The Poetry of Shelley

Michael Ferber

Michael Kelvin Ferber was the youngest of the five defendants in the federal anti-draft trial in the spring of 1968 in Boston, Massachusetts. The trial attracted national attention because one of the defendants was Dr. Benjamin Spock, the well-known pediatrician and author of the best-selling The Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care. The other defendants were the Rev. William Sloane Coffin, Jr., chaplain of Yale University; Mitchell Goodman, novelist and teacher; and Marcus Raskin, a lawyer who served briefly on the U.S. National Security Council under Kennedy and co-founded the Institute for Policy Studies. The trial was known as "The Spock Trial" and the defendants as "The Boston Five".