Most Recent Additions

As most movie goers know, “skin is in.” Some of the current biggies in Detroit are: “Naughty Shutter”; “Naked and the Wicked”; “Nudes on Credit”; “The Erotic Mr. Rose”; “Notorious Daughter of Fanny Hill”; and last, but not least, “Fanny Hill Meets Lady Chatterley.”

The above pictures, and many more like them, have become so popular in Detroit that we now rank number three in the nation in skin houses.

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Joseph Déjacque was a major 19^th-century communist anarchist political theorist and visionary utopian writer, born in Besancon, France on December 27, 1821. To celebrate the bicentennial year of his birth, two New Orleans-based groups, are convening a Déjacque Bicentennial Conference on December 10 and 11.

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That g.d., m.f., c.s., s.o.b., J.L. Hudson is running for mayor.

F. Janorin

Detroit

Love and flowers from a sleeping city.

I subscribed to your Oracle in August and took some issues with me to school in September. I have changed a lot of attitudes with the FIFTH ESTATE’s help.

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The Americans for Democratic Action (ADA) had its long-awaited dinner at the Rackham Bldg. recently, only a few days after anti-war demonstrators had clashed with the warmakers and local gendarmes in the same locals.

I tend to think that the spontaneous outbreaks which resulted in 14 arrests probably had more effect (if anyone can have effect) in dramatizing opposition to the War in Vietnam than the ADA gathering of 500 $10.00 dinner-goers passively listening to ADA National Chairman John Kenneth Galbraith—in a setting which was essentially a reunion of the Democratic Party.

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There is an obvious need for revolutionary media in the black community, states editor John Watson in explaining the creation of a new newspaper for the black community.

Titled the Inner-City Voice, the new paper which has already printed two issues expects to become a weekly with a circulation of more than 30,000 within a few months.

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“Is life too dear or peace too sweet as to be purchased at the price of...slavery?...I know not what course others may take, but for me, give me liberty, or give me death.”

—Patrick Henry

Eddie Steamshovel, Tod Damone, Bob Bob Bob and Soap Xhead spent Tuesday mornings scrubbing tobacco stains off their knees. They wrote the Declaration of Independence. Once when Eddie Steamshovel was by himself in a tavern beer cooler in Michigan he took out his Raisin Bran Detecto-Code Flasher. These men were weird and had grown up with the usual pre-revolutionary superstitions like doing the Monkey and Frug would give you Anthrax.

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

QUESTION: Can anything be done to increase penis size at the age of about twenty? I feel I am underdeveloped and have always felt a little inadequate because of it.

ANSWER: When I was a high school student, a friend felt he had the same problem. Each day he would tie a weight to his penis, swinging it like a pendulum and gradually increasing the weight. He worked his way up to ten or fifteen pounds, setting some sort of record in masochism but his member remained unchanged except for some rope burns.

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Today, after twenty years of Israel’s existence and three wars between Arab and Israeli, the Arab-Israeli conflict remains one of total deadlock. Arab acceptance of Israel’s existence after the June, 1967 blitzkrieg must remain the wishful thinking of the Sunday NEW YORK TIMES.

So many millions of words have been written about the Palestine problem and yet the basic issues remain uncomprehended by so many people. Recent statements by Black Power advocates in the U.S. condemning the “Zionist imperialist war of Israel” show that some radicals in the country are, however, very much aware of why Arab opposition to Israel has not abated.

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The Fifth Estate

1107 W. Warren

Detroit 48201

EDITORS

Harvey Ovshinsky

Peter Werbe

NEWS EDITOR

Frank H. Joyce

EDITORIAL ASSISTANT

Cathy West

CIRCULATION MANAGER

Tommye Wiess

ACE REPORTER

John Sinclair

ART AND LAY-OUT

Gary Grimshaw

Carl Lundgren

FILM EDITOR

Joe Finemen

CALENDAR GIRLS

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In the past month Detroit area music-lovers have had the opportunity to attend performances of the Jefferson Airplane, the Cream, Donovan, the Who, and Ravi Shankar. The biggest threat is to come December 1, when the MOTHERS OF INVENTION invade our hallowed Civic Center’s Ford Auditorium. Detroit will never be the same.

