June 3, 1957: 67 years ago, June 3 1957, San Francisco police arrested City Lights [...]

67 years ago, June 3 1957, San Francisco police arrested City Lights Bookstore manager Shigeyoshi “Shig” Murao for selling Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl” and a Berkeley beat journal called “The Miscellaneous Man,” which the Juvenile Bureau had deemed “unfit for children to read”

Police also issued an arrest warrant for City Lights owner Lawrence Ferlinghetti, who surrendered after returning from a visit to Big Sur. He and Murao were charged with “willfully and lewdly” selling obscene material

Allen Ginsberg wrote “Howl” while living in the Bay Area. The lengthy avant-garde poem, widely considered a landmark of American literature, was first read in full at Berkeley’s Town Hall Theater in 1956, shortly before Ferlinghetti published it in his Pocket Poets series

Police charged that the poem’s frank discussion of drug use and gay sex made it “unfit for public consumption.” After a long trial, Judge Clayton Horn ruled that, though “hortatory and violent” the poem had some “redeeming social importance” and was therefore not obscene