1967
1967 T HE year 1966 was characterized by strikes that brought vast Atlanta construction projects to a temporary halt, by crime, by confrontations in the streets between civil rights advocates and defenders of the old patterns of racial relationships. Optimists hoped that at last the worst was over; but when Atlantans moved on into the year 1967, they would be shocked at continuing violence, unrest, and divergence from the norm in many areas of life. Many Atlantans joined their fellow Americans in the increasing antiwar sentiment as more troops were shipped to Vietnam and casualties continued to mount. In February, Martin Luther King, Jr., spoke out against the war. Antiwar demonstrators marched on the Pentagon October 21, and 647 of 150,000 were arrested. Similar demonstrations had occurred in Chicago, Philadelphia , and Los Angeles. In Oakland police arrested 125, including singer Joan Baez. And, while the war was being vigorously protested, blacks were continuing their demands for civil rights and were showing an increasing militancy. Race riots rocked 127 American cities, killing 77 and injuring 4,000. In June there were riots in Boston, Buffalo, Cincinnati, Tampa, and in Atlanta. As the weather got hotter, so did tempers. In July there were further riots in Birmingham , Chicago, Detroit, New York, Milwaukee, Newark, and Rochester. The most violent areas were Detroit and Newark. Federal troops were used in Detroit, the first use of federal forces to quell a civil disturbance since 1942. A Black Power Conference in Newark had adopted an antiwhite, anti-Christian, and antidraft resolution; and black militant H. "Rap" Brown of SNCC had cried "Burn this town down" on July 25 in Cambridge, Maryland. Police arrested him for inciting a riot. Another SNCC leader, Stokely Carmichael, urged blacks on August 17 to arm for "total revolution." In Atlanta Martin Luther King, Jr., firmly rejected Carmichael's Black Power movement. However, in April King had called the U.S. government "the greatest purveyor of violence in the world," and had encouraged draft evasion and a merger of the civil rights movement and antiwar movement. The unrest in the black community was in some degree allayed by President Lyndon Johnson's appointment of Thurgood Marshall to become the first black Supreme Court Justice on the resignation of Mr. Justice Clark. And a black movie star brought pride to his race by starring in three of the year's top movies. Sidney Poitier had the leading role in ToSir, With Love, In the Heat of the Night, and Guess Who's Coming to Dinner? All three of these movies ran for extended engagements in Atlanta's theaters. Two decades earlier the city had banned movies that even hinted at interracial contact. To learn more about the counterculture that was becoming so manifest, Atlanta readers would buy a rock and roll publication called Rolling Stone and 482 ATLANTA AND ENVIRONS, 1967 try to understand what they were seeing as they rode through the section of town surrounding Tenth Street—which had been taken over completely by a new look of youth: long-haired, bearded young men and their long-skirted, barefooted girl friends—the "flower children" or "hippies"—the product of the years of unrest and drug abuse. There would soon be a local counterculture newspaper called The Great Speckled Bird. The hippie colony in Atlanta soon became famous far beyond its borders. Summer of Love was the title of a movie made about the hippie community in Atlanta in 1967. And a summer of love it was among the flower children; but it was a summer and ensuing years of worry and frustration for landowners and shopkeepers along Peachtree from Tenth to Fourteenth Street. The community , once a nice shopping area for in-town residents, began to deteriorate. According to Bruce Donnelly, a young Methodist minister who at the urging of Atlanta's church and business groups had opened the Twelfth Gate Coffee House for artists and hippie types, there were about 1,500 members of the community in the Fourteenth Street area off Peachtree in the summer of 1967. They ranged in age from thirteen to the early twenties, and among them were many missing children. Soon a new and larger hippie coffee shop, called the Fourteenth Gate, was opened on the main floor of the old building whose basement, called the Catacombs, was the original hippie hangout. Reporter Dick Herbert wrote an insightful description of the Fourteenth Gate as it seemed to him on a visit that lasted two...
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