“How Many Black Hippies Do You See?” The Counterculture in Black and White

Abstract

Historians have treated the counterculture largely as a white phenomenon and drawn sharp boundaries between its escapism and the political engagement of the Black freedom struggle. A look at the counterculture's origins and growth in the late 1950s and the 1960s reveals that the counterculture intersected with Black culture in many ways. White beats, hipsters, and hippies generally admired the civil rights movement's support for equality and nonviolence, but sometimes scoffed at its effort to gain integration into American society. Hippies considered themselves outsiders from society and imagined that they shared affinity with Black Americans. Blacks’ responses to the counterculture ranged from contempt to curiosity to embrace. Some Blacks despised the hippies’ lifestyle and political apathy, but others considered the counterculture an important challenge to “the System.” American culture, style, literature, and music were all affected by the counterculture's experimentalism. The counterculture changed white culture, Black culture, and American culture. Drawing boundaries between cultural forms proves less instructive than focussing on the connections between them.

San Francisco's Haight Street and New York's East Village teemed with young people in the 1960s, offering a carnival of outlandish fashions and Day-Glo colors, but the throngs of hippies traipsing through the Haight were overwhelmingly white. As one Bay Area Black resident asked sarcastically, “How many black hippies do you see?”¹ Admittedly, not many. But tallying the small number of Black hippies does not explain the complex relationship between Black culture and the counterculture in the 1960s and early 1970s. Historians have also characterized the counterculture as a white thing: W. J. Rorabaugh notes the counterculture's racial homogeneity, stating that 97 percent of hippies were white. Paradoxically, historians also assert that the overwhelmingly white counterculture ultimately drew its inspiration and rebelliousness from Black culture. Timothy Miller concedes that nearly all hippies were white, but adds, “Behind 1960s counterculture and its predecessor beat culture lay Black America.”²

That most hippies were white and that the counterculture's roots lay in Black culture are both true, but a more searching look at the counterculture reveals that Blacks’ and whites’ responses to it were varied and complex.³ While most hippies were white, the counterculture and the enormous changes in race relations in the decades after World War II were entwined. Beat and hipster culture in the 1950s and early 1960s coincided with the civil rights movement's challenge to racial segregation and white supremacy. The hippie counterculture gained nationwide attention in 1967, a moment when Black Americans weighed the civil rights movement's integrationism against Black nationalism. The vaunted Summer of Love was also the Long Hot Summer of 1967, when Black Americans rebelled in more than a hundred cities. Hope for interracial harmony was shattered, along with every storefront window in the Haight, when Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in April 1968.⁴ As relations between white and Black Americans deteriorated and hopes for interracial solidarity waned in the late 1960s, the counterculture was recast as white in many Americans’ minds.

But the counterculture's sweeping goal of liberating Americans from conformity, materialism, and technocracy and the Black freedom struggle against racism invariably intersected in many ways.⁵ The counterculture encompassed a wide spectrum of attitudes toward race relations, ranging from a utopian faith in universal brotherhood to apathy. White hippies generally admired the civil rights movement's commitment to nonviolence and equality, although some questioned its demand for integration into mainstream American society. Some were leery of the Black Panthers’ talk of violent revolution yet rallied behind their uncompromising defiance of the System. Black Americans responded to the counterculture with a mixture of contempt, curiosity, and enthusiasm. Civil rights advocates and Black nationalists alike scoffed at the counterculture's political apathy, and at the call to drop out of society. Many scorned white hippies as poseurs playacting as rebels for a year or two before returning to the comforts of middle-class life, but some considered the counterculture's defiance of middle-class proprieties a serious challenge to the Establishment. While some Black thinkers attempted to draw sharp boundaries between Black culture and the counterculture, fashion, literature, and especially music were not easily confined. As historian Sherry Smith observes, “The social and political movements of the 1960s and 1970s were very much intercultural and interracial.”⁶

FROM THE COMBINE GENERATION TO THE COUNTERCULTURE

The counterculture did not suddenly emerge in 1967, but had orgins in the economic, demographic, political, and cultural changes that remade the United States after World War II. Some young Americans chafed at conformity and materialism and rejected America's supposed Cold War “consensus.” A new cultural sensibility coalesced in the 1950s and 1960s in San Francisco's North Beach and New York's Greenwich Village and East Village, which became magnets for hundreds, then thousands, of young people who identified themselves as beats or “hipsters,” originally a slang term for jazz musicians that grew to encompass jazz fans, white and Black.⁷ In these bohemian enclaves white and Black artists and activists combined to create a measure of interracial solidarity. Optimists dared to believe that the growing ties between white and Black youths indicated that Americans were beginning to redress their history of racial inequality.

Beats and hipsters admired Black culture as a vibrant alternative to the blandness of white middle-class life. Some beats and hipsters exoticized and romanticized Black culture, or at least their idea of it.⁸ Norman Mailer's controversial 1957 essay “The White Negro” hailed Black men as America's ultimate outsiders and rebels. The white hipster somehow “absorbed the existentialist synapses” of Black Americans, transforming himself into a “white Negro.”⁹ Sal Paradise, the protagonist in Jack Kerouac's 1957 novel On the Road, yearns to be Black because white society has “not enough ecstasy for me, not enough life, joy, kicks, darkness, music, not enough night.”¹⁰ Beat writers discounted the inequality and indignities that Black Americans confronted, but genuinely yearned to wriggle free from the straitjacket of white middle-class culture.¹¹

