Human Be-In
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The 'Human Be-In' was a happening in San Francisco's Golden Gate Park, the afternoon and evening of January 14, 1967. It was a prelude to San Francisco's Summer of Love, which made the Haight-Ashbury district a household word as the center of an American counterculture and introduced the word 'psychedelic' to suburbia.
The 'Human Be-In' focused the key ideas of the 1960s counterculture: personal empowerment, cultural and political decentralization, communal living, ecological awareness, consciousness expansion. The hippie movement developed out of disaffected student communities around Stanford and Berkeley and in San Francisco's 'Beat Generation' poets and jazz hipsters, who also combined a search for intuitive spontaneity with a rejection of 'middle-class morality.' It was the passing of the torch between two generations. Allen Ginsberg was at the heart of the transition.
The 'Human Be-In' took its name from a chance remark that one of the creators of the San Francisco Oracle, which first hit the streets in September 1966, made at the Love Pageant Rally; the playful name combined humanist values with the scores of sit-ins that had been reforming college and university practices and eroding the last vestiges of entrenched segregation, starting with the Woolworth's lunch counter sit-in of 1960 in Greensboro, North Carolina.
The Human Be-In was announced on the cover of the first issue of the San Francisco Oracle as "A Gathering of the Tribes for a Human Be-In." Speakers at the rally included Timothy Leary in his first San Francisco appearance, who set the tone that afternoon with his famous phrase "Turn On, Tune In, Drop Out" and Richard Alpert (soon to be more widely known as 'Ram Dass'), and poets like Allen Ginsberg, who chanted mantras, and Gary Snyder. Other counterculture gurus included counterculture comedian Dick Gregory, Lenore Kandel, Jerry Rubin. The Hells Angels, at the peak of their 'outlaw' reputation, corralled lost children. A host of local rock bands such as Grateful Dead and Quicksilver Messenger Service, which had been a staple of the Fillmore and the Avalon Ballroom since February 1966, provided the music and Owsley Stanley provided massive amounts of his "White Lightning" LSD to the gathered masses.
The national media were agog. No one was able to agree whether 20,000 or 30,000 people showed up. Soon every gathering was an '-In' of some kind: Rowan & Martin's Laugh-In comedy television show began airing over NBC just a year later, January 22, 1968.
The 'Human Be-In' was later recalled by its major instigator, Allen Cohen, as a necessary meld that brought together philosophically opposed factions of the current San Francisco-based counterculture: on one side, the Berkeley radicals, who were tending toward increased militancy in response to the U.S. government's Vietnam war policies, and, on the other side, the rather non-political Haight-Ashbury hippies, who urged peaceful protest. Their means were drastically different, but they held many of the same goals.
According to Allen Cohen's own account, his friend the expressionist painter Michael Bowen provided much of the "organizing energy" for the event, and Bowen's personal connections also strongly influenced its character. As Allen Cohen put it: "he was friends with the Beat poets from the North Beach era, and had spent time with Tim Leary at Millbrook. He was a mystic hustler who Allen Ginsberg had called the most convincing man he had ever known. He could charm the press and turn on a square. And he did. He invited Leary and the Beat poets to the Human Be-In, and arranged for it to be a worldwide media event."
The counterculture that surfaced at the 'Human Be-In' encouraged people to 'question authority' in regard to civil rights, women's rights, and consumer rights, shaped its own alternative media: "underground" newspapers and radio stations.
Many of the people who were there at the time felt afterwards a deep connection with the earth and with humanity. The Be-In brought together incredibly diverse groups, and there was a feeling there that this coming-together could spread throughout the world. It was an atmosphere of hope and love, and for such a huge gathering, there was remarkably little chaos.
[edit] Trivia
Subsequently, the Be-In later spawned a series of Digital Be-Ins.[citation needed]
Leading UK theatre company, Theatre 14167, take their name from the Be-In and have subsequently produced work by Michael McClure who read at the event.
