The Lesson Of July 23

A year ago today, Pun Plamondon, Skip Taube, and Jack Forrest were captured by the mother-country police forces outside of St. Ignace, Michigan, on their way to an Upper Peninsula hideout where Pun had planned to secrete himself from the FBI.  At that time brother Pun, Minister of Defense of the White Panther Party, had been underground for over nine months as a fugitive from U. S. justice after being indicted by a Detroit grand jury on October 8, 1969 and charged with bombing the CIA's Ann Arbor recruiting office the previous year. He was also charged with "conspiring" with Chairman John Sinclair and brother Jack Forrest to bomb the CIA office. Pun has been held in various county jails - including nine months on the maximum security ward of the Wayne county Jail - under $100,000 bond (recently reduced to $50,000 after the U.S. government postponed the CIA Conspiracy Trial indefinitely), and Skip and Jack have been sentenced to 5-year sentences in the federal penitentiary system for "aiding and abetting a federal fugitive." Skip is in the federal prison at Sandstone, Minnesota; Jack Is in another prison in El Reno, Oklahoma.

The July 23rd debacle was a major turning point in the history of our party - it marked the end of one stage of our development and the beginning of our present era, which was given further definition by the dissolution of the White Panther Party and the founding of the Rainbow People's Party on May 1, 1971. Since this event had such a profound effect on us, we want to try to explain the changes it put us through and what we understand as the significance of those changes in terms of the future of our struggle for the liberation of the rainbow colony and the triumph of the life culture over the death culture. In order to do this, we have to go back to the beginning of our history as an organization to put the events of the past year in their proper context.

WORKSHOP

We were first organized as the Artists' Workshop on November 1, 1964, when John Sinclair, Magdalene Arndt (Leni Sinclair), and 14 other poets, musicians, photographers, filmmakers, painters, actors, composers and heads came together to deal with their problems collectively. The Workshop was established as a community center for the small, hip community in Detroit, and for two years we produced our own free concerts, poetry readings, exhibitions, film screenings, books and magazines; we organized a free school (later the Free University of Detroit) and a cooperative housing project through which we controlled six houses and two storefronts for the people who worked in the Artists' Workshop community. Our basic principle was self-reliance and self-determination for hip people, and the Workshop community was no more than our theory of self-reliance put into active practice.

During this first stage of our development we wrongly believed that we could 'drop out" of Amerikan society and "do our own thing" without bothering anyone else. We felt that the death culture was already dying and would soon collapse under the weight of its own contradictions, and we saw ourselves as building the new order which would replace the death culture within the' very shell of the dying system. But even from the beginning we were faced with a contradiction of our own: even though we didn't want to have anything to do with the established order, it wouldn't leave us alone. Police agents were sent in to infiltrate and cripple our tiny movement for self-determination by ripping off its prime mover - John Sinclair - and terrorizing the rest of our people. These agents took advantage of our openness and idealism by begging to be turned on to our sacraments, marijuana in particular, and then arresting us for violations of the state narcotics laws.

Our failure during that period to create true collective organizational forms for ourselves resulted in the disintegration of the Artists' Workshop when John Sinclair was imprisoned in the Detroit House of Correction on February 24, 1966; Leni Sinclair was left with the whole burden of maintaining the Workshop's shaky economic foundation, most of the people who had been involved in the project left Detroit in pursuit of their own individual interests, and the blossoming operation shrunk back to the Artists' Workshop Press and the two storefronts in which it was housed.

When John got out of jail in August of 1966, he and Leni started all over again, drawing new people into the hip self-determination movement and expanding its scope to try to deal with the needs of the hordes of teen-age "hippies" who were exploding onto the scene in greater numbers every week. The hip community was still minuscule - the first year's dances at the Grande Ballroom, which replaced the Artists' Workshop as the focal point of the community, averaged maybe 300 people a night but it was constantly growing as more young brothers and sisters dug how beautiful it was and started deserting the suburban wastelands they had been trapped in. By this time, the nucleus of an alternative social order which had been previously formalized only by the Artists' Workshop had grown to include the Grande Ballroom, the Fifth Estate newspaper, Mixed Media, the complex of stores and services on Plum Street, a growing number of high-energy rock and roll bands and light shows, and a proliferation of communes of spaced-out freeks. None of this had existed back in 1964, and the established power structure was flipping out - something had to be done to stop this epidemic of longhaired, dope-smoking rock and roll maniacs before the hippies could organize themselves and realize their collective power.

