Most Recent Additions

Current rash of skyjacking is nothing new, merely a new outbreak of the age-‘old custom of piracy in the newest uncontrolled medium: the air. Diverting planes to Cuba is kid stuff. Wait until international pirates see the potential for just taking planes (as long as they can land on territory they control). Then, sooner or later somebody will think of sitting up there in a long-range bomber with a nuclear missile aboard.

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WASHINGTON, D.C. (LNS)—The Supreme Court has upheld (7 to 2) the right of three Des Moines high school students to wear black armbands to school in protest of the Vietnam War.

The majority opinion stated that students and teachers don’t shed “their Constitutional right to freedom of speech or expression at the schoolhouse gate.”

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On April 5^th in Chicago, GIs and civilians will be marching together against the war in Vietnam. The demonstration will be protesting the suppression of GI rights in the army and demanding that the troops be brought home now.

Six other major demonstrations will be held that week in cities near army bases across the country.

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Several hundred people attended Open City’s first benefit held February 28 at Alvin’s Delicatessen.

The three hundred dollars collected at the door was used to purchase the community switchboard now in operation at the Open City office.

For the last few weeks Open City members have met in committees, rapped on telephones and have generally been putting their projects together. The most obvious result of all this has been the opening of the Open City office now located at 4726 Third, near Forest, 2^nd Floor, office number 5.

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SAN FRANCISCO (LNS)—Military justice, it says in the manuals. But to observers of the trial, the two words form a mutual contradiction, one that emerged more starkly than ever when Pvts. Lawrence Reidel and Louis Osczepinski were sentenced on Feb. 15, to 14 and 16 years of imprisonment for their part in the non-violent Presidio protest last October. (See Fifth Estate, last issue.)

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Trustees of Macomb County Community College are considering a policy change which would effectively eliminate most of its black enrollment by phasing out non-residents of Macomb County.

Students for a Democratic Society are protesting the proposed change, and have issued a demand “that all students be granted equal opportunity to register and that no limit be placed on the amount of non-residents enrolled at Macomb,” threatening possible student action if the demand is not met.

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SEATTLE (LNS)—Ernest Gruening, Former U.S. Senator from Alaska, has called on America’s youth to resist the draft and go to jail, according to a UPI report.

“I want to see thousands of young nen refuse to go—until they have so many of them they’ve filled all the jails,” Gruening told an anti-war rally here.

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NEW YORK (Liberation News Service/Guardian) “Love starts at Chase Manhattan,” said the psychedelic lettering on the plastic shopping bags given to the girls attending New York’s first Bridal Fair at Madison Square Garden on Valentine’s Day weekend.

In a back stairwell, house dicks, rent-a-cops, some of the city red squad and independent heavies had isolated 10 radical women who were disrupting the day’s slave trade and were busy throwing them down the steps, slamming them up against concrete walls, twisting their arms, and screaming, “You’re sick, you’re sick, you’re sick.”

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Joyce recently had a baby. She had tried to obtain birth control pills, but couldn’t because of rules which said she had to be married to get a prescription from Planned Parenthood. After discovering that she was pregnant, she attempted to get an abortion, but strict Michigan abortion laws prevented this. Ultimately she married the father of the baby and had a little girl.

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Related: see “GIs Demand Rights” in this issue.

Fellow GIs:

For the past half decade our country has been involved in a long, drawn out, costly and tragic war in Vietnam. Most Americans do not support this war—increasing numbers are demonstrating their opposition, including active duty GIs. It is the most unpopular war in our history. Yet the government’s policy threatens to continue this tragedy for many years to come.

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FT. JACKSON, S.C.—Anti-war GIs here are circulating a petition addressed to their commanding officer calling on him to have a meeting on the post to discuss the war in Vietnam.

[See Ft. Jackson Leaflet in this issue.]

