Owen Gleiberman, film critic for Entertainment Weekly, grew up in Ann Arbor. (Photo courtesy of Owen Gleiberman)

Today, Owen Gleiberman of Entertainment Weekly enjoys a position as one of the country’s most influential movie critics, his opinions read and respected (and sometimes reviled) by millions. Forty years ago he was a precocious middle-schooler who carried a transcript of the Chicago Seven trial in his pocket as he roamed downtown Ann Arbor, exploring the head shops and hanging with the hippies.

Soon after enrolling at the University of Michigan in 1976, Gleiberman was bit by the movie bug and began reviewing films for the Michigan Daily. He struck up a long-distance friendship with Pauline Kael of the New Yorker, who encouraged him in his writing and helped him to land his first job after graduation as a critic for the Boston Phoenix.

Though he now lives in Greenwich Village, Gleiberman makes regular return trips to Ann Arbor to visit family and friends. Over tea at Café Felix on a sleepy Sunday afternoon, he related what it was like to grow up in the countercultural milieu of Ann Arbor in the late ’60s and early ’70s, how that experience influenced his career as a film critic, and his thoughts and hopes on the future of journalism.

Were you born in Ann Arbor?

No, I wasn’t born in Ann Arbor, but I moved here when I was about five or six.

You were a young kid living here when Ann Arbor was at its radical peak. Were you aware of what was going on? Did the counterculture have an attraction for you, even as young as you were?

I was ten years old in 1969. I don’t know if I can speak for other kids, but growing up in Ann Arbor I very much felt the romance of the counterculture. I remember the first Earth Day in 1970, when I was 11. You felt all this energy burbling around.

Where it really kicked in for me was in seventh grade when I started to get a little older and was able to go downtown by myself. Then I got immersed in it. I still have these incredible memories of going to State Street and seeing underground newspapers, and going into the head shops like Middle Earth, which was then really a head shop. Seeing the black-light posters, seeing the underground comics, and even the beads that you would string. All of this was part of the same thing. It was part of this counterculture that was very, very real to me.

And I was into the politics then. I always say that I went through my radical Marxist-Leninist phase when I was 11, and then was smart enough to get out of it and become a centrist when I was twelve-and-a-half. But I really felt the romance of the counterculture. To me then as a kid it seemed like American culture was being changed in a good way by all of this hippie energy, which I think in a way that it was. It was very, very important to me. It really almost defined Ann Arbor for me, or defined what I loved most about Ann Arbor.

I used to have a transcript of the Chicago Seven trial that I would carry around with me and read all the time when I was in seventh grade. So I knew that by the time I was 12 years old that Ann Arbor was not just this kind of cool, fun, mellow place with a lot of candle shops, but that all of this stuff meant something, culturally – that Ann Arbor was at the forefront of things that were going on nationally. That was true, and I perceived it, and I thought it was really cool about Ann Arbor. It made me very proud of the kind of city it was. It just made me love the place.

My favorite thing to do was to go downtown. There was such a continuity among all these countercultural activities, that you felt like you were sort of participating in the counterculture just by going to play pinball.

Owen Gleiberman's graduation photo from Pioneer High School. (Courtesy of Susan Cybulski.)

When I was in junior high and high school, I really got into going to the city council meetings, after they’d elected the two members of the Human Rights Party. It was such a great weekly human drama in seeing these two Human Rights Party people, Nancy Wechsler and Jerry DeGrieck, be these kind of token hippies on this very straight city council. It was like the Chicago Seven trial every week, in miniature, in the way these people would clash with each other.

That’s as close as I ever got to being politically active. Because I am not an activist. As I grew older I started to develop a sort of disdain for protesters with signs, because I actually am a centrist at heart, and I think that protesters often call attention to nothing so much as themselves. I really am for political action getting done, and finding the middle way, and doing things. And yet, the protests did serve a function back then, and I really identified with it.

Also there was so much about the counterculture that wasn’t about politics. It was about music, it was about fashion, it was about drugs, it was about new ways of seeing. That’s the side of the counterculture that I really identified with.

There was a sense of optimism in those days, even though looking back it seems like it was a dark time for America.

Those were dark times for America. Yet all of that was giving such life to popular culture. That’s one of the reasons that the movies of the ’70s were so vital, and are now so mythologized. It was because popular culture was so vital back then. The incredible music, the incredible movies. How could you look at that stuff and not feel a certain optimism about America?

Yes, we had a corrupt government, we had a corrupt president. But the outrage at that was reflected in our popular culture, and we had a system that worked. We had a system that spat out the bad guys. And we had a press that sort of came to the rescue. So ultimately, although there was a lot of negativity, I don’t think the ’60s and ’70s were a negative time for America.

I think the beginning of the real negative time was the election of Ronald Reagan. I think that was the paradigm shift, because that’s when we went through the looking glass. That’s when we seemed to be moving into this greater optimism, but it was a phony optimism. I think that’s when we moved from the politics of reality to the politics of unreality. And I think that’s what led to where we are today.

Do you think that growing up in Ann Arbor had a significant effect on your later life?

I’ll tell you how I think that I’m totally a product of Ann Arbor. What I loved about the ’60s, and what I still do, is that there was something very hard-headed and no-bullshit about the Ann Arbor view. There’s always been a certain skepticism that the people in Ann Arbor have.

During the counterculture era they were skeptical of the lies being told by government. But I also grew up with a certain skepticism about the Left. I saw the kind of groupthink mentality that was there. It seemed to me that the Ann Arbor point of view that I learned was, don’t trust packaged truths, wherever they come from. Look for your own truth, and stick to that.

That, to me, was the real message of the counterculture. To be true to yourself, and to look at who you were as an individual, and express that. That’s what the ’60s meant to me. And that’s the side of Ann Arbor that I still try to carry into my work today.

Groupthink is what’s killing this country, in every form. There’s a lot of groupthink in my profession, film criticism. Even the mentality now that says you’re supposed to stand up for independent films, you’re supposed to stand up for small films.

Wait a minute – who said you’re supposed to stand up for any kind of film? You’re supposed to stand up for good movies. You’re supposed to stand up for your own individual, idiosyncratic judgments. That’s what I believe film criticism should be about.

