Most Recent Additions

Dave Valler passed his sanity tests with flying colors and has pleaded guilty to two counts of possession of grass.

Valler’s court-appointed attorney requested the sanity hearings contending that, “Valler’s habitual and heavy use of drugs impaired his mental ability.” (See FE #77, April 17–30, 1969).

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Trouble time again at Northland. The punk rent-a-pigs out there have been giving our salesmen such a hard time when they are trying to sell that we are going to begin a suit against the shopping center to enforce our legal right to sell in a public area.

Our staff and our attorney, James Lafferty, met with the jerks that run the place last year and came to an agreement whereby the harassment of sellers would stop, but apparently it meant nothing to the businessmen who are trying to drive elements of the free community out of the shopping center.

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A second man has been ordered to stand trial in the March 29 wounding of Patrolman Richard E. Worobec outside the New Bethel Baptist Church on Linwood.

Clarence J. Fuller, of Detroit, was bound over for trial on a charge of assault with intent to commit murder by Recorder’s Court Judge Joseph A. Gillis. Fuller and the first man due to stand trial in the New Bethel Incident, Alfred Hibbitt, also of Detroit, have been both accused of wounding Worobec.

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Fifth Estate

A Newspaper of Detroit

FIFTH ESTATE #79, May 15–28, 1969, Vol. 4 No. 1, page 2

EDITORIAL GROUP

Alan Gotkin

Peter Werbe

Cathy West

Tommye Wiese

DISTRIBUTION

Bruce Montrose

Fred Frank

MUSIC EDITOR

John Sinclair

STAFF

Dena Clamage

Claudie Montrose

Franie Nelson

Marlene Tyre

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[two_third padding=“0 30px 0 0”]Special to the Fifth Estate

SAN FRANCISCO—With Thompson submachine-guns blazing, 160 armed cops moved in on the Fillmore District Monday afternoon, April 28, to quiet a Black Panther loudspeaker.

Sixteen persons were arrested in a bust which resulted from a police complaint that a Panther loudspeaker was insulting the pigs. A number of guns were seized (and have not been released), including two double barreled shotguns, a.45 automatic, a .22 caliber rifle, an M-14, and assorted ammo.

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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 1

* FREE HUEY — demonstration at the Federal Building on Lafayette at 1 p.m. Sponsored by Black Panther Party.

* ANN ARBOR ARGUS Benefit with the MC5 & the Amboy Dukes at the Grande Ballroom, Adm. $2 8 p.m.

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LIBERATION NEWS SERVICE—When two North Korean MIG fighters attacked a U.S. spy plane and shot it down on April 15, self-righteous protests immediately came puttering out of Washington.

The official response has been a “protest” and action by President Nixon ordering fighter plane protection for future reconnaissance flights over North Korea.

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Thanks for reprinting my Other Scenes article on nudity in and out of the theater (They Can’t Get Any Nuder. FE #75, March 20-April 2, 1969). I’ve just seen it and you did an esthetically nice job. But a line was dropped from one of the final paragraphs.

My point (the important part) was that “the real qualitative difference in the experience of public nudity lies in its goals. If one’s goal is to convince a skeptical public that nudity need not lead to sensuality, then one’s participants dare not touch. But if one’s goal is personal self-fulfillment—and nudity is just a means to that end—one will want to touch. And to be touched.

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State Senator Roger Craig, along with Hijinio Rangel, a striking worker from Delano, California, will kick off the International Grape Boycott Day activities in Detroit on May 10^th.

The day’s activities will start with a bus Caravan for Social Justice at 10:30 a.m., leaving from All Saints Episcopal Church at 3837 W. Seven Mile, two blocks east of Livernois. All interested persons are invited to join the caravan which will visit several A&P stores throughout the Detroit Area.

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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.

Get ordained—Send name and address to Universal Life Church, 1766 Poland Rd., Modesto Ca. Get 4-D draft exemption, half fare on airlines and trains and marry people. No cost or obligation, only “What is right.”

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Wayne State University is a working class college in a working class town. It is located in Detroit, a city which has long since taken the United Auto Workers bureaucracy into its ruling class and blunted union militancy by cooptation.

Many of the students of WSU work in Detroit’s factories and belong to unions. Almost all have come into contact with union experience through their parents.

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A cop stood on the Grande stage, presumably to hold the crowds back. He was confused. He had no idea what was happening.

Some black guys and a girl went on stage coming out of the stoned-filled amorphous crowd to reaffirm their blackness and hipness. They knew what was happening.

The kids were there. They come every week. It doesn’t really matter who’s playing. They can be with their friends, dance, and lie on the floor high. Drop out on a Saturday night to prepare again for their pretty one-story suburban high school-prison. They kinda knew what was happening.