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Joseph Patterson is a Negro.

He is 14 years old and bright—an honors student at Miller Junior High School in Detroit.

Joseph Patterson is a self-proclaimed Nazi and a member of Breakthrough, a local right-wing group. Some people, including teachers and counselors at Miller, alarmed at his preoccupation with Nazis and threats of killing everyone from commie teachers he “spys” on for Breakthrough, up to Supreme Court Justice Earl Warren and Lyndon Johnson think that Joseph Patterson is emotionally disturbed. Breakthrough thinks not. Last week they went into Wayne County circuit court to have Mr. Patterson released from the Towne Mental Hospital where Patterson had been committed on a petition from the Wayne County Sheriff. Deputy Sheriff Leontyne Smith who examined Patterson at the Detroit Psychiatric Institute Children’s Clinic where he was referred stated in a petition dated June 15:

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Out of a crop of albums these stand out for one reason or another:

PINK FLOYD: “The Piper at the Gates of Dawn (Tower 5093). The Pink Floyd has enjoyed in London roughly the same position as the MC5 holds here: the Floyd made itself known through working at the weekly UFO dance/ concerts at the Roundhouse, under the sponsorship of the London UPS paper, the International Times.

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The draft resistance action at the Cadillac Tower Selective Service headquarters on October 16 and the busloads of people from Detroit who joined the assault on the Pentagon in Washington, DC brought the first winds of the new turn taken by the antiwar movement. People in this country are now moving to BLOCK rather than protest the mobilization of this country’s forces for the inhuman war in Vietnam.

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WASHINGTON — (Liberation News Service) At least two, and perhaps three, American military men in the line of troops at the Pentagon took off their helmets, laid down their guns, and joined the demonstrators sitting in on the Pentagon steps, Saturday, October 21.

The fate of the demonstrators is unknown, since the Pentagon denies their existence. “There were no defectors. We have no AWOL’s; no one is missing,” stated a Defense Department press spokesman.

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“Bread: prime symbol. Try and find a good loaf.”

Most of us are familiar with this, the opening line from Henry Miller’s essay, “The Staff of Life.” And it seems a good place to begin a column about food.

We all know how really lousy Wonder Bread is, but chances are that’s what is in your bread box. White bread is cheaper and more convenient to buy. Not all of us live near a bagel factory. Now, what to do with it. If you insist upon putting cheese and bologna between it, what can I tell you?

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Charging that Wayne State University’s student newspaper is too leftist and “put out by left-wing radicals,” a group of undergraduate students began publishing a rival daily the week of Nov. 6^th.

The South End, WSU’s s official student publication, formerly known as The Daily Collegian, has come under attack by staffers of the competition paper, The Phoenix. The South End has been criticized as leaning heavily toward the left end of the political spectrum, concentrating on protest and anti-war movements.

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An Open Letter to George Romney

Dear Sir:

As a free man and a revolutionary, and as a citizen of the state of Michigan with strong roots in my own Michigan community of Detroit, I’ve been interested to follow your recent career as a “national” politician. I haven’t really been too interested in your work as governor of the state of Michigan since that office has little or no relevance to my life nor have I ever been very interested in the office of president of the United States, since that office has even less relevance to my life. But the combination of events that has marked your entry into the national presidential race scene has captured my attention and my imagination, and I wanted after yesterday to say something about the whole thing.

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WASHINGTON, D.C.— (Liberation News Service) The Pentagon still clings to its original statements, attributing the use of tear gas at the Oct. 21 demonstration solely to demonstrators, despite eye-witness accounts to the contrary by the Washington Post’s Paul Valentine, Jed Stout of UPI, and many individuals.