They also want to discuss whether their rights as citizens and soldiers are being violated by post authorities. The answer seems obvious. Since the soldiers calling themselves GIs United Against the War in Vietnam began their petition drive there has been a steady stream of harassment and attempted intimidation of their group by Army officials.

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YPSILANTI, Feb. 20 — On this cold Thursday morning over 100 black students seized the administration building of Eastern Michigan University and chained themselves inside.

Students massing on Eastern Michigan campus to support demands of black students.

After a one hour occupation approximately 100 riot-equipped Washtenaw County sheriff’s deputies sawed their way into the occupied building and busted the “leaders” of the demonstration. A list of people to be arrested had been drawn up by the university president the night before.

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The Man’s heavy hand of repression is attempting again to strike at this paper. We have been getting reports from both sellers, distributors, and buyers about police and school harrassment.

At Southfield High, which is run by anti-Fifth Estate fanatics, Principal Robert Hall and youth pig, Richard Overmeyer, persons have been suspended for selling the paper and students have had individual copies confiscated merely for having them in their possession.

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According to the U.S. Army the 27 GIs pictured here staging a sit-in at the Presidio Stockade in San Francisco, Oct. 14, 1968 are guilty of mutiny; a military crime punishable by a prison term of up to life.

This peaceful demonstration was to protest conditions in the stockade and the murder of a fellow prisoner by a guard. The prisoners tried so far have been convicted and received sentences up to 14 years. For the story behind this Army atrocity see the full story on page five.

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FIFTH ESTATE #74, March 5–19, 1969, Vol. 3 No. 22, page 2

Fifth Estate

A Newspaper of Detroit

EDITORIAL GROUP

Alan Gotkin

Harvey Ovshinsky

Tommye Wiese

Peter Werbe

Cathy West

PHOTO EDITOR

Mike Tyre

DISTRIBUTION

Bruce Montrose

MUSIC EDITOR

John Sinclair

STAFF

Claudia Efimchik

Ann Mikolowski

...

FRI. FEB. 21

KNIFE IN THE WATER, film presented by Films Arts International in the Library Lecture Hall, Marygrove College. 7:30 p.m.

JOHN GARY, recording artist, will be appearing at Masonic Auditorium. 8:20 p.m. Tickets: $5, $4, $3.

MEN AND DREAMS, featuring a mime troupe headed by Claude Kipnis, at the Detroit Art Institute. 8:30 p.m.

...

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.

ALL UNCLASSIFIEDS MUST BE PAID FOR IN ADVANCE

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Editors’ Note: The following statement was delivered Feb. 12 at a Wayne University forum on anti-Semitism sponsored by the South End newspaper. It comes in the midst of growing concern on the part of the Jewish community about alleged anti-Semitism both in our city and in other areas.

Hochman, once a Zionist, is a professor at Eastern Michigan University and ran as the vice-presidential candidate with Eldridge Cleaver in Michigan last year.

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ATHENS, Greece (LNS) — Greece’s military dictatorship has imposed a rigid code of conduct on university students. Greece is already under martial law, but the new code could be used if martial law is relaxed later this year, as promised by the dictatorship.

The code imposes stringent penalties on students who show “disrespect” or participate in strikes or demonstrations. The code also permits action against students “not imbued with the spirit compatible with the established system.”

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Reprinted from the Guardian (NYC)

CHITTY CHITTY BANG BANG, a color film in Super-Panavision (sic), produced by Albert R. Broccoli (sic), directed by Ken Hughes, based on a story by Ian Fleming; United Artists (sick).

At this moment long lines of anxious parents are dutifully forming lines at box-offices to buy their expensive reserved-seat tickets to this melange of candy-coated garbage, assuaging their doubts about themselves and their empty lives with the force-fed illusion that they are providing a delicious treat for their offspring.

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ANN ARBOR, Jan. 26—Euripides was so pissed after the Ann Arbor pigs busted the Performance Group’s performance of “Dionysus in ’69”—an updated and realistic version of his “Bacchae”—that the city was covered with a slick icy glaze for three days afterwards.

