Editor’s Note: The following letter was sent to us by a subscriber presently incarcerated in Southern Michigan Prison at Jackson.
Mr. Brown is known to the FIFTH ESTATE staff as one who contributed generously to the paper while he was on the “outside.” He has expressed an interest in receiving letters from other readers. Those interested In doing so may write him at the address below.
Letter to Editor:
I write as one indigenous to Detroit and the movement.
I am a convict presently at Jackson Prison. I was born and raised in Detroit. I studied art and psychology in Detroit.
I was arrested and sentenced in Detroit for a crime I did commit. And I still love Detroit.
However, I indulge in group therapy in the “yard,” and we (black and white) cons wonder when the “land of the free” will cease this ridiculous ridicule of races. Aren’t we all Americans?
We wrote this in protest.
Without Black—
No White!
Without Day—
No Night!
Every color
has a light.
So why the hell fight?
Without Boys—
No Girls!
Without Hair—
No Curls!
And sex is cool.
So why be a fool?
Without Crime—
No Sin!
Without Bars—
No Pen!
And life has got to begin.
Now aren’t you hip?
R. Clayton Brown
9000 Cooper St.
Jackson, Michigan
P. S. Something’s funny: The warden cut off all our bananas.
To the Editors:
In Vietnam we find the U.S. in basic opposition to all that it was based on. We were founded on the theory that a country should not be governed by a foreign power. There should be no colonialism. But in Vietnam we are setting up a colony ruled by a man who, without U.S. support, would not be in power. We engaged in an immoral war for reasons known best to LBJ and Congress; a war which, if the Vietnamese were in a position of choice, would not be.
There can not be peace in Vietnam without America losing face and prestige. Why should we not lose face to save a country? Why can’t a border be instituted to make two Vietnams, as we made two Koreas? Why can’t the Vietnamese fight their own war without U.S. intervention. Who intervened in OUR Civil War? Why not move the war to the U. S., and napalm and murder American women and children for awhile? I’m sure Congress could whitewash this as easily as the slaughter of the Vietnamese.
Now, in order to keep up the ravaging in Vietnam, Congress and LBJ are going to bring to a standstill the work to alleviate misery in the U.S. The war on poverty and the fight for civil rights must stagnate in order to continue killing, burning and ravaging Vietnam. This does not seem right to me, but then, I am not a politician or a man with money, just a teen-ager in the Air Force.
Someday WE will be the politicians and men with money, and then the United States of Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln, Kennedy, Bruce and Ginsberg, King and Carmichael will show itself to the world.
And it will all be good. Keep pushing baby.
‘Skip’
Sir:
During World War II, American citizens were encouraged to plant “victory gardens” in their backyards to help the war effort.
We propose the idea of “peace gardens’ for this year’s Vietnam Summer. If the-readers of the FIFTH ESTATE cultivated all the land which they had available, harvested the flowers, fruits, and vegetables; we could then gather this produce and bring it to the Michigan State Fair in September.
There we could share the food and flowers with one another and make a peace offering, that is, a symbolic sacrifice for the unspeakable destruction of crops, homes, andfamilies which the United States government is committing in Southeast Asia.
J. M. Schwartz
Detroit-Amsterdam Committee
Dear friends,
Enjoy most of your paper all of the time and think one of the most significant statements last issue (vol. 11; No. 4 (30)) appeared bottom right hand corner page eleven in Photo Note—The distortion in the picture would be what one sees first hand, “were it not for a correction made in the brain.”
Isn’t that true of all we see?
Love, Gary
Gruber Detroit
Dear Editor:
Due to the peaking curve to American madness and the polar reaction of the ways of love, peace, and awareness, which we have been a part of, generated and advanced, and after considerable thought and talk and meditation, we have decided that the best way to encourage and manifest a real tribal sense amongst the young and the sympathetic old in America in order to ‘stem the dehumanization of American’ peoples, is to develop the identity of common interest and purpose for a new age in indiginous, local areas in every large metropolitan center in America: to transmute the energies in all cities of war and poison to the warless concentration of love and shared communal living on the living natural planet.
Each city needs a centering and focusing of energies to bring the divided, frightened and confused beings separated by the illusions of color and material wealth together.
We have decided to eliminate the target of a mass media titanic Be-In in the Grand Canyon or elsewhere amongst the hostile maddened police creep insanity of America with all its difficulties of strategically planning and supplying necessities for hundreds of thousands of people in favor of the indiginous native tribal celebration in every urban center or natural surrounding countryside of America.
We are going to hold summer solstice celebrations June 21 in San Francisco and Los Angeles.
We hope it is not too late to put some part of this plan into effect either in your cities, parks or surrounding natural areas and national parks in order to generate a humane tribalism in America.
Also if you could publish a statement that there will not be a Be-In in the Grand Canyon this summer, it would avoid an error of ignorance and unpreparedness.
For the Unity and Peace of all Beings,
Allen Cohen, Editor,
San Francisco Oracle
dear editor:
april 30 was a day of beauty and thats a thing thats usually illegal in detroit.
the blue massacre climaxing the love—in was one of the most reprehensible things to come off on the side of the law in some time. I’m only glad that I left the scene before the little fun and games session began, n wasn’t there to see the sick orgy of little men who’d rather hate than love.
i’d been expecting some fascist trouble at the love-in from the start but i hadn’t been expecting a mass riot kind of thing. rather, what I anticipated were loads of individual atrocities similar to those plainclothes visits to plum street by little hitlers out to bust people for everything from ‘loitering” to wearing beards.
people hate as an outgrowth of their own personal dissatisfaction n the fuzz n lbj n anybody else who sets himself up as authority over other lives has basically the same ailment. they dont have any freedom in their lives n they dont want anybody to have what they dont have.
big brother expected trouble to show its face earlier in the day n illustrate to everybody how lovin ones fellow human beings leads inevitable to adverse circumstances, so when that didnt happen, they felt they just had to move in n teach everybody a lesson.
i hope theyre proud of themselves.
dave szurek
detroit