Fifth Estate 80, May 29-June 11, 1969 Add to the Bookbuilder

BERKELEY (LNS)—One man was murdered and over 200 people injured by police May 15 in the heaviest street battle in Berkeley yet over who controlled a city park.

Above, Berkeley Police shoot at the backs of free people. Below, a police car is burned in retaliation. Photos—LNS.

For the first time, cops used shotguns and rifles against the people. Over a hundred people were hit with birdshot, rock salt and with carbine bullets.

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THE FIFTH ESTATE

A NEWSPAPER OF DETROIT

FIFTH ESTATE #80, May 29-June 11, 1969, Vol. 4 No. 2, page 2

EDITORIAL GROUP

Alan Gotkin

Peter Werbe

Cathy West

Tommye Wiese

DISTRIBUTION

Bruce Montrose

Fred Frank

BUSINESS & ADVERTISING

Bill Rowe

CITY EDITOR

Chris Singer

MUSIC EDITOR

John Sinclair

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The shit is coming down all over America from Greensboro, N.C. to Berkeley, Calif. Blood is flowing in the streets as people battle for their rights.

The question of whether or not fascism will come to this country has been answered by the pigs with a hail of bullets aimed at our brothers and sisters. The long talked about and debated repression has come with indictments, jailings, police beatings and murders.

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BERKELEY—This is Wednesday, May 21. A week ago I pulled into the city in the pre-dawn hours on the back of a fifty-two Chevy farm truck laden with contraband oranges, avocadoes, artichokes. We were on our way home from our outlaw camp in the Baja, Mexico.

As we hauled up Highway One, watching the surf pound against the rocks below our -brothers were being routed with clubs and cyclone fence from the People’s Park in Berkeley.

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BERKELEY—“I’d shoot a pig first,” the young man said.

Standing face to face with his olive drab uniform, his gas grenades and his M-1, a street girl—wonderful colors flowing from every curve on her body—had been talking to him for most of the afternoon.

The People’s Park, touching and being touched, lives of love and freedom—she’d covered it all.

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Dan Seigal, president-elect of Cal’s student body, never finished his talk to the thousands gathered to rally behind the Berkeley People’s Park. When he suggested they take the park, avoiding bloodshed and arrest, the crowd immediately left Sproul Plaza. Chanting “We want the park,” and whooping like Indians, they spilled out onto Telegraph Avenue and walked to the Haste Street intersection where a line of helmeted, brown-uniformed police waited behind barricades.

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NEW YORK—Norman Mailer kicked off his mayorality campaign with a rally at the Village Gate attended by George Plimpton’s party crowd and assorted dilettantes and sycophants. Targets of the evening were the NY Times, which hasn’t been giving Mailer the attention he demands; Esquire magazine whose money he’s been taking uncomplainingly for a decade; and his own audience, most of whom he correctly identified as being present “for the fun of it.”

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While the rest of the “Motor city was Burning,” to paraphrase the MC5, ironically to the tune of “Light My Fire,” the annex of the former Algiers Motel was quiet. Guests were sleeping, “eating hot dogs” and “listening to music.”

It was quiet until the authorities arrived.

When the authorities left, there remained behind the bodies of three black youths—all of them shot to death. All of the other guests had been beaten—two white girls, “caught” in the company of black men, had been stripped naked and severely beaten.

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Author’s note: I tried to write a journalistic reportorial article about the “Miss Student Body” rape held on the WSU campus in honor of Fraternity Week, where mutilated people voted on the headless pictures of women in bikinis guided by criteria of the best “Bod.” This article was going to include an objective description of the protest demonstration of Friday, May 16, and other assorted responses of quasi-liberated men and women—but my anger got in the way. Sorry.

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In an unprecedented move Russ Gibb, Detroit rock and roll magnate and creator and owner of the Grande Ballroom, has announced that he is imposing a 1% community tax on the gate proceeds of the Detroit Rock and Roll Revival, held at the State Fairgrounds over the Memorial day weekend.

The 1% will come off the top of the gross proceeds, Gibb said, and will go into a new Community Fund which will then make disbursements through its Board of Directors to groups and/or individuals in the community who need money.

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Web archive note: This article is untitled in the print original.

In a lightning-fast surprise maneuver the Detroit courts have moved to bring John Sinclair to trial on his famous marijuana charge next Tuesday, June 3^rd, in Recorder’s Court. This latest in a series of repressive police/court actions against Sinclair is also the most serious: the pigs have sworn to convict him on a charge the minimum sentence for which is 20 years in the state penitentiary, maximum: life.

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The Establishment press and the Detroit Police Department have been blasted in a report on the New Bethel Incident done by the Detroit Commission on Community Relations (CCR).

The eight-page staff report is sharply critical of the manner in which the news media reported on the actions of Recorder’s Court Judge George W. Crockett Jr. The CCR also blasted the response of police both during and after the March 29 shootings of two policemen outside the New Bethel Baptist Church.

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Two High School Student Unions, in the northeast suburbs and at Cooley have been agitating for change inside their schools.