It all started when word leaked out that a nude performance was going to take place on the chaste floor of the Michigan Union Ballroom, as a part of the University of Michigan’s annual Creative Arts Festival.

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Open City has started to happen and I’m excited about it and glad to be involved in it. I’m working on the job co-op, hoping to influence the business world to hire freaks who really want to work but are more left of center in their commitments.

Why do we all have to lie so much when we apply for a job? Why do we have to promise to never miss a day and stay with the job forever when both sides know it’s so much bullshit? Part of the job of our committee is to try to get work that is meaningful, a job at which we can be ourselves: long hair, freaky clothes and whatever else we are. We hope to eventually extend beyond the menial, baby-sitting, window washing job set up that other freak communities have established.

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Reprinted with permission of the Guardian, independent radical weekly, NYC

One of the most difficult responsibilities of the revolutionary is to be self-critical. To be self-critical means being able to ask yourself if you are wrong, and if so, to admit the fact and correct it. Revolutionary self-criticism also involves the necessity to see the mistakes before they actually happen, and thus avoid them. However, to engage in self-criticism affords no guarantee that errors will be avoided or corrected. Self-criticism can lead to its own mistakes. The only thing the revolutionary knows for sure is that poverty, exploitation in all of its infinite varieties and racism must be destroyed. It is the question of “how” which involves the revolutionary and the concomitant responsibility to be self-critical.

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GRINNELL, Iowa (LNS) Brice Draper is a PR man for Playboy Magazine. He travels around to college campuses, selling the Playboy line and “promoting products for our advertisers.”

When Hefner’s boy Draper came to Grinnell, the local folk engaged him in naked confrontation. Ten students, six of them girls, took off their clothes to protest Playboy’s exploitation of the female body.

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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: Is there such a thing as sexual allergy? I have been dating a recently divorced woman, but we have had intercourse only once. Here’s why: Shortly after we shared one of the most explosive, mutually exciting and uninhibited amorous encounters a man and woman could experience she developed an irritating vaginal infection.

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Just a short note of congratulations on your editors’ notes column in the last (Jan. 23) issue of the Fifth Estate.

It is not often that a good cultural newspaper is willing to admit that the working class contains more than a bunch of fat contented racists. While I am one of those lucky individuals who can be both worker and hippy, I am the first to realize that this is impossible for most of the population.

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SAN FRANCISCO (LNS)—Pvt. Louis Osczepinski, one of 27 soldiers being tried for mutiny at the Presidio Army Base in San Francisco, attempted to commit suicide on Feb. 14. He slashed his arms four times.

Osczepinski, along with Pvt. Lawrence Reidel, was scheduled to hear the verdict in his case some time during the week of Feb. 17 through 24. On Feb. 13, Pvt. Henry Sood, the first of the Presidio 27 to be tried, was convicted and sentenced to 15 years hard labor.

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There is a lot happening in pop music and it is ridiculous to predict trends. One noticeable occurrence is the breaking up of groups and the need for individual artists to “go it alone.”

The group movement started in England and came over with the Beatles.

On both sides of the Atlantic all musicians seemed to be in groups. Possibly forsaking their own musical desires, what seemed important to the rock artist was the group “sound.”

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Performer James Brown is one Negro who’s certainly managed to come to terms on his own with Black Power. First he gave a cozy, bear-hugging endorsement of Hubert Humphrey (himself just back from hugging Lester Maddox) and then, when HHH’s balloon deflated, the nimble Brown was right in there socking it to them on behalf of President Tricky Dicky. Uncle Tom Brown may be full of soul but he’s also full of shit.

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A review of

Jerry Rubin’s “Letter to the Movement,” New York Review of Books, Feb. 13, 1969, 40 cents.

