Summary: <br> John Lennon in 1972<br> <br> <br> <br> On February 4, 1972 – 47 years ago today – Senator Strom Thurmond of South Carolina sent a memo to John Mitchell, the Attorney General of the United States, in which he demanded that John Lennon be deported!<br> <br> <br> <br> Why would the not very nice Mr. Thurmond want to do such a thing to nice Mr. Lennon? <br> <br> <br> <br> Therein lies a remarkable story!<br> <br> <br> <br> John Sinclair in 1968<br> <br> <br> <br> The story begins with the poet, cultural revolutionary, political activist and pothead John Sinclair, who was born in Flint, Michigan in 1941. Sinclair was the chairman of the “Rainbow People’s Party” of Ann Arbor and a founding member and chairman of the “White Panther Party” (which he created in support of the Black Panther Party). He was, by every measure, one of the major “hippie-dippy agitator-types” operating during those troubled days of unrest over the Viet Nam War.<br> <br> <br> <br> “The Man” (meaning the law enforcement community) decided that Sinclair needed to be silenced. A sting operation was put together, and on January 27, 1967 Sinclair was arrested after passing two joints (marijuana cigarettes, for you youngsters) to two undercover Detroit narcotics police: Patrolman Vahan Kapagian and Policewoman Jane Mumford Lovelace.<br> <br> <br> <br> The trial that followed was marked by what are now referred to as “irregularities.” The upshot: Sinclair was sentenced to ten years confinement at the state prison in Jackson, Michigan. Sinclair requested an appeal; the request was denied.<br> <br> <br> <br> 10 years for 2 joints. Clearly, the sentence was politically motivated. Sinclair writes:<br> <br> <br> <br> “The powers-that-be in Michigan had it in for me. They didn’t like what we were doing, establishing an alternative community, defying their authority, smoking grass. They fixed on me because I was the most outspoken, and also because somehow I was successful in bringing young people around to my way of thinking.”<br> <br> <br> <br> Sinclair immediately became a cause celeb for the counterculture. Sinclair’s wife Leni and his brother David organized concerts and rallies; they enlisted the help of celebrities, including the beat poet Allen Ginsburg, Jane Fonda, and the anarchist Yippie Abbie Hoffman.<br> <br> <br> <br> Pete Townshend about to brain Abbie Hoffman at Woodstock, August 17, 1969<br> <br> <br> <br> (Hoffman, for one, made quite a scene at the Woodstock Festival/lovefest on Sunday August 17, 1969. He jumped on stage during a set by The Who, grabbed a microphone and began making an impassioned pitch for Sinclair before Pete Townshend smacked him on the head with his guitar and chased him from the stage!)<br> <br> <br> <br> The climax of the “free John Sinclair” movement occurred on December 10, 1971 when the “John Sinclair Freedom Rally” was held at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor’s Crisler Arena. The rally was huge. It featured speeches by Allen Ginsburg, Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin, Black Panther Party chairman Bobby Seale, the radical priest Father James Groppi and others; and it featured performances by, among others, Stevie Wonder, Phil Ochs, Pete Seeger, Archie Shepp, and Roswell Rudd. But the climax of the event was the appearance – at 3 am in the morning on December 11 (things were running late) – of John Lennon and Yoko Ono. The couple – who had donated their $500 appearance fee to “the John Sinclair Freedom Fund” – sang about the Attica uprising, about Northern Ireland, and about women’s liberation. They closed their set with a song Lennon had written for the event about John Sinclair: <br> <br> <br> <br> “It ain’t fair, John Sinclair<br> They gave him ten for two<br> What else can Judge Colombo do?<br> Gotta gotta gotta set him free.” <br> <br> <br> <br>
