Beyond the war
Vietnam is the first thing most people associate with protest in 1967, but it was one thread among several. Across the United States, a cultural experiment in San Francisco, urban unrest in northern cities, a new mood among Black activists and a Supreme Court decision on marriage were all changing what Americans took for granted. They had different leaders and different goals, and they should not be treated as a single movement. Still, they shared a willingness to challenge inherited rules, and they often drew on the same young people.
The Summer of Love
By spring 1967 the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco had become the best-known gathering place of the hippie scene. The Human Be-In in January had drawn thousands to Golden Gate Park, and press coverage in the following months encouraged many young people to arrive in the city during the summer. The Summer of Love is often remembered as a festival of music and peace, but it was also a social experiment with real strains: crowding, a shortage of housing and food, drug problems, and a local population unprepared for the crowds.
Its relationship to protest was complicated. Some participants were also active in the antiwar movement, and the hippie slogan of peace overlapped with the language of the marches. Others deliberately stepped away from politics, seeing a new way of living as more important than demonstrations. Groups such as the Diggers tried to provide free food and services, which was a kind of social action without a platform or a march.
Black Power after Newark and Detroit
In July 1967 the Newark riot (12-17 July) and the Detroit uprising (beginning 23 July) became the most serious disturbances of what was called the long, hot summer. Both began with incidents involving police, in cities where residents had long complained about housing, jobs and policing. Many people died in both cities, and the National Guard and, in Detroit, federal troops were deployed. Later in the same month, President Johnson appointed a commission to examine the causes of the disorders, which became the Kerner Commission.
For many young Black activists, these events strengthened the appeal of Black Power, a phrase made famous in 1966 by Stokely Carmichael and Willie Ricks. The term meant different things: for some it stressed political and economic control within Black communities, for others pride and self-defence. A Black Power conference was held in Newark within days of the riot. At the same time, groups that had once been closely associated with nonviolent protest were changing. The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, by then led by H. Rap Brown, was moving away from its earlier interracial emphasis. The Black Panther Party, founded in Oakland in October 1966, drew attention in 1967 for its armed patrols and for its appearance at the California state capitol in May.
Martin Luther King, meanwhile, was trying to widen the civil rights movement to include economic justice and opposition to the war. His speech at Riverside Church in April linked the two. His later book Chaos or Community took up the same questions. These tensions are covered in more detail in the account of the civil rights movement itself.
Loving v. Virginia
On 12 June 1967 the Supreme Court decided Loving v. Virginia, ruling unanimously that state laws banning interracial marriage were unconstitutional. At the time, a number of states, reportedly around sixteen, still had such laws. The case grew out of the marriage of Richard Loving, a white man, and Mildred Loving, a woman of Black and Native American descent, who were sentenced in Virginia for living together as husband and wife.
This ruling is a useful reminder that social change in 1967 was not always accompanied by street protest. It came through the courts, after years of legal work by civil rights lawyers, and it affected private life more directly than many marches did. The film Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, released late in the year, brought the subject to a wide audience, though it reached cinemas as the legal question was newly settled.
What connects these threads
It would be too neat to say these events formed a single revolt. The Summer of Love was largely white and middle class. Black Power grew out of experiences of segregation and police power. The antiwar movement drew in students, clergy, pacifists and liberals with a range of reasons. The links were partial: shared youth, a distrust of official explanations, and a belief that institutions could and should change.
There was also a counter-current. Many Americans reacted to the year’s disorder by wanting more order, a mood often described as white backlash, and the polls showed that protesters were generally less popular than the policies they criticised. The social change of 1967 was real, but it was contested at every step, and the political consequences of that conflict became clear in 1968.