Fifth Estate 23, February 1-15, 1967 Add to the Bookbuilder

Militant Negro leaders in Detroit have called for a nation-wide strike and boycott by black communities in support of Adam Clayton Powell. Over 600 people attended the rally at Central United Church of Christ on January 24 calling for the boycott.

Comedian Dick Gregory, feature speaker at the rally, called for a “new attitude by Negroes.” He pointed out that while white southern senators were elected illegally and still remain seated, Congressman Powell was ousted because he was black. Gregory also said he would not mind if treatment were equal, but “please, Mr. President, don’t let Bobby Baker take the rap alone.”

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As forecast in the FIFTH ESTATE (Dec. 15–31, 1966) federal, state, and local “narcotic” agents swooped down upon Detroit’s underground community Jan. 24^th to enforce Michigan’s archaic and repressive narcotic statutes. The late night raids resulted in the arrests of 56 persons ranging in ages from 17 to 33 years old.

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A news article in the January 21, 1967 MICHIGAN CHRONICLE, a Detroit Negro paper, reported their paper had received several phone calls complaining about the use of the word “nigger” in an anti-draft display at Wayne University.

The display, sponsored by the Wayne chapter of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), outlined different alternatives to the draft including conscientious objection (CO) and going to Canada. Also, the display suggested potential draftees could “cop out” by displaying erratic or disagreeable behavior at the induction center.

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THE POEM FOR WARNER STRINGFELLOW

OCTOBER, 1966

Detective Lieutenant, Detroit Narcotics Squad, who has been single-handedly responsible for busting me on two separate occasions for possessing & selling marijuana

and who stumbled into my new apartment last night by accident

over a year since the last time he saw me

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So you think the Michigan Chronicle, Detroit’s only Negro newspaper, is conservative, its green color reflecting its primary purpose of making money rather than informing the community?

How does the idea of a Negro paper published by a white racist, who may have John Birch Society money behind him, grab you?

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“Why the Dearborn Referendum?” was the subject of a talk given by Dearborn Mayor Orville Hubbard at St. Joseph’s Episcopal Church, January 26.

The lecture was presented by Citizens for Peace in Vietnam as part of their Spring educational series. Other speakers will include William Pepper, who wrote the article in the January Ramparts on U.S. napalm effects on Vietnamese children and Harrison Salisbury of the New York Times, who recently returned from Hanoi.

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In his recently published book FOUR LIVES IN THE BEBOP BUSINESS, A.B. Spellman relates that Buell Neidlinger, former bassist with Cecil Taylor, told him: “I think Cecil Taylor is potentially the most important musician in the Western World ... And I’m basing this,” the “legitimately” trained Neidlinger went on, “on my experience with some of the very best of the new composers and the new orchestras ... Cecil has it, to my mind, clearly above all of them.”

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Special to the Fifth Estate

San Francisco — Hippies, Hippies, Hippies, and when you turn around, more of them were sitting on the grass, perched on fences, standing on benches, straining for a look, or entwined on the ground.

People carrying odd pennants, flags and signs, seeing colored smoke bombs going off. People dropping into the crowd by parachute, souls filing through the crowd handing out L.S.D., others handing out sticks of incense.

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Once, one approached Truffaut with satiate expectancy, awaiting only to be chewed up and spat upon beneath the marquee. In stark wonderment and in bitter tears one expected to be engulfed by the pleasures of cinema at its best. The mystery about him is depleted and this precious auteur now rates the same scrutiny as his far western brothers with only a slightly higher handicap. His reputation has been defiled through the medium of “Farenheit 451,” Truffaut’s latest endeavor, from the novel of the same name by Ray Bradbury.

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James Dickey, in his delightful book of essays The Suspect in Poetry, distinguishes four main ways of reacting to poems which are worth repeating as they may be applicable to film.

In ascending order of importance they are 1) “This probably isn’t so, and even if it were I could-not care less,” 2) “This may be true enough as far as it goes, but well ... so what? 3) “This is true or at least convincing, and therefore I respond to it differently than I do to poems in the first two categories, and 4) “This is true with a kind of truth at which I could never have arrived by myself, but its truth is better than the one I had believed.”

