Most Recent Additions

A massive national denouncement of the continuing war in Vietnam and the Selective Service System is being readied for the week of Oct. 16–22, and by all indications it should well be the largest demonstration of its type in American history.

The Resistance does not recognize deferments, for they are part of the system. By accepting a deferment, a person does nothing to change that system.

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If your government is waging a criminal war do you serve the country best by cooperating?

Who served Germany best under Hitler? Those who obeyed orders and helped kill the Jews? Or the handful of Germans who chose prison and even death rather than cooperate?

Who upheld Russian honor in 1956? Those who obeyed orders, marched into Hungary, and shot down students and workers—or those troops who refused to fire?

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London (UNS) By Mail — Stokely Carmichael participated in the International Congress on the Dialectics of Liberation in London at the Round House.

During his stay here, he also spoke with Black people from Asia, Africa and the West Indies.

On Sunday, July 23, he addressed a massive, mostly Black, session of the Congress and announced he would be unable to attend further meetings next week because he was leaving unexpectedly.

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It is hard to reach you guys. Once you go through the doors of that induction center it is almost impossible to get to you. Well, you are inside now. Maybe you are at some base in the U.S. getting your basic training. Maybe you are stationed in Germany. Maybe you’ve gotten your orders for Vietnam. Maybe you are already there.

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(UPS) One of the most feared (and most frequently fantasied) of sexual activities is the orgy.

Right now you are probably fantasizing one of your own, right?

The word “orgy” is ambiguous. In its broadest sense it connotes a sensual activity which is pursued without restraint of appetite, or an “unbridled exercise of passions,” as my dictionary would have it.

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d.a. levy, 1960s

(UPS) The following is an interview with D.A. Levy, the nationally prominent young Cleveland poet who was twice arrested early this year because of his outspoken poetic opinions of the good mayor and his mucked-up administration of that city.

L.B.: When were you arrested on obscenity charges?

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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 long continued use of spray deodorants cause cancer of the armpits?

ANSWER: At first, I thought your letter was a put-on. In fact, that might have been your intention but, nevertheless, you raise an interesting question. Certainly there has been no epidemic of cancer of the axilla or armpit. But spray deodorants have not been in use for very long. Cigarette smoking causes cancer of the lungs but it takes about 20 years for it to develop. We don’t yet have 20 years experience with spray deodorants.

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(UPS) FE note: If you read last issue’s column, (“Better Living—Thru Chemistry,” FE #38, September 15–30, 1967) please read this one also. Our advice would be that anything that can explode should be forgotten unless you are really into [sentence not finished in the print edition]

Further information on Superpot. If you heat lighter fluid near an open flame you’ll blow yourself up. In a pot of boiling water put the solution.

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Well, the Detroit Teachers’ strike is over—and guess who got the royal screwing? About 175,000 black kids whose basic conditions of instruction were not improved more than a piddle.

The matriarchy of Union President Mare Ellen Riordan triumphed again. She and her Marygrove Mafia have succeeded in developing such tight control of that organization that it’s almost impossible to move without an approving glance from her.

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Editor’s Note — The San Francisco Mime Troupe will perform Saturday, October 28 at 8:15 in The Detroit Institute of Arts Auditorium in a benefit performance for the Fifth Estate. The Mime Troupe was in Detroit last Fall and received rave reviews (from us) for their “Civil Rights in a Cracker Barrel.”

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The sphere of politics has gone full-circle with the newly organized Oakland County Chapter of the Young Americans for Freedom.

In the past, YAF has been considered a right-wing, conservative organization. Recently, the Oakland County YAF under the chairmanship of Terry Epton passed resolutions against the draft and against “laws regulating the sale possession and use of marijuana.”

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If the once highly-touted, but now quite tarnished “War Against Poverty” has done nothing else, it has provided a new battleground for political bickering-among the poor themselves and among the middle-class citizens who think they’re trying to help the poor.

Probably the greatest boondoggle around here nowadays is the Wayne County Office of Economic Opportunity (WCOEO) program. Designed to serve the “poor” areas in Wayne County outside Detroit, it makes the Detroit poverty program look like a smashing success in contrast.

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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.

The Fifth Estate, 1107 W. Warren, Detroit, 48201. phone 831–6800

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UPS—Superpot! To obtain pure cannabis resin—almost colorless, odorless, tasteless: take hash and reduce to a powder. Dissolve in small quantity of petroleum ether. Ordinary lighter fuel will do for this purpose.

Shake and bring to the boil. Take care it does not explode—lighter fuel boils at about 70 degrees. Unwanted mush will settle at bottom. Pour solution into a saucer, flush muck down bog.

