The Human Be-In: A Union Of Love And Activism

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For some, 1967’s Summer Of Love had its origins on a mid-January day in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park; for others gathered on the Polo Fields, this was the final day of the true hippies. But there’s no query that there was a direct line connecting the Human Be-In on January 14, 1967, to the momentous weekend in the midst of August 1969 referred to as Woodstock.

According to the press launch for The Human Be-In, “A union of love and activism previously separated by categorical dogma and label mongering will finally occur ecstatically when Berkley political activists and hip community and San Francisco’s spiritual generation and contingents from the emerging revolutionary generation all over California meet for a Gathering of the Tribes for a Human Be-In at the Polo Fields in Golden Gate Park.”

The Hippie motion that had developed from the hipsters, these concerned in liberal politics, college students from Berkeley and Stanford together with the flotsam and jetsam of a youth tradition interested in radical life all helped to create the setting through which the “Human Be-in” took place. It was organized by Michael Bowmen, an artist and activist who was a central determine within the Haight-Ashbury space of San Francisco (Haight and Ashbury was an intersection of two streets that gave the realm its identify – a reputation that resonates around the globe).

Bowmen created a poster for the occasion and gathered others round him to talk at The Human Be-In, together with Timothy Leary, beat poets Allen Ginsberg and Gary Snyder, and Richard Alpert who later turned religious instructor Baba Ram Dass. Also there was Owsley Stanley, the underground’s chief chemist, who supplied industrial quantities of LSD to the gang of 20,000 or in order that turned as much as activate.

As nicely as listening to the speeches at “the Gathering of Love,” the gang have been entertained by the cream of the San Francisco bands – The Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane, Big Brother & the Holding Company, and Quicksilver Messenger Service. At round 5 p.m. as the sunshine was simply beginning to fade, Ginsberg led everybody within the chanting of “Om Sri Maitreya,” after which everybody began to clear up their collective garbage; many headed for the seashore to look at the solar go down.

Just like many such occasions in historical past, these commenting on them have made a behavior of adjusting among the key info. The numbers on the Be-in have swelled to 100,000 based on many newspaper articles written within the final 20 years. There was no violence and no police based on some; that’s until you depend the man that was overwhelmed up in entrance of a photographer by the “security” minded Hells Angels. Either manner, the legend of The Human Be-In and hippie idyll was nurtured and, earlier than lengthy, extra folks have been interested in San Francisco, for higher and worse.

Follow our Summer Of Love playlist, that includes all of the songs that outlined an period.

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