xt79p843r862 https://exploreuk.uky.edu/dips/xt79p843r862/data/mets.xml Blue-Tail Fly, Inc., 1969- 19700201  newspapers 2008ua008_1_5 English Lexington, Ky. : Blue-Tail Fly, Inc., 1969- : Lexington, Kentucky. Contact the Special Collections Research Center for information regarding rights and use of this collection. Blue-Tail Fly Blue-Tail Fly, February 1970 text Blue-Tail Fly, February 1970 1970 2010 true xt79p843r862 section xt79p843r862 
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Dope temperance anyone?


 
contents
A Nice Place to Put a University, page 5 Gene Mason
Interview:   Marlene Dixon, page 7
Sue Anne Salmon and Gretchen Marcum
"Pollution, " a drawing, pages 8 and 9
by Norman Adams, a student at the Louisville School of Art
looking back--on Robert Kennedy's 1968 Appalachian tour, page 11 Rick Bell and David Holwerk
James Baldwin on the Black Panthers, page 13
verse:   Jonathan Greene, Thomas Baker, Tom Lewis, page 14
music: Fathers and Sons, page 14 Dan Fisher
The blue-tail fly is published monthly by blue-tail fly,  inc. at 210 W. Third Street, Lexington,  Ky. 40507.   Send money.
blue-tail fly
February, 1970 vol. 1, no. 5
staff:   Guy Mendes,  Rick Bell,  David Holwerk, Jack Lyne,  Bucky Young,  Nick DeMartino, Sue Anne Salmon, Chuck Koehler, Gretchen Marcum, Julie Mendes,  Don Pratt,  Doug Stewart, Kevin Hill,  John Simon,  Geoffrey Pope,  John Beckman, Ron Genin,  Tony Urie and Becky Martin.
Dope dope
Though our cover question was not entirely serious, the thought was no doubt present following mid-month drug raids here which netted 31 people.
Lexington's not-so-mod-squad raided the Operation Deep Freeze coffeehouse where they arrested three people on drug charges (the coffeehouse manager and his wife and a girl who alledgedly had a Cex of some sort in her possession), and 18 others"including 11 minors"on a variety of charges such as disorderly conduct, contributing to the delinquency of a minor, and loitering.
And within the next 24 hours the cops (with the help of student narcs) busted four residences and nine more people on dope charges. Another arrest for disorderly conduct (made at the police station when a friend of one of those being incarcerated hollered after him "Don rtell them anything.") brought the total to 31.
It was the first large scale bust to hit the local head community since last spring and it loosed the usual tremors of paranoia, rumors and weak jokes about going back to Bud ¢ The local narcs revelled in their victory, declaring"Viet-cong-body-count-style"that they'd seized aout S5.000 worth of grass and acid.
Louisville's dope scene has been similarly hassled. Frank Burke, newly elected mayor of the city, campaigned on a promise to fight the "growing drug menace" (among other things) and seems bent on keeping his word. In December, 15 people were indicted on drug charges after a couple of mass raids. Seven more were arrested this month.
And if University of Louisville students seem even more paranoid lately it might be because over 60 narcs have taken up temporary residence- on the campus from February 16 to 27. The Southern Police Institute, now a part of l'1's newly created School of Police Administration, sponsored its 16th Annual
Mid-Winter Seminar on "Narcotics and Drug Abuse: Enforcement and Case Development." SPI has been training police officers and chiefs primarily from the Dixie states, for over 20 years, and has been the primary"often solitary-education that many policemen receive beyond the high school level.
An SPI brochure declares, "Far too many narcotics cases are being dismissed or not prosecuted due to improper and inadequate police knowledge and investigative procedures." The seminar is an effort to help narcs and other cops bust dopesters with greater skill and accuracy.