GREAT DOPE RAID

On January 24, 1967, the police, under the direction of Mayor Jerome Cavanaugh and Police Commissioner Ray Girardin (who both made personal appearances at the scene of the crime), mounted a desperate full-scale attack on the hip community in Detroit with a massive "dope raid" aimed specifically at the Artists' Workshop and the people who were working to build it back up. This time both John and Leni Sinclair were arrested, along with 54 other brothers and sisters in the Warren-Forest neighborhood-including a rock and roll band, a number of poets and musicians, the Magic Veil Light Show, most of the staff of LEMAR (Legalize Marijuana) and Guerilla newspaper, and several hip craftspeople who had shops on Plum Street. It wasn't just a bunch of freeks rounded up at random - the "Great Dope Raid" was aimed precisely at the people who worked at the center of the hip community  and it was staged precisely as an act of terrorism, rather than as an attempt at "curbing the drug traffic" in the city. Of the 56 people who were arrested that night at the Workshop, the Castle (a great old housing center which had been the center of the Workshop's cooperative housing project and which was at the time a headquarters for four separate communes of freeks), and two or three other communes in the neighborhood, 43 were released in the morning without charges and the rest of the victims- with the exception of John Sinclair- were eventually released on probation. Leni Sinclair fought her case and beat it in court, Ralph Greenwood jumped bond, went underground, and eventually committed suicide, and Ron Frankenburger of the Magic Veil Light Show, fled to California, while John Sinclair took this opportunity to challenge the constitutionality of the Michigan marijuana statutes and ended up in the penitentiary two and a half years later.

The January 24th raid was another major turning point for the Workshop and the whole community-a lot of people were completely terrified and went back to their safer former life in the suburbs, but the people who held fast, after a shaky period of total paranoia, began to understand that the only solution was to organize ourselves so we could deal with shit like this, while continuing to build up our alternative social order. The growing repression only strengthened our will to resist and to fight back more effectively, and it forced us to begin to re-examine the premises upon which our movement had been based. We saw that it would be impossible to simply "drop out" without protecting our rear at the same time, and we started the fist organized Legal Self-Defense group, under the auspices of LEMAR, after the January 24th raid.

TRANS-LOVE ENERGIES

The major result of the raid, however, was the formation of Love Energies, which was an extension of the Artists' Workshop and the interim group called the 1967 Steering Committee, formed at the beginning of January by John Sinclair and Gary Grimshaw, Emil Bacilla, Rob Tyner of the MC-5, Allen Van Newkirk of GUERRILLA newspaper, and Jim Semark of the Workshop. Trans-Love began as an umbrella coalition of all the active elements in the hip community - the Workshop, LEMAR, GUERRILLA, the Fifth Estate, Mixed Media, the Magic Veil Light Show, people from the Plum Street stores, the MC- 5, Billy C. and the Sunshine, and individual poster artists, musicians, poets, filmmakers, photographers, printers, craftspeople and artisans from the community. There was no organizational structure whatsoever- the Workshop people provided headquarters and staff for the collective, meetings were held from time to time to plan specific community activities, and a Trans-Love newspaper (the Warren-Forest SUN, forerunner of this newspaper) was started by Sinclair and Grimshaw to promote the work of the organization and pull the community closer together, but once more the same mistake was made as had been committed by the Artists' Workshop's organizers: no permanent structural form was created to make sure that the organization could grow into a real alternative social institution capable of serving the range as well as the immediate needs of our people. A small minority of the "members" of Trans-Love Energies made all the decisions and tried to execute them without drawing everyone else into the process and making servants of the people out of all the brothe.rs and sisters who wanted to work in the interest of the community.

Still, Trans-Love was a great step forward, and the staff collective carried out a lot of important programs under the Trans-Love banner during the spring and summer of 1967. We put out the Sun, tried to put together a cooperative booking agency for the bands that related to what was happening, started a phone message center, put out a daily mimeographed news bulletin for a while, turned the Workshop into a 24-hour-a-day community center and crashpad, started a free store, tried to organize a free ride service for people who had to get around town, provided rehearsal space for bands who didn't have a place to work out, sponsored benefits to raise money for the Bail Fund, directed people who got busted to attorneys and bondsmen and sometimes posted bond for them, started the Psychedelic Rangers as a "peace force" for free outdoor gatherings like the Belle Isle Love- In of April 30th, which we sponsored and organized, and even tried to open a people's ballroom under the direct control of the community as an alternative to the Grande, which had begun to deteriorate into a big-name pop business showplace instead of a spaced-out community center. And during the Detroit Uprising, which started July 23rd, 1967, we distributed free food and clothes to poor black and white people who didn't have anything to eat after all the neighborhood stores had been looted and burned down.