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WARNING: Word is out that some tripsters are using the anesthetic cyclopropane (Trimethylene) for their highs. I hope this message reaches you in time.

Cyclopropane is far more dangerous than laughing, gas (nitrous oxide). Arrhythmias of the heart and respiratory failure are not uncommon effects of this gas. In other words, the heart may stop beating or beat so quickly and weakly that blood is not circulated through the body. Or the brain centers which control breathing may be so heavily anesthetized that breathing stops.

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[Part 2 of the interview appeared in FE #79, May 15–28, 1969.]

Editors’ Note: John Watson, editor of the Wayne State University South End, has been involved in Detroit revolutionary politics for a number of years. Former editor of the black community newspaper, The Inner City Voice, Watson was one of the original founders of the League of Revolutionary Black Workers. He is currently serving as a member of the Central Committee of the League.

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Editors’ Note: The author of this article is currently doing time in a federal prison in West Virginia on a conviction of possession of two grams of marijuana. Prior to his transfer, he spent close to a month in Wayne County Jail where he wrote the following commentary.

Upon reading the article in the South End of February 24, “Seven Days in Detroit’s Hell Hole” I was inspired to write this commentary on the Wayne County Concentration Camp where I am presently incarcerated.

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The MC5 have always had the policy of kicking out all of the jams so it should come as no surprise that the Ann Arbor based group has severed their contract with Elektra Records.

“At this point we’re totally unsatisfied and unhappy with the way things have been going with Elektra,” said Wayne Kramer, MC5 lead guitarist. “They’re far and away the hippest record company, but they don’t even know what we’re talking about.”

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“The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie” is not a great movie, but it’s an unusually good one, and maybe Maggie Smith’s performance should really be called great. Her characterization is in the grand manner as modulated and controlled, and yet as flamboyant, as anything you could ever see on stage.

Miss Smith plays Jean Brodie with a relish and force and tenderness that makes her Miss Brodie ours.

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MONTEREY, Calif. (LNS)—The Army is taking a Danang-sized shelling as the climactic phase of the Presidio “mutiny” case enters its third week here at Fort Ord.

In a sharp departure from earlier trials, with defendants taking the stand to apologize for the Oct. 14 sit-down, or not testifying at all, Terence Hallinan’s clients have begun testifying that their actions were justified.

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NEW YORK—As part of a nationwide conspiracy to smash the Black Panther Party, 21 New York Panther members were arrested on charges of conspiracy April 2 in a 5 a.m. roundup.

According to New York District Attorney Frank Hogan, the arrests thwarted a Black Panther plot to blow up various parts of the city on the following day, including Macy’s, Alexander’s, Korvette’s, Bloomingdale’s and Abercrombie & Fitch. The indictment also accused the Panthers of having plotted to sabotage a section of New Haven Railroad track.

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This man is not from KQA-TV as his camera indicates, but rather he is from PIG-TV. It is one of six portable video-tape units that Police Commissioner Johannes “The Lover” Spreen has wasted $19,000 of the taxpayers’ money on.
This little toy is used at demonstrations to provide photographic proof of police actions and “individuals engaged in the commission of illegal acts.”
The American Civil Liberties Union thinks that their use is probably unconstitutional. Next time you see one of them at a demonstration put your picket sign in front of it or stand in their way, but be careful not to knock one to the ground because they are very expensive and break easily. Photo by A. Gotkin.

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WASHINGTON, D.C. (LNS)—Al Capp rapped pretty heavily to the 78^th Continental Congress of the Daughters of the American Revolution.

He came down, in his cornpone style, on SDS, Joan Baez, (“phonie Joanie,” he calls her), and welfare, and treated the Daughters to a taste of his own brand of foreign policy: “It’s very simple—anyone who kills Americans is no damn good.”

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In response to the arrest of two antiwar GIs and the steady harassment of military organizers, the Detroit Resistance and the Detroit Committee to End the War in Vietnam have launched a law suit against the Board of County Road Commissioners.

The suit, which was announced by Attorney Marc Kadish of the National Lawyers Guild and Victory Fidelman of the Resistance at an April 8 press conference, will attack the regulation which governs the distribution of literature at Metropolitan Airport.

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Imagine this scene: a bright cloudless warm May Sunday in Detroit. On days like this, rare as the purple wallaby, half the local population has suddenly taken cover indoors in a shroud of bubbling beercans, listening to Tiger announcer, Ernie Harwell, broadcasting his play-by-play commentary from New York.

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a review of

Don’t Look Up, Dir: Adam McKay, 2021

Planet of the Humans Dir: Jeff Gibbs 2019

“You guys. The truth is way more depressing. They are not even smart enough to be as evil as you’re giving them credit for.”