The Young American Poets, edited by Paul Carroll, Follet Publishing Co., 1968, $3.95,

Evergreen Review Reader, edited by Barney Rosset, Grove Press, 1969, $20.00

“From the Bay Area to New York we are suffering the greatest depression in our history...it’s a common problem, not an individual one, and people don’t talk to one another too much anymore. America proved deaf, and our dreams proved innocent. Scores of our brothers have become inactive and cynical,” Jerry Rubin has spoken.

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NEW YORK (LNS)—New York cops are guilty of a regular pattern of arbitrary arrest, physical abuse and courtroom perjury, according to a two-year study recently completed under the auspices of the New York Civil Liberties Union.

The study was conducted by lawyer Paul Chevigny and its findings are published in a new book, Police Power.

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“Read All About It!” for this issue consists of those papers put out by and for GIs.

It should be obvious from the number of papers existing, especially the ones from army bases, that the opposition within the armed services to the war and to the military has become increasingly visible in the last six months or so.

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The Legal Self Defense (LSD) benefit February 4^th was the greatest success in my memory: over 1200 people attended and offered their bread for support, and the LSD Fund netted over $2200.00 for the community.

A Board of Directors for LSD was set up to handle the disbursement of the money when people need it, and a bank account was opened in the name of Legal Self Defense. The Board comprises Brother Jack Forest, Detroit Captain White Panthers; Brother John Watson, editor of the South End newspaper; Brother Pun Plamondon, editor of the Sun (Ann Arbor) and Minister of Defense, White Panthers National Office; Brother Alan Gotkin, of the Fifth Estate Editorial Group and Minister of Propaganda, Detroit White Panthers; and Revs. James Markunas and Robert Morrison from St. Joseph’s Episcopal Church.

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RICHMOND, Calif. (LNS)—Workers and students here fought together Feb. 3 to repel scab attempts to break picket lines during a strike against Standard Oil Refinery.

Some 500 students and 800 workers slashed scab car tires and shattered windows with clubs. Strike breakers on foot were pushed back and beaten when they attempted to cross picket lines. When the company goons arrived to photograph the pickets, they were jumped and their cameras were demolished.

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WINDSOR, Ont.—For the first time in its history, the University of Windsor has felt the effects of increasing student demands for a voice in those decisions which affect their lives.

On Feb. 11, 55 students took over the Theology and Classics departments in the South Wing of the Administration Building.

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Reprinted from the Guardian.

San Francisco—A major breakthrough in the San Francisco State College strike was achieved Feb. 7 when representatives of striking workers at the Standard Oil refinery in Richmond, across the Bay, joined with striking SF State students and teachers to call for the formation of a mutual-aid agreement in the best traditions of labor solidarity.

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Recorder’s Court Judge Thomas Poindexter has bound over for trial seven of the nine persons accused of conspiring to bomb police stations, draft boards, and the Ann Arbor CIA office last Fall.

Poindexter has apparently already decided that the accused are guilty even before the trial begins.

“A conspiracy is like a circle,” he said on Feb. 7 after an 11 day preliminary examination. “After I make that comparison the defendant David Valler is the center of the circle.”

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February 21^st marked the fourth anniversary of the assassination of Black America’s hero, El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz (known to many as Malcolm X).

Born Malcolm Little in Omaha, Nebraska on May 19, 1925, Malcolm quickly learned the bitter taste of white racism. His mother was born as the result of her mother’s rape by a white planter (thus giving Malcolm his light complexion and red hair).

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John Watson, the Editor-in-Chief of Wayne State’s revolutionary student newspaper, the South End, has been charged with assault and battery on a TV newsman.

Watson, pleading innocent, was arraigned Feb. 14 in Judge Robert Colombo’s court. A jury trial was set for March 6^th. Ken Cockrel is his attorney.

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TOPEKA (LNS)—Pvt. Donald Till wasn’t happy when the MP’s busted him for being AWOL.