Do you come back to Ann Arbor a lot? Is it a second home, or maybe a getaway of sorts?

In some ways I think of it like that. I love coming back here. There is a certain spirit of the place, that I think it still has, that I reconnect to. Everybody likes to reconnect with their roots, but in my case the roots are something I still believe in. They still nurture me.

I don’t know if I would be a film critic if I hadn’t grown up in a place like Ann Arbor. It always inspires me to come back here.

Tell me about your road to becoming a film critic. There was a thriving community of film buffs in town during the ’60s and ’70s. Were you a part of that?

Absolutely. The film culture in Ann Arbor is really what gave me my own start as a movie buff. I was nurtured in that environment. It’s what showed me what love of cinema was all about.

This was an era in which being a movie buff was just part of the atmosphere of the time. There was a phrase around in the ’70s, called the film generation. It was the idea that people who came of age around that time were maybe the first generation that saw film as their literature. That they took film seriously, the way that an earlier generation had taken novels. A lot of people on campuses felt that way. I mean, students were just really into going to the movies, and taking them seriously.

The University of Michigan was a big enough place to support a lot of film societies. And on certain nights you would go and these screenings would be packed. Especially if it was a certain kind of movie. A Woody Allen double feature on Saturday night would have lines around the Modern Languages Building. Screwball comedies, Hitchcock films, they got that kind of response. Other movies were more obscure, but in general there were a lot of people who went to these movies.

It doesn’t seem that surprising for Woody Allen to draw a big crowd at the campus cinema. What does surprise me is that crowds would turn out for a Bogart picture, or even a silent comedy by Chaplin or Keaton.

I think this was the first era where going to see old movies had become kind of cool. I think part of that was that the ’60s were about overthrowing a lot of old stuff, and about only seeing new things as cool.

But by the time the ’70s really settled down, a lot of that was over, and for the first time I think a lot of students started to go back to those earlier models of movie stars, and of romantic comedies, things like that, and realized these were incredible movies, too. And there was something actually quite cool about them.

At some point you started writing about movies for the Michigan Daily, and even took a turn as Arts Editor.

I think one of the things that really got me involved in the Daily is that in my second semester, freshman year, I had really connected with a couple of Robert Altman films that I got very excited about. That semester a student group put together a whole Robert Altman festival, where they showed all his films, and they had all these people from his films come and give talks, like Elliot Gould, and Joan Tewkesbury, writer of “Nashville.”

I decided I wanted to be involved in that, and to cover it for the Daily. It was covering that event over my whole second semester that sort of fused being a movie buff and writing, for me.

The Daily was a first-class newspaper in the 1960s, competing with the professional papers in the area, and often having its stories picked up by the national news media. How was it in your day?

I think it was pretty good. One thing I know for sure is that the attitude we had at the Daily was that, in addition to just wanting to put out a good paper and serve that community, we felt that we were competing with the Ann Arbor News.

Now, the Ann Arbor News wasn’t necessarily the greatest paper, but they were a respectable paper, and they were a real paper, and they were professionally staffed. We just took it for granted that they were our competition, and I think that was a healthy attitude to have. How often did we scoop them, or do better coverage, I don’t know. But I think that was the right attitude to have.

What are your thoughts about the folding of the Ann Arbor News?

Well, from what I’ve read, they did it in part as an experiment. Ann Arbor was considered one of the most wired communities in the United States. So this was an experiment to see if a town that was sophisticated, that had a lot of people that used the Web, like Ann Arbor, could make the transition to getting their news online, as opposed to reading a newspaper. If in fact the experiment – a rather reckless experiment, I’d say – was successful, then it would sort of show how this could happen in other communities.

I believe what’s happened so far – and this is very anecdotal because I don’t live here, but I do know people in Ann Arbor so I try to keep up with this a little bit – my feeling is that if I had to sum it up in one sentence, I would say that the community of Ann Arbor misses the Ann Arbor News. That they still miss it, and it’s not just nostalgia.

What that paper provided, a sense of the information in one place, a sense that everybody would be reading that same information that you read – that gave you something. It gave you a certain feeling of unity about the information in the community, which is what a newspaper provides, and that that has not really been replaced.

If that’s true, then I would say the experiment was not really a success, and may actually aid the preservation of newspapers. Because yes, they’re up against it economically, yes, their business plan has been eroded, yes, it’s going to continue to happen. But if people genuinely like newspapers and continue to find a use for them, then that’s a reason to keep them around.

Would you say then that you’re cautiously optimistic about the future of journalism?

I think that moving into the digital era doesn’t need to affect writing that much. I mean, I’m not sure there needs to be a mystical difference between reading a piece through a digital medium or reading it on dead trees. I don’t know if the definition of a good piece of writing has really changed. I don’t know if people’s hunger for good writing has really gone away.

Now, of course, the big question in journalism is, people seem willing to pay for journalism and writing if it’s on dead trees, and they seem hostile to paying for it digitally. That’s the big question looming for journalists. Will we ever get to a point where people actually want to pay to read things digitally?

My feeling is, maybe yes. Certainly that’s what I think should be. But going forward that’s a great unknown.

About the writer: Alan Glenn is currently at work a documentary film about Ann Arbor in the ’60s. Visit the film’s website for more information.

Black Action Movement protesters on the University of Michigan campus in 1970. (Photo courtesy of Jay Cassidy.)

Except that if you could somehow step back in time exactly four decades you would be greeted by a very different sight: students shouting, marching, and picketing; classes disrupted, canceled, or being held in nearby churches; angry voices calling for the deployment of the National Guard; a campus and community pushed almost to the breaking point. If the events of the Black Action Movement strike of 40 years ago had unfolded only a little differently, today people might speak of “Michigan” rather than “Kent State” as marking the tragic and deadly end of the sixties.

Instead, the BAM strike became one of the few protests of that era in which the students could make a valid claim of victory.

As it turned out, each side would have reason to believe that it had bested the other. The students because the university had been forced to negotiate and had ultimately acceded to the most important of their demands; the university administration because they claimed to be merely going forward with the plan they had proposed at the outset, rather than succumbing to student pressure.