—Kate Dibiasky (fictional astronomer in Don’t Look Up)

So, what to make of an unusual film about a streaking, earth-bound comet colliding with present-day distractions? Does it shake up the entertainment cycle only to disappear like a fairly close asteroid missing our orbital self-importance?

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Progressive High School students throughout the Detroit area were shocked April 22 to read in the Detroit “News”: “Ferndale H.S. Drops 138 Negro Protesters.”

This blatantly racist act by the administration at Ferndale came down when black students walked out in protest of the treatment of their demands to the Ferndale Board of Racist Education. The students, according to spokesman Anthony Collins, had demanded a meeting on April 21, but the Board stalled, and finally postponed the meeting. So black students walked out.

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FT. JACKSON, S.C.—Military hearings began April 22 at this Southern Army base into the cases of eight anti-war GIs being harassed by the post brass.

The eight are all members of GIs United Against the War in Vietnam, an on-post organization of mostly black and Puerto Rican soldiers, who have been circulating an anti-war petition and holding regular discussions on the war since late January.

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a review of

Run Home if You Don’t Want to be Killed: The Detroit Uprising of 1943 by Rachel Marie-Crane Williams. UNC Press 2021

Rachel Marie-Crane Williams’s new graphic history examines the violence that erupted in Detroit during the summer of 1943 in 230 evocative and beautifully rendered black and white images and text. But erupted might be the wrong word to describe what has been called variously a race riot, a pogrom, or, as Williams says in her title, an uprising.

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Someone was more stoned than we were last night. He was walking down the Grand Trunk railroad tracks between Fourteenth and Grand River. He was a neighborhood resident of the slum area north of Warren on the near West side, close to the Fifth Estate office.

He had been in the uprising two years ago when the A&P and the Cunningham’s on Trumbull had been burned down. The thought grew in his mind: Fire. He wanted to burn. He wanted something to burn.

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Pig-paper reporters don’t wear blue uniforms.

But the pig media has to be considered one of the important repressive forces in this country. As long as “their” media are allowed to define “facts” for people, “their” power structure will be able to control these people. Power is partially the ability to define your world and yourself.

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The central argument in the New Bethel Incident is over the administration of law in Detroit’s Recorder’s Court. [See The New Bethel Incident, FE #77, April 17–30, 1969.]

This was underscored by what transpired during the pre-trial examinations of two suspects in the shooting of Patrolman Richard E. Worobec outside the New Bethel Baptist Church on March 29.

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ATTENTION GIs: We are interested in any and all written material given you while you are in the service. This includes everything from training manuals to Stars and Stripes. Also, any of you who would like to submit articles or letters to the editor are urged to do so.

If you want to show your support for Judge George W. Crockett and risk getting a few traffic tickets at the same time, stop in our office and pick up a “Support Judge Crockett” bumper sticker. They are free or if you can, for a small donation. We will not send any out by mail.

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Fifth Estate

A Newspaper of Detroit

FIFTH ESTATE #78, May 1–14, 1969, Vol. 3 No. 26, page 2

<strong>EDITORIAL GROUP

</strong>

Alan Gotkin

Peter Werbe

Cathy West

Tommye Wiese

DISTRIBUTION

Bruce Montrose

Fred Frank

MUSIC EDITOR

John Sinclair

STAFF

Dena Clamage

Claudie Montrose

Franie Nelson

Marlene Tyre

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NEW YORK—CBS president Frank Stanton (who fired the Smothers Bros.) passed down the word to Columbia Records to stop advertising in the dirty, little underground papers.

At about the same time, Columbia mailed out a general press release boasting about the success of its phony “Revolutionaries” hype. Enormous sums of publicity money were spent not only on advertising but on “display racks, window streamers and posters.”

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The forces of political and cultural oppression have opened up a new front. Along with attempts to silence, arrest, and confine the leadership of the black community, the forces of repression inherent in capitalistic societies have begun to strip the young white community of their spokesmen.

The most current manifestation of these repressive forces is the harassment of John Sinclair, MC5 mentor-manager and Minister of Information of the White Panthers.

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“Along with the country as a whole, the press has too long basked in a white world, looking out of it, if at all, with white men’s eyes and a white perspective.”

—Kerner Report, p. 389

Although the media’s coverage of the New Bethel incident has been at best confusing and at worst rampant with racial hysteria, it is not exceptional.

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Don Lobsinger, leader of the right-wing Breakthrough group, was sentenced April 3 to 15 days in jail for disrupting a church forum on black power last December 3.

He was accused of trying to break up a meeting at St. Lucy’s Catholic Church in St. Clair Shores where Frank Ditto of the East Side Voice of Independent Detroit was telling the all white audience about black power.

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from Special and AP Dispatches

WASHINGTON—Gen. David M. Shoup, former commandant of the Marine corps, charges that an ambitious elite of high ranking officers, preferring war to peace, is turning the United States into “a militaristic and aggressive nation.”