Meanwhile, out in Colorado the University of Denver suffered the largest single drug bust to hit a college campus. On January 21, 37 Denver cops conducted a nighttime raid on four campus dormitories and eight off campus housing units busting a total of 42 students. That total easily surpassed the 28 arrested at the State University of New York at Stony Brook in the much-publicized 1968 bust. The University of Denver student senate allocated $4,000 in student feeds to help meet the bail costs of those arrested.
And the U.S. Senate passed the "no-knock" drug bill by a vote of 70-15; approval is expected in the House.
But there is good news on other fronts. Martha Mitchell to the contrary, the killer weed may well have definite medicinal uses"according to long-secret medical research just made public in The Washington Post.
The Attorny General's missus, who is well on her way to becoming a high camp folk hero, recently asked the chief medical officer of the Narcotics Bureau in Washington to burn some grass for her so she could take a wiff and be able to identify it if need be. "The next morning I woke up with the most horrible reaction you can imagine," she said. "My eyes were completely closed, my face was
swollen and I had the skin of an elephant."
The medical reserach, done ten years ago at the Army chemical welfare laboratory at the Edgewood Arsenal in Maryland, was disclosed when the proceedings of a 1969 National Institute of Mental Health conference were published. According to Dr. Van Sim of the Edgewood Arsenal, marijuana may be effective in treating tetanus, migraine, high blood pressure and sunstroke.
Marijuana, the scientist noted, lowers blood pressure for as long as 36 hours"an effect that may be helpful in treating patients with high blood pressure. Pot also quickly lowers the body temperature of experimental. subjects by as much as three degress"a possible cure for extreme cases of sunstroke. Sunstroke currently kills a large number of its victims when it is severe enough to render them unconscious. An injection of marijuana serum might save those lives.
Sim also cited the work done in the 1940's by the late Dr. Walter Siegfried Loewe of the University of Utah, who found a tetrahydrocannabinol (THC, or synthetic marijuana), "very effective" in preventing epileptic seizures when given in small doses.
Loewe's studies, Sim lamented, were stopped because of political pressure and fear of possible addiction. At that time, medical researchers had not proved beyond doubt, the impossibility of physical addiction to marijuana.
The research disclosed in the newly published proceedings of the 1969 meeting join the overwhelming body of past work in substantiating the claim that marijuana is far superior to alcohol. No solid research has documented claims that marijuana hurts people. And there is evidence to the contrary: for example, unfinished work in Boston reportedly indicates that motor control of experienced users improves when they smoke.
On the legal front, an organization
named Right A Wrong has formed to act as a marijuana lobbying group. Made up of straight business types, Right A Wrong's main purpose is keeping lines open to politicians; its founders believe grass may be legalized before the end of the Nixon administration. "They may throw this one to us as a bone," one of the organizers said, "so we won't bug them on the race problem, the war and poverty. The government works in ways like that."
The organization's main worry is fear of a takeover by left-wing radicals, which, in a sense, is already happening. Right A Wrong had originally proposed a huge July 4 smoke-in in Washington D.C. this summer. But after radicals (namely the Youth International Party) expressed interest in the event, Right A Wrong decided it was a bad idea and backed out.
Another fledgling group, Amorphia, Inc., seems to have its corporate head in a better place. Still mostly on paper at this point, the group hopes to invovled 300 leaders in arts and letters, sciences and medicine who will push for the legalization of marjjuana while cooperating on the fight against abuse of the true "hard" drugs. It will be a profit corporation ($5 a share) that would seek to become the major grass manufacturer and distributor. Revenue"figured to be about $2 billion a year"would create an economic foundation for development of what Amorphia calls "revolutionary life styles"support of over 100 p00 people in prototype integrated communities." Right A Wrong hopes to involve people like Margaret Mead, Buckwinster Fuller, Tom Wolfe and Marshall McLuham. Their job would be to sway the 85 percent of the Gallup Poll public now opposed to legalization.
