Peace, Power & Soul: The Black Revolution Behind White Counterculture

Chicago, May 1973. A student at Westinghouse Industrial Vocational School on the city’s West Side. Photo by John H. White, U.S. National Archives.

I remember being a preteen and viewing archival photos from the 1960s and 1970s hippie movement for the first time. I admired the peace and love protest signs dancing in the sky, Volkswagen buses hand-painted in bright colors, and flower crowns flowing through the tops of the crowds. I recall seeing one photo of a woman holding a sign with a popular phrase of the anti-government movement of the time, “Make Love Not War.” It reminded me of Tupac’s lyric “They got money for wars but can’t feed the poor,” [1] and my heart leapt with anticipation as I thought: Where are the Black hippies? But as I grew older — and my fascination with the Flower Power movement continued while my adoration for the Black Power movement deepened — I never saw Black hippies. I eagerly scanned snapshots from iconic events like Woodstock, Altamont, and Summer of Love, but saw only white faces. My mind wandered as I flipped through photos, essays, and articles, thinking: I see our culture, slang, and style, but where are we? How can they advocate for liberation without the trailblazers of the most effective liberation movements? 

The truth is the trailblazers were always there: Blackness was at the root of hippie counterculture, but as the flowers bloomed, no one peeked into the soil. But it was always there. 

“It is no accident that the source of Hip is the Negro,” said Norman Mailer in 1957 when writing about the radical movement of the beatniks, which would heavily inform the hippie counterculture that was to follow. [2] The hipness, resistance, and nonconformity these white counterculture groups uplifted were born from Black struggle, survival, and resilience. 

It is interesting to consider that hippie movements like the “longhairs,” where men wore their hair long as an act of resistance, sprouted from the same cultural roots that grew bouncy afros drawn up to the sun as symbols of Black pride. But it wasn’t only the physical style that was acquired and rewired from Black culture - it was also the emotional depth of radical protest. The strategic choreography of rebellion. The purposeful paint strokes on the canvas of revolution. 

Washington, D.C., May 5, 1971. Protestors gather near the Capitol during anti-war demonstrations. Photo by Thomas J. O’Halloran and Marion S. Trikosko, U.S. News & World Report Collection, Library of Congress

These facets of the hippie counterculture weren’t birthed in Woodstock. They emerged from Black rock, jazz, soul, and power.

Hippies viewed the system as broken and corrupted and advocated dismantling societal structures through individualistic forms of liberatory expression. Ostensibly, these views aligned with the stance of the Black Power movement, but the seeds were vastly different. One group was rejecting oppressive privileges; the other never had privileges to reject. 

For example, white counterculture youth found solace and freedom in Black rock music. The frequencies of the sound, vibrations of the bass, and spirit of the lyrics lifted young white teens from the margins of their bedrooms. This fascination with rock, coupled with rock’s roots in African beats and rhythms, became the birth of white middle-class kids in the 1950s associating rebellion with Blackness. And this ideology seeped into the white counterculture of hippie movements. 

As historian Grace Elizabeth Hale writes, white counterculture youth “sensed in the sounds something inherently and authentically Black... and used it to enable their own transformations.” Rock became their personalized outlet for rebellion and reinvention, identifying with Black music, even as they clung to the social and political privileges of whiteness with, “one foot outside and one foot inside white life.” [3]

This history mirrors the current realities of Black communities having to grapple with the implications of cultural appropriation, misunderstanding, and disregard. This struggle makes me reminisce on J. Cole’s 2018 lyrics: 

These white kids love that you don't give a ****

'Cause that's exactly what's expected when your skin Black.

…And somewhere deep down…I gotta keep it real

They wanna be Black and think your song is how it feels.

-J. Cole, 1985 (Intro to “The Fall Off”) [4]

So, it is true that a large percentage of hippies came from privilege, while concurrently romanticizing poverty. While they did advocate for, “the rights of racial minorities and, to some extent, women,” the hippie counterculture movement, “came from a prosperous, white, male-defined segment of society.” [5] However, there were historical moments of radical change and collective liberation that emerged from these movements; and that is where Black Power and Flower Power collided. 