When they decided to fly him to Fort Riley, Kansas for a court-martial, Till hatched a plan. Feigning fear of flying, he conned a parachute out of his captors, and then questioned them at length about its use.

Mid-flight, the industrious soldier leapt 3,000 feet to his freedom. Unfortunately he was captured a short time later.

FIFTH ESTATE #73, February 20-March 5, 1969, Vol. 3 No. 21, page 2

Fifth Estate

A Newspaper of Detroit

EDITORIAL GROUP

Alan Gotkin

Harvey Ovshinsky

Tommye Wiese

Peter Werbe

Cathy West

PHOTO EDITOR

Mike Tyre

DISTRIBUTION

Bruce Montrose

MUSIC EDITOR

John Sinclair

STAFF

Claudia Efimchik

...

On Monday evening, February 20^th, Alvin’s Delicatessen hosted the second “official” meeting of the OPEN CITY project.

After smoldering in the cauldrons of the finest minds in Detroit’s underground, OPEN CITY is being realized at a killer pace.

The primary objective of this meeting was to create committees around which people can be organized. This was accomplished in such an organized and (lo and behold) enjoyable manner as to make one wonder whether organizational meetings are worthy of the profound aversion which most people have for them.

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FRI. FEB. 7

A TASTE OF HONEY presented by the Film Arts International in the Library Lecture Hall, Marygrove College. 7:30 p.m. Adm. 50 cents.

GRANDE BALLROOM. This weekend the Savoy Brown Blues Band and Mother Earth will be performing. You must be 17 and adm. is $3.75.

UNDERGROUND FLICS at the Detroit Repertory Theatre. The films for this week include “Brats” with Laurel & Hardy, “Square Inch Field,” “Stretching Out,” and “Autumn Spectrum.” 13103 Woodrow Wilson, shows at 11 p.m. and 1 a.m.

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REVOLUTION

REVOLUTION

ELDRIDGE

CLEAVER

Get your shit together be

ready

Tell your friends be

the first on

your block

My God Man be

serious

What would Che say

?

Kill a pig a day fuck in the streets wear

berets

Quote Mao

If you like this poem

it isnt for you

friend

five sticks/electric cap

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William Leach from the Black Panther Party is absolutely correct (“The White Left—Serious or Not?” FE #70, January 9–22, 1969) when he points out that white so-called revolutionaries have not organized anyone in the white community—we must ask ourselves why?

Is it because we are afraid to challenge the handful of Wallacites in Hazel Park, or Wyandotte who are attempting to give leadership to the thousands of young white workers who live there.

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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.

Wanted: Articles, photos, etc. on the MC5. Mag. 53270 Aulgur Dr., Rochester, MI 48063.

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Global books, a long-time Detroit Marxist bookstore, has moved its headquarters to 4415 Second at Canfield.

The bookstore, which has been in operation since 1958, carries radical literature, both current and classic, periodicals from Socialist countries and books on black liberation, labor and economics.

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a review of

the Rolling Stones, “The Beggars’ Banquet” (London)

the Beatles, “The Beatles” (Apple)

The Beatles and Rolling Stones albums have been out for a couple of months now and we have a clearer perspective on what these, the super-est of the groups are up to.

When the Beatles’ album first appeared my immediate reaction was that it would be pretentious for anyone to attempt to “review” it. The Beatles had released a new album, of course it was great, and what else could us “lowly types” say about it.

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Diane di Prima has died. Now we have no choice but to introduce her to each other, since she is no longer here to introduce herself.

Diane Di Prima, 1960s

On paper, you could say, “she was a poet, she was a feminist, beatnik, anarchist, Buddhist.” You could list her famous friends and lovers. Promote her books, her poems, her art. But she was so many things.

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Reprinted with permission of The Guardian, independent radical weekly, NYC

The revolutionary process takes many decades to fulfill itself. The generation which finally assumes power gives the appearance of having started a revolution in a short period of time. That is not so. The generation which wins power is only completing work begun decades before.

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