Several full-time movement activists in the Michigan area have been arrested in recent weeks on trumped-up felony charges.
At East Lansing, Bill Ayers of the SDS Regional Staff and Mike Price of East Lansing SDS were both arrested for allegedly assaulting a TV-2 camera crew with a dangerous weapon—supposedly a two-by-four.
A Fifth Estate reporter present the night the crime was supposed to have been committed (the arrests didn’t come until over a week later) saw or heard of no such incident.
TV-2 cameramen claim that over a thousand dollars worth of damage was done to their equipment in the course of the assault. Mike and Bill don’t know what TV-2 is talking about and wonder why the cops waited so long to arrest them if it really happened since there were cops all over the place that night.
Perhaps the TV-2 people who pressed charges were lying through their teeth like Joe Weaver of TV-2 did when he had South End editor John Watson arrested on assault charges.
Also arrested at East Lansing were Tony Ladiner and Allan Maki. Ladiner was charged with using obscenity in a speech during an administration building sit-in protesting the firing of radical professor Bert Garskof and demanding open enrollment for black, Third World and white working class people.
Maki was charged with larceny for taking a couple of sandwiches while in the building.
The trials of Bill Ayers, who had his beautiful curly hair cut off by the pigs, and Mike Price come up in April.
At Kalamazoo, a radical woman student was arrested for assault and battery on a jock.
It seems the jocks were mad because radicals had leafleted the classroom of a professor who claims that education is and should be propaganda. Since there are so many facts, he says, a person can take any point of view rationally, and therefore we should use the facts to defend the American way of life.
So during the class this one jock kept insulting a radical woman seated nearby, calling her a dirty whore, etc. After the class the two got into an argument and the girl, Linda Lanphear, really socked it to him.
Mark one for Women’s Liberation. Anyway, the jock went home and cried to his fraternity brothers and Linda was arrested. Her trial comes up soon.
Meanwhile, eight brothers and sisters being charged with the Detroit bombings last fall come to trial March 22, and face up to 15 years in prison.
And the Minutemen who injured one man in their little bomb-propaganda raid in Detroit March 11 even left an addressed card at the scene, but no one seems to be raising too much of a fuss about them.