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a review of

A Desert Pilgrim’s Bestiary by Anthony Walent, author; Maurice Spira, Illustrator. Eberhardt Press, 2019

A Desert Pilgrim’s Bestiary is both archaic and modern. Anthony Walent has been employing this very tension in his zine, Communicating Vessels, for many years, that is assembled and designed using functioning, but antique typesetting equipment.

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Happy hippies and costumed peace freaks assembled behind DeRoy Auditorium on Wayne University’s campus for the 2^nd Annual Halloween March the night of Oct. 31. Led by John Schwartz, alias Jacob Odaryan, the march was to bring an absurdist dance of death to the festive evening.

Seventy-five freaks danced around DeRoy and stopped for a WWJ-TV newsman. “Help the poor, stop the war” chanted the marchers. They then danced down Cass Ave. Their chanting visibly disturbed Wayne’s Public Safety fuzz and stopped traffic on both sides of Cass. Black children running alongside the marchers dropped firecrackers in the street and some joined the zany throng.

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Tommye Wiess, Fifth Estate circulation manager, surveys damage left by right-wing vandals at the office of the Detroit Committee to end the War in Vietnam. The office has since been repaired and the anti-war group is continuing its activities. photo: Ollie Anderson

Detroit’s right wing launched a terrorist attack on the offices of the Detroit Committee to End the War in Vietnam early in the morning on October 29.

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No, this is not an astronaut—just a well-prepared demonstrator on his way to a march. photo: Dave Lindquist

The anti-war movement has recently become actively involved in the type of resistance protests that has brought a violent reaction from the forces of law and order. One has only to witness the police terror perpetrated on demonstrators at Oakland, Washington, D.C., and Madison, Wis., to realize that those involved in demonstrations should take some precautions before venturing out’ in the streets for confrontations with the police.

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In his early 19^th century book Jerusalem, English poet, painter, and printmaker William Blake writes: “I must create a system or be enslaved by another man’s. I will not reason and compare: my business is to create.” Blake was an anti-authoritarian revolutionary. Although largely unrecognized during his lifetime, his liberatory influence has been felt in the spheres of politics, poetry, religion, economics, art, and sexuality.

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The next project of Abigail Susik, author of Surrealist Sabotage and the War on Work, investigates the radical connections between anarchism and surrealism through the little-known figure of Jonathan Leake and his work in the 1960s with the magazine, Resurgence.

It is devoted to the extremely rare surrealist, anarchist, IWW, and anti-racist underground zine which had twelve mimeographed issues printed in New York, Chicago, San Francisco; between 1964 and 1967. It contains reprints of all twelve issue covers, as well as page selections from each issue, including the recently discovered, formerly lost issue #4.

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a review of

The Weight of The Stars: The Life of Anarchist Octavio Alberola. Written and illustrated by Agustin Comotto. Translated from Spanish by Paul Sharkey, AK Press 2022

“These notions of Marxism and anarchism have shown themselves not to be serviceable enough, as circumstances have changed and so they need re-elaborating, amplification, or amendment.”

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Reprinted from Fifth Estate, #378, Summer 2008.

In fairy tales, humans can possess exterior souls, things magically containing or embodying individual life force—stone, egg, ring, bird or animal, c. If the thing is destroyed, the human dies. But while the thing persists, the human enjoys a kind of immortality or at least invulnerability. Money could be seen as such an exteriorized soul. Humans created it, in some sense, in order to hide their souls in things that could be locked away (in tower or cave) and hidden so their bodies would acquire magical invulnerability—wealth, health, the victoriousness of enjoyment, power over enemies—even over fate.

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Rojava is still in my eyes. A fountain in the middle of desert. By desert, I mean authoritarian regimes, imperialist and colonialist forces, and Islamist warmongers. But it seems now that while at a societal level, Rojava is flourishing with ways to fight patriarchy, the environment is turning into an actual desert.

