John Sinclair, a marijuana activist who was immortalized in a John Lennon song, dies at 82

“They gave him 10 for two/What else can Judge Colombo do/We gotta set him free,” Lennon sang in “John Sinclair."ANN ARBOR, Mich. — John Sinclair, a poet, music producer and counterculture figure whose lengthy prison sentence after a series of small-time pot busts inspired a John Lennon song and a star-studded 1971 concert to free him, has died. He was 82.

“They gave him 10 for two/What else can Judge Colombo do/We gotta set him free,” Lennon sang in “John Sinclair,” a song the ex-Beatle wrote that immortalized its subject.held at the basketball arena in Ann Arbor. They took the stage after 3 a.m., about eight hours after the event got underway. The day before the concert, the Michigan Legislature voted to reduce to a misdemeanor the penalty for possession of small amounts of marijuana, punishable by up to a year in prison.FILE - John Sinclair talks at the John Sinclair Foundation Café and Coffeeshop, Dec. 26, 2018, in Detroit.

Sinclair was born in Flint in 1941. His father worked for Buick for over four decades and his mother was a high school teacher who gave up her job to raise John and his two siblings. Sinclair grew up in Davison, a town not far from Flint, and graduated from the University of Michigan-Flint in 1964 with a degree in English Literature.

Upon the dissolution of the White Panther Party in 1971, Sinclair formed and chaired the Rainbow People’s Party, which embraced Marxism-Leninism and promoted the revolutionary struggle for a “communal, classless, anti-imperialist, anti-racist, and anti-sexist ... culture of liberation.”

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