That the protest came to a peaceful conclusion was due most probably to the restraint exhibited by university president Robben Fleming, and perhaps moreover Gov. William Milliken, who unlike other state leaders of that time (primarily Ronald Reagan in California) was not inclined to ruthlessly crush student rebellions; as well as the BAM leadership, who despite their often inflammatory rhetoric were determined to keep the strike non-violent.

The programs instituted as a result of the BAM strike of 1970 represented the first major breakthrough in a decades-long struggle to end discrimination at the University of Michigan. Up until the 1960s there were few black students or faculty at the university. In 1962 a federal investigation concluded that there was considerable racial bias in hiring at UM and urged that steps be taken to increase integration at every level. A committee set up by President Harlan Hatcher recommended that a special program be established to provide additional recruiting of minority students as well as financial aid and support services. The Opportunity Awards Program was started in 1964 and by 1969 black enrollment had increased from 2% to a little over 3%.

To many, however, this modest increase hardly seemed to make a difference. Elise Bryant was a freshman at the university in the fall of 1969. Coming from a mostly black neighborhood in Detroit, she was struck by the scarcity of African-Americans on campus. “You wouldn’t see any black people on the street,” she recalls, “and it became this custom that if you saw a black person on the street you would say, ‘What’s happening?’ And I remember when I would leave Ann Arbor and go to New York for a visit, or go back to Detroit, I’d start talking to every black person on the street, and it wasn’t the same. Sometimes there were weird reactions. People were like, ‘What are you talking to me for?’”

Once accepted at the university, black students continued to face prejudice and discrimination that was deeply entrenched in campus life. “It was that Northern brand of racism that was more subtle, that wasn’t blatant” explains Bryant. “I mean, all my friends were getting jobs as waitresses, and I applied to every restaurant on campus as a waitress and couldn’t get hired.”

Cynthia Stephens, a bright young African-American student who came to Ann Arbor in the fall of 1968 at age 16, remembers being told by her adviser to take a reduced course load. “I’m sitting there staring at her in amazement. I wasn’t Suma Cum Laude from Cass, but I had a 1300 SAT score, which qualified me in those days to make my own schedule without going to a counselor. And I was just like, ‘Are you looking at my record, or looking at me?’”

In the spring of 1968, following the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., a group of black students locked themselves into the UM administration building to protest the lack of support for minorities at the university. In response, the administration agreed to establish a Martin Luther King scholarship fund and appoint a few additional black administrators. Over the next year President Fleming (who replaced the retiring Harlan Hatcher) held discussions with black students that resulted in the establishment of a Black Studies curriculum and the opening of the Center for Afro-American Studies in the fall of 1969.

A Black Action Movement protest outside the Frieze Building in 1970. (Photo courtesy of Jay Cassidy.)

But for many, the integration of the university was simply not moving fast enough. In late 1969 representatives of most of the black student groups on campus came together and decided that a more proactive approach would be required in order to speed the process. The following January a series of talks were held between black students and university administrators regarding the matter of black enrollment, and a number of the students were invited to dine with President Fleming and further discuss the issues.

When the students arrived at the president’s house on the evening of Feb. 5, however, it wasn’t to have dinner but rather to hold a demonstration on the front lawn in which they presented Fleming with a list of demands. Chief among these was an increase in black enrollment to 10% – the percentage of the state population that was African-American – by the fall of 1973. Other demands included the hiring of additional recruiters for black students, the hiring of additional black faculty, the institution of new support services for black students, the establishment of a Black Student Center, the expansion of the MLK scholarship fund, tuition wavers for disadvantaged students, and a significant increase in the almost non-existent Hispanic student population.

“We do not expect the university to procrastinate and sub-committee these demands,” the statement concluded. “They are for immediate and positive action.” It was signed by “the United Black Population at the University of Michigan,” a coalition of a half dozen or so black groups from the various colleges and departments of the university. Soon they would adopt the much catchier moniker of the Black Action Movement, and bring the university as close to calamity as it would ever be during the entire period of student protest.

University of Michigan President Robben Fleming at a news conference during the 1970 Black Action Movement strike. (Photo courtesy of Jay Cassidy.)

The atmosphere was tense at the regents’ meeting on Feb. 19, when representatives of BAM appeared to present their demands in person. Although tempers occasionally flared, most of the regents expressed sympathy with BAM’s position. They refused to respond directly to the demands, however, and asked President Fleming to prepare an alternative proposal for their next public meeting in March. BAM stormed out of the room and a group of about 25 black students went to the Undergraduate Library and took hundreds of books off the shelves, forcing the building to close while the books were replaced.

The next morning BAM members gathered at the university’s administration building to again demand immediate action. When President Fleming and the regents once more refused, a larger contingent of black students went back to the library and disarranged thousands more books. Fleming responded by stationing Ann Arbor police officers at major university libraries.

In the coming weeks there were further disruptions, such as the interruption of classes to discuss the BAM demands, and the blockading of the Michigan Union snack bar. These actions were upsetting to many, but even so support for the BAM position was growing across campus.

Early in March President Fleming made a public announcement of his alternative proposal. It established 10% black enrollment as a “goal” rather than a commitment, and promised that the university would work toward achieving a number of the other BAM dictates, but only if additional funding could be found. Fleming contended in his 1996 memoir, “Tempests into Rainbows,” that it was primarily lack of funding that prevented the university from granting the BAM demands.

The regents held an open meeting on March 18 to discuss Fleming’s plan. Almost 500 people attended. An exhausting and at times heated debate – in which BAM referred to the administration’s proposal as a “nebulous, weasel-worded proposition” – ended without agreement. The BAM leaders called for a demonstration in nearby Regents Plaza the next day.

Protesters in 1970 marching across the University of Michigan Regents Plaza. (Photo courtesy of Jay Cassidy.)

On March 19, 1970, while inside the administration building the regents voted their approval of Fleming’s plan, outside was an angry rally in which the BAM leadership announced that the university’s black students were on strike and intended to close down the campus until their demands were met. Police were summoned and the gathering became a melee, with scuffles breaking out between law officers and demonstrators. Four students were arrested. Charges of racism were made against the Ann Arbor police because although a good proportion of the demonstrators were white, all of the arrestees were black.

