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an urgent crash plan to provide some two thousand quick jobs for the minority-race unemployed, and Congressman Phillip Burton claimed that one thousand jobs would be made available in the city's post office during the Christmas rush. Judges Elton Lawless and Joseph G. Kennedy declared a "San Francisco riots amnesty" and freed three hundred adult prisoners, ninety of whom were white and had been arrested in the national guard curfew protests and were bruised and shaken when released because they'd been knocked about by the black inmates of the jail. The House UnAmerican Activities Committee launched an inquiry to probe the "riots" for subversive elements, and sought the support of moderate civil rights groups like the NAACP and the Urban League "to purge black action groups of subversion." The Artists' Political Action Committee of the Artists' Liberation Front paraded in front of city hall with a black coffin labeled "Another 16 Year Old." Connie's Haight Street restaurant, along with the Socialist Workers Party-Young Socialist Alliance, laid two large, bright, yellow wreaths on the dirt of the rubbish-strewn hillside where Matthew "Peanut" Johnson had been shot dead, as a poignant memorial-- "In Brutal Memory of Black Justice."

Then it was all over and the riot headlines were pushed off the front pages by a sensational expose of a former Kentucky governor's grandson named Augustus Owsley Stanley III, as the "LSD Millionaire," and by the "LSD Fugitive's Strange Story" concerning Ken Kesey's totally unstrange return trip to San Francisco while everyone had been preoccupied during the insurrection. After having fled the city ten months before to escape a pot bust, he came back from Mexico, he said, "as a fugitive, and as salt in J. Edgar Hoover's wounds," and also to help with a "graduation ceremony." He confused everyone with his change of heart about LSD and angered some former friends by wanting to convene seventy-five hundred people for an "acid test commencement" on Halloween, to show the way to a new style of communal interchange. At the same time, he wanted to deemphasize chemical turn-ons by graduating acidheads out of LSD. All it finally amounted to, after the hoopla died do~hn, was a by-invitation-only, private party held in a warehouse with a lot of booze and plenty of group analysis. For weeks the press had everyone hyped about what a Slam! Bang! party-bash it was going to be, but it turned out to be something less than a whimper. "Spargere voces in vulgum ambiguas," someone said a long time ago in the prologue of the past. [end page 244]