If, between now and 197? when dope is legalized, you should find the police knock, knock knocking on your front door, there are a number of things you should remember:
February, 1970


 
* First of all, you don't have to let any policeman into your house"unless he has a search warrant. The same thing goes for your car or garage. And in your absence, no one (landlords etc.) has the right to let the police search your home.
* You have a right to ask for a copy of the warrant; exercise that right and make sure the warrant pertains to you and has your address on it. If the policeman only has a warrant for arrest, he cannot search your entire home, but only the immediate surroundings.
* If police take anything from your home (files, subversive books, etc.) you should get a receipt.
* If you're driving a car, a cop has the right to see your driver's license and registration papers, but he cannot search the car without a warrant.
* If a policeman is arresting you he must say that you are under arrest and he must tell you the charge.
* If a policeman asks you any questions, you have the right to remain silent.
* Get the badge numbers and names of the cops involved in case there is any harassment.
* The cops have to let you talk to a member of your family, a friend or a lawyer (it is best to call the most reliable). If you don't have the change for the call, the police are supposed to provide it, along with a phone book. (When a lot of people get busted together, the phone calls can be pooled and shared over a period of time. This is important from the standpoint of keeping in touch with the outside world.)
* Don't sign anything or say anything until you've talked with your lawyer" whom you have the right to meet with privately.
* If the cops want to give you a drunken driving test, you have to take it or they can revoke your license.
* If you're a UK student and you're charged with a misdemeannor, you can call the University and you will be sprung on the University's recognizance.
Most of these tips come from a booklet entitled "Know Your Rights" put out by the Kentucky Civil Liberties Union. We have a few at the fly office or you can write the KCLU office-Room 405, 205 S. Fourth St., Louisville 40202 .It's free if you send a self-addressed, stamped envelope.
Changes on Olympus
By Liberation News Service
WASHINGTON, D.C. (LNS)-If Americans ever believed there was an Olympus within their borders, the location had to be the chambers of the United States Supreme Court. "I'll take it all the way to the Supreme Court" has long been the sputtered refrain of the miffed and abused. Changes in personnel at the Supreme Court amount to a changing of the gods for Middle America.
The Court is like a slowly turning 12-compartment revolving door. One man gets old and leaves. A younger old man takes his place. The new man stays for a long time.
G. Harrold Carswell, 50 years old, will probably be around for a long time. The whole country knows about his 1948 pledge never to abandon the cause of white supremacy. Fewer people know the details of his part in the incorporation of a segregated private golf club, his record of rulings against black civil rights activists. Fewer still know what he did to women by ruling that an employer could summarily deny a job to women with pre-school children. But as Carswell's ascent to the Supreme Court begins to look like a fait accompli, a 71-year-old man, appointed to the Court over 30 years ago by Franklin D. Roosevelt, is beginning to sound really interesting.
In a book scheduled for publication Feb. 19, Justice William O. Douglas says he's about ready to opt for revolution. In Points of Rebellion, the new book, Douglas attacks the Pentagon, the FBI, the CIA, former Presidents Truman and Johnson, government and corporate bureaucracy and the racism of police, entrepreneurs, and educators.
"Where grievances pile up high," he writes, "and most of the elected spokesmen represent the Establishment, violence may be the only effective response."
"George III was the symbol against which our Founders made a revolution now considered bright and glorious ...
We must realize that today's Establishment is the new George III. Whether it will continue to adhere to his tactics, we do not know. If it does, the redress, honored in tradtion, is also revolution."
Inveighing against elaborate anti-communist security procedures regulating employment, and promising that dissent against American militarism will not be stilled, he charges that "The Pentagon has a fantastic budget that enables it to dream of putting down the much-needed revolution which will arise in Peru, in the Phillipines, and in other benighted countries."
"At the international level," writes Douglas, "we have become virtually paranoid. Indeed a black silence of fear possesses the nation... Truman nurtured that fear, Johnson promoted it, preaching the doctrine that the people of the world want what we have had, unless suppressed, will take it from us."
