This is a history of artists and the ways they were policed in Michigan from the 1950s to the 1970s, as told primarily through the experiences of John Sinclair, a poet, writer, journalist, artist, organizer, and activist who served prison time for violations of the state narcotics laws for marijuana in the 1960s and 1970s. John Sinclair’s trajectory as an artist activist was initially shaped by the racially segregated youth leisure culture of the greater Flint, Michigan, area, where Sinclair grew up and went to college, went to concerts, and started collecting records. With his subsequent move to Detroit, where he met and married artist Leni Sinclair (née Magdalene Arndt)—a German migrant one year his senior—the two entered into a partnership as underground journalists, artists, and community organizers. The Sinclairs managed their various homes as communes and used them as gathering places for people to get high, listen to music, use their printing supplies, read poetry, put art exhibitions on display, and in general serve as an ad hoc youth community center. They became brokers of sorts within an informal fraternity of artists and musicians in Southeast Michigan that came from a diverse range of ages, religions, ethnic backgrounds, and sexualities—many of whom were seeking community in a peer group away from the surveillance of family, church, school, the draft board, their bosses, and the police. The open bartering of marijuana at the Sinclair household and their beatnik sensibilities made them targets of surveillance and arrest by various police agencies that utilized networks of informants and undercover officers, inter-agency information sharing, and mass arrests to selectively criminalize political and cultural dissent during the Cold War. From the fall of 1964 to the summer of 1969, the Sinclairs were both arrested numerous times for marijuana crimes, but only John was ever convicted—three times in all. In response, the Sinclairs began working to decriminalize marijuana, a movement that was gaining considerable traction among mainstream society as wealthy white parents were increasingly forced to hire lawyers to defend their own children against marijuana charges. After the 1967 Detroit Rebellion the Sinclairs moved their commune to Ann Arbor, and helped found the White Panther Party to promote the band John managed, the MC5, in addition to coordinating their various community-organizing ventures and to form a working relationship with the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense. When John went to prison in the summer of 1969 following his third marijuana conviction, Magdalene ramped up efforts to persuade mainstream figures to support changing the state narcotics laws as they pertained to marijuana, and she tapped into influential reformists within the Michigan Democratic Party who were looking to implement broad criminal justice reforms to instill confidence in police, the courts, prisons, and government. The Sinclairs leveraged John’s experiences as an incarcerated white male dissident to craft a radical critique of law and order politics that influenced mainstream political discourse and popular culture. Their activism continued in the realm of electoral politics in Ann Arbor, where they attempted to harness a youth constituency to support radical causes, but various complications drove them back to Detroit, where they continued to work as artists and community organizers in the rapidly changing city.
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