A new way of living together

Abstract

This dissertation discusses the history of Atlanta’s hip community, a complex grouping of radicals, hippies, antiwar supporters, underground journalists, street people, college activists and progressive social workers that existed from the mid-1960s until the first years of the 1970s. This project explores how a true community developed in the face of the region’s staunch social and political conservatism. While college administrators cautiously tolerated student activists, city officials attempted to rid the city of the hip district, the “Strip,” that developed in Midtown. This opposition, combined with a shared belief that a new nation needed to emerge out of the racism of the Jim Crow South, the destruction of the Vietnam War and the conformity of suburban Cold War America, created a communal identity which manifested itself in student movements, an underground newspaper, a diverse antiwar movement and a belief that parts of Atlanta belonged to hips. Developing slowly in the years after 1965, the hip community experienced its zenith from 1968 to 1970 when thousands of people demonstrated against the Vietnam War, moved into the Strip, and came together in multiple ways to solve their own problems in their own way. The introduction of heroin and other hard drugs along with an increase in the Strip’s population of addicts, vulnerable runaways and bikers threatened the recently achieved successes in Midtown, leading hips, private social service agencies, and local churches to work together at solving these problems. A brief window of cooperation between hips and city leaders closed when the threat of a massive migration of new hips to the Strip in the summer of 1970 led the mayor and police to increase their efforts at controlling the hip community. These problems, along with an increase in violence in the Strip, the de-escalation of the Vietnam War and the acceptance by mainstream society of New Left and countercultural elements led to the slow decline of the hip community over several years and its complete demise by the first months of 1973.