The presence of significant numbers of white students at the March 19 demonstration underscores an important aspect of the BAM strike: the support it was given by the traditionally non-black activist groups on campus, such as Students for a Democratic Society. The participation of white students was crucial to the effectiveness of the strike, if for no other reason than there simply were not enough African-Americans on campus to be able to make a significant impact on the normal operations of the university.

On March 20 a group of about 200 picketers marched outside Hill Auditorium during the university’s Honors Convocation, at which President Robben Fleming was speaking. A party of white protesters entered the concert hall and marched up and down the aisles, fists raised in a Black Power salute, chanting “Open it up or shut it down.” BAM leaders were angry that the disruption of the ceremony had been undertaken without their approval. Through the Michigan Daily, the university’s student newspaper, BAM told its supporters: “If we don’t say do something, don’t you do it.”

Protesters at Hill Auditorium during a University of Michigan Honors Convocation. (Photo courtesy of Jay Cassidy.)

Not everyone in BAM was in favor of accepting help from white activists. But it was eventually agreed that the non-black groups would be welcome as long as they remained in a subordinate role. Cynthia Stephens, who had become a leading figure in BAM – “I was the vice president, because in those days that was what women were” – recalls that many were worried that the white radicals, who were more experienced in managing protests, might try to take over. “In order for the strike to have been successful, whether we perceived it or not, we needed their support,” says Stephens. “But it needed to be support.”

Madison Foster, who was a junior faculty member and one of the leaders of the BAM negotiating team, thinks that to focus on the ethnicity of the strikers is to cloud the most important aspect of the protest. “It wasn’t just a black strike, or a white strike,” he says. “It was a student strike.”

By the following Monday, March 23, the moratorium was having a clear impact – to the surprise of almost everyone, including BAM itself. Picketers marched outside the main classroom buildings and class attendance was noticeably down. A number of professors and teaching fellows joined the strike and canceled their classes, while others held their classes off campus to show support.

The university presented a front of indifference. The Michigan Daily quoted one regent as saying, “The students can strike until hell freezes over as far as I am concerned.” President Fleming added, “As long as classes are being held, we don’t have to care whether people are going or not.”

Picketers block access to a university parking structure during the 1970 Black Action Movement strike. (Photo courtesy of Jay Cassidy.)

This outlook would change as the week wore on and the strike gathered momentum. Class attendance continued to drop. The School of Social Work, the Residential College, and the Institute for Social Research closed down. BAM and its supporters instigated additional disruptions, interrupting classes to talk about the issue of the strike, marching through hallways banging on trash cans, picketing in front of parking garages, and blocking traffic (someone “lost” a contact lens in the middle of State Street by the Michigan Union and a group of strikers spent an hour on their knees looking for it).

By Wednesday, attendance at the College of Literature, Science and the Arts (LSA) was down an estimated 60%. More and more faculty were coming out in favor of the BAM position, and President Fleming offered to meet with black leaders at the bargaining table. BAM was feeling its power, however, and was not so inclined to make a quick settlement. By Thursday, LSA attendance was down an estimated 75% and the college was considering shutting its doors.

Then on Friday came what may have been the most crucial development, when the American Federation of State and County Municipal Employees announced its support of the strike. University employees who were AFSCME members refused to cross the student picket lines and campus food service came to a grinding halt. “The men and women of AFSCME were incredible,” remembers Cynthia Stephens, now a judge on the Michigan Court of Appeals. “It’s what made me initially decide I really, really, really wanted to be a labor lawyer.”

Elise Bryant concurs. “In my mind it was the union that made us strong. Because I think the administration would’ve let us spin our wheels until the end of the semester, then wait for the next crop of students to come in. Which is what they figured out after that – give them what they want and then they’ll be gone.”

Toward the end of the week the strike increased in intensity, with the disruptions taking on a more physical nature. Windows were being broken and other university property damaged. Some faculty and students were feeling threatened. But neither BAM nor President Fleming wanted violence, and both made great efforts to keep the situation under control.

Black Action Movement protesters on the University of Michigan campus in 1970. (Photo courtesy of Jay Cassidy.)

“We used conflict,” explains Madison Foster, “but we kept some of the hotheads from doing violent things, both black and white. We had to tighten up some people so they understood that there were consequences, if they were talking about blowing up something or doing something destructive, because we would end up being the ones that would be hurt.”

President Fleming was also under increasing pressure to bring the strike to an end, by force if necessary. “I credit Fleming for not escalating the conflict by calling in troopers, or by escalating his rhetoric,” Foster says. “In that sense he handled the situation well.”

But what is not generally known is that at an early point in the negotiations, Fleming – whose reputation as a leader at both the University of Wisconsin and UM rests to a large extent on his disinclination to use force to end student disruptions – threatened to bring in the military. “To me that was a very critical point,” says Foster. “Early on, after maybe the third session, he said flatly that if we didn’t abandon the buildings and do the things he wanted, he was going to call the National Guard. I was telling a friend that I probably made one of the boldest comments of my life, in hindsight. I said, ‘Well, I guess we’ll die,’ and we walked out. I wasn’t going to negotiate under threat.”

Foster’s recollections take on added significance when one considers that a little over a month following the resolution of the BAM strike, 13 student protesters were shot and four killed by National Guardsmen at Kent State University in Ohio, less than a day’s drive from Ann Arbor. Tensions were running high on the Michigan campus, and all across the country that spring. If the military had been called out to end the BAM strike, the results could have been tragic. Thankfully, they were not.

“We didn’t realize that people would really ever shoot at students,” says Cynthia Stephens. “It wasn’t real to us. If we had tried to start the BAM strike after Kent State, I don’t know if it would’ve happened. I also sort of wondered whether – and I don’t know this at all, because I didn’t know folk at Kent State – I wondered whether the measured response by the University of Michigan gave encouragement to the students at Kent State to believe that what happened there wouldn’t happen.”