During this period, Pun Plamondon, Genie Johnson (Plamadon), and Dave Sinclair joined the Trans-Love community workers. This was the famous "Summer of Love, " and all of us were filled with great LSD-driven visions of the imminent spiritual rebirth of America and the collapse of the dying order. When the Detroit Uprising jumped off, we thought the beginning of the end had arrived, and we were busy planning for the "post-revolutionary construction" which would start with the victory of the insurrection. But that fantasy ended with the brutal suppression of the slave revolt in the streets and the gun-butts of the National Guard and U.S. Army troops who beat our door down and threatened to shoot all of us on the spot. The Summer of Love came to a premature end in Detroit on the 1st of August. The dynamite acid which had been blowing the minds of thousands of hippies started to turn into speed, our dreams of instant utopia were smashed to smithereens, and the focal point of our work gradually shifted to the rock and roll arena when we took in the MC- 5 and started building them into a powerful propaganda weapon for the "cultural revolution" in Michigan.

MC-5

By the fall of 1967, we were working full-time with the MC-5 and the Up (who had just got together then) and made another attempt to influence the direction of the Grande Ballroom as a real community center, since our attempt at establishing an alternative to it had proved premature. The Trans-Love commune moved over to the corner of 2nd and Forrest in Detroit, turning the old Workshop over to the 5 so they would have a place to practice regularly, and we opened a community information center in our new quarters. We also set up another center In the Grande itself and took over the light show there. We had seen that the "revolution" wasn't going to happen overnight, and our new plan was to commit ourselves to making the MC-5 into a major influence on young people, as well as an economic power which would enable us to get enough seed capital so we could fund long-range self-determination programs under our own control. By building the bands into super-popular forces in the music industry we felt we could gain entrance into radio, television, the recording industry, and big entertainment palaces where we could reach more and more of our young brothers and sisters with our "total assault on the culture" message while at the same time pulling in enough money eventually to create our own record company, buy printing presses and other means of production and even radio stations which we could operate collectively in the interests of the people. This program would also allow us to support ourselves and expand our (continued on page 12)

(continued from page 11) operation so we could more effectively serve the people. We put everything into this effort through the winter of 1967 and the spring and summer of 1968, when we began to run into heavy opposition from the police and other authorities. We left Detroit for Ann Arbor in May of 1968 because the police harassment of our headquarters was threatening our continued existence there, and soon after that Pun and Grimshaw were arrested by Traverse City police on a phony marijuana charge. Pun was held in the Traverse County jail for almost three months under $20,000 bond, and Grimshaw fled the state to go underground for two years. At the same time the MC-5 started getting hassled by police at almost every gig they were playing around Detroit and Michigan, taking arrests for playing free music in West Park in Ann Arbor and for "assaulting a police officer" in Oakland County when John Sinclair and Fred Smith got beat up by a bunch of storm troopers at a teen club there. It was becoming clearer than ever that the established order was not going to stand by and let us carry out our program without a fight, and we found ourselves forced to fight back against the increasing repression of ourselves and our people every time we turned around. Our illusions of a "cultural revolution" without any need of armed struggle or other political measures were finally smashed completely when we went to Chicago in August to take part in the Festival of Life with the Yippies and just barely managed to escape from Lincoln Park without getting our heads - and more important, all our equipment- smashed by the Chicago police.