Older Americans, who had endured the Great Depression and World War II, often found the beats’ rebellion incomprehensible. Who rebels against peace and prosperity? Life magazine profiled the beats in 1959, depicting them as lazy, unkempt, sandal-wearing, drug-addled, and self-absorbed in the “full flowering of their remarkable individualities.” The magazine estimated that 90 percent of beats were white but noted that they revered Black Americans, especially jazz musicians and junkies, who were unburdened by white middle-class proprieties. “The things the Beat treasures and envies in the Negro,” Life reported, “are the irresponsibility, cheerful promiscuity and subterranean defiance.”¹² Black journalist Bob Cottrol offered a different account of the beats and the Village scene the following year in the Amsterdam News, New York's leading African American newspaper. Cottrol focussed on poet, jazz trumpeter, and painter Ted Joans, whose charismatic poetry readings had made him “a legendary Village personality.” “It is only proper that a Negro be the leader of the Beatniks,” Cottrol wrote, since white beats adopted their slang, uninhibited attitude toward sex, and love of jazz from Black Americans. Cottrol observed that interracial groups were commonplace in Village bars and cafes and accused the city government of concocting pretexts to revoke the liquor licenses or fire safety certificates of businesses in which Blacks and whites mingled to stymie integration and relationships between Black and white New Yorkers.¹³

Art critic John Gruen produced the most perceptive account of New York's cultural and artistic ferment in the early 1960s in The New Bohemia (1966), in which he surveyed the constellation of painters, writers, musicians, and filmmakers tranforming the Lower East Side from a poor immigrant neighborhood into the East Village, a laboratory of cultural experimentation. Unlike the beats, who prized nonconformity, individualism, and authenticity, these new bohemians valued community. In Gruen's clunky but apt phrase, these young people represented “the combine generation,” and craved “Combination – of brain and body, of public and private, of Black and white, of performance and audience, of one's inner and outer self.”¹⁴ Gruen's book tellingly begins by emphasizing young bohemians’ rejection of one of America's most deeply entrenched taboos: interracial sex. The first thing a visitor to the East Village notices, he writes, is the number of “young Negroes, walking arm in arm with white girls.” “The most distinguishing characteristic of the New Bohemia” was not its daring innovations in dance, music, art, or film, but “its acceptance of integration as an unquestioned part of the scene.”¹⁵

The East Village fostered the creativity of a remarkable group of Black artists and writers. The Umbra Workshop, a group of Black writers founded in 1962, included poets Ted Joans and Amiri Baraka and novelist Ishmael Reed, whose innovative novels defied the strictures of America's literary canon in the 1960s and 1970s. In 1965, Reed was among the cofounders of the East Village Other, which became the forum for the emerging counterculture. Reed described the East Village of the early and mid-1960s as a community in which artistic experimentation and interracial relationships flourished.¹⁶

San Francisco's North Beach also became a beat and hipster scene, and some beat writers, including poet Allen Ginsberg, decamped from New York for the the Bay Area in the mid-1950s. As North Beach rents climbed and the area was overrun by dive bars and tourists, some hipsters moved to the Haight–Ashbury neighborhood in the early 1960s, and the Haight replaced North Beach as the city's bohemian enclave. Across the bay, the University of California's Berkeley campus became a site of political protest as student supporters of the civil rights movement founded the Free Speech Movement in 1964 to challenge the university's prohibition of political advocacy on campus.¹⁷ Hipsters were soon replaced by hippies – a word that was popularized in part by the 1965 publication of Malcolm X's autobiography, in which he recalled referring to white jazz fans as “hippies,” adding that they “acted more Negro than Negroes.” The white jazz aficionados who frequented Black nightclubs in Harlem in the 1940s and 1950s, he stated, craved “Negro ‘atmosphere’” and “Negro soul.”¹⁸

Allen Cohen launched the San Francisco Oracle in September 1966, and the magazine's articles and eye-popping illustrations indelibly shaped the countercultural philosophy and aesthetic. The Oracle proclaimed California “the center of radical change in every form” and endorsed LSD guru Timothy Leary's philosophy: “Turn on, tune in, drop out!”¹⁹ The newspaper promoted the Human Be-In, a happening slated for January 1967, and boasted that this “Gathering of the Tribes” would bring together political activists, hipsters, and spiritual seekers in “A union of love and activism.”²⁰ Walter Bowart, editor of the East Village Other, declared that the hippies’ “love experiment in the Haight” offered “alternatives to the established order” of conformity and greed.²¹ Extensive media attention to the Be-In and the Summer of Love focussed on hippies’ eccentric clothing, free love, and drug use, and publicized San Francisco as the vortex of countercultural experimentation.²²

White hippies and Black residents encountered one another face-to-face in both the Haight and the East Village but hardly saw eye-to-eye. An estimated 50,000 to 100,000 young Americans traveled to San Francisco in 1967 to participate in the Summer of Love and perhaps to remake the world.²³ Black residents, many of whom had recently moved from the nearby Fillmore district into the more affluent Haight–Ashbury, complained that the new arrivals had literally trashed the place. “These hippies have come in and turned a once nice neighborhood into a slum,” stated one Black resident.²⁴ Many of the new arrivals were unemployed and unhoused, and hung out on the street day and night. Black parents in the Haight and the Fillmore worried that their children would be exposed to the flower children's free love and drug use, and complained that police officers allowed white youths to smoke pot openly but arrested Black people caught with drugs. “Negroes never would have been allowed to do what these white kids are doing,” declared resident Doris Bullard. The Chicago Defender, the nation's most influential Black newspaper, complained that “Black residents must suffer in silence as a nation oohs and ahs over the filthy hippies while looking down its nose at non-whites trying to better themselves.”²⁵

