On the 14th of January 1967, The Human Be-In, an event in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park signalled the beginning of the Summer of Love, which turned the city’s Haight-Ashbury district into the centre point of American counterculture; the world that came to characterise this suburban union was “psychedelic”. Tens of thousands of people gathered for a spectacle which surprised the national media by sheer public enthusiasm. The festival’s organizers, artist Michael Bowen and poet Allen Cohen (also the co-founders of Oracle newspaper), called the event a Be-In, a word-play on the sit-in protests of the civil rights movement, as well as those held at colleges and universities, sometimes referred to as teach-ins.
The Oracle announced on the cover of its 5th issue “A Gathering of the Tribes for a Human Be-In”, a joyous, all-inclusive occasion: “A union of love and activism previously separated by categorical…
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