Fifth Estate 61, Sept. 5-18, 1968 Add to the Bookbuilder

Chicago and the Democratic Convention were the end of a fantasy trip. The last illusion that social change could be brought about through popular pressure on the Democratic Party was shattered beneath the clubs of Daley’s pigs and the manipulations of the Humphrey political machine.

The Party has shown itself for what it is—a cynical, corrupt political tool of a power elite working behind a military shield to prevent any popular interference with its operation.

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photo by the real Dr. Squat

Indignation over the “Battle of Chicago” created one of the largest demonstrations held in Detroit in quite a while.

Called by the Detroit Coalition, a rally was held in Kennedy Square on August 29. Over 400 people attended even though only several hours’ notice had been given. Many stopped on their way from work to picket.

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KILLEEN, TEXAS—More than 160 black soldiers from Fort Hood refused to take part in riot control operations in Chicago.

The rebellion—the largest in recent U.S. military history—began the night of August 23 at the Texas base. Approximately 100 black GIs from the 1^st Battalion, 41^st Infantry Brigade, First Armored Division, staged a sit-down demonstration to protest their orders to fly to Chicago the next day.

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Fifth Estate

A Newspaper Of Detroit

EDITORS

Harvey Ovshinsky

Peter Werbe

EDITORIAL ASSISTANT

Cathy West

CIRCULATION

Tommye Wiese

NEWS EDITOR

Alan Gotkin

MUSIC EDITORS

Tony Reay

John Sinclair

OFFICE MANAGER

Debbie Quigg

PHOTO EDITOR

Mike Tyre

ART DIRECTION

Blallen

ADVERTISING

Gunnar Lewis

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Editors’ Note: The Fifth Estate contains virtually no news coverage of the Battle of Chicago. For once the overground media did its job and to repeat the horror stories here would only be redundant. Rather, we feel that it is important to put the Chicago events within a perspective and provide an analysis of the events that occurred.

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Quite a time these last few weeks. Most of our full-time staff went to Pig City and returned without injury or arrest. Still, just being there and seeing what happened to our brothers and sisters gave us a real shot in the arm in terms of our commitment to change this society. We want people in control of their own lives instead of pigs.

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Each step in a revolutionary’s development is a result of a definite experience. The role of a revolutionary is forced on the man, the man who knows the truth and can do nothing but live it. Gaining this truth is the hardest part of the development, the continual struggle for truth; the truth may come early or late in life or it may never come at all, but until it comes the man struggles, he struggles with his fellow man, but most of all he struggles with himself, and he never seems to know why he always loses.

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The London Times reports sadly that Britain isn’t yet equipped to “‘retaliate quickly” against an enemy who attacks with germ warfare. As long as nationalistic feelings prevail over humanitarian ones there’ll always be this chess game with expendable lives by leaders who remain safely above it all....The U.S. Embassy has been replaced by the Hilton Hotel and the Playboy Club as top targets for stone-throwing anti-American demonstrators... A man who received a civil honor, the MBE, for “services to sport” (giving rent-free premises to an Olympic team) has been requested to return the award after being convicted (of perjury) in a court case: Establishing the principle, of course, that you’re judged by your future activities rather than your past...

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To those of you tenderly under 20: imagine, if you dare, that tomorrow you could no longer obtain records anywhere. Imagine that all the record stores were suddenly boarded up. Imagine that all of your records and tapes have mysteriously disappeared, your stereo is missing, and that it is now impossible to gain access to music anywhere in the world. Pretend, for a moment, that all the musicians everywhere have suddenly left without notice!

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Detroiters made out fairly well in “The Battle of Chicago” with a minimum of casualties and arrests. At this writing the only known arrests were Sue Wender, of People Against Racism, Dan Hodak and an unidentified member of Youth for Peace Freedom and Justice. All were released on bond.

Hard hit, though, was people’s property. Frank Joyce, National Director of PAR, returned to his car to find it had been completely demolished by flames. It was parked half a block from a pig station and had visible quantities of peace literature in the back seat.

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ANN ARBOR—The Peace and Freedom Party nominated Eldridge Cleaver as its Presidential candidate August 18^th at the Party’s national convention.

The selection of a Vice-presidential candidate will be up to each state or combination of states, because the Convention as a whole could not unite behind a national Vice-presidential candidate despite Cleaver’s proposal that Jerry Rubin fill that spot on the ticket.

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David Wheeler, chairman of the Draft Resistance, and Frank Joyce, National Director of People Against Racism, were recently allowed to retain their freedom from the draft for the time being.

Following an early Morning demonstration on August 19^th, Wheeler received a 4-F deferment and Joyce received a 1-Y, both on political grounds.

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The rabid anti-Communist vultures are now having a field day. They are suddenly showing a concern for the people of Czechoslovakia which they never exhibited for the Blacks in Rhodesia and South Africa or the Orientals in Vietnam.

In the history of the world, words like “freedom” and “democracy” are usually only valuable as items of a propaganda machine. They are cute “means” necessary to unite or propel a people behind a national cause that is really much more dedicated to political and economic power.

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July 23, 1968 will have to go down in the history of the black revolutionary struggle as a day of even more importance than July 25, 1967 (Detroit) and August 11, 1965 (Watts). It was on Tuesday night, July 23, that a small group of black men set up an ambush for the police in the streets of Cleveland, Ohio. They set it well and carefully: “... there were telephone complaints about an abandoned, stripped white Cadillac left on Beulah St.,” wrote the New York Post’s Jimmy Breslin. “The police tow truck came up to the Cadillac, shots came from three directions. The driver was a civilian employee. He was not hit. He was doing what they wanted him to do, radio for help. They would use their aim later.”

