studies / Partner Publisher

A new 2026 reprint of this zine originally published in 2018, slightly redesigned, some corrections, and better printing!

This issue of Pound the Pavement is a look back on—and documentation of—the God Bless Graffiti Coalition project. The God Bless Graffiti Coalition was a short lived public art project conceptualized by Josh MacPhee and Daniel Tucker, and actualized by an international network of graffiti writers, street artists, and sympathizers in the late 1990s and early 2000s.

Josh MacPhee

Art & Culture / Partner Publisher

In 1962, Penguin Books carried out an unprecedented experiment in Anglophone paperback book cover design. Deploying a new design grid created by Romek Marber, they released a flood of crime and mystery novels wrapped in simple, efficient, green and black covers. An unheralded peak of late-Modernist design, many of these covers still stand out today as some of the most interesting and compelling ever created for Penguin—or any press!

This publication, in which Josh MacPhee tells the history of this design experiment, includes nearly 70 cover reproductions as well as a bibliography and bios of key designers. In addition, it features a 2-sided poster with a giant grids of 128 book covers.

The content draws on earlier research MacPhee had done on the Penguin Crime series for his Judging Books By Their Covers blog post series on Justseeds.

Josh MacPhee

Art & Culture / Social Movements / Partner Publisher

Apartheid? Hell No! is a zine collecting over 100 anti-apartheid graphics from South Africa and the anti-apartheid solidarity movement in the 1980s, and it really feels like there is really no better time to recirculate this treasure box of potent graphics.

I originally found much of this content in an large photocopied document I unearthed from the library of the University of Colorado back in the late 1990s. While I photographed a lot of the imagery, the larger frame for it has been lost to time—I have no documentation of who originally assembled the content, although I suspect it was a grad student project from the late 1980s.

I've collaged the material in a similar manner to my Free Leonard Peltier zine (Pound the Pavement #22) from years back, but have also attributed the content whenever possible.