SKIP & JACK

We had also come under the powerful influence of the Black Panther Party during that summer, and when Pun was finally sprung from jail on bond he was excited about creating a similar organization for the youth community, which we would call the White Panther Party. The WPP was formed on November 1, 1968, the day after we recorded the MC-5's first album at the Grande Ballroom, with the primary purpose of trying to put the "cultural revolution" into an explicitly political context by merging the "total assault on the culture" program of rock and roll, dope, and fucking in the streets with armed self-defense and what Eldridge Cleaver and Huey P. Newton called the "mother-country radical movement. " We still considered our major function to be mass propagandists for the "revolution, " and with a major record album and a projected series of national tours for the MC- 5, we were now able to multiply our effect tremendously. Skip Taube and Jack Forrest entered our collective at this time, too, each of them bringing his movement experience and rhetoric to our total assault program and heightening the intensity of our rap, which had been raised to a whole new level of militancy by the anti-depression rants of John and Pun. Skip had been active in Ann Arbor SDS with Diana Oughton and Bill Ayres (later among the founders of Weatherman), and Jack had organized a Yippie collective in Detroit after working with SDS there (he was the first White Panther recruit in Detroit when we formed the WPP).Their movement background combined with the increasing influence of the Black Panther Party and the unprecedented police repression we were drawing to push our whole approach farther and farther to the left, toward the general hysteria and frenzy which was driving the former civil rights peace movement into the streets with rocks and bottles instead of protest signs after the Chicago stomp scene. The problem with this approach, which soon overshadowed the constructive work we had been doing, was that it was mounted out of simple frustration and rage without much thought for its consequences. We had been pushed to the point where we just reacted against the forces that were messing us over, and the harder they pushed the more frantic our reactions became. We started threatening the government with all kinds of ridiculous militant rhetoric which we could not possibly back up, and the government of course took us at our word: when we said we would "smash the state" and "off the pigs" they took us very seriously indeed and moved against us in ways that would insure our elimination as any sort of threat to their existence. This would only piss us off even more, and our rhetoric would heat up another notch, which would in turn increase the repression against us. We were caught up in a mindless spiral of empty threats and very real repression from which it seemed impossible to escape, and to add to the problem our constant woofing and screaming helped alienate our people from us, probably because they could easily see that we were just getting what we were asking for: plenty of trouble and unnecessary grief, which they didn't want any part of.

This spiral reached an early peak in the summer of 1969, when John Sinclair was first convicted in Oakland County of assaulting a police officer after he blatantly challenged the police to lock him up in a television news interview. Then he went to trial on the January 24th marijuana ruse in July, 1969, and ended up being dragged out of the courtroom while hollering at the judge and making insane threats to narcotics officers which weren't even meant to be carried out-just plain woofing pure and simple. He was acting out of a warped sense of "politics" which said that it was "revolutionary" to talk real bad and come on super- defiant, expecting the power structure to run away in fear and trembling, but the real effect was of course just the opposite, and it cost him the opportunity to remain free on appeal bond while his conviction was being appealed.

CIA RUSE

The worst part about this kind of reactionary behavior was that it influenced not only the rest of us, but a lot of our sisters and brothers who related to what we were doing, and this only made matters worse instead of better. After John was locked up Pun, Skip, Jack, and most of the rest of us carried on the same approach in our public work, and those of us who didn't really feel right about it didn't speak up in opposition because we respected our brothers' judgement and had to back them up in the face of all the heat they were drawing. Pun took John's place as the major spokesman for the WPP, and his frustration at the ripoff of his ace comrade only increased the intensity of his militancy, as it did to the rest of us.

On October 8, 1969, with John in Marquette Prison, Grimshaw still underground, Pun facing marijuana charges in three states, Genie and Leni with a marijuana charge in New Jersey (they got busted for possession on their way back from Woodstock), Skip with various demeanor beefs against him, and a general feeling of impending doom permeating our collective consciousness, a federal grand jury in Detroit handed down an indictment charging John, Pun and Jack Forrest with conspiring to blow up the Ann Arbor CIA office, and Pun with actually blowing the place up over a year before. Pan immediately split when he heard the news over the radio, choosing to "go underground" even though he could have stayed around to be arraigned and freed on bond. The underground mystique was very big at that time, and the government won another victory over us by virtue of our ignorance and our desire to be as "revolutionary" as everybody else. Weatherman had just been formed that summer, the Chicago Conspiracy Trial was going on, the Days of Rage started that same day, and it was like there was a big contest on the "left" to see who was the "most revolutionary. " The Black Panther Party had contributed to this situation throughout 1969 by stressing that it was the "vanguard of the revolution" because so many of its members had been killed, forced into exile, or locked up in jails and penitentiaries and the "mother country radicals" (including ourselves) seemed to feel that the way we could "prove ourselves as revolutionaries" was to get beat up, killed, locked up, or indicated by the government for various forms of violent activity.

