Most Recent Additions

After messing around with Tom Sincavitch’s “Discharge for the good of the service” and finally turning it down, the Army has offered him a deal.

If Tom agrees to plead guilty to the charges of violating the orders of a sergeant and a captain they will drop the charge of violating an Army regulation, give him nine months confinement at Fort Leavenworth and then give him a Bad Conduct Discharge.

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NEW YORK, N.Y., July 1—The national office of the American Servicemen’s Union announced that two revolts had taken place in army stockades recently; on June 14 at Ft. Jackson, South Carolina and on June 22 at Ft. Riley, Kansas.

The uprising at Jackson was touched off by the beating of a prisoner, Julio Rivera, who had refused to pull K.P. Rivera was severely beaten by three sergeants and had to be hospitalized.

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Editors’ Note: The so-called “riot manual” described on the opposite page [FE #84, July 24-August 6, 1969] should be seen for what it is—a battle plan for the subjugation of the black community, demonstrators, and anyone who challenges the way this system is run. Its ruthlessness and cynicism should be ample evidence that the police are not an agency to protect the people, but rather to terrorize them.

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Some ways to think about the meaning and significance of three white, Christian males, two of whom are members of the armed forces, going to the moon.

“This is it,” said Cal Rogers, an elderly Oklahoman, who stood beside a tent and sipped a container of coffee. “This is what we’ve been working and paying for so long? That’s why I’m here to see what its all about.” (N.Y. Times Wednesday July 16, 1969).

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(via The Ann Arbor Argus) When the insurrection of July, 1967 began, Detroit police were ready with Schutzstaffel rules.

The Argus secured an official copy of the police riot manual issued in 1966 and signed by Ray Girardin, police commissioner, 1961–68. Among the manual policies still in force are the following.

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Editors’ Note: As of this writing the Woodstock Rock Festival may not happen. It seems the town council of Wallkill, N.Y. (the site of the festival) voted unanimously not to allow the festival to be held in their town. This came after almost a quarter of a million dollars in advance sales had been taken in.

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SAN FRANCISCO—“Naked Angels” is the best movie I’ve ever seen. I’ve seen “2001” four times, and I thought that was better than “Wild Angels” which I saw only 3 times.

A new genre of films is being born from the low-count B-movie trade: Motorcycle flicks. They are destined to become as classic as Westerns—only Westerns were legends and dealt with the projected past. Motorcycle flicks define our future, and our future is one of gangland violence, measured in horsepower cubic centimeters and steel tonnage. Get ready.

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The Fifth Estate

“To Serve the People”

EDITORIAL GROUP

Alan Gotkin

Peter Werbe

Cathy West

DISTRIBUTION

Bruce Montrose

Fred Frank

BUSINESS & ADVERTISING

Bill Rowe

STAFF

Dena Clamage

Rick London

Claudia Montrose

Dave Watson

Marilyn Werbe

Tommye Wiese

The FIFTH ESTATE is published every other Thursday of each month by the Fifth Estate Newspaper, Inc., 1107 W. Warren, Detroit, Michigan 48201. Application to mail at second-class postage rates is pending at Detroit Michigan. Subscription rate is $3 for one year; $5 for two years. Canadian is $3.50; all other foreign are $5 per year. Phone: 831–6800.

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South End Editor Cheryl McCall speaks at July 14 press conference flanked by Art Johnston (l.) and Attorney James Lafferty (r). Photo—A. Gotkin.