Joan Didion's withering portrait of the flower children in “Slouching towards Bethlehem” (1967) depicted them not as dropouts from society, but as pathetically disconnected from it. Didion recounted the chasm between the hippies’ renunciation of materialism and Black Americans’ quest for integration and opportunity in her cringe-inducing account of the San Francisco Mime Troupe's blackface performance The Minstrel Show, or Civil Rights in a Cracker Barrel. Peter Coyote, a founding member of the Diggers – anarchists who renounced private property and performed street theater – who performed in the show, considered it a biting satire of American racism, and the troupe often performed The Minstrel Show to raise funds for civil rights organizations. But the guerrilla theater production unnerved audiences in San Francisco and other cities with its insensitive use of racist tropes and blackface actors, who taunted Black audience members with questions such as “Who stole Chuck Berry's music?” and “What'd America ever do for you?”²⁶

The East Village also became a mecca for thousands of young people in 1967, and longtime residents resented the influx, which caused rents to soar and filled the neighborhood's streets with panhandlers and drug dealers.²⁷ The New York Times reported that the young people hanging out in the Village were overwhelmingly white, because “Negro youths apparently don't need such a scene to declare their freedom from and hostility to the Establishment.”²⁸ Friction between whites, Blacks, and Puerto Ricans compounded tensions in the East Village. “Hippies and Negroes are traditional antagonists,” the Times stated. “Relatively few Negroes become hippies.”²⁹ Puerto Rican men, raised in Catholicism or Pentecostalism and a culture of machismo, detested hippies’ behavior and lax morality.³⁰ Black and Puerto Rican youths considered Tompkins Square Park their turf, and melees broke out in the park in May and June 1967, as Black and Puerto Rican men pelted hippies with bottles and debris.³¹ After both sides called a truce, the Diggers hosted a free concert featuring rock and conga bands in an effort to alleviate tensions. Meanwhile, self-appointed Puerto Rican serenos (“peacekeepers” or “watchmen”) patroled the neighborhood to maintain order, but antagonism between whites, Blacks, and Puerto Ricans persisted.³²

THE COUNTERCULTURE IN BLACK AND WHITE

The 1960s counterculture coincided with the culmination of the civil rights movement and the rise of Black Power, and the counterculture was shaped by the Black freedom struggle. Most hippies endorsed the civil rights movement's commitment to nonviolence, individual dignity, and equality, but some hippies’ disdain for politics and materialism rendered them indifferent to the the movement's goals of integration and economic opportunity for Black Americans. David Simpson, a hippie in San Francisco, declared, “The Negroes are fighting to become what we've rejected. We don't see any sense in that.”³³ Hippies were similarly divided over Black nationalism, Black Power, and the Black Panthers. Those who embraced peace and love as a panacea for society's ills recoiled from militant rhetoric, but others hailed the Panthers as a revolutionary vanguard leading the assault against the System.³⁴

Most Black Americans were dubious about the hippie philosophy and lifestyle, because dropping out and renouncing material possessions made little sense to people who had been denied equality and opportunity throughout American history. They dismissed the self-indulgence of white youths, who could afford to don bizarre clothes and spurn the workaday world for a year or two, after which they would cut their hair, exchange tie-dye for a suit and tie, and slip effortlessly into middle-class white society. “The hippies really bug us,” stated one young Black resident of the Village, “because we know they can come down here and play their games for a while and then escape. And we can't, man.” As another Black resident put it, “They're saying ‘drop out of society,’ and that's not where it's at for our guys – they want in.”³⁵ A high-school student in San Francisco similarly complained that a white youth could pretend to be poor and outcast, but “he can return to the greener grass when he's good an’ ready. But the brothers and sisters are FOREVER hippies.”³⁶

The nation's most eminent Black leader, Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., expressed a mixture of ambivalence and respect for the hippie worldview in December 1967 when he delivered the prestigious Massey Lectures, sponsored annually by the Canadian Broadcasting Company. Addressing “The Young Generation and Social Action,” King considered the mixture of hope and alienation that impelled some young Americans to demand political change and caused others to become hippies and “disengage from society.” King took the hippies seriously, describing them as “not only colorful, but complex.” “The hardcore hippie is a remarkable contradiction,” he stated, because he drops out of society, “Yet he advocates love as the highest human value – love, which can exist only in communication between people and not in the total isolation of the individual.” King predicted that the hippie movement would prove evanescent, but he acknowledged hippies’ genuine discontent with American society and endorsed their commitment to peace.³⁷

Writer James Baldwin visited San Francisco 1967 and saw no prospect of combining flower power and Black Power. Baldwin immediately noticed the gap separating young Black residents and hippies. Black youths and hippies bore one another no ill will but walked and talked right past one another in the Haight. The flower children had renounced the comforts of American society, but their talk of peace and love was jarringly at odds with Blacks’ growing militance. Black youths and hippies, Baldwin observed, “seemed to have no effect on each other, and they certainly were not together. The Blacks were not putting their trust in flowers. They were putting their trust in guns.” Acutely aware of America's long history of racism and fraudulent commitment to equality and freedom, Black youths were dubious about whites’ newfound discovery of the nation's hypocrisy. The white youths who flocked to the Haight, according to Baldwin, had said “no” to American society but had not taken the far more daring leap of saying “yes” to dismantling white supremacy. Baldwin predicted that the young people hanging out in the Haight in 1967 would soon return home and flower power would wilt as quickly as it had bloomed.³⁸

