Black & Red No. 6 1/2

"The final issue of Black & Red, no. 6½, is the most experimental in form. It is made up of five pieces that run concurrently through the issue. Each piece is printed in either red or black ink, to distinguish it from other pieces on the same page. The front and back covers reproduce, in miniature, the covers from issues 1 through 5. There is no clear front or back to the pamphlet. Each cover image is labeled as one of the five pieces: “What Happened ...,” “The Revolutionary Project,” “letter to readers,” “in Paris,” and “Kalamazoo Action.” The reader can pick up the booklet and choose which side to begin reading from. Beginning with the cover, each piece continues on the next same-facing page for sixteen pages. It’s a complicated way to arrange the contents and requires that each section fit exactly on sixteen pages. There is an element of playful-ness in puzzling together each piece. The text “What Happened ...” documents the escalation of activities that took place on the WMU campus in between the time of the publication of Black & Red no. 6 and no. 6½. Issue no. 6 includes back and forth between the WMU administration and Lanphear, Maier and other members of the “B & R Gang.”12 In no. 6½, Lanphear writes that she was followed around by campus police, expelled from WMU, arrested, and put in jail. She is labeled an “outside agitator.” This development prompts a reaction from other students. The ensuing episode is relayed through small reproductions of the front pages of the Western Herald, the WMU student newspaper. The print quality is not crisp, so only the headlines are legible. They’re accompanied by short editorial captions. A headline from March 1969 reads, “Concerned Students Meet to Discuss Grievances.” A couple of headlines that follow indicate that the students submitted their demands to the university president, and that the Board of Trustees urge students to use “legitimate channels” to air their grievances. The next headline reads “STUDENTS TAKE OVER STUDENT CENTER.” Then, the front page of an EXTRA edition of the Western Herald reads “VIOLENCE ERUPTS ON WESTERN’S CAMPUS: 200 POLICE CALLED TO QUELL DEMONSTRATION, 37 Arrested, 4 Policemen Injured in Three Hour Battle.” Subsequent pages show photos of state riot police preparing to disperse thousands of students, and Kalamazoo police standing in front of the university presi-dent’s home. A front-page article from the city paper, the Kalamazoo Gazette, reads in large letters “ACCORD IS SOUGHT IN WMU DISPUTE, with a photo of state, city, and county police marching in a line. By the time Black & Redno. 6½ was published, most of the “B & R Gang” had left Kalamazoo. Lanphear would move to Paris with Roger Gregoire, where they both became active with the Situationist International.The “Letter to Readers” marks the transitionof Black & Red from a magazine to a press:reader,In the six months which have passed since B & R #6 appeared, there has been a dispersal of the group. Some have remained in Kalamazoo, some are in Detroit; others are in Paris. Dispersal has not led to disintegration; it has become the occasion for going beyond our previous activity, to move from a critique of the university to a critique of daily life.Idle reader, if you are a spectator observing our activity as a spectacle while you continue to lead a “normal” life, get with it! The goal of B & R is neither to sell you a journal nor to entertain you. We urge you to engage yourself, on your own or with us, in practice which creates conditions for the collective realization of the revolutionary project.Concretely, we intend to clarify the revolution-ary project, to confront revolutionary theory with our own practice and that of our contemporaries, in order to move with others beyond the constraints of capitalist daily life: 1) We will publish clear statements of the revolutionary project (and will need translators to help us find and translate this literature); 2) We will launch experiments which aim at self-expression by the base, the rank and file, namely people who separately reproduce the “institutions” which oppress them. ...The next issue of B & R will be devoted to activities in Kalamazoo: documents and description, a theoretical analysis of their relevance, as well as a self-critique of the actions in the light of revolutionary theory. Subsequent issues will deal with Detroit and Paris.' Although this is the final numbered issue of the journal titled Black & Red, the press that emerged out of it—also called Black & Red—persists to this day. While an issue on Kalamazoo never did materialize, other books and publications did. The format shifted from collections of articles to single texts (for instance, the translation of Guy Debord’s Society of the Spectacle was distributed as an issue of Black & Red)." The Detroit Printing Co-op by Danielle Aubert.