The Cooley High School Student Union recently printed and distributed its Five point program with the following demands:

1) The elimination of ROTC;

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Selfridge Air Force Base is an idyllic installation on the beautiful shores of Lake St. Clair about twenty miles north of Detroit. It houses a SAC installation, a fighter-wing, and miscellaneous other units.

Victory celebration by Airman Theodore Goldflies, and his lawyers, Marc Stickgold and Marc Kadish. Photo/Alan Gotkin

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Paul Bindrim is a clinical psychologist who believes that the most agonizing feelings through which human beings must suffer result from the conflict between the need to say “Love me, and let me love,” and the need to retain a personal identity.

Nineteen strangers, Bindrim among them, gathered in a small paneled room at the Center for the Whole Person and enacted the kind of human drama upon which Paul Bindrim bases that conclusion.

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Free medical attention for Detroit’s Free Community is now available at the Open City office, 4726 Third, every Monday evening from 6 until 8 pm.

Although this service has been in operation only a month the response has already been very encouraging. At this time plans are being considered to keep the service open three days a week and additional doctors and nurses have expressed an interest in Open City.

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Mrs. Stuyvesant Fish’s original monkey dinner was held at 19 Gramercy Park in New York in 1908, wherein Mrs. Fish invited the “haute monde” of her day, according to writer Tom Wolfe, to a dinner in honor of the Prince del Drago.

Of course, nobody bothered to ask who the prince was, but they all came, and there was the Prince, a full-grown Chambezi baboon in evening clothes, fitted in a wing collar and tails. This grand gesture was Mrs. Fish’s way of showing how strange “society” had become in her day, willing to go anywhere for whatever purpose, if it seemed grand and gay enough.

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“The solution to the race problem is separation. White and black should be separate. Their natures are opposite. This is the source of all our problems today. White and black are trying to force something (integration) that even God himself didn’t intend.”

Speaking before well over 300 people on the mall of Wayne State University, Muhammed Ali, former Heavyweight Boxing Champion of the World, ran down his views on racism, the black struggle, and women on May 14.

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A few years ago, pre-moog synthesizer, and long before the dawning of the “age of aquarius,” Detroiters were known to cluster at the various points of departure in order to cheerfully bon voyage their young ambassadors of jazz, whose responsibility it was to saturate the land with sounds ( pan-euphoniously?). Anyway, the story goes, they were supremely successful and with their talents garnered for their city a most enviable reputation...

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The Incredible String Band came to town one night, a few weeks ago, to share themselves and their music.

They came courtesy of CREEM magazine, and found that Detroit’s people, like those of most cities, were not ready for the peaceful message and music of the ISB.

Although most of the vast Ford Auditorium on May 16 was empty, the stage was filled before Mike Heron, Robin Williamson, Rose, and Licorice came on.

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“We are bringing our legitimate grievances to the legal establishment of the white man’s government to give the racist monopoly capitalist system the opportunity to begin to redeem itself for the crimes which have been perpetuated against Black workers and Black people for centuries.”

With this statement on Friday, May 16, the League of Revolutionary Black Workers filed charges with the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) against the United Auto Workers International Union (UAW), Locals No. 3 and No. 961, and against the Chrysler Corporation.

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JACKSON, N.C.—The Army announced May 20 its “final disposition of the cases of the three anti-war soldiers who had been in the Fort Jackson stockade for two months.

There will be no courts-martial for Joseph Cole, Eugene Jose Rudder and Andrew Pulley; they were released from the stockade today and the Army says that they will be discharged from the service in short order.

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When the heroine of Ingmar Bergman’s great movie “Persona” turned on a television set and saw the atrocities of the Vietnam war, we in the audience experienced something close to cultural shock—a medievalist had crossed the time barrier. One of the severest and most frequent criticisms of Bergman has been his renowned social indifference.

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The strike of the Third World peoples and white supporters at San Francisco State College was a part of expanding the movement in this country toward liberation. It was a strike, an action with a direction toward a revolutionary level because it was based upon principles drawn from the foundation of oppressed Third World people’s needs.

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HAVANA, Cuba—Eldridge Cleaver, Black Panther leader is living and writing in Havana according to the British news agency, Reuters.

Cleaver, who disappeared in the United States late last year after a warrant was issued for his arrest on a phony charge of parole violation, was rumored to have been living in Cuba, but his whereabouts on the island had been a mystery.

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Those events marked with an asterisk (*) need Fifth Estate salesmen. If you want to earn some extra money, come down to our office and pick up some papers.

THURS. MAY 29

* THE BONZO DOG from England and the Wilson Mower Pursuit at the Grande Ballroom. Adm. $2.50.

EAST TOWN THEATRE. Grand opening of Detroit’s newest rock joint. The SRC. Teegarden & VanWinkle, Savage Grace, and Catfish all entertain at 8041 Harper near Van Dyke. 8 pm. Adm. $2.50.

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Unclassifieds cost 50 cents per line per issue. Figure four words per line. (A word is a word including one and two letter words. A phone number is a word. Street numbers are words. Abbreviations should be sensible. DISCOUNT RATES: Five runs cost 35 cents per line.

We dig the Fifth Estate, L.A. Free Press, and other undergrounds here in ‘Nam. Keep the truth coming.

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