Bill Keast sent Cheryl McCall a telegram at 2:30 am July 11 which read:

I REGRET TO INFORM YOU THAT I HAVE FOUND IT NECESSARY TO INSTRUCT THE PRINTER OF THE SOUTH END NOT TO PRINT THE ISSUE PLANNED FOR FRIDAY JULY 11. I AM CONVINCED THAT ITS PUBLICATION WOULD DO SERIOUS DAMAGE TO WAYNE STATE UNIVERSITY AND TO THE FUTURE OF’ STUDENT JOURNALISM HERE. FURTHER I AM SUSPENDING PUBLICATION OF THE SOUTH END UNTIL THE STUDENT NEWSPAPER PUBLICATION BOARD HAS HAD AN OPPORTUNITY TO DEVELOP POLICIES AND GUIDE LINES CONSISTENT WITH THE RECOMMENDATIONS OF THE STUDENT FACULTY COUNCIL AS APPROVED BY THE BOARD OF GOVERNORS OF WAYNE STATE UNIVERSITY AND IN THE LIGHT OF THESE DEEMS IT APPROPRIATE FOR PUBLICATION TO BE RESUMED. WM KEAST, PRESIDENT, WAYNE STATE UNIVERSITY.

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The Hill was run by lanky Louie, an ex outrider with the Highwaymen. “The Grand Dude,” as they called him now is sort of manager of a couple scraggly rock and roll bands that lived on and around The Hill. There was the Sun, but most notably, perhaps, were the Tate brothers, Terry and Hawg, who form the nucleus of the Tate Blues Band.

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A demonstration against Iran’s execution of gays during a Christopher Street Day gay pride parade in Berlin.

My name is Arsham Parsi, a 37-year-old gay man born and raised in Iran. Neither of these facts were my choice. Discovering my difference from other men—not being interested in women—terrified me because I could be killed for who I was.

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Last October 3 marked twenty-five years since eighteen US soldiers died in Mogadishu, Somalia during a famous firefight that most Americans know as Black Hawk Down, for the crashed US helicopters. The loss is embedded in the American consciousness through a self-pitying book and film, and was widely commemorated on the 25^th anniversary.

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As has been the case throughout colonial conquest, the military police force of the Canadian state, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) have facilitated the occupation of Indigenous lands by resource capital. Most recently, the state forced its way onto Wet’suwet’en territories in northern so-called British Columbia to secure access for a Coastal GasLink liquified natural gas pipeline (LNG).

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Longtime Fifth Estate friend and contributor, David Porter, died December 29; he was 79. A dedicated teacher, anarchist researcher, and grassroots community activist, Porter applied his anti-authoritarian principles to many projects.

David Porter in his office, 1975

Growing up near Chicago, Porter graduated from Oberlin College near Cleveland in 1961. He then attended the Institute of Political Studies in Paris. His doctoral studies in politics at Columbia University included a year in Algeria learning directly about the workers’ self-management movement there.

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I traveled to Dharamsala, India in 2005 to set up a one-month summer study program, in collaboration with the Louisiana Himalaya Association, and have taken groups of students there periodically since then. During last summer’s trip, we visited renowned ecofeminist theorist and activist Vandana Shiva’s Navdanya Biodiversity Farm. We toured the fields and the seed bank, heard lectures by staff members specializing in various areas of agroecology, and were extremely fortunate that Shiva herself could speak to our small group about Navdanya and the ecofeminist politics of Earth Democracy.

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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.

Bi-guy Wants to go straight. Send suggestions to: L.P.G., 2152 Dorchester, apt. 104, Troy, Michigan 48084.

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COLUMBIA, S.C. — The Army brass at Ft. Jackson is still trying to screw GIs for exercising their Constitutional rights. (See last issue, p.15 [“Free Speech for GIs: Analysis of a victory” by Michael Smith, FE #82, June 26-July 9, 1969] for background story.)

Pvt. Tommy Woodfin, one of the founders of GIs United Against the War in Vietnam, has just come through a second court martial. He was acquitted on two counts, but plead guilty to a third count of being Absent Without Official Leave. Woodfin went AWOL on Memorial Day to visit his sick girlfriend in a New York hospital. He was sentenced to one month at hard labor and busted in rank.

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in Cooperation with Detroit Adventure

THURS. JULY 10

DETROIT SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA at Meadowbrook, Ehrling conducting; Itzthak Perlman, violinist. 8:30 pm.