Negotiations continued over the weekend but on Monday, March 30, the strike began to lose momentum. Class attendance was on the rise and food service had resumed. Some may have believed the strike to be over after the university announced on Sunday that agreement had been reached on nearly all points, despite an informal arrangement between BAM and the president that neither side would make public statements until the negotiations were completed. (Fleming claimed that the press release was a mistake, but it could also have been a canny political maneuver.)

Money had been found in the various colleges and departments of the university to support the desired increase in black enrollment, as well as many of BAM’s other demands. The only major point of disagreement remaining was whether 10% enrollment should be a “commitment” or a “goal.” The BAM leadership decided that it was time to settle.

“I think we reached a point where we believed we had gotten what we could get,” explains Cynthia Stephens. “We had achieved maximum victory from that event, and this wasn’t a winner-take-all contest.” Also, the students were becoming restless, she says. “It was getting to the end of the semester. They needed to graduate and finish classes.”

“And ultimately, how long we could keep external forces away” – i.e., the National Guard – “was also an issue.”

On April 1, 1970, it was announced that a settlement had been reached and the strike was over. The university pledged several million dollars toward the “goal” of reaching 10% black enrollment by the 1973-74 term. Programs would be established to recruit black students and faculty, aid and support services would be put in place for minority students, and the Center for Afro-American Studies would receive increased funding. However, there would be no Black Student Center, no tuition wavers, nor any additional funding for the MLK scholarship. Also refused was amnesty for students who would otherwise be disciplined for their actions during the strike.

BAM leaders staged a victory celebration that same evening. In an oral history interview given in 1978, Fred Miller of Students for a Democratic Society recalled the scene in the Michigan Union ballroom on April 1.

The night that they announced the settlement was one of the most incredible political events I’ve ever been at. They had a jazz band. The place was packed and the music sort of builds up to this peak, and in comes the negotiating team. Each member of the negotiating team gave a short speech. They had it really well orchestrated, and they were rousing speeches. The event created a real feeling that the struggle had been essentially won, and it left everyone feeling satisfied.

At the same time, the university administration was presenting the settlement as being in their favor, in that the final agreement seemed little different than the plan they had originally wanted to implement. “To assist a new generation of able, energetic black men and women to move into positions of responsibility and leadership will be an aspiration worthy of our greatest efforts,” said the regents in their official statement. Perhaps both sides’ claims of victory are equally valid.

The struggle to improve conditions for minorities at the university was far from over, however. The goal of 10% enrollment was never achieved. The UM black student population peaked at just under 8% in 1976, then began to decline. (Today it stands at 2,204 out of 41,674, or a little over 5%.) In addition, racial problems on campus caused the reawakening of BAM in the middle ’70s – BAM II – and late ’80s – BAM III.

“The lesson of the Black Action Movement is that we must keep our lamps trimmed and burning,” says Elise Bryant, who is now a professor at the National Labor College. “That the work doesn’t stop. There’s a song, ‘You’ve got to work for it, fight for it, day and night for it, pass it on, pass it on.’ And I think that’s the mistake my generation made, and I think I made, in terms of not reaching back and offering opportunities for the next generation, not giving them the history and the culture – because they’re not going to learn it any place else.”

“You have to leave the place better than you found it,” she says. “That’s what I was taught.”

Alan Glenn is working on a documentary film about Ann Arbor in the ’60s. Visit the film’s website for more information.

John Lennon and Yoko Ono, playing at the 1971 John Sinclair Freedom Rally at Crisler Arena. (Photo courtesy Leni Sinclair.)

The passage of nearly four decades can dim even the keenest of memories. But to Hiawatha Bailey, the events of that winter afternoon in 1971 are as clear as if they had happened yesterday. Bailey was 23 and working at the communal headquarters of the Rainbow People’s Party in the ramshackle old mansion at 1520 Hill Street in Ann Arbor.

“I was doing office duty,” he recalls, “which entailed sitting at the front desk and answering the phone. Some friends were there, and we were sitting around, tripping on acid, probably, and the phone rings. I pick it up and I hear this voice, ‘Hello, this is Yoko Ono.’”

Bailey, of course, didn’t believe it for a second. “I said something like, ‘Yeah, this is Timothy Leary,’ and hung up. We all got a good laugh out of it.” A few minutes later the phone rang again. This time the voice on the other end said, “Hello, can I speak to David Sinclair, Chief of Staff of the Rainbow People’s Party. This is John Lennon of the Beatles.”

“I wasn’t even that familiar with the Beatles then,” says Bailey, now lead singer for the Cult Heroes, an Ann Arbor-based punk rock band. “I was more into the Stooges and the MC5, more radical rock ’n’ roll. But I knew right away that it really was John Lennon.” He put the call through.

“Dave and John talked for quite some time,” Bailey recalls. “Lennon said, ‘I heard about the benefit that you blokes are putting on, and I wrote a little ditty about John Sinclair and his plight. I’d like to come there and perform it.’”

They Gave Him Ten for Two

John Sinclair – poet, pothead, cultural revolutionary, and Chairman of the Rainbow People’s Party of Ann Arbor, Michigan – was at that time confined to the state prison in Jackson. More than two years earlier he had received a nine-and-a-half to ten-year sentence for the possession of 11.50 grains of marijuana – two joints’ worth – following a trial marked by numerous irregularities.

“The powers-that-be in Michigan had it in for me,” says Sinclair, who now lives in Amsterdam. “They didn’t like what we were doing, establishing an alternative community, defying their authority, smoking grass. First in Detroit, then in Ann Arbor. 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.”

Even those who weren’t quite as certain of Sinclair’s blamelessness agreed that ten years in prison for possession of two joints was an unusually severe sentence, and probably politically motivated.

John Sinclair, circa 1969. (Photo courtesy of Leni Sinclair.)

“They wanted to put me away,” Sinclair says, “and so they did.” Following the sentencing, a request for an appeal bond was denied, and the 27-year-old cultural activist went directly to a maximum-security prison.

Sinclair’s sudden departure sent the collective into a state of shock. But his wife Leni and brother David quickly assumed leadership roles and began to direct the effort to free their party’s leader.