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a review of

• The Scavengers and Critics of the Warren Report by Richard Warren Lewis based on an investigation by Lawrence Schiller. Dell Original 95 cents

• The Truth About the Assassination by Charles Roberts. Grosset & Dunlap, Original Paperback $1

“If I learned anything in Dallas that day, besides what it’s like to be numbed by shock and grief,” says Charles Roberts in his book (p. 13), “it was that eye-witness testimony is the worst kind.”

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Dearest Hippie Editor:

I think you guys at the Fifth Estate are the biggest clot of hypocrites I have ever had witness to. Some people wrote some letters to the Editor in your Aug. 15–31 issue. They called you hypocrites. They were right. So give them this idiot reply “Go back to your bar-b-ques and rock gardens and go soak your head in gravy, and hang yourself on a telephone wire,” and other kindergarten sayings.

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THE FIFTH ESTATE

1107 W. Warren

Detroit 48201

831–6800

EDITORS

Harvey Ovshinsky

Peter Werbe

NEWS EDITOR

Frank Joyce

EDITORIAL ASSISTANT

Cathy West

CIRCULATION MANAGER

Tommye Wiess

MUSIC & LITERARY EDITOR

John Sinclair

ART

Gary Grimshaw

FILM EDITOR

Joe Fineman

CALENDAR GIRLS

Karen Kovach

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ART & ARTISTS: c/o Mario Arnaya, 16 Buckingham Palace Rd., London SW1, Eng.

AVATAR: 145 Columbia Street, Cambridge, Mass. 02139

BERKELEY BARB: 2886 Telegraph Ave., Berkeley, Calif. 94795

CANADIAN FREE PRESS: Student Co-op, Argyle House, 53 Argyle, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada

CONNECTIONS: 22 North Henry Street, Madison, Wisconsin 53703

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FORT KNOX — Pvt. Thomas Tuck of Cleveland, a black anti-war GI at Ft. Knox, Kentucky, was given a summary court-martial August 4 and sentenced to thirty days in the stockade at hard labor. His offense was that he refused to pick up a gun twice.

Tuck was notified of the court-martial the day before the trial. At the trial he was told that he would not be permitted a civilian lawyer. The Cleveland Draft Resistance Union has hired New York lawyer Conrad Lynn, who has filed notice of an appeal on this basis. The question is: does a soldier have a right to due process of law?

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The dance/concert, which will be open only to those 17 or over due to local ordinances, will feature the music of the MC-5, the Rationals, the Thyme, the Apostles, Wilson Lindsey’s FDA, the Gang, Our Mother’s Children, and a number of other Detroit bands, with lights by the Pisces Eyes Light Company.

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The resistance to the Draft Resistance Committee office at 12820 Hamilton in Highland Park has been stepped up into a Mississippi-style harassment campaign.

At 11:20 p.m. the night of August 28 someone shot three slugs from a large-caliber rifle through the front window of the office. Two more shots were fired through the front windows of the office in the dark hours of the morning of September 1.

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On Sunday, September 3, the Detroit Free Press ran a five page feature entitled, “The 43 Who Died.” It was an in depth investigation into each riot connected death carried out by three competent Free Press staff reporters.

The three, Barbara Stanton, William Serrin and Gene Glotz, compiled evidence on the John Leroy case among the others. Their finding substantially corroborate the Fifth Estate version of his death (see Fifth Estate, August 15–31, 1967 and September 1–15, 1967). They added some new information as to the horror Leroy and his companions suffered at the hands of the National Guard.

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New York—The American Civil Liberties Union has asked for the end of criminal sanctions for homosexual practices in private between consenting adult partners.

In a policy statement released in New York today, the civil liberties group said that while laws penalizing homosexual conduct are “more honored in the breach than in practice” there is widespread “harassment and—intimidation of homosexuals.”

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The Grande Ballroom, through the goodness of Uncle Russ, will again be the scene of a huge benefit dance/concert for Trans-Love Energies Unlimited, the Detroit hippie / artists coop.

Titled “Homage to John Coltrane,” the concert will celebrate the birth of the late musical giant (Trane was born September 23^rd, 1926, on the first day of Libra) and commemorate his passage from this planet July 17^th, 1967. Music will be donated by the MC-5, the Up, and the Charles Moore Ensemble, Detroit’s first and most forward avant-garde jazz unit. Moore’s original group, the Detroit Contemporary 5, performed in a “Homage to John Coltrane” concert at the old Artists’ Workshop on Forest Avenue in November of 1964.

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The San Francisco Mime Troupe, which has earned an international reputation for slaughtering sacred cows, will be performing its anti-war commedia dell ‘arte “l’Amante Militaire” in a benefit performance for the Fifth Estate on Saturday, October 28.

R.G. Davis, the articulate and energetic director of what he has called the ‘guerrilla theatre,’ had this to say about charges of obscene, suggestive gestures, disloyal treatment of the Vietnam War and presidential policies, and shock for shock’s sake in his show:

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Between now and October 9^th the J.L. Hudson Gallery is offering the public a legal trip via the work of Michelangelo Pistoletto.