AUDITIONS FOR TALENT SHOW at the Rappa House See July 11.

FOLK MUSIC from 9 till midnight at the Red Roach Coffeehouse. Plum St., at Fifth.

DETROIT CONCERT BAND, Belle Isle Music Shell at 8:15 pm.

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QUESTION: I think my girlfriend and I have been screwing too much. The reason I believe this is lately I’ve been almost continuously tired.

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

Could it be that too much sex is wearing me out? We only screw once a day, six or so times a week. As far as I know, I’m getting a balanced diet and plenty of sleep.

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Special to the Fifth Estate

NEW YORK, N.Y., July 1—Five beautiful women, including Kathy Czarnik of Detroit, entered Manhattan’s 44^th Street draft board and destroyed 2,000 1-A files. They also broke office equipment and scattered other records across the office.

They were able to leave the office without detection and appeared July 3 at a noon rally in Rockefeller Center of 2,000 persons to explain their actions to the public.

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The Detroit area is getting desperately short of places for rock bands to play. Three months ago things looked really good with the Grande, the Hideouts, and the Crow’s Nests all doing well; the Eastown getting ready to open, and at least eight smaller clubs rumored to be opening by early summer.

But in the last month the prevailing winds seem to have shifted in the other direction. The Clawson Hideout was forced to close down because the city fathers and the Knights of Columbus (who own the hall) limited the capacity to 350, hardly enough to break even. The Crow’s Nest West has closed to remodel right at the start of the Summer.

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One of the basic fundamentals of conservatism, presumably, is to conserve what you’ve got (no matter how much somebody else might need it) and to this extent at least, William Buckley, heir to a $100 million fortune, is true to conservative principles. Several hundred or thousand subscribers to Buckley’s magazine, the National Review, received a heart-rending plea in the mail last week: unless somebody gives the slick right-wing magazine $250,000 “it is quite literally true that the nation’s only conservative journal of opinion will have to close down.”

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On the night of July 3 the staccato of machine-gun fire rang out across the Jeffries Housing Project bordering on the Lodge Freeway. The sound was accompanied by the appearance of flickering letters on the wall of one of the high-rise concentration camps spelling out the name: NEWSREEL.

The sound and the letters are the trademark of Newsreel, a radical filmmaking and distribution organization which had an outdoor film showing at the housing project.

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Within the past year, America has suddenly found time to experience something called the “rebirth of the blues.” On magazine covers, in underground journals, in popular music—the blues.

Blues has surfaced into the popular culture. It has surfaced not from the so-called underground or “hip” subculture but from an underground far deeper—the black culture. For blues, the only purely native American music, ironically was spawned and nurtured by a man often considered as less than an American, the black man.

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Madison Avenue seems determined to co-opt and make a profit on everything, even revolution.

What the movement has to do is politicize every facet of Amerikan life and relate to people everywhere they are—in this case, at the movies.

For the last couple of weeks several people from the SDS summer program have been spending spare time at “CHE!” (“A man who created a nightmare of violence and terror”). We went to theatres all over Detroit passing out the June 12 “Che!” issue of the Fifth Estate [FE #81, June 12–25, 1969], and rapping about what Che and Cuba really are about.

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Tom Sincavitch, the Detroit GI who took sanctuary in St. Joseph’s Church this Spring is facing another court-martial the last week in July.

Sincavitch is being held in the Ft. Riley, Kansas stockade for refusing to report for duty. He had been put on active duty following his refusal to attend his Army Reserve meetings in Detroit. He called the training he was receiving “racist.”

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You jump into Toronto all of a sudden after driving four hours through the Ontario countryside.

Our first thought as we drove the station wagon downtown on Yonge St. was, “The youth revolt is international!” It was partly the pop festival that weekend, but all of downtown Toronto looked like Beverly St. when the Grande is playing.