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I have never talked with anyone knowledgeable about Harlem affairs who does not believe that Esther James, the woman who sued Adam Clayton Powell for libel, was a bag woman as the Congressman had called her.

The problem is that in order to prove it, since the defense against libel is the truth, Adam Clayton Powell would have had to produce witnesses willing to testify about corruption in the New York Police Department. Where is the policeman who is willing to admit that he took the payments from Esther James? Or that the N.Y. police department runs the numbers racket in Harlem? So when Esther James admitted on the witness stand, as she did that she was a police informer, that in itself was a tacit admission that she was a bag woman.

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I mistrust people who smoke pot loudly. Bragging, yelling, telling.

I don’t think it’s wrong to turn new people on. I’d just never thought of trying to sell marijuana in mass form. It seemed that LEMAR was trying to prove that psychedelics were safe “for the whole family.” I think they’re right, only I instinctively shrink away from anyone trying to lay something on me. American TV commercials did that to me.

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America—the world—lives in a period of transition of its entire way of life. On the one hand we live in utter confusion and yet on the other we are beginning to see the immense possibilities that are now available to us to construct a HUMAN society, a society in which man will be released from thousands of years of struggle and toil he has put himself to. Moreover, we live in a period of great spiritual discovery. We find ourselves at the beginning of a human epoch that will see each of us—all men—MAN flower into the beautiful creative animal he is.

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Saturday night, January 14, at the Meadow Brook Theater was a Brechtian evening in more ways than one. A youthfully middle-aged audience, whose appearance and intermission conversation would have been classified by Brecht as bourgeois, reacted enthusiastically to a first-rate production of his ‘The Caucasian Chalk Circle.’ Despite the fact that it was an opening play for a new company, it was in some respects better than the production by the Lincoln Center Repertory Theater in New York last year.

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Councilman Nicholas Hood’s recent “anti-crime” breakfast of Negro “leaders” may have been a lot more clever than one would think at first glance.

This writer’s first reaction was: What kind of crap is this—that, according to Hood, “Negroes should utilize the same energies devoted to the civil rights movement to the fight against crime.”

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A series of free entertainment on Friday nights has been organized at Wayne State University by a group of students known as the Friday Night Coordinating Committee (FNCC)

On February 3 there will be a classical music concert at Community Arts Aud., at 8:00, presenting Dr. & Mrs. Hockberg of the Wayne State University School of Music.

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The New Age of man finds more and more people interested in living together for the mutual benefit of one another’s growth and development.

While many communes have been set up in the past they have generally been of limited success. Despite all the difficulties that one encounters in communal living it is the belief of many that it is only through such living together and the sharing of lives that man can achieve his maximum potential.

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I want to compliment you on the very fine article which you co-authored in the January 1 through 15, 1967, issue of the Fifth Estate [“Spare the Rod…?” FE #21, January 1–15, 1967]. I think that it was a well written article which discussed and documented very well the kinds of problems we have around corporal punishment here in the Detroit Public School system.

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In a sermon on Anti-Semitism on January 22, the Rev. David M. Gracie, St. Joseph’s Episcopal Church, called for stronger measures against Breakthrough, a local right-wing group, and its various disguises, better protection of community groups against their “disruption, harassment and embarrassment,” and “prosecution (of them) with at least as much zeal as was shown in the Hobart Street trespass case.”

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The floodlights and the TV cameras swung around in a wide arc to survey the results of a question asked from the podium. The question: “How many of you are willing right now to stand up and say you’re not willing to go and fight in Viet Nam?” In answer, more than one-half the 150 in the audience rose to their feet.

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On Wednesday, January 18, the Ann Arbor Police Department confiscated Jack Smith’s film FLAMING CREATURES during a showing to 300 college students, hippies, and film buffs. This was, we suppose, an attempt to protect these people from having to see things that they weren’t supposed to see.

It was a very subtle bust, actually. Everyone was sitting there watching the film when the screen went black and the lights came up. There was confusion for a few minutes, people wondering if the film was over or what.

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