As we prepare for Black Space Agency Youth Housing Visioning Session on April 22, 2018 with Youth HEALers, we reflect on the all but forgotten history/memory of DIG THIS NOW, a newspaper created by #NorthPhilly youth gangs in 1968 with help from a Temple student. After a particularly bad wave of violence between rival youth gangs and shortly after the Columbia Ave riots, the gangs called a truce and the newspaper was started to document life in their community and gang life. One of the gangs involved would open a branch of Dig This called Hip City that included articles on how to stop the violence. Dig This Now is a potent example of how powerful Black youth can be and always have been as forces of change and how they have addressed issues we continue to deal with, such as gentrification and displacement and how they were able to connect it to the violence of survival in disinvested communities. | archival images via Temple Digital Archives, found photos, and Philadelphia Inquirer
| archival images via Temple Digital Archives and Philadelphia Inquirer