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NEW YORK (LNS)—Top secret operations are being launched in Vietnam to kill or capture American deserters fighting for the NLF, according to a London Express story reprinted June 24 in the New York Post.

The operations have been ordered as the problem of troops going AWOL in the war zone becomes increasingly serious.

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DETROIT (LNS)—Workers in the automobile industry—described by The New York Times as “among the cream of the nation’s industrial workers”—are feeling the squeeze of rising prices and falling real wages.

Although pay raises have been won regularly from the big automobile giants, the increase in the cost of living has kept real wages down.

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Since I’m more or less trapped working downtown this summer my latest food adventure is the lost art of sandwich making.

Making your own lunch is always a drag. When you were a kid there was at least some element of surprise when your mother made your lunch. At least there was with my mother who believed in putting in surprises once in a while.

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“Stop the madness and expand Tweed. Two neighborhoods can’t hold up economic progress,” pronounced a local newspaper columnist, directing his ire at residents on the edge of New Haven and East Haven, Connecticut.There, the grassroots Stop Tweed campaign has so far halted the expansion of Tweed Airport.

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There is something faulty with the concept of humans as rational animals. It defines humanity by a limited criterion and tries to separate humans from our animal being. This sets up a hierarchy in which the true human is defined by the portion of the brain that is rational. Perhaps, even worse than the idea of the rational animal is the idea of the “rationalizing animal.” Pratkanis and Aronson in their 2001 Age of Propaganda: The Everyday Use and Abuse of Persuasion, place this as a central factor in how we are manipulated.

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“The National Black Economic Development Conference (NBEDC) will in no way yield to threats of prosecution for non-existent crimes or other intimidation. On the contrary, we will continue to press our demands which are known to be just by all, including the religious industry and the U.S. Department of Justice.”

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Listen and dig the “fair” deal the troops get in good old Vietnam by the military-pig-racist-establishment.

Currently I am being framed on a phony marijuana bust. I have an eyewitness to testify in my favor but it will be the word of two enlisted men against the word of two 1^st Lts. who can do no wrong as far as the military is concerned.

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The Fifth Estate

A Newspaper of Detroit

EDITORIAL GROUP

Alan Gotkin

Peter Werbe

Cathy West

DISTRIBUTION

Bruce Montrose

Fred Frank

BUSINESS & ADVERTISING

Bill Rowe

CITY EDITOR

Chris Singer

STAFF

Dena Clamage

Claudia Montrose

Franie Nelson

Dave Watson

Marilyn Werbe

The FIFTH ESTATE is published every other Thursday of each month by the Fifth Estate Newspaper, Inc., 1107 W. Warren, Detroit, Michigan 48201. Application to mail at second-class postage rates is pending at Detroit Michigan. Subscription rate is $3 for one year; $5 for two years. Canadian is $3.50; all other foreign are $5 per Year. Phone: 831–6800.

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Weirdness continued as the State of Michigan suffered another set-back in its attempt to put John Sinclair behind bars.

The White Pahther Minister of Information, accused of possession of marijuana, was granted a mistrial by Recorder’s Court Judge Robert Colombo June 25 after he decided that the testimony of an undercover narc was prejudicial.

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The fact that there is a grass famine in Detroit is not news to local smokers.

It appears, however, that the phenomenon is nation wide with reports received of similar situations in New York, Chicago, and San Francisco.

The causes, although speculative, appear to be two-fold. The first holds that the Mafia has completely stopped large shipments of marijuana into the country in an effort to drive independent dealers out of business and bring the entire scene back under their control.

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The search for a community park in the Warren Forest area continues.

On a balmy Sunday, June 27, about 60 people met in a vacant lot at the corner of Leota and Fourth. The topic of discussion was the proposed site of a park that the community could use without getting in the way of children at play and that was built by the people themselves.

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One of the more astonishing and bizarre developments in the ever-increasing confrontations between revolutionary and establishment elements in our society was leaked to this paper.