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a review of

“The Northman”

Dir: Robert Eggers, 2022

There was an unavoidable discomfort in my bones upon deciding to view “The Northman.” It felt difficult to ignore how, from advertisements, the film’s early Norse historical setting seemed like unfortunate—if unintentional—catnip for fascists with a tendency for perverting Paganism to justify ideologies of volkisch nationalism. And yet, I was happily surprised.

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a review of
The New Science of the Enchanted Universe: An Anthropology of Most of Humanity by Marshall Sahlins. Princeton University Press, 2022

The late anthropologist Marshall Sahlins (1930–2021) is best known for his claim, first published in 1968, that people living in traditional economies based on hunting and gathering enjoyed lives of relative security, abundance, and leisure.

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Reprinted from Liberation Magazine.

Secretary of State Dean Rusk doesn’t seem to appreciate the monumental irony of his own position. On the one hand he insists fervidly on the right of small nations like South Vietnam to independence”: on the other he damns the means by which such independence is usually achieved, namely “wars of national liberation.”

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Energies of the West Central Organization, since its formal emergence on the Detroit scene in June,1965, have exploded the myth of “apathy” inherent in the behavior of “poor folks.” Human beings—Negro, white, Mexican, Maltes, and Puerto Rican—who have never fully recognized and used their latent power are doing so now. “poor folk’s” organizations which thrive in one area of Detroit’s poor folk ghetto are merging into a poor folk liberation front popularly known as WCO. Presently, WCO is confronting the common enemy—those persons who by design or inability operate the existing educational, welfare, housing, law enforcement, and urban renewal machines, etc., in a way which conspires against poor people.

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Mrs. Draper, active trade unionist and secretary of California Citizens for Farm Labor, spent several days on the Delano-Sacramento pilgrimage march of the grape strikers.

A giant march and rally of some 10,000 farm workers and supporters on Easter Sunday in Sacramento, California demonstrated the enormous support which the seven-month strike of the Delano grape strikers has aroused. On Easter morning the original 67 pilgrims who had left Delano 25 days earlier were joined by thousands coming from all parts of the state and nation for the last five miles from West Sacramento to the gold-domed State Capitol.

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Color image of album cover for Phil Ochs’ 1966 LP “I ain’t Marchin’ Any More.”

It has been a good season recently at Ed Pearl’s Ash Grove: last week it was Doc Watson and now it is Phil Ochs, songwriter, poet, revolutionary, and all-around good egg. Phil Ochs, who has been held over this weekend to co-star with Guy Carawan, writes his own songs, thinks up his own comedy lines on the spot, and plays his old-style Gibson Jumbo guitar in a most entertaining fashion. I talked with Phil Ochs between sets and he told me:

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a review of

El Socialism Salvaje: Autoorganizacion y democracia directa desde 1789 hasta nuestros dias (Wild Socialism: Self-organization and direct democracy from 1789 to the Present) Charles Reeve. Virus Editorial, 2020

What Paris-based author Charles Reeve calls socialismo salvaje, “wild socialism,” is the demand for direct democracy and popular control of social institutions by workers, peasants, and citizens in periods of social and political upheaval appearing throughout modern history.

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Vietnam Newsletter

Detroit Committee to End the War in Vietnam

Vol. 1, No. 2

1101 W. Warren, 832–5700, May, 1966

The major activity of the DCEWV since the March 25–27 International Days of Protest was a demonstration at a fundraising function of the 17^th District Democrats. About 35 demonstrators carrying signs reading: STOP THE BOMBINGS; BRING THE TROOPS HOME; I WAS A LIBERAL UNTIL I DISCOVERED THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY SELLOUT: and MARTHA (Griffiths) MUST GO, formed an orderly picket line from 8 to 10 p.m. in front of the Latin Quarter where the affair was held. Three of the demonstrators, who managed to obtain tickets legitimately, participated in the cocktail party, despite police efforts to keep them out of the building. One of them, Dena Clamage, executive director of the Detroit Committee, engaged Rep. Martha Griffiths of the 17^th District in a discussion about the Vietnam war, which ended when Rep. Griffiths accused Miss Clamage of baiting her and suggested that if Miss Clamage were opposed to her (Griffiths’) Vietnam policies, she should support some other candidate running on a peace platform. Smiling, Miss Clamage assured Rep. Griffiths that she would.