In the coming months they worked tirelessly, organizing benefit concerts, demonstrations, and rallies. Wherever possible they enlisted the aid of sympathetic movement celebrities – Allen Ginsberg, Jane Fonda, Donald Sutherland, Jerry Rubin, Abbie Hoffman (whose misguided attempt to win support for Sinclair at Woodstock during the Who’s set earned him a bump on the head, courtesy Pete Townshend’s guitar), Tom Hayden, and others. But after two years of diligent effort they seemed no closer to getting John out of jail.

At some point in the summer of 1971, Sinclair – who was still helping to lead the party from behind bars – decided that what they needed to do was organize one huge benefit rally for the end of the year. With the help of sympathetic student organizations they were able to secure the use of the University of Michigan’s recently constructed Crisler Arena for Dec. 10. (That’s also international Human Rights Day – although no one seemed to realize it at the time.)

A Total Bomb

Utilizing the contacts that they had built up over the years, Leni, David, and the others assembled a list of about a dozen radical speakers and musical performers who agreed to appear at the rally. Then they approached Peter Andrews, an experienced area music promoter who was working as events director at the university. Andrews was a friend of John Sinclair and had previously organized a few small benefit concerts on his behalf. But he wasn’t interested in producing this show.

“I just looked at it and said, ‘This is a total bomb you have on your hands. You’ll get three thousand people tops, and in the fifteen-thousand-capacity Crisler, it’ll only show how little people care about John Sinclair.’”

Andrews, now semi-retired and living in Ypsilanti Township, recalls that the Sinclairs weren’t willing to take no for an answer. “I went to Toronto with my girlfriend just to get away from them for a few days. When I got back, Leni came to see me and she said, ‘John Lennon and Yoko Ono want to play at the rally!’”

Andrews was skeptical, thinking that this might simply be a ploy to get him involved. “I said, ‘Oh, really. And who’s the headliner, Jesus Christ?’”

Leni Sinclair insisted that it was real, however, and explained that Jerry Rubin had talked the Lennons into doing it. Andrews was still doubtful but agreed to fly to New York and meet with John and Yoko. Even today he still marvels at the surreality of that trip to New York with Leni in December of 1971.

Some Time in New York City

“Nobody met us or anything,” he says. “The only thing we had was a telephone number to call. I remember putting a dime in the phone, and dialing the number. John Lennon answered. He said, ‘Oh yeah, we’ve been waiting for ya, come on over, here’s where we’re at, great!’ I hung up the phone and looked at Leni, and I said, ‘We’re hot, we are happening.’”

Sinclair and Andrews took a cab from Grand Central Station to the Lennons’ two-room apartment in the West Village. “They greeted us, they were very friendly, very, very nice,” says Andrews. “I had Lennon sign a contract for $500 to appear, and he crossed it out and put, ‘To be donated to the John Sinclair Freedom Fund.’”

The visitors from Michigan spent about an hour talking with their newfound allies. At one point, Lennon asked Andrews to come into the bedroom and listen to a song he had written to perform at the concert. “He wasn’t sure if the song was appropriate, and he wanted my opinion. He sang the song – ‘It ain’t fair, John Sinclair’ – with that steel guitar he had. I assured him it was totally appropriate, and the lyrics were cool. He was very grateful.”

Andrews shakes his head in wonder at the memory. “I thought to myself, ‘John Lennon’s asking my opinion! Man, this is somethin’ else.’”

After leaving the apartment they had gone only about a block before Andrews realized that even with a signed contract as evidence, no one was going to believe that John Lennon would be at the show. “So we went back, and I asked John if he had a cassette recorder. I wrote a little script out, and he and Yoko read it into the recorder. Now I knew we had it.”

The Magic of John and Yoko

On Wednesday, Dec. 8, two days before the concert, the Committee to Free John Sinclair held a press conference in Ann Arbor. The tape that Peter Andrews had made was played for representatives of the local and national media.

“Hello, this is John with Yoko here,” began the recorded message. “I just want to say we’re coming along to the John Sinclair bust fund rally to say hello. I won’t be bringing a band or nothing like that because I’m only here as a tourist, but I’ll probably fetch me guitar, and I know we have a song that we wrote for John [Sinclair]. So that’s that.”

Tickets went on sale that same day at $3 each. “It sold out in such short amount of time – two or three hours, statewide – that we actually had guards, uniformed guards, to protect the people that got tickets from the ones that didn’t,” says Peter Andrews. “We distributed tickets statewide so that people would have an opportunity – not a big opportunity, but you had a chance if you ran down there and got in line.”

Andrews recalls that they didn’t spend a penny on advertising. It was enough to simply make the announcement of John and Yoko’s participation and let the media take it from there.

From Mop Top to Working-Class Hero

After the breakup of the Beatles, and before his untimely death by an assassin’s bullet in 1980, John Lennon performed in public on only a handful of occasions. In retrospect it may seem odd that one of these was a benefit for a jailed longhair in the cultural backwater of Michigan. But at the time it made perfect sense.

Ann Arbor was in the forefront of the radical movement of the late ’60s and early ’70s. That same period found the famously outspoken Beatle becoming deeply involved in political activism – denouncing war and injustice, attending demonstrations, concocting peace-themed “happenings” with Yoko, encouraging his fans to “Imagine no possessions,” advising them that “A working-class hero is something to be.”

In the summer of ’71 John and Yoko moved to New York on a more-or-less permanent basis and quickly became close with Yippie activists Jerry Rubin and Abbie Hoffman. Rubin was committed to speaking at the John Sinclair Freedom Rally in December, and encouraged John and Yoko to appear, as well.

It wasn’t difficult to get Lennon interested. He’d been toying with the idea of doing a series of all-star concerts combining rock music with radical rhetoric. After long discussions with Rubin, this morphed into an “anti-Nixon tour” that would travel across the U.S. during the summer of ’72 and wind up in San Diego at the Republican National Convention in August.

The rally in Ann Arbor would serve as a trial run.

Not in Kansas Anymore

John and Yoko arrived with little fanfare in Detroit on Friday, Dec. 10, the day of the concert. Peter Andrews picked them up at the airport in a borrowed limousine and drove them to the Campus Inn in Ann Arbor, where a number of the evening’s musical acts were staying. Andrews had booked the Lennons into the presidential suite.

