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This news short comes from Grosse Pointe South High School—A former student by the name of Mick was hired by the administration to patrol the johns and report people who were smoking. After being employed for quite a while he got busted for dealing dope to the students, and was caught in possession of one pound of hash.
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In the continuing story of the dope raids in public schools, Kennedy High School in Taylor was the victim of a coordinated plot on March 2. At 9:20 a.m. the principal came over the P.A. and announced that there was a “suspected gas leak in the school” and that everyone should evacuate the building. When everyone was outside, six Taylor pigs with German shepherds went through the lockers of all the students.
According to Roger, who called the story in to us, “Later in the day they tried to make us believe that it was a bomb threat. Many kids got their lockers messed up and I think that several got busted for possession of dope.”
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On Wednesday night, March 10, some students broke into the counselor’s office at Finney High School and trashed it, stealing all the bus tickets in the office.
Ferndale
Bill Dungy was charged with possession and held on $25,000 bond after the Academy street commune bust in Ferndale. He is now out of jail after his ransom was dropped to $1,000 and his friends got the bread together.
The dude who informed on them, Clyde, is caught in at least as bad a situation as is the guy who was busted. He is slightly retarded and the pigs saw him as a convenient tool to bust a lot of people in Ferndale. They got friendly with Clyde and used him to set up a couple of busts. He is now caught between the two forces—the people he turned pig on and the pigs who don’t give a shit about what happens to him.
Capitalist Comedy
The Michigan State Chamber of Commerce unsuspectingly put on a comedy for 300 students from various schools around the Detroit suburbs. The Jaycees sponsored a speaking event where prominent businessmen from the Chamber of Commerce spoke to the students. The idea was to convince them that “the American way” was, in fact, the best. Quotes from the honks in coats and ties were: “Business cares about the community,” and “We work for the benefit of the public and not for money,” “Just look at all the charities we contribute to,” and “People wanting to change this society should join the business world and change it from within.”
Bill, from Madison Heights H.S. tried to rebut some of the arguments but people from the floor were not allowed to speak until the end and then the questions were not answered. He said, “Very few people in the audience actually fell for this snow job. They were actually trying to convince us that the interests of business were the same as ours. And that shit about charities—everyone knows they do that to get out of taxes.”
Is it any surprise that the short-haired pig in the business suit, who owns Burroughs or Consumer’s Power isn’t exactly the most favorable image for a 16-year-old, dope-smoking revolutionary?
Out-state
Six students from Huron H.S. in Ann Arbor were busted Saturday, March 7, for cutting down billboards along I-96. A total of about 50 billboards have been cut down by the “Beaver Patrol” as they call themselves. They have delivered revolutionary justice to signs around Monroe, Coldwater, Jackson, Parma, Tecumseh, and Chelsea.
A spokesman for the group, William Board, reports that their first targets were “Stuckeys, because they’re the ugliest,” but that they soon ran out of these and expanded their operation to include others. Their main weapon is a specially modified chain saw with an ultra-efficient muffler system.
Their avowed goal is to rid Michigan of all its billboards. As they left, they reported that, “reality hasn’t heard the last of us!” (From the Argus, Ann Arbor)
Pushers
The Fifth Estate Street Sales Network has expanded to include some 45 streetsales people and extends from Melvindale to Pontiac. The distribution to drop-off points is now being handled by the Fifth Estate staff and has increased the circulation of the paper by more than 4,500 copies. These papers are going out to people who previously didn’t get the Fifth Estate in the schools, shopping centers, theatres, and ballrooms.
We still need more people hawking the paper, specifically downriver. People who want to sell should get together with a couple of friends and give us a call at 831-6800. You pay 10 cents per copy and sell them for 25 cents. What you don’t sell you can exchange for copies of the new issue or get your money back.
Peoples Media
* Students at East Detroit High School just came out with the first edition of STP: Serve the People.
* “God, Mother and Apple Pie” came out in its first issue for Saginaw….the people who put it out want to develop it into a community paper for their city.
* “Behind the Bleachers” came out at Walled Lake Western High School. The staff completely sold out the 700 copies that they had printed. The regular school paper is in debt and can only get rid of about 200 copies, so they started copying the style and material from “Behind the Bleachers.” No reaction has come from the school administration. However, there is a group of about 40 parents organized by the John Birch Society who are pressuring the principal to stifle the paper and suspend its writers.
* From the “Free Amerikan” of Crestwood H.S. in Dearborn comes the following excerpt. It is an expression of the purpose of the paper and speaks very well as to the purpose of almost all the papers that are being put out:
“Fellow students, any struggle to change conditions in a society cannot be won by individual actions. The underground newspaper called the Free Amerikan is trying to unite the students and teachers to fight the administration and change the oppressive conditions in our school.
“We know that the administration will attack us, but we do not fear them, once the students and teachers are united we will be unbeatable.
“This underground newspaper is being published to insure that the students in Crestwood High School have a better chance to speak out, which has been denied too long.
“There have been many rules which have been set up which are unfair to the students at Crestwood, and some teachers have misused and taken advantage of their power over the students. This unjust action toward the students must be stopped.
“The Free Amerikan is only trying to give the students at Crestwood more rights….”
* When an underground paper, the “Star Spangled Bird” came out at Cousino HS in Warren, the writers of the paper were ready for repression. They had been told that if the paper came out they would be busted for “distributing literature an that the paper was to be given out. Jeff, Sam and Dave stayed home and other people gave it out. Even though they didn’t actually distribute it, they were called up and told not to come back to school until they came with their parents for a “conference.”
In one of the more popular methods of repression, the principal was trying to use their parents against the students to try to stifle their activism. The usual line is “Johnny is such a fine person and has such potential to go to college, if only he’d just quit getting mixed up in all this commie political stuff.”
The writers of the paper have been going by the name of the Warren Student Union. With the threatened repression, they decided to lay low and not publish their paper for a while. However, political activity at the school has by no means diminished.
There is still much work going on around the People’s Peace Treaty, and there have been a whole series of speakers from the Fifth Estate Speakers Bureau at the school, speaking on the war in Southeast Asia, the March on the Warren Tank Plant, and on Women’s Liberation.
PRESS RELEASE….
Early Tuesday morning, March 2, a group of anti-war protestors staged a raid on the Chrysler-US Army tank arsenal in Warren, Michigan. Hanging a sign on a fence which read, “People’s money for schools, Not for tanks,” and covering a tank with paint, the demonstrators were announcing their opposition to the expanded war in Southeast Asia, the senseless killing there, and the deprivation of children faced with cutbacks in their school facilities and resources in Detroit.
And while the US government deplores the use of bombs by radicals against property here they develop huge tanks, bombs, etc. to kill people in Indochina. Such rationale can only be understood as illogical to say the least.
This is only one of many demonstrations that will continue if the war continues.
—Anonymous