Pistoletto, a 34 year old Italian artist, has succeeded in opening up an entirely new dimension in art through the relatively simple device of mounting life-size photographs on highly polished stainless steel plates.

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It was a muggy, uncomfortable night at the 17^th District Democratic Headquarters in the all-white Redford section of northwest Detroit. Meeting was the “Democratic Forum,” a conservative faction of the District. The speaker was the noted liberal statesman, Councilman Mel Ravitz.

What was he there to talk about? What else but the recent Detroit insurrection (Part I). And it was amazing how one person, a learned Ph.D. in Sociology, could say so little in such a long speech.

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I was speaking of the change taking place in this nation, and would say that in America the change is most evident in two sectors or subcultures of the civilization. In the black stinking ghettoes of the poor and exploited, and in those sections of cities and land where the enlightened young have gathered for all intents and purposes outside the rigid general social framework of this America. These two sectors illustrate the two “major steps” outlined in this column last time.

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Convening in Chicago’s Palmer House, one of America’s plushest (and whitest) hotels, the National Conference on New Politics brought black militants and much of the white left into occasional dialogue and frequent chaos.

The New Politics convention assembled an unprecedented array of strange bedfellows under one roof. Before the convention ended, white Mississippians called for Black Power, Jews condemned “Zionist imperialism,” a couple of nuns endorsed the Newark conference resolutions (which characterized Christianity as a slave religion) and as usual the minuscule Ad-Hoc Committee for a Marxist-Leninist Vanguard in America denounced almost everyone.

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A Detroit Diggers Society has materialized in the Warren-Forest area and is in the process of being “organized” by two neighborhood hippies, Dan Vincent and Cindy Lee. Organization to the Diggers means getting a place to operate out of, scrounging up rent money and donations of money, food, clothing, and housing, all to be distributed freely among the people of the community.

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

EDITOR’S NOTE: The following column will be a regular Fifth Estate feature. It is published regularly in our sister Underground Press Syndicate paper, The Berkeley Barb. Dr. Schoenfeld is a legitimate medical doctor and all of the questions he answers are authentic ones sent to him by readers of the UPS papers that syndicate his column. Your questions are welcome and may be sent to Dr. Schoenfeld at the Fifth Estate, 1107 W. Warren, Detroit, Michigan.

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Five new productions, including three classics and two contemporary plays, will be featured at the Hilberry Classic Theatre during its Wayne State University Centennial season of repertory.

A revival of last year’s record-breaking success, “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” will be performed in the fall.

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“White man’s justice” in Detroit courts has again been offered to members of the city’s hip community, the Fifth Estate learned this week in two separate reports from Detroit longhairs.

“White man’s justice” is that peculiar form of legal blindness which punishes black people equally and allows errant white middle-class youths the chance to redeem themselves in the eyes of their society. It is evident usually in marijuana cases, where hippies are offered probation and a fine in exchange for going straight, i.e. cutting their hair, putting on decent clothes, and returning to school or a job. The alternative, of course, is a quick lock-up.

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The National Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam, which organized the massive April 15 demonstrations in New York City and San Francisco, is now arranging for a mass mobilization to confront the warmakers in Washington, D.C. It will be on October 21, with supporting demonstrations around the world.

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The worst thing one could say about the Algiers Motel Tribunal is that it was Recorder’s Court upside down.

If the tribunal was biased and weighted against the four white defendants, Detroit Patrolman Robert Paille and Ronald August, National Guardsman Theodore Thomas and private guard Melvin Dysmukes, then it was weighted in exactly the same way that Recorder’s Court proceedings are against Negro defendants.

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The Draft Resistance sold its Red Flag, but didn’t make one hell of a big profit. $5 to be exact. Maybe people thought it was contaminated by its previous owner.

Incidentally, there was a bad typo in the article offering the flag for sale (FE #37, 1–15, 1967). The story read “the left join the right in stamping that dirty visionist (sic) flag.” The word should have been revisionist. Big deal.

OAKLAND—Plans for a four-day siege of the Oakland Induction Center, October 16–21 were announced to day by spokesmen for National Stop the Draft Week Committee. Compulsory conscription was labeled “a criminal conspiracy against American youth that must be stopped.”

“We have picketed, protested, leafleted and argued against the draft and the racist war in Vietnam,” said Terence Cannon, member of the Stop the Draft Week Steering Committee. “There is only one way to keep young men from being shanghaied into the armed forces and that is to stop the draft from operating. We declare that we are opposed to the government’s policy and will do everything we can to bring it to a halt.

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NEW YORK—The national Committee of the Socialist Workers party has announced here that it has nominated Fred Halstead and Paul Boutelle as the party’s candidates for President and Vice-President of the United States in the 1968 elections.

