John Sinclair (poet)

John Sinclair (born October 2, 1941) is an American poet, writer, and political activist from Flint, Michigan.

Sinclair's defining style is jazz poetry, and he has released most of his works in audio formats.

Most of his pieces include musical accompaniment, usually by a varying group of collaborators dubbed Blues Scholars.

As an emerging young poet in the mid-1960s, Sinclair took on the role of manager for the Detroit rock band MC5.

The band's politically charged music and its Yippie core audience dovetailed with Sinclair's own radical development.

The sentence was criticized by many as unduly harsh, and it galvanized a noisy protest movement led by prominent figures of the 1960s counterculture.

Sinclair was a member of the Class of 1960 at Albion College in Albion, Michigan, but he dropped out after his first year.

Sinclair subsequently attended the Flint College of the University of Michigan, now the University of Michigan-Flint.

During his time at UM-Flint he served on the university's Publications Board, school newspaper The Word, and was the president of the Cinema Guild.

Born in Flint, Michigan, Sinclair was involved in the reorganization of the Detroit underground newspaper, Fifth Estate, during the paper's growth in the late 1960s.

Fifth Estate continues to publish to this day, making it one of the longest continuously published alternative periodicals in the United States.

Sinclair also contributed to the formation of Detroit Artists Workshop Press, which published five issues of Work Magazine.

He graduated in 1964.

Sinclair worked as a jazz writer for Down Beat from 1964 to 1965, being an outspoken advocate for the newly emerging Free Jazz Avant Garde movement.

Sinclair was one of the "New Poets" who read at the seminal Berkeley Poetry Conference in July 1965.

Sinclair managed the proto-punk band MC5 from 1966 through 1969.

Under his guidance the band embraced the counter-culture revolutionary politics of the White Panther Party, founded in answer to the Black Panthers' call for white people to support their movement.

During this period, Sinclair booked "The Five" as the regular house band at Detroit's famed Grande Ballroom in what came to be known as the "Kick out the Jams" shows.

In April 1967 he founded the Ann Arbor Sun, a biweekly underground newspaper, with his wife Leni Sinclair and artist Gary Grimshaw.

In 1968, while still working with the band, he conspicuously served as a founding member of the White Panther Party, a militantly anti-racist socialist group and counterpart of the Black Panthers.

He was managing the MC5 at the time of their free concert outside the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago.

The band was the only group to perform before police broke up the massive anti-Vietnam war rally.

Eventually, the MC5 came to find Sinclair's politics too heavy-handed.

Arrested for possession of marijuana in 1969, Sinclair was given ten years in prison.

He and the band separated in 1969.

After a series of convictions for possession of marijuana, Sinclair was sentenced to ten years in prison in 1969 after offering two joints to an undercover female narcotics officer.

The severity of his sentence sparked high-profile protests, including an infamous incident at the 1969 Woodstock Festival wherein Yippie activist Abbie Hoffman jumped on the stage and seized a microphone during a performance by The Who.

Hoffman managed to shout only a few words about Sinclair's plight before he was forcibly ejected from the stage by guitarist Pete Townshend.

Sinclair was freed in December 1971, but he remained in litigation – his case against the government for illegal domestic surveillance was successfully pleaded to the US Supreme Court in United States v. U.S. District Court (1972).

Sinclair eventually left the US and took up residency in Amsterdam.

Various public and private protests culminated in the "John Sinclair Freedom Rally" at Ann Arbor's Crisler Arena in December 1971.

The event brought together celebrities including Lennon and Yoko Ono; musicians David Peel, Stevie Wonder, Phil Ochs and Bob Seger, Archie Shepp and Roswell Rudd; poets Allen Ginsberg and Ed Sanders; and countercultural speakers including Abbie Hoffman, Rennie Davis, David Dellinger, Jerry Rubin, and Bobby Seale.

Three days after the rally, Sinclair was released from prison when the Michigan Supreme Court ruled that the state's marijuana statutes were unconstitutional.

These events inspired the creation of Ann Arbor's annual pro-legalization Hash Bash rally.

With a more successful protest, John Lennon performed his new song "John Sinclair" on television and recorded it for his next album, Some Time in New York City (1972), though by that time Sinclair had been released.

With "directness and simplicity", said one critic, the lyrics lament Sinclair's intended harsh punishment: "They gave him ten for two – what else can the bastards do?"

In 1972, Leonard Weinglass took on the defense of Sinclair in Detroit, Michigan after he was charged with conspiracy to destroy government property along with Larry 'Pun' Plamondon and John Forrest.

He continues to write and record and, since 2005, has hosted a regular radio program, The John Sinclair Radio Show, as well as produced a line-up of other shows on his own radio station, Radio Free Amsterdam.

In 2006, Sinclair joined MC5 bassist Michael Davis to launch the Music Is Revolution Foundation, serving as a general board member.

Sinclair was among the first people to purchase recreational marijuana when it became legal in Michigan on December 1, 2019.