“They gave him 10 for 2, he gave them a revolution,” reads the tagline for a new documentary project about the late poet and activist John Sinclair.
Ann Arbor Hash Bash organizers announced the John Sinclair Foundation is joining forces with Coin Theaters Inc. to create a documentary about the former Ann Arborite, whose 10-year prison sentence for two joints inspired the marijuana legalization movement and helped give birth to Hash Bash in the 1970s.
The documentary project is expected to honor Sinclair’s lasting impacts on politics, art, music and civil rights.
“In many ways, John was kind of like a Forrest Gump character, except for the fact he was brilliant and he smoked a lot of pot,” said Pete Boehm of Coin Theaters.
He’s referring to Sinclair’s wide range of life experiences, including legal fights that went as far as the U.S. Supreme Court as President Richard Nixon’s attorney general authorized FBI wiretaps of the White Panthers headquarters in Ann Arbor.
Political activist John Sinclair fires up the crowd during the annual Hash Bash on the Diag of the University of Michigan Diag in Ann Arbor on April 3, 2004. Thousands gathered for that year’s event to drum up support for marijuana. Lon Horwedel | The Ann Arbor NewsLon Horwedel | The Ann Arbor News
Sinclair, who was born in Flint, famously came to Ann Arbor from Detroit in 1968 with about 30 members of his counterculture commune Trans-Love Energies, radical hippies who enjoyed smoking pot and getting politically active.
They packed into a pair of houses on Hill Street, a stone’s throw from the University of Michigan, and lived with the MC5, the proto-punk rock band Sinclair managed. They started the White Panther Party, an anti-racist political collective that grew into the Rainbow People’s Party, and started putting on free live concerts in Ann Arbor’s West Park until the city shut them down.
Sinclair also was involved in putting out the Ann Arbor Sun, an alternative newspaper, and helped get progressive Human Rights Party candidates elected to City Council, paving the way for Ann Arbor to decriminalize marijuana decades ahead of other cities.
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