So Pun went underground and Skip took his place as the most prominent member of the party, continuing the policy of woofing and hollering at the "pigs" that had been established by John and Pun. Our positive community organizing and service programs all disintegrated as all of our energies were taken up with trying to get our comrades out of prison or back from underground and with trying to stay out of jail ourselves. Nothing seemed to be working out right - we could barely support ourselves and pay the rent on our house, we weren't having much success in gaining the support of the people we professed to be "serving" with our work, and we just got more and more frustrated. But we kept on following the same approach to "the revolution", pushing our super-militant line and even trying to spread what little "influence" we had into more and more areas of the country. John was dreaming up all kinds of grandiose schemes from prison for us to carry out, and Pun was constantly issuing statements from underground which exhorted people to "make the revolution" and "raise the level of the struggle in the mother country." He persistently flaunted the FBI with their inability to capture him, which they rewarded by putting him on their infamous "Ten Most Wanted List"-Pun was advertised by the government as "the first white radical" to gain that distinction, and we were all deeply honored by this achievement.

JULY 23 BUST

Pun had been safely in exile for a while, but he was desperate to coma back to the "mother country" and "make the revolution in the belly of the beast. " Without contacting anyone in advance he suddenly reappeared in the vicinity of Michigan and made contact with some people in the party, who started to make arrangements to "aid and abet" their closest comrade. During this whole period, from the beginning of the WPP to the summer of 1970, we had never managed to get ourselves together enough to build a collective leadership structure for our "party", and most if not all of the most important decisions of our "organization" were made individually and spontaneously with little or no thought of the consequences of those decisions. That went for John's behavior in the courtroom as well as Pun's decision to go underground, his decision to come back to Michigan, and his, Skip's and Jacks decision to pull what turned into the July 23rd caper. In effect we were all just running around like a bunch of maniacs running our mouths and begging for trouble, and we didn't take into regard the consequences of our actions on our sisters and brothers in the WPP or, more importantly, all our people in the community at large We felt real "revolutionary, " but we weren't doing anything for anybody at all-except the government, which should have been paying us for doing what we were doing. But we couldn't understand that quite yet.

The July 23rd caper went like this: Skip had apparently arranged a hideout for Pun in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, and he and Jack Forrest borrowed a van to carry Pun up there with some supplies to hold him for a while. They jumped in the van and drove through the middle of Michigan in the middle of day, stopping along the way to pick up a few beers just as if they were a bunch of college kids on their way to the beach. Their utter lack of discipline and simple common sense cost them their freedom when they were stopped by a state police cruiser after dumping some empty beer cans by the side of the road, and their capture threw the rest of us into a panic. Pun was put under a $100,000 cash bond, and Skip and Jack under $30,000 bonds which were impossible for us to raise. Besides, they had been caught dead in the act and we could see no way to beat their cases, so Skip and Jack pled guilty to one 5-year charge and had two others dropped in return, They were given the maximum sentence-5 flat-and railroaded off to the penitentiary.

The total senselessness of what had happened was what hit us the hardest - it began to dawn on all of us that we had just been stumbling along, doing whatever popped into our heads without regard for either the personal or political consequences of our actions, and that something had to be done about it immediately if we wanted to have any future effectiveness, let alone survive. John, as usual, heard the news about the capture over the radio in Marquette and he flipped out, kicking off what proved to be nine months of intensive discussion of our whole situation with an attack on Pun and Skip and Jack as crazed individualists who were living in a fantasy world of their own. This was typical of the kind of operation we had at the time, and it started things off on a bad note, but within two months the early antagonisms had cooled down and all of us were finally beginning to discuss our problems and seek collective solutions to them.

CRITICISM & SELF-CRITICISM

The early antagonism John expressed over the incident made it hard for the real issues to come to the surface. The whole discussion was carried on in terms of personalities rather than issues at first, and it took us a while to see that it wasn't about personalities but about political contradictions that had been building under the surface for a long time. Once we got that straight, we were able to start progressing more rapidly toward a solution, but it still took us months to arrive at a harmonious synthesis.

John's imprisonment gave him time to do a lot of studying, primarily of political theory and history, and he was the first of us to realize that we had not been "revolutionaries" at all but merely rebels acting more out of our frustration and anger than anything else. John's antagonistic position at the beginning complicated things more than they should've been, but we finally realized that the only way to settle anything was by using the revolutionary principle of "unity-criticism-unity", which means that people have to see that their interests are basically the same even though they may have serious disagreements on specific issues, and work together from a base of unity of purpose to struggle out their opposing views in order to arrive at a new unity. This is what saved us in the end -all the people who really did have the same basic interests made up their minds to stay and struggle out our contradictions scientifically, taking them out of the realm of personalities and emotions and putting the discussion on the level of issues and political policies. This was all new to us, but we kept at it and finally got it all together.