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The game is definitely played in someone else’s ballpark! The rules are really quite simple: attend an endless stream of meetings attended only by other candidates; seek publicity, but avoid notoriety; have a platform, but don’t say anything really controversial (substitute “honest”?) belong to as many organizations as possible, but list only the respectable ones on your literature; make the proper deals and alignments with a variety of political hacks; etc., etc.

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“The bombing won’t stop us. We’re still going full speed ahead with our plans.”

Jack Weinberg, a member of the Vietnam Day Committee, said this quietly only hours after he and 10 other VDC members had narrowly escaped death in a midnight bomb blast that ripped through the VDC headquarters on Fulton Street here [in Berkeley, Calif., not indicated in print original] April 9. Four VDC members were treated for minor injuries at the University Hospital, and released.

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Washington, March 29, (UPI)—The Defense Department called today for the drafting of 34,600 men in May. It had asked for 21,700 for April.

The Army still needs 90,000 more men to complete its buildup for the Vietnam war.

The new draft call dimmed hopes previously expressed that the induction of college students might be avoided. Selective Service officials believe that induction of college students would be unnecessary if the draft could be kept below 30,000 a month.

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There seem to have been a lot of very hip things going on in Detroit lately, though from my (disad-)vantage point I can only read about them or hear of them on the radio. I heard very beautiful things about the Archie Shepp et al. concert last month—anyone who missed the happenings in Ann Arbor should be locked up here in my place. Archie brought trombonist Roswell Rudd, the strongest man on his instrument today, from New York City; bassist Charlie ** Haden, now living in San Francisco after getting straight at Synanon; and drummer Beaver Harris, of NYC, with him for the big Ann Arbor affair, and all reports indicate that they all got into some very moving music. After the concert proper a mammoth session took place under Ron Brooks’ auspices—participating were some of the strongest voices in the country—Rudd & Harris of NY; Haden of SF; altoist Joseph Jarmon, tenor saxophonist Fred Anderson, trumpeter Bill Brimfield, bassist Charles Clark, and drummer Steve McCall, all of Chicago (they had played, under Jarmon’s name, for the WSU Artists’ Society the night before); and cornetist Charles Moore and drummer Danny Spencer of Detroit. These men worked in a lot of combinations, including 2 bass-2 drums teams (Moore’s setting), and enough music was made (as I hear it) to fill the whole midwest.

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The condition of education in America is not an education towards realizing the possibilities of one’s own life, but is in fact an arm of the larger system of the nation with the duty to turn out people who will maintain whatever that system is or has become.

The education is generally aimed toward preserving, and eradicating what is considered worthless (or, it might better be said, what is considered dangerous—considered so by this segment that determines, in that what is kept out of reach is generally this history and traditions of such minorities as Negroes, any respect for the quality of language they’ve developed-the very things that would render them a sense of their own worth; that is, roots of their own strength).

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(reprinted from the LA Free Press)

Somewhere in Los Angeles this week, a small group of men and women are preparing the tenth in a series of weekly radio programs of news and critical commentary on America’s foreign policy which they tape and send to Hanoi for broadcast to American troops.

Since it is very possible that the activities of Radio Stateside, as the group calls itself, are illegal (they are urging American soldiers to oppose America’s role in Vietnam), everything is done in clandestine fashion.

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Schedule

Friday, March 25: At 6:30 P.M. the Wayne State University

Young Democrats are sponsoring a forum on the war in Vietnam in the community Arts Auditorium, Cass and Kirby.