Most Black nationalists shared Baldwin's doubts about the counterculture's sincerity and potential in 1967. As the Summer of Love neared its zenith in San Francisco in July 1967, beat poet Allen Ginsberg and Black Power leader Stokely Carmichael debated the hippie phenomenon at the Dialectics of Liberation Congress organized by psychotherapist Joe Berke in London. Ginsberg claimed that hippies were experimenting with new values that transcended American culture. “The reason the hippies have taken on these beads, appurtenances, music, of shamanistic groups, of ecstatic trance-state types,” he explained, “is because they are beginning to explore, for the first time, the universe of consciousness of other cultures beside their own.” Carmichael dismissed hippies as “confused little kids who have run away from their home and who will return to their culture within a year or two.”³⁹ In an essay on the congress and the confrontation between “Black Nationalists and the Hippies” in Liberator magazine, published by the Afro-American Research Institute in New York, actor and activist Clayton Riley urged Black youths to shun the counterculture, deriding hippies as “pathetic innocents” who would soon abandon their “charade” and return to comfortable middle-class lives. Even more damningly, Riley called hippies members of a whites-only club “as contemptuously racist as any local chapter of the Ku Klux Klan.”⁴⁰

The Black press treated hippies with a mixture of curiosity, contempt, and acceptance. In August 1967, Ebony, the nation's most prominent Black magazine, published a special issue on “Black Youth in America,” which surveyed their hopes and frustrations and inquired whether the counterculture held any relevance for Black youths. Charles E. Brown's photo essay “The Hippies of ‘Hashberry’” surveyed hippies’ fashion and lifestyles just as National Geographic might explore the culture of a remote Amazonian tribe.⁴¹ Psychologist Kenneth B. Clark, whose research on racism's harmful effects on Black children decisively influenced the US Supreme Court's 1954 ruling in Brown v. Board of Education, declared that Black youths “cannot escape into the oblivion of ‘hippie land’” like their white counterparts, because the badge “of their rebellion is their color and it is always with them in America.”⁴² Donald R. Hopkins, assistant dean of students at the University of California, Berkeley, observed that the generation gap divided Black youths and their parents just as it separated white Americans. Black youths, like whites, distinguished themselves from their parents through fashion, hairstyles, and music, but did not embrace hippies’ drug use or rock music (played by “artless adolescents”).⁴³ But, importantly, white and Black young people rebelled for different reasons: white youths rebelled against “the inanities of middle classness” while Black youths battled against racial discrimination.⁴⁴

Summer and love are fleeting, so the Summer of Love was perhaps destined to be short-lived. The Haight fell victim to its own success and to media hype, and many hippies believed that 1967 marked the counterculture's demise, not its apogee. They accused the media, corporations, and advertisers of packaging the hippie phenomenon for a mass audience and shearing its potential to create a new society. Thousands of “plastic” hippies glommed onto the counterculture in search of a good time instead of seeking to build a new society, while “hip” merchants cashed in by peddling records, clothing, and drug paraphernalia.⁴⁵ In October 1967, sincere devotees of the counterculture held a funeral to mourn “The Death of Hippie, devoted son of mass media,” and the bygone summer.⁴⁶

In both the Haight and the Village, residents’ antagonism toward hippies forced many young people to realize that cities were not the place to found a new society based on peace and love, and they moved to smaller communities in the countryside in northern California, upstate New York, Vermont, Colorado, and other locales.⁴⁷ The hippie flight “back to the land” held little allure for Black Americans, many of whom had fled cotton fields for cities during the twentieth century. While most commune members were white, a few Black youths did move back to the land. Toni Robinson joined the AAA commune in Colorado after graduating from college. Her father, journalist Louie Robinson, could not conceal his disdain for his daughter's lifestyle or for hippies, but attempted to explain the appeal of communal living to Ebony's readers. White commune members, he observed, “were about as far removed from the power-prejudice-orientation of Caucasian America as it is humanly possible to be.” His daughter and her white comrades had become so thoroughly disenchanted with American society that dropping out was the only viable response. Communal living would create “a prototype for the future,” in which people of different races, ethnicities, and classes would live together peacably.⁴⁸ Most communes, though, were white enclaves, and some commune members moved to the countryside to escape from cities’ racial diversity. When musician and civil rights activist Nina Simone visited Morningstar commune, established by folk musician and comedian Lou Gottlieb in California's Sonoma valley, she immediately noticed that “there aren't any black people here.” One new arrival at Morningstar was dismayed to discover that “there are hippies here who are full-blown bigots.”⁴⁹

CULTURAL RADICALISM, CULTURAL NATIONALISM

After the historic victories of the Civil Rights movement, race relations became more fraught in the late 1960s. Black rebellions, beginning with the Harlem protest of 1964, convulsed American society in the 1960s.⁵⁰ The murder of Malcolm X in 1965 fueled the growth of Black nationalism. Stokely Carmichael's call for Black Power and the revolutionary rhetoric of the Black Panthers inspired many Black youths and rattled some white Americans.⁵¹ The counterculture, antiwar movement, and Black Power traveled different paths in the 1960s but those paths frequently intersected, and the decade's cultural and political upheavals reinforced one another in 1968 and 1969 during what historian Terry Anderson calls “the second wave” of the 1960s.⁵²

While most Black nationalists dismissed the counterculture, some saw potential in its cultural radicalism. Eldridge Cleaver, minister of information for the Black Panther Party, stated that the counterculture was more threatening to the status quo than political protest, telling the Berkeley Barb, “The cultural revolution in the white community is to the left of the political left in the white community.”⁵³ The hippies, he wrote in Soul on Ice (1968), were rattling the American political system:

The characteristics of the white rebels which most alarm their elders – the long hair, the new dances, their love for Negro music, their use of marijuana, their mystical attitude toward sex – are all tools of their rebellion. They have turned these tools against the totalitarian fabric of American society – and they mean to change it.⁵⁴

