Death of Hippie
The "Death of Hippie" was a symbolic event organized by activists from the Haight-Ashbury community in 1967, aimed at addressing the decline of their neighborhood and the counterculture movement. The event featured a procession where participants carried a coffin down Haight Street, inviting mourners to offer items such as love beads and incense sticks, which represented the cultural artifacts associated with the hippie lifestyle. This act was framed as a rite of exorcism intended to liberate the Haight-Ashbury area from the constraining labels and perceptions tied to the hippie identity, encouraging participants to identify as "free men" instead.
The underlying goal was to reclaim narrative control over their movement and to signal a transformation away from the mainstream media's portrayal of hippies. While the event marked a pivotal moment for those involved, the term "hippie" remained entrenched in popular culture and did not easily fade from public discourse. The "Death of Hippie" reflects a complex interaction between community activism and cultural identity, highlighting the challenges faced by the counterculture during a period of significant social change.
Death of Hippie
Date: October 6, 1967
An event staged to formally signal the end of the Summer of Love in San Francisco. It was a melange of ritual, street theater, and publicity stunt intended paradoxically to ward off further mainstream news coverage of the Haight-Ashbury counterculture.
Origins and History
Haight-Ashbury community activists organized the Death of Hippie event in hopes of symbolically reversing their neighborhood’s precipitous decline. Its central act involved an entourage of hippies bearing a coffin down Haight Street. Mourners were encouraged to cast into it such offerings as love beads, incense sticks, and copies of local newspapers. These last items signified that the now deceased “hippie” was, in the end, “the son of mass media.” According to the organizers, the procession was construed as a rite of exorcism that would reportedly “free the boundaries of the Haight-Ashbury district” and “destroy the ’we/they’ concept inherent in the idea of a ’hip.’ ” Participants were encouraged to move out of the district and henceforth refer to themselves as “free men” instead of hippies.
Impact
Through this event, members of the counterculture attempted to gain narrative control over the direction of their movement. By changing their collective name and dispersing, they signaled that they had assumed a new form that would not be subject to easy distortion by the mass media. Although the counterculture did diffuse geographically in the Summer of Love’s aftermath, the term “hippie” was too well established in popular parlance to be so easily dislodged.
Additional Information
Charles Perry’s The Haight-Ashbury: A History (1984) examines the hippies and their lifestyle.