And domestically, he is horrified by "the upside down welfare state" where "railroads, airlines, shipping"these are all subsidized; and those companies' doors are not kicked down by the police at rught." Meanwhile, he sees no way of robbing from the state the ability "to conduct midnight raids without the search warrants needed before even a poor man's home may be entered by the police."
He hears the "powers-that-be faintly echo Adolf Hitler," who said (1932):
Legislature pass a resolution declaring that the citizens of Kentucky are opposed to the war and are in favor of an immediate withdrawal of all U.S. forces from Southeast Asia.
Freedom of press: a heinous crime?
By Bucky Young
Martha Allen and Mike Honey came to Kentucky from Michigan to fight repression and guess what happened"they got repressed.
Mike and Martha (who are husband and wife) are coordinators for the Southern Committee Against Repression (SCAR) and also are on the staff of the Southern Conference Educational Fund (SCEF). They were arrested for protesting the Black Six trial that was to have been held in rural, predominantly white Munfordville.
The Black Six are six blacks charged with conspiring to dynamite oil refineries in connection with Louisville's civil disorders in the summer of 1968. The trial was moved to Munfordville at the request of Commonwealth's Attorney Edwin Schroering Jr. because he said pre-trial publicity would make a fair trial in Louisville impossible. Moving the trial to Munfordville was supposed to solve all that.
"No one denies that he had the ! right to hold dissident views. On the ! other hand, it was a drag having him j around. "
"The streets of our country are in turmoil. The universities are filled with students rebelling and rioting... We need law and order." And Justice Douglas can't help but grant that the political opponents of the state have the right to defend themselves and to resist any attempts to crush them:
"American protestors need not be submissive. A speaker who resists arrest is acting as a free man. The police do not have carte blanche to interfere with his freedom"
Douglas is a real fluke, a liberal revolutionary in 1970 America. His book says nothing about how he intends to deal with the reality of Carswell. But Douglas is 71. And Carswell is only 50.
SMC plans Frankfort march
Plans are being made for a statewide antiwar demonstration to be held in Frankfort on Saturday, March 7.
The UK chapter of the Student Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam, organized on the UK campus last month, is organizing the protest, which will begin with a parade through Frankfort starting at 1 p.m. and will end with a rally on the steps of the CapitoL
The UKSMC has sent teams of informational organizers out across the state in an effort to involve as many students and as many campuses as possible.
The SMC will request that the state
Mike and Martha's crime consisted of sending a letter to all the people listed in the Munfordville phone book telling them that the politicians were trying to make fools of them. "The prosecutor in Louisville knows he doesn't have enough evidence for a conviction, and that is why he is dumping this case on you," the letter said.
"He seems to think that the citizens of Hart County will convict these six people without any evidence ... We urge you to protest against this trial being pushed off on you."
The letter was mailed January 1 and on January 5 Hart County Circuit Judge Charles Richardson said it had made a fair trial there impossible and asked that the trial be moved back to Louisville. It has been, for the time being, and Mike and Martha consider that a victory, although they say they will not stop fighting until the charges against the Black Six are dropped completely.
However, Judge Richardson said Mike and Martha had committed a "heinous crime" and asked that they be indicted, which they were on January 15. The charge was "embracery""an obscure and seldom, used provision prohibiting attempts to influence or prejudice a jury.
Mike was arrested first because Martha had gone to Washington, D.C, to work on another case. He said the jailer who locked him up told the other prisoners they could "do whatever they want to with him (Mike)"nobody will ever find out."
However, Mike said he had no diffi-
culty with the other prisoners "because there is a common feeling in jail that you're all being fucked over." After that, he was placed in solitary confinement in a four-by-seven-foot cell for the 19 days he was jailed.