Kathleen Cleaver did not share her husband's enthusiasm for hippies, who were only “retreating into a fantasy world of pretty colors, pleasant smells, and drug induced sensations.” But Eldridge, she wrote, loved to cross the bay from Oakland to “soak up the panorama” along Haight Street because the hippies “projected a whimsical, free flowing spirit that must have been immensely appealing to a man who had spent ten years caged up in prison.”⁵⁵ After several scuffles broke out between Panthers and hippies, it was likely Cleaver who called a truce in 1968 in the pages of the Black Panther newspaper: “Black brothers stop vamping on the hippies. They are not your enemy … WE HAVE NO QUARREL WITH THE HIPPIES. LEAVE THEM ALONE. Or the BLACK PANTHER PARTY will deal with you.”⁵⁶ Black activist Julius Lester also endorsed the counterculture's potential to change the US, calling it an utter renunciation of American society.⁵⁷ Hippies’ and Yippies’ outrageous dress and behavior, he wrote, waged “psychological guerilla warfare” that alarmed middle-class and conservative Americans even more than the SDS, the SNCC, or the Black Panthers. “In America, maybe, just maybe, the paths to revolution will be clothed not only in guerrilla uniforms but beads and incense.”⁵⁸ Even the Chicago Defender, which frequently criticized and ridiculed hippies, conceded that they might help change American society. Defender editor Louis Martin wrote hopefully in 1969 that protest by leftists, hippies, Black militants, “and all the other young hell-raisers” might “uproot the raw racism that is poisoning and strangling the life out of our democracy.”⁵⁹

The promise and perils of political and cultural radicalism intrigued filmmakers. Arthur Penn's 1967 film Bonnie and Clyde depicted the Depression-era gangsters as countercultural renegades, and the success of Easy Rider (1969), a road movie about acid-tripping bikers, proved to studio executives that movies about hippies could lure young viewers into theaters. Notably, Italian director Michelangelo Antonioni's Zabriskie Point (1970) explored the links between political protest, the counterculture, and Black nationalism. The film's cinéma vérité opening scene depicts a testy meeting of white and Black campus radicals, one of whom is portrayed by Kathleen Cleaver. Wearied by internecine squabbling, a white student, Mark, announces that he is willing to die for the revolution but “not of boredom” and stalks out of the room. After a campus protest erupts in violence, Mark is suspected of shooting a police officer, steals an airplane, and flees to the desert. There he meets Daria, a hippie girl who works for Lee Allen, a Los Angeles real-estate developer hell-bent on gobbling up desert land to build a resort community, Sunny Dunes. Mark and Daria paint the stolen airplane in psychedelic designs and political slogans and he flies the plane to Los Angeles, where he is shot dead by police officers. In the film's extended final scene, set to Pink Floyd's alternately dreamy and terrifying psychedelic instrumental, “Come In Number 51, Your Time Is Up,” Daria envisions Lee's hillside mansion blown to bits. Blasted by critics for its incomprehensibility and wooden acting, Zabriskie Point delivered a searing indictment of American society and offered an understanding portrait of youthful alienation.⁶⁰

Cultural nationalism was central to the Black nationalism in the late 1960s. After Malcolm X was murdered in 1965, poet Amiri Baraka moved from the East Village to Harlem, and launched the Black Arts Movement (BAM), which became the most influential Black cultural organization of the 1960s. He also penned “Black Art,” which sounded the call for Black nationalism and Black culture: “We want a black poem. And a / Black World.”⁶¹ Inspired by BAM and the writings of anticolonialist Frantz Fanon, poet Don L. Lee (Haki Madhubuti) urged Black Americans in 1969 to repudiate white cultural forms and create “blackpoetry” and “blackmusic.”⁶² “Culture,” he wrote, borrowing from Fanon, “is the sustaining force of any nation.”⁶³ In “A Message All Blackpeople Can Dig” (1969), Lee urged Black Americans to shun the counterculture: “we are not hippies, / WE WERE BORN HIP.”⁶⁴ The following year, in “Move Un-noticed to Be Noticed: A Nationhood Poem,” Lee taunted “the first black hippy i've ever met,” asking him, “why u be dressen so funny anyhow, hunh?” Lee urged Black Americans to “be something real” and “move, into our own, not theirs.”⁶⁵

