TheWhite Panthers were an Americananti-racist political collective founded in November 1968 byPun Plamondon,Leni Sinclair, andJohn Sinclair.[1] It was started in response to an interview whereHuey P. Newton, co-founder of theBlack Panther Party, was asked what white people could do to support the Black Panthers. Newton replied that they could form a White Panther Party. Thecounterculture era group took the name and dedicated its energies to "cultural revolution.” John Sinclair made every effort to ensure that the White Panthers were not mistaken for awhite supremacist group, responding to such claims with "quite the contrary." The party worked with many ethnic minority rights groups in theRainbow Coalition.
The group was most active in Detroit andAnn Arbor, Michigan, and included theproto-punk bandMC5, which John Sinclair managed for several years before he was incarcerated. From a general ideological perspective, Plamondon and Sinclair[which?] defined the White Panthers as "fighting for a clean planet and the freeing of political prisoners." The White Panthers added other elements such as advocating "rock 'n roll, dope, sex in the streets and the abolishing of capitalism."Yippie co-founderAbbie Hoffman praised the WPP inSteal This Book andWoodstock Nation, and John Sinclair often referred to himself as a Yippie as well.[2][3]
The group emerged from the Detroit Artists Workshop, a radical arts collective founded in 1964 nearWayne State University. Among its concerns was the legalization ofmarijuana; John Sinclair had several arrests for possession. It aligned itself with radical politics, claiming the12th Street Riot was justifiable under political and economic conditions in Detroit.
Plamondon was indicted with John Sinclair in connection to the bombing of aCentral Intelligence Agency office inAnn Arbor on September 29, 1968,[4][5] a year after the founding of the group. Upon hearing on the left-wing alternative radio stationWABX that he had been indicted, he fled the U.S. for Europe and Africa, spending time inAlgeria with exiled Black PantherEldridge Cleaver. After secretly re-entering the country, and on his way to a safe house in northern Michigan, he was arrested in a routine traffic stop, joining John Sinclair, who had been sentenced to nine and a half years in jail for violating Michigan's marijuana possession laws, in prison. Plamondon was convicted and was in prison when Sinclair was released on bond in 1971 while appeals were being heard on his case. Sinclair's unexpected release came two days after a large "Free John" benefit concert, with performances fromJohn Lennon,Yoko Ono,Bob Seger, andStevie Wonder, was held at theUniversity of Michigan'sCrisler Arena.
The group had a direct role in two important legal decisions. A landmarkU.S. Supreme Court decision in 1972 quashed Plamondon's conviction and destroyed the case against John Sinclair. The court ruled warrantless wiretapping was unlawful under theU.S. Constitution, even in the case where national security, as defined by the executive branch, was in danger. The White Panthers had been charged with conspiring to destroy government property and evidence used to convict Plamondon was acquired through wiretaps not submitted to judicial approval. The caseU.S. vs. U.S. District Court (Plamondon et al.),407 U.S. 297, commonly known as the Keith Case, held that theFourth Amendment shielded private speech from surveillance unless a warrant had been granted, and that the "warrant procedure would not frustrate the legitimate purposes of domestic security searches." The judgment freed Plamondon, yet John Sinclair was free only on bond fighting his possession conviction. In 1972, theMichigan Supreme Court ruled in thePeople v. Sinclair, 387 Mich. 91, 194 N.W.2d 878 (1972) that Michigan's classification of marijuana was unconstitutional, in effect decriminalizing possession until a new law conforming to the ruling was passed by theMichigan Legislature a week later. Sinclair was freed but the cumulative effects of the imprisonment had marked the end of the White Panther Party in Michigan, which renamed itself the Rainbow People's Party while John Sinclair and Plamondon were in prison. The Rainbow People's Party, headquartered in Ann Arbor, disbanded in 1973.
In November 1968,Fifth Estate published the "White Panther State/meant". Thismanifesto, emulating the Black Panthers, ended with a ten-point program:
We want freedom. We want the power for all people to determine our own destinies.
We want justice. We want an immediate and total end to all cultural and political repression of the people by the vicious pig power structure and their mad dog lackies the police, courts and military. We want the end of all police and military violence against the people all over the world right now!
We want a free world economy based on the free exchange of energy and materials and the end of money.
We want free access to all information media and to all technology for all the people.
We want a free educational system, utilizing the best procedures and machinery our modern technology can produce, that will teach each man, woman and child on earth exactly what each needs to know to survive and grow into his or her full human potential.
We want to free all structures from corporate rule and turn the buildings over to the people at once!
We want free time and space for all humans—dissolve all unnatural boundaries!
We want the freedom of all prisoners held in federal, state, county or city jails and prisons since the so-called legal system in America makes it impossible for any man to obtain a fair and impartial trial by a jury of his peers.
We want the freedom of all people who are held against their will in the conscripted armies of the oppressors throughout the world.
We want free land, free food, free shelter, free clothing, free music, free medical care, free education, free media, EVERYTHING FREE FOR EVERYBODY![34]
The ten-point program and "White Panther State/meant" were also published in theAnn Arbor Sun, which was a newspaper founded by John Sinclair in November 1968. The newspaper was originally called theDetroit Warren-Forrest Sun before it was changed to theAnn Arbor Sun whenTrans-Love Energies moved to Ann Arbor in 1968.[35] The organization, founded by John Sinclair, his wife Leni Arndt Sinclair and artist Gary Grimshaw in 1967, set up shop at 1510 and 1520 Hill St, where theAnn Arbor Sun was produced and edited by the members of the group.[36] On July 28, 1969, theAnn Arbor Sun printed a revised copy of the White Panther's ten-point program.[34]
The newspaper was considered to be the mouthpiece for the White Panther Party for quite some time before the newspaper transitioned to an independent publication spreading views on local issues, left-wing politics, music, and arts.[35] Finally in 1976, the publication of theAnn Arbor Sun was suspended indefinitely.
^Johnson, Art (April 3–16, 1969)."MC-5 in San Francisco - 1969".Fifth Estate. No. 76.Archived from the original on September 3, 2023. RetrievedSeptember 3, 2023.
^"Introduction".The John and Leni Sinclair Papers, 1957–1999 at the Bentley Historical Library. Archived fromthe original on May 19, 2011. RetrievedApril 8, 2014.
Carson, David.Grit, Noise, and Revolution: The Birth of Detroit Rock 'n' Roll.University of Michigan Press: Ann Arbor, 2005.
Hale, Jeff A.. "The White Panthers' 'Total Assault on the Culture.'" InImagine Nation: The American Counterculture of the 1960s and '70s. Eds. Peter Braunstein and Michael William Doyle. New York: Routledge, 2002: pp. 125–156.
Luca BenvengaThe cultural workers. Fenomeni politico culturali e contestazione giovanile negli anni '60, Bepress, 2014.
