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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...