By late fall we were still struggling, and we still couldn't agree on what to do - John had proposed that we change our name to the Woodstock People's Party, and everybody else carne to agree that we had to get rid of the name White Panthers because it didn't fit anymore. But we could not all agree on that name, so we decided to postpone the discussion of the name on the 1st of December until the end of the upcoming CIA Conspiracy trial, and to maintain our unity at least until after the trial, when we would be able to take up the ideological struggle (battle of ideas) again.

RAINBOW PEOPLE'S PARTY

It was just at this time that Pun and Genie came up with the name Rainbow People's Party and laid it on the table for discussion as an alternative to the name Woodstock. Then John was taken to the Wayne County Jail to prepare for the CIA Trial, and he and Pun had a chance to rap a few times for the first time in almost two years. They found that they were in almost total agreement, and Pun convinced John that the Rainbow image was even better for describing our culture than the Woodstock myth.

All in all the whole process was really dynamic, and we all learned an incredible amount from it. We worked out a lot of personal contradictions between different individuals in the process, and we managed to bring most of our problems right into the open so we could settle them. Everybody learned from everybody else, and by April we had all come to the same conclusion, which had seemed impossible even two months before. So on May 1 we announced the formation of The Rainbow People's Party, and published the first issue of the Ann Arbor Sun. The different ideas that people had were discussed in a lot of detail and were either accepted and developed to a higher level, or rejected in whole or in part. We really learned that we could solve our problems by discussing them openly instead of keeping our disagreements and resentments and shit to ourselves, going around talking behind people's backs, forming cliques and factions, etc. It blew our minds!

Now we still aren't as together as we want to be, and we still have not accomplished most of the goals we set for ourselves, but we've discovered the correct methods of thinking and methods of work and, what's more important, we're using them in our daily activity. We know we have a long way to go, but we know from our experience in this heavy ideological struggle that we can do it if we work together and follow the correct procedures. A lot of people believe that freeks are incapable of organizing themselves, that our people can't get ourselves together and become a strong revolutionary force so we can have some control over our own destinies in this country, but we know better now. We thought we were going to fall apart ourselves, but we managed to pull ourselves together by a reaffirmation of our faith in each other and in the principles we have come to believe in over the years. We're starting to learn from our mistakes and turn them into advantages, and that's a great step forward.

JULY 23

A year has passed since the July 23rd scene and we feel like we're a whole different people from what we were a year ago. We're still together-in fact we're more together now than we've ever been-and we're doing a lot better work than ever. We don't know what will happen this July 23rd. Since 1967, July 23rd has been a big day for us, which is only natural because we've been relating ourselves to the SUN as our symbol since then, and this day is the first day of Leo (the Sun sign). The Detroit uprising of July 23rd, 1967 brought us out of our hippie bag and made us understand the relation of our culture to the black liberation movement; on July 23rd 1968, John Sinclair and Fred Smith got beat up at a MC -5 job in Oakland County, which made us see how it wasn't enough just to play the music and hope for the best - that led directly to the founding of the White Panther Party; John was sent to the penitentiary on July 25th, 1969, which made it possible for him to start his study and thus for all of us to come to a better understanding of our political role in the world - wide liberation movement; and Pun, Jack and Skip got captured on July 23rd, 1970, which made us start getting ourselves together through ideological struggle and change our whole approach to the problem of liberating the rainbow Colony. Now we're ready to move on - we have come to welcome calamity in its various forms, because it constantly pushes us forward to new levels of understanding and activity. We now understand that our lives progress in cycles just like the Sun, constantly moving, constantly changing, constantly becoming brighter and purer. We can never forget the lessons of July 23rd, and we hope that you can understand us a little better now.

Long live the Spirit of the Sun!

Rainbow Power to the People of the Future!!

Central Committee, Rainbow People's Party

John Sinclair, Chairman

Leni Sinclair

Gary Grimshaw

Pun Plamondon

Genie Plamondon

Frank Bach

Peggy Taube

David Fenton

David Sinclair, Chief of Staff

July 23, 1971