A member of the Federal Communications Commission sympathetic to the struggle of today’s youth against their senile oppressors, revealed the incredible and even hilarious details of a hitherto suppressed report circulated in only the highest, innermost governmental circles.

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HONDURAS: turmoil unleashed, one student demonstrator killed

COSTA RICA: 2,000 students demonstrated

PANAMA: National Guard on duty

COLOMBIA: 20,000-man special security force tried to control student strikes and heavy street fighting

ECUADOR: ten striking students killed by police...Rocky’s car nearly overturned

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with additional notes by Fifth Estate staff

CHICAGO (LNS)—SDS expelled the Progressive Labor Party (PL) and its political allies from the ranks of the organization June 21.

The action was the turning point of the 1969 SDS National Convention. SDS leaders saw it as a historic step in the history of the nation’s left, and as a breath of fresh air for the movement.

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a review of

The Assault on Childhood, Ron Goulart, Sherbourne Press, Los Angeles, 1969, $6.50

The Assault on Childhood is a book about the newest species of American human/animal: Superkid, and his manufacturers.

Superkid is a real product of mass culture, a person who is not a kid anymore, but who is not really an adolescent nor an adult either. Superkid is the new American person.

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A recent issue of Scope magazine carries a bullshit hype by Peggy Cronin called “The Young Radicals In Our High Schools.” In the article Miss Cronin attempts to show how high school activists are “not quite radical.” She went to two individuals, one from Cass Tech and one from Seaholm High in Birmingham, to give her an “objective” analysis of the high school situation.

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Brother Warner Mach, currently living out in the hinterlands of Rochester, sent us a box of “Uncle Sam Cereal” he came across while shopping in the local A&P out there.

Although the advertising puffery on the box claims that good ol’ “Uncle Sam’s” (“a natural laxative”) has been “keeping Americans regular since 1908,” none of us had ever heard of the stuff. With that in mind, I thought it would be interesting to explore this phenomenon that might be branded “toilet paper patriotism.”

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SAN FRANCISCO (LNS)—Black Panther Party Chairman, Bobby Seale recently reiterated his call for a United Front against Fascism in America. The United Front is to be inaugurated at a National Conference called by the Panthers in Oakland, Calif., July 18–20.

To this Conference have been invited representatives of groups across the country, not just radicals, but all who consider themselves “progressive” and who “take a firm stand against the development of fascism in America.”

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The White Panther Bike Run and the people’s party at the U-M Arboretum July 6^th turned out to be a quiet get together of freaks and young people without the usual interference by the pigs.

Things started at 1:00 that Sunday afternoon as 50 bikes split from the Fifth Estate office off to Ann Arbor.

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Compiled in cooperation with Detroit Adventure

FRIDAY, JUNE 27

THE GOLDEN AGE OF COMEDY a selection from over 2,000 reels of magic moments with Laurel and Hardy, Will Rogers, Harry Langdon and others. And HAPPY-ANNIVERSARY (1961) and RUPTURE (1967) two delightful French shorts by Pierre Etaix. Rackham Aud. 60 Farnsworth. Adm. $1 students 75 cents.

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When you see “The First Time” you begin to think that this “Graduate” bit is becoming a pretty poor excuse for a movie.

This time the striking Jacqueline Bisset has the Mrs. Robinson role, and Wes Stern, Rick Kelman, and Wink Roberts all comprise the Benjamin Braddock figure, working under the assumption that three Dustin Hoffmanns are more fun than one.

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Editors’ Note: The author is an attorney with the Detroit Law firm of Lafferty, Reosti, and Jabara, who spent two months in Columbia, S.C. working on the legal defense of members of GIs United Against the War in Vietnam.

COLUMBIA, S.C. — The story of the Ft. Jackson Eight is the story of how an attempt by the brass to break a rank and file GI movement failed.

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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.

All unclassifieds must be paid for in advance.

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