The crowd at the 1971 John Sinclair Freedom Rally in Crisler Arena. (Photo courtesy of David Fenton.)

“I thought it was funny to put them up in the presidential suite,” he says, “because this was basically all anti-Nixon. I remember stopping over there to make sure everything was cool. I couldn’t stay, but boy, I wish could have. They were all jamming up in Lennon’s suite. I thought, ‘Damn, this is too much.’”

The event had grown so big so fast that to many of those involved it felt like a waking dream. “It was madness, all of these people, all the music and the politics,” says Hiawatha Bailey. While working backstage at the rally he felt a sudden need for a few minutes away, and walked over to the nearby football stadium.

“I’m sitting there, in this huge, empty stadium,” Bailey recalls. “All of a sudden this whirling dervish picks up a pile of trash, goes around the stadium, and drops it right next to me.” He smiles and shakes his head. “I’m thinking that I’d better get out of there, before Dorothy and Toto show up!”

But for Bailey the unreality wasn’t quite over. “I go back to the arena, and up comes this limo, and John Lennon, Yoko Ono, David Peel and the Lower East Side and all those scalawags that he hung out with, all start piling out. John says to me, ‘You look like someone I can trust, mate, come with me.’”

Bailey became an impromptu bodyguard, helping to hold back the fans as the Lennons and their entourage entered the arena. “These people were ready to rip me apart to get to John Lennon,” he says. “They had their albums they wanted signed, and they were very vehement about it.”

After escorting the company to their dressing room, Bailey recalls, “John turns to me and says, ‘Watch the door.’ Then he hands me a bag of coke, and says to enjoy myself. So I’m leaning up against the door, holding a bag of John Lennon’s blow, and behind me he’s teaching David Peel and those guys the chords to ‘John Sinclair.’ And I’m just like, ‘Man, this is far out.’”

A Long Day’s Night

Peel would have plenty of time to learn the song – John and Yoko didn’t end up taking the stage until around three in the morning, more than two hours behind schedule. They were preceded by nearly eight hours of speakers and musical performers that included Allen Ginsberg, Jerry Rubin, Bob Seger, Phil Ochs, Commander Cody and His Lost Planet Airmen, poet Ed Sanders, Black Panther Party chairman Bobby Seale, Chicago Seven defendant Rennie Davis, radical priest Father James Groppi, and jazz legend Archie Shepp.

The dramatic high point of the evening was a surprise telephone call from the imprisoned John Sinclair that was broadcast live over the arena’s loudspeakers. Voice choking with emotion, Sinclair spoke to his wife and daughter, conveying his belief that they would soon be reunited. “You could almost see the tears flowing down the aisles,” remembers Peter Andrews.

According to many reports, the other non-musical portions of the program did not appear to have a great impact on the audience. The singers, however, seemed to go over somewhat better. According to the Michigan Daily, Bob Seger was “dynamite,” Commander Cody “kept the audience pretty satisfied,” and Phil Ochs was “good and clever.”

But the big musical hit of the evening – possibly even bigger than the Lennons – was a performer that most people didn’t even know would be there.

A few days before the concert, Peter Andrews was working in his office when the phone rang. It was Stevie Wonder.

After his meeting in New York with John and Yoko, Andrews thought nothing could faze him. But now here he was listening to the wunderkind of soul tell him that, even though he wasn’t in favor of marijuana, he was dismayed by what had happened to John Sinclair, and wanted to be part of the show.

“I’m going, ‘Holy shit.’ I didn’t need a draw, so I decided that Stevie Wonder would be a surprise act. I told him over the phone that I didn’t want anybody knowing about this, and not to make any announcements or anything. There were only about three people other than me that even knew about it until he showed up with his equipment.”

Stevie Wonder performing at the 1971 John Sinclair Freedom Rally. (Photo courtesty of Stanley Livingston.)

The Wonder of Stevie

Twenty-two-year-old Jane Hassinger was elated when she learned that Stevie Wonder would be appearing that night. As a member of Drug Help, a local grassroots counseling service for youth with drug and alcohol issues, she was working in one of the arena’s two “drug tents” when Wonder took the stage. “I’d been on the job almost the whole time and didn’t really have an opportunity to watch the show,” she recalls.

“But I said to my co-workers, ‘I’m leaving for Stevie Wonder.’ I went up close to the stage. And he was extraordinary. It was as magical as anything I can think of. There was a roar when he came on.”

“We’d all grown up on Motown,” explains Peter Andrews. “When Stevie came out the crowd went bananas. I just loved it, as the promoter of the show. I still almost tear up when I think of the emotion people had.”

It wasn’t just the crowd that went bananas, either. “When Stevie was about to go on, I thought I should tell the Lennons,” says Andrews. “Well, John just flipped. He goes, ‘Stevie Wonder! I gotta see him!’”

Andrews didn’t think that was a good idea, as the ex-Beatle was certain to be mobbed. But Lennon was insistent. “He said, ‘Peter, don’t you understand? Stevie Wonder is my Beatles!’ He’d never seen Stevie perform. So I agreed. We got like ten security guys, and John Lennon and myself were in the middle of the circle, and we went to the back of the stage to watch.”

Yoko Ono and John Lennon performing at the 1971 John Sinclair Freedom Rally at Crisler Arena. (Photo courtesy of David Fenton.)

Gimme Some Truth

Stevie Wonder wasn’t there simply to dazzle the audience with his music, however. Like all the performers he was also there to make a political statement.

“Before coming here today,” he said at one point, “I had a lot of things on my mind, a lot of things that you don’t have to see to understand. We are in a very troublesome time today in the world. A time in which a man can get 12 years in prison for possession of marijuana, and another who can kill four students at Kent State and come out free.”

“What kind of shit is that?” he asked the crowd, which responded with a roar.

The audience had also cheered earlier in the evening when Phil Ochs delivered the refrain of his song about the White House’s resident paranoiac:

Here’s to the land you’ve torn out the heart of

Richard Nixon, find yourself another country to be part of

But of all the performances that night, it was that of the star attractions which was the most overtly political.