Writer Ishmael Reed, however, rejected racial and cultural separatism. In 1967, Reed moved from the East Village to Berkeley, where he observed the hippie subculture and the Black Panther Party firsthand.⁶⁶ Upon arriving in San Francisco he immediately noticed that Black culture suffused the counterculture: “its members dress like Blacks talk like Blacks walk like Blacks, gesture like Blacks wear Afros and indulge in Black music and dance.”⁶⁷ Reed's wildly inventive novels, The Free-Lance Pallbearers (1967) and Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down (1969), combined Black cultural nationalism and countercultural experimentation. Black and white culture, he believed, invariably influenced one another. In his “Neo-HooDoo Manifesto” (1969), he envisioned America's cultural gombo enriched by Black culture, music, dance, folk traditions, and wisdom that whites had for centuries suppressed. Dominated for centuries by white people, ideas, and institutions, America would remain repressive until Black culture liberated white Americans from their inhibitions.⁶⁸ Reed fully realized his Neo-HooDoo aesthetic in his third novel, Mumbo Jumbo (1972). Set in the 1920s, the novel charts the booming popularity of “Jes Grew,” shorthand for jazz and Black culture. Scholar and composer James Weldon Johnson wrote in 1922 that ragtime originated as folk music in New Orleans in the nineteenth century and “jes’ grew” until it became “the one artistic production by which America is known the world over. It has been all-conquering. Everywhere it is hailed as ‘American music.’”⁶⁹ Well, not quite everywhere. Jes Grew alarms some white Americans, who consider it a dangerous virus because ragtime and jazz cause many white listeners to shake their hips and shake off their inhibitions. Warren G. Harding leads the effort to stamp out the virus, campaigning for President in 1920 on the slogan “Let's be done with Wiggle and Wobble.” The Wallflower Order, an organization of elite white Americans (whom no one ever asked to dance) works feverishly to stop the virus and preserve “Atonism,” America's repressive, Eurocentric, monotheistic culture. Mumbo Jumbo also satirizes some Black nationalists, whose austere ideology Reed found as oppressive and life-denying as the dominant white culture. Abdul Hamid, a Black Muslim editor who ranks among the novel's villains, is a stand-in for poet Don Lee (Haki Madhubuti).⁷⁰ Reed's protagonist and hero, detective Papa LaBas, strives valiantly to fend off Jes Grew's foes. For LaBas as for Reed, Neo-HooDoo is not a disease but a cure, “an anti-virus” that offers the antidote to America's stultifying culture.⁷¹ At the novel's end, LaBas looks ahead and promises, “They will try to depress Jes Grew but it will only spring back and prosper.”⁷² In the novel's epilogue, Reed concedes that Jes Grew's foes suppressed Black culture in the 1920s and thwarted it again when it reemerged amid the cultural and racial upheaval of the 1960s. Ultimately, though, the irresistible appeal of Neo-HooDoo, America's Black counterculture, would enliven America's bland, repressive, white-dominated society and stir up, as Reed would call it, a cultural gombo.⁷³

MY SOUL HAS BEEN PSYCHEDELICIZED

Young Americans’ ideas about race and music were inseparable from one another in the 1960s. As music historian Josh Kun notes, “music does not just ‘participate’ in American racial constructions, it has been central to their history.” Black and white musicians had traded melodies and rhythms for decades. Blues, R & B, and soul all inspired rock ’n’ roll, and some white Americans condemned rock ’n’ roll as Negro music in the 1950s and early 1960s – yet, by the late 1960s, rock was categorized as music played by white musicians for white listeners.⁷⁴ Rolling Stone, founded in San Francisco in 1967, became the most influential rock magazine and played a pivotal role in defining rock music as white and enshrining a canon of white musicians and records. The magazine also covered blues, soul, and funk, publishing articles on James Brown, Aretha Franklin, and Motown artists and posited that Black music possessed an authenticity that white musicians could emulate but not attain. Ralph J. Gleason, the magazine's cofounder and most eminent music critic, contended that blues and jazz emerged from Black Americans’ long history of oppression while white rockers and fans were still learning to clap on the backbeat.⁷⁵ Amiri Baraka also drew a stark boundary between Black and white music, writing in 1966 that Black music expressed a yearning for freedom, while the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, and other imitators were engaging in outright theft and minstrelsy. For poet Ted Joans, white rock musicians’ success confirmed a well-known truth: “crime does pay.”⁷⁶ But music was not strictly bounded by the color line, and white rockers did not simply imitate or steal Black music but adapted it, while soul musicians were influenced by rock and by the counterculture.⁷⁷

In the 1950s and early 1960s, hipsters considered jazz the sound of freedom and disdained rock ’n ’roll as commercial and unsophisticated. But, as rock music became more popular and its lyrics more socially conscious in the 1960s, some listeners believed that the music possessed the power to inspire real change in American society. Sam Silver wrote in the East Village Other in 1967, “The music is spokesman for the culture.” Journalist Chester Anderson, who migrated from the East Village to San Francisco in 1967, gushed in the San Francisco Oracle that rock was “a way of life” and a quest for “total freedom” that offered humanity's “first real hope for the future” since the advent of nuclear weapons in 1945, while Gleason called music “a power to change the world.”⁷⁸

Music historians commonly described soul music as the voice of Black solidarity and protest, and soul has until recently been omitted from accounts of the counterculture.⁷⁹ But Emily J. Lordi emphasizes instead soul's extraordinary diversity and musicians’ experimentalism in the 1960s and early 1970s. Psychedelia influenced both rock and soul in the 1960s, as musicians experimented with distortion, changing time signatures, and other techniques to evoke the consciousness-altering effects of drug use.⁸⁰ Vast economic, political, and cultural differences separated San Francisco's Haight–Ashbury from the Black Panthers’ headquarters in Oakland, but musical styles crossed the Bay and musicians combined them to create the San Francisco sound. The first psychedelic soul band, Rotary Connection, formed in 1966, and included white and Black musicians and infused soul with the hallucinatory aesthetic of psychedelia.⁸¹ Black and white musicians created psychedelic rock and soul, and several of the most significant psychedelic bands of the 1960s – the Jimi Hendrix Experience, Sly and the Family Stone, Love, the Chambers Brothers – included Black and white players and mixed rock and soul. Love, who featured guitarist Arthur Lee, quickly became one of the hottest bands on Los Angeles's Sunset Strip in 1966. Love's third album, Forever Changes, released in November 1967, was a psychedelic folk rock masterpiece that expressed disillusionment as the counterculture passed its zenith and the body count in the Vietnam War grew: “And the water's turned to blood / And if you don't think so / Go turn on your tub / And it it's mixed with mud / You'll see it turn to gray.”⁸² “My soul has been psychedelicized,” the Chambers Brothers proclaimed in their eleven-minute anthem “Time Has Come Today” (1967). The song's thumping garage rock beginning segues into a six-minute freak-out of distortion, reverb, laughing, screaming, percussion, and tempo changes. A shortened version of the song released as a single soared to number 11 on the Billboard chart in 1968. As the song's lyrics proclaim, “The rules have changed today.”⁸³

