the diggers summer of love

Give a shout. The bands performing would provide the soundtrack for the Summer of Love, such as the Grateful Dead and Jefferson Airplane. But what was the Summer of Love, apart from this shared feeling among America's youth?

Imagine a time when the world seems to be swept up in a spirit of optimism and joy — the sense, perhaps, that everything is moving in the right direction, and the concepts of freedom and love are at the forefront of people's minds. Here, lead guitarist John Cipollina is seen getting ready to hit the stage. However, the sexual freedoms pioneered during the 1960s have taken hold in a great number of countries around the world. This “Gathering of the Tribes” brought together the political antiwar activists who hailed from across San Francisco Bay in Berkeley and the hippies who had flocked to Haight Ashbury. It changed my life like it changed everyone else's. The goal was enlightenment: "With LSD, we experienced what it took Tibetan monks 20 years to obtain," one member of the Family Dog commune told The Week, "yet we got there in 20 minutes.". If you look closely, you can see that the ball is painted to represent the earth. The “establishment” refused to accept the counterculture and did not try to hide their hostility. They grab your fleeting attention as the spherical suds float into the heavens. The Summer of Love could not be contained to the Bay Area alone or the United States. Even those on the fringes of the Summer of Love could find a voice fighting against the war. While their politics would seem to clash, the Angels considered themselves protectors of Haight-Ashbury.

Traveling the world can bring you sights and scenes that you will never experience in your home ... Before there was a movie fictionalizing their lives, the Von Trapp family was a real family band ... Winter does a certain something to all of us. Hendrix would soon become a global sensation. Not a member? If you were to consider the 21st century as having progressed — or, depending on your point of view, degenerated — past a certain point, then it would appear that a genuine countercultural moment on such a scale might never happen again. The Invisible Circus was an important happening orchestrated by three activist organizations: the Diggers, the Artist Liberation Front, and the GLIDE memorial church. The counterculture’s distrust of the establishment led to a wave of new media.

With limited possessions and limited employment, hippies greatly appreciated and helped build a communal network of living, sharing, companionship, and loving. Curiously enough, those captured within the bubble seem to be enjoying the bubble blowing less than those seated on the ground. The concept of the countercultural "wave" is a very useful one, which tells us that the Summer of Love was already building before 1967, and its effect was felt thereafter, though with less intensity. On January 14, 1967, 30,000 people (most of whom were tripping on Owsley Stanley’s white lightening acid) converged on Golden Gate Park for the first Human Be-In. With so much love in the air, how can you not toss your hands above your head and give a roar?

If you look closely, only a few long haired hippies are in the shot. Fans anxiously waited outside the theater to get a more intimate experience of Janis Joplin or the Grateful Dead.

“We were all reading the same newspaper, the Berkely Barb, which was a melting pot of radical and hippie news, we were all listening to the KMPX radio station, which played the sounds of our home-grown bands like the Jefferson Airplane, the Grateful Dead, the Byrds, and Janice with Big Brother and the Holding Company, who all sang songs about peace and love. On the heels of the Beat Generation and the rejection of materialism and standard narrative values, San Francisco became home base for the Summer of Love. The movement was self-consciously aware of the subversive role that free love played. It feels like such a phenomenon would be impossible now, but in the US just over 50 years ago, a change was in the air, so much so that the summer months came to be given a title which has stuck ever since. Fun fact: the Diggers helped popularize whole wheat bread, which they baked in coffee cans at their Free Bakery.

The AWOL GIs offered the hippies a chance to participate in antiwar activism on their own terms: “We noticed soldiers in uniform coming into the [Digger free] store, leaving their uniforms, putting on old clothes and disappearing out into the Haight,” said Peter Coyote. In the moment, you are capable of contorting your physical and spiritual self to the bends and rhythms of the music. We all believed that we were essentially teetering on the brink of nonviolent revolution.”.

They performed live street theater and were known for giving out free food to the public. To help set the stage for the Human Be-In, organizer Michael Bowen encouraged attendees to bring flowers with them.

Subtitled "A Gathering of the Tribes," the Human Be-In brought together disparate threads of the counterculture to affect political change. Groups like the Diggers understood that the community could only sustain itself if everyone played their part. The feeling of change to those who experienced it was, apparently, palpable. Barbers around the world shudder at the thought of another Summer of Love.

The Grateful Dead and Jefferson Airplane performed at their hometown event. We began to analyze the situation more deeply and realized that the entire culture was producing the Vietnam War—this wasn’t a political aberration.

Peaceful protests became a common sight in Haight-Ashbury, as were the police securing them and the press reporting on them. Why these people are not on their feet is a disappointing mystery. The Monterey Pop Festival attracted some 200,000 people of the course of the weekend, having been organized by key figures in the countercultural music scene, including John Philips of the Mamas and the Papas, former Beatles publicist Derek Taylor, and record producer Lou Adler. SIGN UP, In Search of the Lost Chord: 1967 and the Hippie Idea, and another 60,000 marched in San Francisco, Fantasy Fair & Magic Mountain Music Festival, ICYMI: explore the first illustrated history of printed ballot design, illuminates the noble but often flawed proce…. The Diggers were a communal living group based in the Haight-Ashbury neighborhoods of San Francisco during 1967 and 1968. The Diggers were aware of how the movement was being co-opted by the mainstream and commodified as a lifestyle. While high school and college students received most of the recognition for popularizing the Summer of Love, some of the older crowd were not shy in bring their young children along for the ride. Flushed with a community of people without work, many community groups began to support the hippie revolution. We were all for getting stoned and dancing and playing, but the serious business was how to deal with the machine that's chewing up Southeast Asia. This photo was taken in September 1967 not long before the Summer of Love’s completion. At Golden Gate Park, this group of flower children works hard to keep their enormous beach ball in the air. To be young and in love. And it made a gap in belief so large that through it people could begin to question all the other myths of the corporate state." This couple took the Summer of Love literally. She joined Haight-Ashbury’s own Big Brother and the Holding Company in 1966 but would not earn her proper recognition until the Monterey International Pop Music Festival.

The Diggers opened a free food service and a handful of free stores where anything was for the taking. According to Charles A. Reich's 1970 book The Greening of America, "it forced a major breach in consciousness. The sun’s subtle reflection illuminates her in a near-divine manor.