John Lennon and Yoko Ono took the stage at around three in the morning. Backed by an improvised band that included David Peel and Jerry Rubin, they sang about the Attica uprising, about the conflict in Northern Ireland, about women’s liberation, and, finally, about the man of the hour, without whom none of it would have been possible:

It ain’t fair, John Sinclair

In the stir for breathing air

Won’t you care for John Sinclair?

In the stir for breathing air

They gave him ten for two

What else can Judge Colombo do?

Gotta gotta gotta gotta gotta gotta gotta gotta gotta gotta gotta gotta gotta gotta gotta set him free

Then abruptly the Lennons were gone, and the show was over.

Don’t Let Us Down

Monday’s edition of the Detroit News contained a review of the rally that ran under the headline, “Lennon Let His Followers Down.”

Of course, not everyone in the audience was disappointed with Lennon’s performance. But it’s easy to see how many would have been somewhat less than impressed. The ex-Beatle’s set was entirely acoustic, long before going “unplugged” became fashionable. He played only four songs, none of which were familiar to the audience. And he left the stage after about 15 minutes.

“Yeah, I was disappointed by John and Yoko’s ‘street art’ performance,” says Jeff Alder, then an eighteen-year-old aspiring musician. “I mean, the great Beatle jamming with Jerry Rubin playing bongos or congas or something he had no idea how to play, along with David Peel and the freakin’ lousy Lower East Side. But I was still impressed that John came to support our guy.”

Alder, who today works as a studio technician at the University of Michigan, remembers being much more affected by Stevie Wonder’s performance. “Like John L., it was real impressive that he even came to play. Only Stevie actually came to play!”

But Alder admits that these are minor points. The bigger goal was to show support for John Sinclair. “The coolest thing of all was that it worked,” he says. “Regardless of any critiques of the performances and all the yapping, it worked.”

“We got John out!”

Bring Him to His Wife and Kids

Seventy-two hours after the commencement of the rally, John Sinclair was free.

For a brief moment the state penitentiary in Jackson became the backdrop for a scene out of some sort of freaky countercultural version of “It’s a Wonderful Life.” As flashbulbs popped and movie cameras rolled, the burly, long-haired revolutionary enjoyed a tearful reunion with his tiny wife Leni and their young daughter Sunny after almost two-and-a-half years apart.

This was no miracle, however. Rather, it was the result of years of concerted effort on the part of hundreds of people, not just to free John Sinclair but also to reform what many felt were the state’s draconian drug laws.

The day before the rally, the Michigan State Senate passed a bill that drastically reduced penalties for marijuana possession. Three days after the rally, the Michigan Supreme Court granted Sinclair bail pending appeal, after having denied six previous such requests.

The question remains about how much of an effect the event itself had on winning Sinclair’s freedom. The timing is, of course, very suggestive. The justices, however, maintained that their decision was made solely in light of the passage of the new drug bill.

Peter Andrews thinks that even without the spectacle of the rally, Sinclair would have eventually been released. “What it did,” he suggests, “was say, ‘How about right now!’”

However it happened, John Sinclair was out, and all who had struggled so long rejoiced. But the denouement wasn’t wholly Capra-esque. Peter Andrews believes that he lost his job as a result of the rally, which was simply too extreme for university administrators.

Disaster also struck John Lennon, who subsequently found himself under intensive FBI surveillance and threat of deportation. The anti-Nixon tour was canceled, and the former Beatle shied away from political activism for the rest of his life.

But Leni Sinclair, for one, remains grateful for John and Yoko’s efforts on behalf of her ex-husband, and is still tickled to have been mentioned in one of Lennon’s songs.

“Just knowing that we’re part of history is a good feeling,” she says.

John Lennon Sat Here

Walking the peaceful, tree-lined streets of Ann Arbor today, one sees little that evokes the time when John Lennon and Yoko Ono came to town to sing for the freedom of John Sinclair. It is difficult to conjure up the passionate, volatile milieu of that bygone era – the demonstrations, the sit-ins, the marchers with their protest signs, the smell of tear gas in the air.

There are a few reminders of the city’s radical past still to be found here and there: Ozone House, the People’s Food Cooperative, the Ecology Center, the Ann Arbor Film Festival – and the Herb David Guitar Studio on the corner of Liberty and Fourth. There the connection to Lennon’s visit is particularly strong – in the back amid rows of guitars sits a chair that Liverpool’s favorite son once occupied nearly 40 years ago.

“He just roamed into the shop that day,” remembers Herb David. “Nobody knew who he was. He was this little red-headed guy who didn’t look like anything you thought John Lennon looked like.”

A chair that John Lennon sat in 38 years ago, at Herb David Guitar Studio in Ann Arbor. (Photo by the author.)

David recognized him, however. “I said, ‘Hi, John.’ He said, ‘I’m not John.’ So I asked who he was. He said, ‘I’m his cousin.’ I said, ‘OK – hello, cousin.’ Then I let him go, and he just roamed around and we talked.” At some point during his visit Lennon felt like taking a load off, and ended up creating an instant curio for David’s shop.

“It’s fun to have,” he says. “It has a mystique. People get excited about sitting down in the chair. I say, ‘Sit in that chair, you’ll feel different.’”

When asked if he really believes that, David grins mischievously.

“You never know,” he says.

Could it be possible? Could the chair somehow be imbued with the spirit of the John Lennon who came to Ann Arbor 38 years ago?

The John Lennon who asked only that we “Give peace a chance,” and who every holiday season wishes all a “Happy Xmas” and assures us that “War is over, if you want it?”

The John Lennon who stood on the stage in Crisler Arena and said to the assembled thousands, “We came here not only to help John [Sinclair] and to spotlight what’s going on, but also to show and to say to all of you that apathy isn’t it, and that we can do something. OK, so flower power didn’t work. So what? We start again.”

Could the spirit of that John Lennon somehow inhabit the chair?

If so, maybe we all should take a minute to sit in it.

Alan Glenn is working on a documentary film about Ann Arbor in the ’60s. Visit the film’s website for more information.