Detroit’s star activist adds BLM rally to her 50 years of rebellion
Defying Covid-19 and advancing years, Leni Sinclair left home recently to join a Black Lives Matter demonstration in Detroit. “It was exhilarating,” the 80year-old rock photographer and radical activist of 1960s counterculture said last week. “But I did my marching 50 years ago.”
Sinclair spoke to the Observer about how she has been watching closely the current challenges to racial inequities, environmental carelessness and entrenched institutional and political decadence. Earlier this week, in what could be seen as a fulfilment of the 60s social progress movements, Kamala Harris, the California senator and daughter of Jamaican and Indian immigrants, was selected as Joe Biden’s vice-presidential pick – an echo that reverberated again with the political ticket’s choice of campaign theme song: Curtis Mayfield’s 1970 classic Move On Up.
Harris is not the first Black candidate to seek the Democratic presidential nomination. The 60s inspired their own: Shirley Chisholm, the first Black female member of Congress, who ran in 1972 under the slogan: “Unbought and Unbossed.” Sinclair’s interest in the present lies in her part in forming the White Panther party, a correspondent to Huey Newton’s Black Panthers, the group that promoted black self-determination, which was in some ways parallel to the anti-police violence and empowerment goals expressed by Black Lives Matter leaders. “Don’t come running to our aid, don’t throw money saying, here, take this and fix the problem. No. Fix your problem,” Hawk Newsome, ounder of the Black Lives Matter of greater New York, said last month.
“Sometimes I think, where is the Black Panther party now we need them?” Sinclair says. “Thankfully, some white people are waking up to what’s been happening in this country for a long time. The whole country is turning into the panthers.”
Together with her husband, John Sinclair, the native-American activist Lawrence “Pun” Plamondon and the Detroit band the MC5, their roadies and elements from the artists’ workshop,
Sinclair started the White Panthers without approval from Newton and cofounder Bobby Seale. They had heard the panthers didn’t want white people involved but they “should start their own organisation if they want to help us”.
“We were already organising white people who wanted change, so we called ourselves the White Panthers,” Sinclair recalls. The group defined itself with a 10-point plan that called for “fighting for a clean planet and the freeing of political prisoners”, with additional aims of “rock ’n’roll, dope, sex in the streets and the abolishing of capitalism”.
The Black Panthers, too, were unimpressed – “they called us psychedelic clowns,” says Sinclair – at least until the group started distributing the Black Panther newsletter in south-east Detroit.
Later, the two groups held political education classes and “got on the same wavelength”. The Black Panthers later reversed the White Panthers’ Gary Grimshaw-designed big cat for their revolutionary symbol. Still, the name of the group sowed confusion, says Sinclair. “Nobody could understand that we were white and progressive, and that had terrible consequences.”
Sinclair had emigrated to the US from East Germany in 1959, two years before the Berlin Wall was erected. In East Germany, her brother, Erhard Arndt, was arrested by the Stasi and imprisoned for a year and a half after word spread that the White Panthers were a reactionary nationalist group. “The movie The Lives of Others could have been about my brother,” Sinclair says. “It irks me to this day. Those people who spied on him should be put in jail.”
Sinclair remembers being in Detroit in 1967 when the city was consumed by anti-racist protests that left 43 dead, over 1,000 injured, more than 7,000 arrested and 2,000 buildings destroyed over three days. The band Motor City 5 (known as the MC5), managed by her husband John, hung a “Burn Baby, Burn” banner from the communal Detroit Artists’ Workshop Society house they shared with the (Psychedelic) Stooges. The collective – whose 1964 manifesto shows them as in some ways a template for San Francisco’s communal movement – took the sign down as the destruction unfolded.
Sinclair was also at the protests outside the 1968 Democratic convention in Chicago. The overtly political MC5, with their sonic war-cry “Kick out the Jams, Motherfucker”, played as tensions escalated into violent clashes between antiVietnam war protesters and authorities. Sinclair left when she saw the guns; the band soon after.
She was also there in 1971 when John Lennon and Yoko Ono came to Detroit to play at a free concert for her husband, who at the time was imprisoned for possession of two joints – a charge that almost certainly functioned as a curb on his political activities. Lennon played a song titledJohn Sinclair at the show.
Fearful of a challenge to their immigration status, the couple put an end to their political activism. “They clamped down on him,” Sinclair said. “The working-class hero couldn’t speak out. He was censored, and he lost his soul.”
After John Sinclair was arrested in 1969, and the MC5 were harassed by authorities following the Democratic convention, the band broke its political contract, and the remaining White Panthers changed the name of the group to the Rainbow People’s party and then Trans-Love Energies.
Lest anyone dismiss the episode, a legal effort to force the FBI to reveal wiretaps on the group led to Michigan federal judge Damon Keith ordering the Richard Nixon justice department in 1971 to halt wiretapping without court orders. That, in turn, led to the exposure of the government’s larger surveillance operation against radical America, known as the Huston Plan, which played a part in Nixon’s impeachment.
The Artists’ Workshop proved influential, and its vegan-extolling influence travelled far: “I had to educate the San Francisco people,” said Sinclair. “They really got their ideas from Detroit. Then it went both ways – they learned from us, and us from them.”
The group was closely affiliated with Detroit’s black jazz musicians, who “didn’t care if you were white or black so long as you could blow your horn”. MC5, with their virtuoso lead guitar player, Fred “Sonic” Smith (later husband to Patti Smith), and the Stooges would listen to high-energy jazz in the van on their way to gigs, Sinclair recalls. But it would be wrong to think of Stooges singer Iggy Pop as energised by politics. “Iggy was just so far out nobody knew what to make of him,” Sinclair says. “He was not political, and he didn’t care about what people thought. Hejust wanted to create havoc.”
Sinclair’s political initiation came in Michigan’s growing countercultural movement in the early 1960s. She joined the Students for a Democratic Society at Wayne State University, and was already a member of Detroit’s avant-garde Red Door Gallery – a forerunner to the workshop – when she met her future husband in 1964.
“I looked at what was going on around me with a little bit foreign eyes, and what I saw happening in front of me was just all so important to me … I was lucky I had a camera to take some pictures,” she told Detroit’s Kresge Arts foundation when she received its eminent artist award in 2016. Alongside Sinclair’s political activism, her camera was a gateway to the world of musicians. She took 57,000 photographs of the Detroit scene and visiting musicians, from Fela Kuti, Sun Ra and Aretha Franklin to Prince. But her shots of a smouldering 21-year-old Iggy Pop, cigarette dangling, and MC5, stand apart.
From Sinclair’s perspective, – informed by experience and by observing the current president – “the worst there has ever been” – change must come from the young, and if 2020 is like 1968, the torch of social change is theirs to carry. “What’s going on now is a continuation of the struggle for decades and centuries against white supremacy and the suppression of black people. Now, finally, it’s making the newspapers and iPhones. Young people, just like back then, are demonstrating and eventually their parents were won over.”
Last month, Sinclair read that 20 high-school students had painted “power to the people” on a city street. “I hadn’t heard that phrase for 50 years. I love it. Young people are the future, and unless America turns into a militaristic dictatorship, like the Germans went though in 1933, the future is going to look a little bit different.”