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a review of

Richard Wright, a biography by Constance Webb. G.P. Putnam’s Sons, NYC, 442 pages $8.95.

William Styron’s Nat Turner: Ten Black Writers Respond, edited by John Henrik Clarke. Beacon Press, Boston, hardbound $4.95, paperback: $1.95

Whenever a better-than-third-rate book enters the midst of all the recent jet-propelled “publishing about Black” it must seemingly SCREAM! to be heard above all the confusing Noise of Publicity. Constance Webb’s gigantic biography of Richard Wright (author of Native Son, Black Boy, [1] and originator of the phrase, Black Power) does not, unfortunately, scream, and so it will probably drown in libraries (at $8.95 a copy) before it has had a chance to swim in public dialogue.

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Dear Sirs,

I have been a subscriber to your paper for a long time and hope to be a subscriber for a long time to come, but that’s not why I wrote.

I wish to congratulate you on your last issue (vol. 3, no. 7), it was great!

I also wish to criticize you on your letting John Sinclair ruin your fine newspaper by printing all of his bullshit on the MC5.

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This particular piece is written to serve two purposes:

(1) For those who know and like British Blues so that they may learn something of its history and composition.

(2) For those lemmings of this society who treat blues as a science text book; in that what counts is sticking to the rules laid down by the innovators of that form; so that they MAY (and pigs may fly) treat the next piece of blues they hear as a musical section of someone’s soul, being contained therein exactly the emotions that said person is/was feeling at that time.—

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A new law has been passed where you can have any mail stopped which you consider offensive: The law was passed to smite smut—always good for the idiot vote—but—the bill is so worded that you are the sole judge of what is offensive.

If you feel that your congressman’s newsletter, a religious appeal or the normal junk mail is offensive all you have to do is go to the post office and ask for P.O. form 123 and fill out the form giving your name and address and the name and address of the firm which you want to stop sending you advertisements. You do not have to give any reason or justification why you find the mail’ offensive.

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Dr. Eugene Schoenfeld speaking at Community Arts Auditorium, May 28, 1969 at a benefit for Open City. Photo: Alan Gotkin.

Dear Dr. Schoenfeld:

Your discussion of the sneeze-orgasm question in a recent column gave me the unaccustomed and satisfying experience of becoming aware of a mysterious part of my own behavior.

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I want to take up where I left off last time and get into some of the alternatives to the present scene in the local rock and roll industry. There has been some fantastic response to my last column—even Russ Gibb gave me a call on a Saturday afternoon, and I hadn’t heard from him for some time—and I want to detail some of the things that are starting to happen.

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WASHINGTON, D.C. (LNS)—The U.S. Justice Department has released results of a study conducted for it by the University of Michigan which states that twenty-seven per cent of all policemen “were either observed in misconduct situations or admitted to observers that they were engaged in misconduct.” Two-thirds of this group were seen “in some form of conduct that could be classified as a felony or misdemeanor,” while the rest admitted such naughty acts.

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Merchants continue to use guns on young people in the Fitzgerald community on Detroit’s Northwest side and are being supported by your local police.

The latest reported incident on August 9^th involved the Bollinger Party Store on Fenkell near Greenlawn. The proprietor, Mr. Fedah, on being asked about dispensing stale and shoddy merchandise, pulled a gun, fired a shot, and ordered a delegation of young black people, led by John Hunt, coordinator of a local community supported Teen Drop-In Center, to get out at gun point.

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NEW YORK, Aug. 22 (LNS)--Phil Hutchings, Executive Secretary of SNCC, announced that Stokely Carmichael, former National Chairman of the organization, had been formally expelled. “Brother Carmichael, both as a member and as chairman of SNCC made tremendous strides in the fight for black liberation in the past eight years, but it has been apparent now for some time that SNCC and Carmichael were moving in different directions,” Hutchings’ statement read.

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Richard Lester’s new film, “Petulia,” is a contradiction in terms—it is at one and the same time old-fashioned, avant-garde, sophisticated, heavy-handed, and pointless.

Lester, who directed the Beatles films and “How I Won the ‘War,’” is no stranger to cinematic mixed bags, but this time something went wrong.

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LONDON The cartoon about the Beatles, “Yellow Submarine” is a watershed movie that could change the pictorial content of all movies and the style of cartoons for all time

Full of puns, (Ringo, rescued by the U.S. Cavalry after being chased by Indians, describes his adventure as “arrowing”), pictorial tricks (clouds patterned like Mexican blankets), thought-provoking jokes (vicious dog with four heads, all pulling different ways) it is a melange of all the commercial and pop art tricks of the past decade.

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Fri. Sept. 6

DIALOGUE ’68. A festival of radical rock music for three nights. The UP, Billy C. and his Killer Blues Band, and the Psychedelic Stooges will play Prior to the performances

A SHOWING OF UNDERGROUND FILMS will be presented by the Detroit Repertory Theatre, at the first Unitarian Church, Forest and Cass. $2.50 per night or $6.00 for all three nights. Tickets may be purchased at Hudson’s, Grinnell’s, or at the church.

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All unclassifieds must be paid for in advance.

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