The lingo of psychedelia and the counterculture became ubiquitous in soul lyrics and in slang, and getting high became synonymous with pleasures of every sort. Ray Charles's cover of the Coasters’ “Let's Go Get Stoned” (the lyrics referred to gin, but many listeners thought of marijuana) briefly topped Billboard's R & B chart in 1966. After leaving the Motown label in 1968, the Isley Brothers released a single, “It's Your Thing,” the following year, which used the countercultural mantra, “do your own thing,” to send a kiss-off to Motown president Berry Gordy: “It's your thing, do what you wanna do.” The Isleys scored a hit with “I Turned You On” in 1969.⁸⁴ Motown also experimented with psychedelic sounds and themes. In 1968, the Temptations recorded their first psychedelic soul single, “Cloud Nine,” which used a wah-wah pedal (a first for Motown) and endorsed escapism as a response to poverty and hardship: “Every man in his mind is free / You're a million miles from reality.” The following year the Temptations released Puzzle People and Psychedelic Shack. Musically, the title track of Psychedelic Shack was not especially trippy, but the lyrics beckoned listeners to a place “Where you can really do your own thing” and dabbled in mind expansion: “Come in and take a look at your mind / You'll be surprised what you might find.”⁸⁵

Musical and political rebellion were not confined to the East and West Coasts. Detroit was home to both Motown records and a vibrant rock music scene that included the Stooges and the outspoken leftist band MC5. Race relations in the city were tense, and Black Detroiters erupted in rebellion in August 1967, but rocker and Detroit native Alice Cooper described the city's music scene as integrated. White fans attended soul concerts and Black fans and musicians, including George Clinton's band, Funkadelic, checked out the city's rock shows. “Soul music,” Cooper recalled, “ran through Detroit rock ’n’ roll.”⁸⁶ Detroit music promoter and hell-raiser John Sinclair founded the White Panther Party in 1968 to support the Black Panthers and Yippies. The White Panthers’ manifesto borrowed words from Malcom X, calling for nothing less than a “total assault on the culture by any means necessary, including rock and roll, dope, and fucking in the streets.” Sinclair, who managed MC5, called rock “a weapon of cultural revolution” and hyped the band as “rock and roll guerillas” whose music would shake the walls of the Establishment.⁸⁷

The 1969 Woodstock festival is often remembered as the high tide of the counterculture and living proof that the hippie philosophy had not died and that the young generation possessed the keys to a harmonious society.⁸⁸ Most of the performers at Woodstock were white rock bands and folk musicians and most of the 400,000 people who attended the festival were white. The murder of Martin Luther King the previous year blighted hopes for interracial cooperation, and comparatively few Black youths attended the concert.⁸⁹ But the festival was not devoid of Black performers or attendees, and the concert opened with folksinger Richie Havens, featured Sly and the Family Stone, and concluded with Jimi Hendrix.⁹⁰ The greatest rock guitarist of the 1960s, Hendrix was undeniably a Black hippie. He invented psychedelic blues by wringing never-before-heard sounds from his Stratocaster, and his troubador lifestyle and flamboyant clothes can only be described as hippieish. In “If 6 was 9,” he taunted, “Mr. Business man, you can't dress like me,” then espoused the counterculture's mantra, “do your own thing”: “If all the hippies cut off their hair, I don't care.”⁹¹ Music critics and listeners sometimes struggled to account for a Black guitarist at a moment when rock, despite its roots in the blues and R & B, was being racialized and defined as white music. Hendrix's live shows also flummoxed some music critics, and his overtly sexual performance of the Troggs’ “Wild Thing” at the Monterey Pop Festival in June 1967 wowed listeners but provoked Robert Christgau to slur Hendrix as “a psychedelic Uncle Tom” who pandered to the audience.⁹² Hendrix's signature song, “Purple Haze,” evoked a drug-induced vision, or stupor, and his searing rendition of the “Star-Spangled Banner” at Woodstock's culmination transformed the national anthem into a hundred-decibel howl against the Vietnam War.⁹³

No musician more deftly melded Black and white musical influences with the spirit of the counterculture than Sly Stone, whose songs were trippy, funky, and danceable. As a DJ and record producer, Stone helped create the San Francisco sound, recording white bands such as the Beau Brummels, the Vejtables, the Mojo Men, and the Great Society, with singer Grace Slick. Sly and the Family Stone released their debut album in 1967 and recorded a string of hits with their hybrid of funk and psychedelia. While Stone's danceable grooves propelled the band's music, songs such as “Hot Fun in the Summertime” (1969) were laid back and far from funky. As one music critic noted, Stone's songs appealed to listeners Black and white, and to straights and freaks: “They encourage do-your-own thing dignity against any establishment – plastic or acid.”⁹⁴ Stone's sound mingled Black and white influences and his lyrics explicitly addressed the problem of racism. “Everyday People,” which topped Billboard's Hot 100 and soul charts in early 1969, concluded with a singsong yet affecting indictment of bigotry: “There is a yellow one that won't accept the Black one / That won't accept the red one that won't accept the white one / And different strokes for different folks / And so on and so on and scooby dooby doo.”⁹⁵ Stone brought his psychedelic sound, outrageous clothing, electrifying stage presence, and racially integrated band from the Haight to Harlem in 1969 when he performed at the Harlem Cultural Festival, a series of concerts in Mount Morris Park. Fans called the band back for several encores, and Stone's performance inspired other bands to jettison matching suits and choreographed dance routines and adopt his looser, funkier style.⁹⁶ When Sly and the Family Stone played Woodstock a few weeks later, the band's mixture of trippiness and brotherhood set to an irresistible dance beat “completely captured the audience's imagination” according to reviewer Mike Jahn, even though the band's set was sandwiched between Janis Joplin and the Who in the wee hours of the morning.⁹⁷

