Every small town had a group of creative kids that, try as they might, could not take delight in praising the emporer’s new clothes.
In the media age of the 1960s they began to make contact with each other. Webs of contact grew between these small hippie scenes. At that time anyone who looked like a hippie truly was your brother or sister freak and would greet you as an old friend. Larger cities had whole communities, but every town had a place where “those hippie kids” gathered together.
In Atlanta it was The Strip on Peachtree and the area from there to around Piedmont Park.
Hippies were seeking individual and group liberation of humans from the constrictions of 1950 Eisenhower rigid social norms. It even worried everyone’s grandfather Ike enough to warn of the coming Military-Industrial Complex that threatened American’s democracy and free way of life.
Duck hat, created by MysterE, a Donald fan, worn selling The Bird at 14th and Peachtree during the era.
Neo-hippie Phillip Rauls
In 1967 there was a truly underground swell in small towns all over Alabama, South Carolina, North Carolina, Florida, Tennessee, and Georgia. Everything in the South seems to run slower. Thus it was the Summer of Love happened on the West Coast in 1967. The media made the whole world a voyeuristic participant. Southern freaks who had fled to the hipper West Coast from small minded hometowns, then returned and sparked small local movements. Enough sparked folks began building an underground movement of like minded folks finding each other.
Weekends at Piedmont Park in 1968 Atlanta began to notice an amazing thing. The Georgia of Lester Maddox had flowered forth its own hippy freaks. And suddenly there seemed to be a lot of them each week crawling out from under rocks somewhere and gathering around 8th street to 14th streets on Peachtree and in Piedmont Park. Tho the limits are still debated, everyone around Atlanta knew generally where The Strip was located. Straight suburbanites detoured by to variously ogle hippie chicks, seek drugs, or be outraged and amused at the freakshow. New waves of freaky people constantly arriving in Atlanta from small towns all over the area knew to seek The Strip or Piedmont Park on the weekend to find friendly people.
“You’re gonna meet some gentle people there...”
