Question

If the so called summer of Love signaled a transformation of young white people, what kind of transformation was taking place among African Americans?

Answer 1

In the 1980s, multiculturalism seemed a danger to the nation. Books filled the shelves warning that its rise on university campuses signaled no less than the closing of the American mind. Two decades later, it was fodder for satire. Cartoons like “The Boondocks” and “South Park” depicted multiculturalist teachers as if they were clueless white hippies.

But before all of that, back in the early 1970s, it was a genuine counterculture led by a small avant-garde of artists and writers.

For a long time, they didn’t even have a name for what they were doing. There were lively scenes going on in Los Angeles, New York, and San Francisco—all cities that had critical masses of young people of color, universities where programs like Afro-American studies or ethnic studies were taking root, and community centers that served as hubs for artistic and activist expression.

The San Francisco Bay Area was the real beating heart of what would become the multiculturalism movement. It was there in 1968 that students at San Francisco State College launched a campus-wide strike that lasted five months, the longest in U.S. history, as they demanded the creation of a Black Studies and a School of Ethnic Studies. Soon student strikes had broken out at the College of San Mateo and the University of California at Berkeley, and universities such as Stanford, Michigan, Syracuse, and Harvard began adding such courses

Answer 2

The Summer of Love is the name of a social phenomenon that took place in the summer of 1967. Thousands of people (mostly hippies) converged in San Francisco. These people generally supported ideas that we now associate with the counterculture of the 60s, such as the opposition to the war in Vietnam, rejection of consumerism and suspicion of the government.

African Americans were also experiencing a transformation, and this is often referred to as the Long, hot summer of 1967. During this same summer, race protests became extremely common all over the country. Black Americans were trying to achieve equal rights in an unprecedented effort. This led to the creation of the Kerner Commission, which developed suggestions to reduce race tensions in the future.