The surging influence of Black Power in the late 1960s inspired songwriters to condemn racism more forcefully and led some music critics to distinguish between Black and white music.⁹⁸ The Black Panthers instructed Stone to write explicitly political lyrics and to replace the two white members of his band with Black musicians. Stone refused to sack his bandmates, but Stand!, released in May 1969, included “Everyday People” and a more blunt antiracist statement, “Don't Call Me N_____, Whitey.”⁹⁹ Two years passed between Stand! and Stone's next album, There's a Riot Goin’ On (1971). The album's opening track, “Luv N’ Haight,” alluded to the San Francisco scene but the songs expressed Stone's disenchantment as the hopes of the civil rights era and the counterculture waned.¹⁰⁰ After Stone's performance at Madison Square Garden in December 1971, Clayton Riley's scathing review in the Amsterdam News pronounced flower power dead and ridiculed the idea that Stone's music could erase the color line between soul and rock or between Black and white youths. Black music expressed a profound yearning for freedom while rock used “stolen” rhythms and promised freedom but delivered only “the right to buy fun.” For Riley, rock and hippiedom were phony rebellions for whites youths that offered nothing more than a good time.¹⁰¹ Amiri Baraka also criticized Black soul, R & B, and pop musicians for writing apolitical songs. “Where is the Black Music that is not about dope or smoke or scag or booze or copouts?” he asked in 1971. He urged Black listerners to turn off and tune out soul and funk and listen instead to the “visionary Black music” of John Coltrane and Sun Ra, which radiated “the sound of national liberation.” If free jazz filled the airwaves, he wrote, “all of our consciousness [would] be so raised that the very government of the united states would be imperiled.”¹⁰² Many jazz musicians shared Baraka's disdain for soul and rock, but trumpeter Miles Davis listened to rock, soul, and funk in the 1960s, and the music of Sly Stone especially inspired his jazz fusion experiments on Bitches Brew (1969) and On the Corner (1972). Davis hoped that these albums’ combination of jazz, rock, soul, and funk would attract young listeners Black and white, but most jazz critics were initially ambivalent about Bitches Brew and disliked On the Corner's reliance on soul and rock rhythms and electronic instuments.¹⁰³

WHERE HAVE ALL THE HIPSTERS GONE?

Historians variously mark the death of “the 1960s,” the soul era, Black Power movement, and counterculture sometime between Altamont and Watergate. Sky-high enthusiasm about the Woodstock Nation in the summer of 1969 had crashed by year's end. On the outermost fringe of the counterculture and communal living, Charles Manson mesmerized a group of wayward souls and scrambled together bizarre interpretations of the Book of Revelation and the Beatles’ White Album to concoct his prophecy of impending race war. In August 1969, Manson sent a handful of his followers to murder actress Sharon Tate and grocery executive Leno LaBianca and his wife Rosemary, telling them that white residents of Los Angeles would blame Black militants for the killings and retaliate. News accounts of the grisly murders and the Manson clan dampened the euphoria radiating from the Woodstock festival, held only a week after the murders.¹⁰⁴ In December, a member of the Hell's Angels motorcycle gang murdered Meredith Hunter, a Black man, in front of the stage during a Rolling Stones concert at California's Altamont Speedway. Hunter's murder, captured in filmmakers Albert and David Maysles's riveting documentary Gimme Shelter, offered a shocking counterpoint to the utopian faith in peace, love, and music at Woodstock and prompted Rolling Stone and the Berkeley Barb to question the young generation's self-proclaimed moral superiority to anyone over thirty. The Manson family killings and the ugly scene at Altamont revealed that long hair, faded jeans, and smoking pot did not guarantee a commitment to peace, love, or racial harmony.¹⁰⁵

The portentous sound and lyrics of the Temptations’ “Ball of Confusion (That's What the World Is Today)” (1970) marked the sea change as the tide of hopefulness that crested in the 1960s ebbed. Released on 7 May, only three days after the killing of four antiwar protestors on the campus of Kent State University, the dissonance and reverb of the song's guitar intro set the tone, and its rapid-fire lyrics anticipated rap by nearly a decade and indicted America's failings (“Segregation, determination, demonstration, integration / Aggravation, humiliation, obligation to our nation”). Whites’ pushback against racial equality provoked urban rebellions, leaving “The cities ablaze in the summer time.” Mind expansion too often gave way to drug abuse and “Young folks walking round with their heads in the sky.” The counterculture waned, sending “Hippies moving to the hills.” And the body count in Vietnam continued to rise despite pleas from people around the world to “End the war.” The world seemed to be spinning off its axis, and too few people seemed to care. As the song's refrain lamented, “And the band played on.”¹⁰⁶

Critics of the counterculture were quick to write its obituary and to dismiss it as a failure.¹⁰⁷ Some writers, artists, scholars, and activists tried to draw and enforce sharp boundaries between a white counterculture and Black culture in the 1960s and dismissed the counterculture as nothing more than a lark for white youths. But ideas, styles, and sounds were not easily contained. White hipsters and hippies were inspired by Black culture and Black Americans explored and participated in the counterculture. The counterculture's influence spread far beyond the East Village and Haight–Ashbury and helped transform Americans’ ideas about morality, music, fashion, and freedom. The counterculture's heyday may have been fleeting and its utopian vision of peace and love unrealized, but it changed white culture, Black culture, and American culture in ways that survive long after the Death of Hippie.