He refused to make the $2;000 bond because he didn't want to concede any legitimacy to the charges against him. Realizing he was raising a political issue by doing so, the authorities constantly attempted to intimidate him into leaving. Besides the solitary confinement, there was one occasion on which a state trooper appeared outside his cell with black jack in hand. The trooper told the jailer he would give him ten dollars to let Mike out so he could get at him. (Mike doesn't even have long hair.)
Martha was arrested a week later when she returned and also placed in solitary confinement"for 12 days. In the meantime, a group of 79 persons from Louisville signed a "complicity letter" about Mike and Martha's case and sent it out to Munfordville residents. The letter read, in part:
"If sending that letter (Mike and Martha's) to you was a crime, so is publishing a newspaper ... so is talking to your neighbor on the street. The Hart County Court has said that it is a crime for American citizens to communicate with each other. We say it is not! If sending that letter was a crime, then sending this one is too. The signers of this letter are equally guilty."
None were arrested. Neither was the editorial staff of The Courier-Journal which wrote an editorial raising some of the same points Mike and Martha had made in their letter.
They were released when a Louisville group decided they had been in jail too long and posted the bond for them. Their trial has been set for April 7. Now that they are out, both are as determined as ever to continue their struggle.
Martha feels the issue of a free press is crucial to the case: "The main reason the situation exists is because of a lack of a media."
In a statement she issued earlier, she said, "Most people, don't own big newspapers, and the newspapers often don't print what we say. Our only recourse is to do what we did"print our views ourselves and distribute them. If we are to be jailed for that, there is no freedom of the press for us, or for most citizens."
"If they can find a means to make us be quiet about political trials," she said in a later interview, "then they'll have us all locked up."
Fidel cuts cane with Venceremos
By Gene Cluster
HAVANA (LNS)-Fidel Castro spent all of Christmas Day with the Venceremos Brigade. Most of the day, Fidel and the North American volunteer can-cutters were in the fields together, unceremoni-. ously wielding their machetes, cutting cane, sweating.
Like everyone else in the Brigade, I had come to Cuba with a number of different preconceptions, not all of them conscious. I had real difficulties imagining Castro coming to the camp. My experiences with political leaders were few and formal. They gave speeches, press conferences; they set up an intentional distance between themselves and people.
My ideas about Castro were more vague. I thought of him as the Castro that most Cubans always referred to as Fidel. I didn't realize how much I had been brainwashed by the American press. Even though I respected him as a revolutionary leader, I reacted to the hatred in the newscasters voice as he talked about the "danger of Latin American countries becoming like Castro's Cuba." Nothing in my experience helped me imagine what a visit from a revolutionary leader would be like.
*   *   * ââ€"  *
The night before he came, Christmas eve (for those of you celebrating it in the usual way), an official meeting was called, and' the head of the camp announced that 1 Fidel was coming. That speech was the first clue to the nature of Fidel's visit. Other than increased security and some publicity, we were told that we would have a normal day of cutting cane. Fidel had come to cut his daily quota of cane, for everyone in Cuba is now mobilized for the harvest. We were not to disturb him in his task, nor was he to interrupt
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ours. The next morning all of us, Cubans and Americans, had breakfast early, earlier than usual, before heading for the fields. We all left for the fields with cameras slung over our shoulders next tp the machetes. Four hours later, after a hard morning of cutting cane with no sign of Fidel, we realized that the first group of cane cutters, including representatives of the North American Brigade, a group we had passed by, had included Fidel. We certainly had not distrubed his cutting, which totaled 560 "arrobas." TheVen-ceremos Brigade members' average on a good day is 180 arrobas.
* *  * *
At dinner, I was lucky enough to sit near Fidel. But not near enough"I couldn't hear him talk, only see him. He was in no way formal We all ate from the same tin trays, the same rice and beans and meat and tomatoes. When he listened, he tilted his head from one side to the other. He seemed to be often joking, and 1 felt as if I could see his eyes twinkling. When some of us got brave enough to come up and start taking pictures, he joked and laughed. Then an American with a cowboy hat with fists on the side walked up and gave Fidel the hat. In exchange, Fidel gave him his army hat. When people rushed up to see him, he started talking with us. "Where are you from? What do you do?"ž.asking questions, and only half waiting to hear the complete translation.