Writing in the April issue of the magazine Atlantic, Shoup says that the search for promotion, interservice rivalry and an eagerness to test military doctrines lies behind the deep American involvement in Vietnam and the heavy invasion of the Dominican Republic.

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ANN ARBOR—This city witnessed the first public expression of dissent by Women’s Liberation groups of Michigan Saturday night, March 22, at the Miss Ann Arbor Pageant.

Outside the Auditorium doors of the Ann Arbor High School where the Pageant was being held about 100 women picketed in protest of the local meat auction which will eventually culminate in the Atlantic City Miss America prostitution rites.

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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.

FRI. APRIL 18

* EUGENE O’NEILL’S “Long Journey into the Night” in the Library Lecture Hall, Marygrove College. 7:30 p.m.

WSU CHAMBER SINGERS and CHAMBER ENSEMBLE, Wayne Community Arts Auditorium. 8:30 p.m.

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The first Detroit Pop Festival on April 7 at Olympia Stadium came off beautifully. All the stalwarts of the Detroit music scene were in attendance to create a ten hour musical trip for over 16,000 people that came to listen.

The Amboy Dukes, the MC5, the Frost, Ted Lucas, The Wilson Mower Pursuit, The Train and so many other good bands blasted through the incredibly bad Olympia acoustics to show the audience that Michigan Music is what’s happening.

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The Detroit Black Panther Party has just opened up a new office and asked the community to aid them in securing needed supplies.

If you have desks, typewriters or other office machines available they can be put to immediate use in aiding the work of the Panthers.

If you can help or wish to make a donation to the Panthers contact the Fifth Estate office, 1107 W. Warren, Detroit, 48201 or call 831–6800.

I’ve been watching all the shit going down around Detroit and our revolution either means we’re fighting for communism or black supremacy. I am not prejudiced, but want equality for all; not white or black supremacy.

And I’ll be damned if I’m in this revolution if it’s for communism. I wanna change the government, but not have the government change me.

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Tom Sincavitch, who “quit” the army has again refused active duty at Ft. Riley, Kansas on March 27 and was returned to the stockade “pending referral of new charges.”

Tom was convicted of being absent without leave for his first “offense” and given a six month suspended sentence. He had taken sanctuary in St. Joseph’s Church and was arrested by 40 FBI agents on March 13.

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John Mayall is one of the most respected white musicians playing the blues today. While the blues are popular and being utilized by many pop musicians who are good copyists and technically proficient, there are few original or innovative performers.

Mayall, who has been playing the blues since 1963, has released seven albums. He is serious about the music and is no longer interested in performing good imitations of black bluesmen. Instead, he has developed a personal and unique style.

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There is a tendency to casually dismiss works of science fiction and the supernatural in the arts, as if this type of thinking were just too cheap, too trivial to be bothered with. “2001” was virtually boycotted by the New York dailies and periodicals.

“The Illustrated Man” is a thoughtful, stimulating, and absorbing movie—one that I will return to see again and again and yet, if its early critical reception is any sign, I fear that this film will be largely underrated and thereby lose the very audience it seeks to contact.

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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.

Bachelor, 28, well educated, seeks same for roommate and/or for companionship. Call 5670213 Evenings.

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Sanity tests have been ordered for Dave Valler who is facing trial on two counts of sales and possession of grass and for conspiring to dynamite several public facilities.

The police and prosecutor consider Valler to be the ringleader of the eight persons charged with the Detroit area bombings last year which hit police stations and cars, a draft board, the Ann Arbor CIA office and a research institute.

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a review of

Invisible Generation: Rants, Polemics, and Critical Theory Against the Planetary Work Machine by Jason Rodgers. Autonomedia, 2021

For many years, Jason Rodgers has been a motivating presence in a startlingly large number of anarchist zine projects and communities, including frequently in this magazine. Her work has been published in a great many collective contexts, but always singly and hard to find. In Invisible Generation, her diverse body of critical writing has finally been brought together.

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a review of

Space Forces: A Critical History of Life in Outer Space by Fred Scharmen. Verso, 2021

The late stand-up comedian, Bill Hicks, used to close his routines with an idea. Take all the money allocated to the U.S. military each year, he would say, and instead use it to feed and clothe and educate the poor of the world, not one person left behind, then take whatever’s left over “to explore space, together, both inner and outer, forever, in peace.”

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The anti-war movement surged back onto the streets Easter weekend with major demonstrations taking place in six cities, and smaller actions in 44 others.

On April 5, 100,000 people rallied in New York City to hear speeches supporting the Black Panther party, the Presidio 27 and the Chicago “Conspiracy.” The demonstration was orderly throughout; the speeches marked a departure from the “broadbased, liberal-radical coalition” to reflect a growing class consciousness.

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