Saturday, March 26: At 4:00 P.M. a mass march will start down Woodward from Central -Methodist Church at Adams and Woodward. We will march to Campus Martius carrying signs, banners, and giant grotesque puppets to the beat of death drums.

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Common Council, City of Detroit, 2 Woodward Avenue, Detroit 26, Michigan

Dear Sirs,

A meeting was held Wednesday, March 9 at Burton School promoted through the combined efforts of Cass Community Council, Cass Community Church, Burton School Mother and Dad’s Club, WCO affiliated groups (St.. Patrick’s Parrish and Central Methodist Church, Southern Baptist Convention, Priscilla Hall, St. John’s Episcopal Young Adult Fellowship and Cass Park Baptist Church).

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The Fifth Estate 1107 W. Warren Detroit Michigan 48201

831–2525

EDITOR AND PUBLISHER

Harvey Ovshinsky

EDITORIAL ASSISTANTS:

Steven Simons

Nancy Mitchnick

Karen Mitchnick

Marilyn Mitchnick

Deborah Osmet

Janet Klotman

Robin Dibner

Steven Dibner

The National Student Association’s Poor People’s Corporation Personnel Program is recruiting sales representatives to work in New York, Chicago, and San Francisco, and managerial aides to work In cooperatives in Mississippi. Sales representatives will be Working in programs designed to increase the sales of the Poor People’s Corporation by establishing marketing agreements with retail stores and student stores on college ‘campuses, and by working to establish P.P.C. stores. They will be working on a commission basis, with a guaranteed income of $45/week, and an allowance for certain operating expenses.

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Liberal Detroiters were recently mildly surprised and, perhaps, even a little bit shocked, by a recent picket line thrown by the West Central Organization (WCO) before a union hall where a victory” fund-raising dinner was being held for recently re-elected Councilman Mel Ravitz.

One prominent local progressive, George Crockett, Jr. refused to cross the line, even though he was a close personal friend of Ravitz.

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Skeptics about Happenings—the kind of person who says, “I’ve seen one and I don’t like them”—should visit Al Hansen’s loft at 119 Avenue D. It is like finding yourself In the attic of a childhood you only heard about but never knew. “I had always enjoyed the fact that people visiting me couldn’t tell in many cases whether a thing was a work of art or a useful household object,” writes Hansen in his book, “A Primer of Happenings & Time/Space Art” (Something Else Press, $4.50). “Friends who knew very well what art is and isn’t would even make jokes such as, ‘May I sit in this chair, or Is it by George Brecht?’ or ‘Can I put my cigarette out in this, or is it part of an assemblage?’”

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I would like at this time to point out what I believe to be the central considerations involved in my position that the United States is totally unjustified in pursuing its current policy in Vietnam.

To begin with, the resumption of bombings of North Vietnam can lead only to escalation and intensification of the already dangerous war in Vietnam. Three presidents have warned us of the dangers of an all-out war on mainland Southeast Asia; and yet, this is exactly the situation which the United States is now confronting.

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Their Statement:

On Friday, March 4, 1966, Attorney General Nicholas D. Katzenbach presented the subversive Activities Control board with a petition asking them to list the W.E.B. Du Bois Clubs of America as a “Communist front group” as provided under the McCarran Act.” This act would require the Du Bois Clubs to register as a “Communist Front Group.” For every day that we fail to register, we are subject to a $10,000 fine and five years in jail. We will not register.

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James Peake, director of Du Bois Clubs (DBC) national publications, who lives in San Francisco, stated on March 11 that he knew of 2000 new memberships since the terrorist attacks. Of these, 700 are in the San Francisco Bay area. There is no way of estimating at this time how many more new members there are across the nation of which the national office had not then been notified. Except that a substantial number of people in other groups on the left have, like Staughton Lynd, joined as a protest against the recent attacks, it is not known just what these memberships signify. Only one thing can be said With certainty: this reaction is not what Attorney General Katzenbach wanted.

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