Halstead, a 40 year old cloth cutter from New York, said that the war in Vietnam would be a central issue of the campaign. His running mate, Boutelle, a 35 year old cab driver, said that black power would be a twin issue.

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In one of the largest steps in its history, the American Federation of Musicians has drafted plans for a huge apprentice program for teen-age rock musicians which could alter the present music industry considerably.

The program, to be implemented by Detroit’s Local 5 under the supervision of business agent Dennis Day, calls for concerted action by the union on two major fronts: to convince teen musicians to join the union under its new “affiliate membership” plan, and to convince club owners that they should sign “union shop” agreements with Local 5 which would provide for employment only for union bands at union scale.

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There are only two paths open to a country whose internal and external empires are in the state of decay prevailing in the United States. That of the left or fascism.

The trend toward fascism in the United States is accelerating at an incredible rate. It is beginning to acquire the kind of mass base which served Hitler in Germany. The catalyst for tendencies always present in American society, is the equally accelerating struggle for black liberation.

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Editor’s note: The following article appeared on the Religion Page of the Detroit Free Press of August 19, 1967. It refers to the creative use of natural rhythm.

A leading doctor and editor of the national Journal of the American Institute of Hypnosis suggested that techniques of hypnosis be used to control riots in the future.

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a review of

The Impoverished Students’ Book Of Cookery, Drinkery, & Housekeepery by Jay F. Rosenberg. New York: Doubleday. $1.25.

Not so different from Chaucer’s scholar, students today are usually poor and this book is meant to ease the pains and help the limited budget. An impoverished student is defined as an individual who loves to eat, bates to cook, and cannot really afford to do either.

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Atlanta—On Saturday, August 12, a crowd of 175 supporters and newsmen gathered at Atlanta’s Piedmont Park to watch 25 Atlanta students and workers take off and burn their Levi pants.

The “burn-in,” sponsored by the Southern Labor Action Movement (SLAM), marked the kickoff of a nation-wide boycott of all Levi Straus products. The boycott is being organized in support of the 400 workers now on strike at Levi Straus’ Blue Ridge, Georgia plant.

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Each in its own way, the Draft Resistance Committee and the Highland Park Police Department both celebrated Anti-Draft Week, a week of intensive protest against the Vietnam war and the Selective Service System.

The new Detroit draft resistance movement attempted to communicate to the public through any means possible the discontent and resentment of young men being drafted to die in somebody else’s war in Vietnam.

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An ad in the July 15–30 Fifth Estate calling for unknown playwrights and aspiring actors to help rejuvenate the American stage has blossomed into the Detroit Drama Workshop. First performance... two original one-act plays—Joan Feret’s “The Nightmare” and Sam Cohen’s “The Library Room.” Dates are September 14, 15, 16 and 21, 22, 23 at 616 West Hancock.

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NEW YORK — Melvin L. Wulf, an ACLU Legal Director has announced that a brief was filed on August 18 challenging the right of US Attorney General Katzenbach to force the W.E.B. Du Bois Clubs to register with the Subversive Activities Control Board as a “Communist-front organization” under the 1950 Subversive Activities Control Act.

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1. More and more bombing, including population centers. More and more napalm. More and more poisoning chemicals. More and more U.S. troops.

2. Forced hat-in-hand negotiations. Ignore the Geneva accords. Permanent U.S. control of South Vietnam. Terms which the Vietnamese can never accept.

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ATLANTA, GA.—Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. has announced a nationwide campaign “to give Americans an opportunity to vote on the Vietnam war -through the time honored institutions of initiative and referendum.”

The campaign, supported by the organization Vietnam Summer, seeks to place anti-war referenda or initiative petitions on local and state ballots across the nation this fall and next Spring. Projects are already underway in over a dozen localities including Detroit and Ann Arbor.

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At this point, the only safe speculation regarding the New Politics Conference to be held in Chicago over Labor Day is that you shouldn’t believe what the underground press is going to say about it.

The key debates at the Convention will center on 1968 electoral strategy.

Should energy and resources be expended on a national presidential campaign or a series of local insurgent campaigns or both? Should campaigns be conceived as one-shot protests against the war and racism or should they be viewed as mere organizing devices to create long range radical institutions? Should campaigns aim to bolster Reform and “Concerned” ‘ Democrats and “peace candidates” or is it necessary to abandon attempts to reform the two party system, creating a third party?

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To the Editor:

May I say one thing, I hope that the Fifth Estate is not losing it’s awareness, love, peace and spiritual splendor.

From reading the August 1–15 issue, exploiting the Detroit Riot scene, and all—that excess-baggage that was written along with it was just too much for me to bare.

I’ve been very loyal to the Fifth Estate and I hope to continue, but please for heaven’s sake don’t drop your fine paper into the acid of terror, etc.

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