John Sinclair, the Free John Rally, and the Five-Dollar Fine

In nineteen sixty-nine, a Michigan court sentenced a poet named John Sinclair to ten years in prison for providing two marijuana cigarettes to an undercover police officer. The sentence was widely viewed as the most aggressive possible application of the law against a man who was also the manager of the MC Five, a ferociously political Detroit rock band, and the founder of the White Panther Party, a left-wing organization that had made itself impossible for authorities to ignore.

Sinclair sat in prison. The legal appeals ground slowly. And then, on December tenth, nineteen seventy-one, something unusual happened in Ann Arbor.

The Free John Sinclair rally filled Crisler Arena. John Lennon and Yoko Ono performed. Stevie Wonder performed. Bob Seger performed. Allen Ginsberg read poetry. The event was broadcast live on radio and film. It was, by any measure, one of the more remarkable political concerts in American history, organized around the release of a single man serving time for two joints.

Within three days, the Michigan Supreme Court ordered Sinclair released on bond. By March of nineteen seventy-two, the court had overturned his conviction. By April first of that year, the Hash Bash rally was born on the University of Michigan Diag, a protest against new marijuana laws being enacted in the wake of the court decision. The Hash Bash has been held on the first Saturday of April every year since, for more than fifty years.

Two years after the first Hash Bash, Ann Arbor became one of the first cities in the United States to formally decriminalize marijuana, replacing potential jail time with a five-dollar civil fine. City council members elected on the Human Rights Party ticket pushed the ordinance through. Voters wrote it into the city charter in nineteen seventy-four.

Michigan eventually legalized recreational marijuana in two thousand eighteen. The argument began here, with a poet, a concert, and a five-dollar fine.