By this time, I understood why he was Fidel and not Castro. He did not come across as a distant figure, he came across to everyone as a close human being. I began to understand that a political leader can be a real person. Suddenly, many people began asking him to our recreation room where I had been seated waiting, and Fidel followed.
Ignoring the set-up of the speaker's platform, he walked into an open space in front of our benches and asked, "Who's in charge here? Who's running this thing?" When it appeared that he was, he began to converse. And then he just started talking, offering to answer our questions and starting off by giving a half-hour running commentary on everything.
* *  * *
"We have no interest in dealing with the government of the United States as long as it continues to commit genocide in Vietnam The kind of relations we want to build are between us and the people such as you of the Venceremos Brigade."
He talked to us about the blockade, and about Cuban economic development, but not in a way we had heard it before. Fidel does not use rhetoric; he does not thunderously denounce U.S. imperialism, or try to bring us to our feet chanting in a heavy way about world-wide solidarity.
For the first time since the brigade has been in Cuba, we sat and listened and were charmed and understood without ostentatious displays of our feelings for his work.
He began to talk about the "new man" someone asked him to elaborate on what that meant in Cuba, and how specific developments were helping to build a socialist man. It was like asking him to describe the revolution, which he did.
"The revolution is like a book," he said, and then began to read it to us.
We spend all our days cutting sugar cane, terrible, hard, dreary, boring work, the worst kind there is or was in Cuba (fifty cents a day before the revolution). "1 cut cane for the first time after the revolution," Fidel said, and we knew what he meant.
Everyone in Cuba knows about the ten million tons...the whole country is mobilized for the harvest. The signs near the cane fields say, "Welcome guerrillas who have come to fight our common enemy" the sugar cane." Ten million tons will. mechanize the cane industry.
"We never realized that to turn this. Utopia into a reality we would be cutting cane," Fidel told us. "Cane is an antidote
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LET A THOUSAND PKRKS BLOOM
Photo by Lynn Adler; from People's Park photo book, copyright Ballantine Books, Inc.
against bourgeois ideas. It is cold and wet in the morning; not even a superman could do this without..." and here he drifted off.
We all understood that we couldn't all be cutting cane without revolution, and that there can't be a revolution without cutting cane.
Later on he said, "I have an allergy against anything which contributes to individualism." The Cubans do want to develop creativity, and to maintain personality differences among people, but they are concerned about eliminating individualistic goals"there is a difference between a people working for themselves, and a people working for a whole people.
A black girl asked him to discuss racism in Cuba, and his opinion of the black movement in the United States.
"While the class system exists in the United States, racism will exist." He told her to ask the Cuban workers in the camps about the elimination of racism in Cuba. He admitted it was a difficult task.
I was impressed by his urging her to ask black workers how they felt, rather than Fidel, a white man, giving a glowing account. I think she felt that he sidestepped the issue, but she could have pressed it"he was letting us ask anything.
Once before that night, after answering a question, he asked back of the questioner, "Was that satisfactory? Or am I being demagogic?" (I tried to imagine Nixon asking me if I thought him demagogic.)
Finally, someone asked him about his own role in the future of Cuba. "We are very happy that our role is decreasing," he said, and began to talk about how the people will develop and reap the benefits of technology, and his role would lessen.
I remembered again the incredible feelings I have here about the possibility of change. No one clings to the past as a sacred value. Fidel, who is young, but not as young as many who are building the revolution, made clear his concept of how fast things could change: "We hope that the people of the future will not even have a remote idea of how their parents lived."
And then it was 10:30 and time for us to sleep so we could get up at 5:45 the next morning and cut another day's worth of sugar cane. Fidel left and said he might come back, and we all walked out as though we were high.
