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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, died April 2 at a hospital in Detroit. He was 82.

The cause was congestive heart failure, said his publicist, Matt Lee.

Mr. Sinclair drew a 9½-to-10-year prison sentence in 1969 from Detroit Recorder’s Court Judge Robert Colombo for giving two joints to undercover officers. He served 29 months and was released a few days after Lennon, Stevie Wonder, Bob Seger and others performed in front of 15,000 attendees at the University of Michigan’s Crisler Center.

“They gave him 10 for two/ What else can Judge Colombo do/ We gotta set him free,” ex-Beatle Lennon wrote and sang in <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qx1og_HqyBk&embeds_referring_euri=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.google.com%2Fsearch%3Fclient%3Dsafari%26sca_esv%3D27919f41f8c15d06%26rls%3Den%26q%3D%25E2%2580%259CJohn%2BSinclair%2C%25E2%2580%259D%2Blennon%26tbm%3Dvid%26so&source_ve_path=Mjg2NjY&feature=emb_logo" target=_blank>“John Sinclair.”</a>

Lennon and his wife, Yoko Ono, performed at the Dec. 10-11, 1971, “John Sinclair Freedom Rally,” held at the basketball arena in Ann Arbor. They took the stage after 3 a.m., about eight hours after the event got underway.

Earlier in the night, Mr. Sinclair’s wife, Leni, had called her imprisoned husband, and the conversation between the couple and their 4-year-old daughter, Sunny, was amplified for the crowd, which chanted “Free John!”

“I’m trying to get home. I want to be with you,” a sobbing Mr. Sinclair told the crowd that night, a Friday.

At the time of Mr. Sinclair’s arrest, possession of marijuana was a felony, punishable by up to 10 years in prison. He was arrested in Detroit while living as a poet and activist who co-founded the White Panthers, a radical collective allied with the Black Panthers. He received the maximum sentence.

The day before the concert, the Michigan legislature voted to reduce the penalty for possession of small amounts of marijuana, making it a misdemeanor punishable by up to a year in prison.

Because he already had served 2½ years, Mr. Sinclair was released from prison three days after the concert.

“For me, it’s like coming into a whole different world from the one I left in 1969,” Mr. Sinclair wrote in “Guitar Army,” a collection of his writings that was published in the early 1970s.

Mr. Sinclair continued his advocacy for marijuana, helping to usher in Ann Arbor’s token $5 fine for pot possession and celebrating when his home state legalized recreational cannabis in 2018.

“I’m the pioneer. I was the first one in Michigan who said marijuana should be legal, and they said I was totally nuts,” he told the Detroit Free Press in 2019. “I’m proud to have played a part in this. I spent nearly three years in prison because of marijuana.”

Mr. Sinclair was born in Flint, Mich., on Oct. 2, 1941, and grew up in nearby Davison. His father worked for Buick for more than four decades, and his mother was a high school teacher who gave up her job to raise John and his two siblings. He graduated from the University of Michigan at Flint in 1964 with a degree in English literature.

During the next six-plus decades, Mr. Sinclair did a bit of everything — dabbling in performance art, journalism (via underground newspapers), cultural and political activism, and poetry.

“You got to/live it not just/say it or/play it that’s what this is/all/about,” he wrote in a 1965 poem.

Upon the dissolution of the White Panthers in 1971, Mr. 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.”

Mr. Sinclair aggressively fought for progressive policies as part of the burgeoning “New Left” movement. “In those times, we considered ourselves revolutionaries,” he said in 2013. “We wanted equal distribution of wealth. We didn’t want 1 percent of the rich running everything. Of course, we lost.”

Mr. Sinclair often kept a toehold in the world of music, managing for a time Mitch Ryder and perhaps most notably the MC5, a Detroit-based quintet known for the song <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0tx8GiTFK-I" target=_blank>“Kick Out the Jams”</a> and as a hard-rocking forerunner to the punk movement. Mr. Sinclair’s death came only two months after that of MC5 co-founder <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/obituaries/2024/02/02/wayne-kramer-mc5-dead/#" target=_blank>Wayne Kramer.</a>

Mr. Sinclair also promoted concerts and festivals and helped to establish the Detroit Artists Workshop and Detroit Jazz Center. He taught blues history at Wayne State University; hosted radio programs in Detroit, New Orleans and Amsterdam; and wrote liner notes for albums by artists including the Isley Brothers and Harold Melvin &amp; the Blue Notes.

His first marriage, to Magdalene “Leni” Arndt, with whom he had two daughters, ended in divorce. In 1989, he married Patricia Brown. A complete list of survivors was not immediately available.

Mr. Sinclair never stopped promoting — and partaking in — the use of marijuana. He helped create Hash Bash, a yearly pot celebration at the University of Michigan, and served as state coordinator of the Michigan chapter of NORML, the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws.

“The only issue I’ve really kept active on is marijuana, because it’s so important,” he told the Free Press. “It’s been a continuous war for 80 years on people like you and me. They’ve got no business messing with us for getting high.”

Junfu Han

Associated Press

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SINCLAIR WHITE PANTHERS OBITUARY

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