Bare feet and clenched fists unified in marches. Beaded necklaces and black berets gathered in protest. 

Black Panther Convention at the Lincoln Memorial, June 19, 1970. Photo by Thomas J. O’Halloran and Warren K. Leffler, Library of Congress.

Prominent figures throughout the hippie movement in the 1960s demonstrated support for civil rights and Black liberation. Bob Dylan stood alongside members of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, sang for Black farmers in Mississippi, and performed at the March on Washington. Jefferson Poland, founder of the Sexual Freedom League, helped register Black voters in the South. Barry Melton of the rock band Country Joe and the Fish volunteered for the Congress of Racial Equity. [6]

In 1968 an editorial in The Black Panther, the official newspaper of the Black Panther Party, illustrated their stance on this unity, saying, “Black brothers stop vamping on the hippies. They are not your enemy. Your enemy, right now, is the white racist pigs who support this corrupt system.... Your enemy is not the hippies.... WE HAVE NO QUARREL WITH THE HIPPIES. LEAVE THEM ALONE. Or the BLACK PANTHER PARTY will deal with you!” [6]

However, the harmony this convergence produced included clashing notes. 

The comforts and privileges hippies walked away from had never been offered to the Black people fighting for justice and liberation. And this disconnect led to discontent. Black language like dig, cool, and chick rolled off the tongues of white counterculture participants while they advocated for collective freedom. But they avoided paying the costs of that freedom by having the ability to enter and exit poverty and oppression whenever they pleased. To Black communities at the time this felt more like appropriation than revolution. In 1967, Ebony Magazine noted the claims of a white Haight-Ashbury resident who said, “The Negroes are fighting to become what we've rejected.” [7] This sentence uplifts the disjointed nature of these two movements, including how some white activists deeply misunderstood the lived realities of the Black communities they claimed to admire. 

Even so, some leaders urged a broader vision of solidarity. Activist Chester Anderson argued that Black and white revolutionaries were being divided by design. “The Man,” he wrote, benefited from racial division, and through shared struggle “Freedom Power” could emerge. He encouraged white hippies to visit Black neighborhoods not to observe and disrupt, but to engage - to understand Black life, not just Black style.

Fountain Square, Downtown Cincinnati, June 1973.  “Speaker’s Landing” overlooking the square, with Du Bois Tower in the background. Photo by Tom Hubbard.

The merging of the Black Power and Flower Power movements revealed that unity across cultures is possible — even essential — to reach true liberation. But that unity must honor the depth of Black resistance, not just the beauty of its style or the melody of its music. This perspective pulses through today’s fight for liberation, pleading with us to listen more closely. To look beyond the blooms and into the soil. To recognize true revolution as accountability, not aesthetic. Because solidarity without understanding is performance.

So, are we ready to show up with more than flowers in hand, willing to unlearn, dismantle, and rebuild from the roots?

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Sources & Further Reading: 

[1] Tupac Shakur, “Keep Ya Head Up,” Strictly 4 My N.I.G.G.A.Z., Interscope Records, 1993.

[2] Mailer, Norman. The White Negro: Superficial Reflections on the Hipster. 1957.

[3] Hale, Grace Elizabeth. A Nation of Outsiders: How the White Middle Class Fell in Love with Rebellion in Postwar America. Oxford University Press, 2011.

[4] J. Cole, “1985 (Intro to ‘The Fall Off’),” KOD, Dreamville, Roc Nation, and Interscope Records, 2018.

[5] Timothy Miller, The Hippies and American Values (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1991).

[6] Damon R. Bach, The American Counterculture: A History of Hippies and Cultural Dissidents (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2020).

[7] Ebony, “The Hippies: Their Style and Their Scene,” August 1967.