It was not Castro's Cuba; it was Cuba's Cuba, and it was led by Fidel. The man who had led a military revolution in the mountains and marched victorious in Havana, did now not only believe, but put into practice, the idea that man can "build a Communist society"when fraternal feelings will prevail and all needs can be satisfied collectively."
Peoples Park: deputies indicted
By Mark Gladstone
BERKELEY, Cal. (CPS)-In the wake of a federal grand jury investigation into their actions during last year's People's Park confrontations, 12 Alameda County sheriff's deputies have been accused of violating civil rights by shooting, beating, or intimidating persons.
U.S. District Court Judge William T. Swejgert issued a summons ordering those indicted to appear in federal court Feb. 16.
Two of the men, Deputy Leonard Johnson and former Deputy Lawrence L. Riche, were specifically accused of discharging shot guns against riot victims James Rector, who later died from the wounds, and Alan Blanc hard, who was blinded, last May 15.
In Oakland, Alameda County Sheriff Frank I. Madigan, who was in charge of all police operations during the Park crisis, called the charges "the sickest operation that the government has en gaged in."
Madigan said he would be the first to contribute to the defense of his deputies and asked from community support.
Meanwhile, the Alameda district attorney's office has no plans to review the case. Senior trial lawyer DeVaga told CPS that the Civil Rights violations are for the federal, not state statute.
He also questioned the whole federal grand jury process, saying, "I always had doubts about systems where a person could say anything." In such procedures, he said, any kind of evidence is admitted, even heresay.
...and the Park lives on
By Karen Wald
BERKELEY, California (LNS)-Sud-denly there was a call that a company from ultra-reactionary Orange County had leased the parking lot on the land that had once been People's Park. The lot was about to open and the police were casing the area to see what the young people who built and faced shotguns for that park would do.
1 he University of California which stole the land of People's Park last year by force of arms has tried to get someone to use it for a long time. But the land is hallowed by the blood of James Rector and the street people and no one would touch it with a ten-foot pole.
The architects for proposed new dormitories refused to submit designs. In October, when part of the land was made into intramural playing fields for the fraternities, the Inter-Fraternity Council voted to boycott the fields for their intramural games, and the fields lay dormant.
In a callous and stupid attempt to divide the black and white communities, the University paved over the park land and offered a parking lot concession to a black community group called NOW, which is financed by the Berkeley Economic Opprotunity Council, as a way of making money for the black community. Not easily taken in, the black group angrily denounced the attempt for what it was, and called the 116-stall parking lot the University had erected "a desecration to the memory of a beautiful struggle."
In early December part of the lot was designated as space for dormitory students to park. But no one parked there.
Then the Parking Company of Ameri-ka, a huge Orange-country based firm, became the new "owner" of the lot by offering the highest bid. But when they tried to open it up Dec. 30, they were greeted by more than 100 pickets from the Berkeley community. Signs reading "Resist -and Create" were accompanied by others more directly to the point: "Park at Your Own Risk."
The number of picketers grew.
"We agreed to pay the University $800 a month for the lease," complained company vice-president Francisco (Frank) J. Chaves, as he stood gloomily next to the only car"his own"on the newly paved asphalt. "I tell you, we need the business."
Asked if he knew the history of the Park land and the reason for the picketing, he admitted, "Yeah, I read about the trouble they had here," adding, "but the University told us we wouldn't have to pay them if we couldn't get this thing operating." (So the University was thinking ahead, eh?) "Anyway," he reassured himself out loud, "they're only a few. They'll get tired in a few days. They're not sincere. People need a place to park."
Meanwhile, the University and the City have done all they can to see to it that Chaves does get business by closing down the large City Parking lot nearby for "renovations,"
The first day of Orange Country's Parking Company of Amerika enterprise dragged on and no car entered the lot. Chaves stood with his Bay Area manager, Paul Vigil (no fooling, that's his name) and