Discuss how the Hippie culture could connect to the Civil Rights Movement.

This might be a challenge because the fundamental desire
of the Hippie movement was to disengage with traditional society, while the goal of the
Civil Rights Movement was to engage people of color with it.  Herein lies the
fundamental challenge of the latter with the former.  Those who struggled for the right
to vote, or to possess equal economic and social opportunity, and access to better
education could not understand how the Hippie movement so easily dismissed society and
social reality.  It had to have stood as a reflection in the mind of many that the
Hippie movement could not speak for the Civil Rights Movement because it did not
primarily speak to the people who saw the movement as so necessary.  Another level of
distance that caused divergence is that the Hippie movement centered on the growing
conflict in Vietnam, something that was to coopt the Civil Rights Movement later on in
the decade.  In this light, the Hippies understood that the war in Vietnam is going to
become the fundamental issue in the latter part of the decade and the Civil Rights
Movement was going to be seen through this lens and not in its own right.  However, I do
think that some level of connection could be forged between both.  Dr. King's preaching
of non- violent resistance and the transformational quality of love is a concept that
the Hippies, as a group, did understand and embrace.  The Hippies used many of the same
tactics of active resistance predicated upon non- violence.  When King speaks of a
larger vision that encompasses all human beings, he articulates a condition that the
Hippies embraced.  Finally, the idea of a "Dream," a world that is different from what
is and propelled by the desire of what should be, is something that the Hippies actively
endorsed and supported.  It is here where there can be some common ground between the
hippie movement and the Civil Rights Movement.