Allan Appel Photo
May 15, 1967 edition of the Panthers’ community news service, Oakland, Calif.
On May 15, 1967, the Black Panther Defense Minister Huey Newton wrote, “Politics is war without bloodshed. War is politics with bloodshed.” On July 29 of the same year, Illinois Gov. Otto Kerner, appointed to head President Johnson’s national commission on civil disorders, after the Detroit riots, called the “the war on poverty and discrimination” a continuation of the American Revolution.
In between, on June 12, a landmark unanimous Supreme Court decision declared “marriage is one of the basic civil rights of man” and thereby ended all race-based legal restrictions on marriage. That decision, Loving v. Virginia, is the title and trigger for “1967: The Summer of Loving,” a small but illuminating exhibition of books, photographs, and paper ephemera.
Stacia Stein Photo
The modest show, at the Lillian Goldman Law Library on the third floor of the Yale Law School on Wall Street, makes the large case that the real action during the tumultuous summer of 1967 was not in sex, drugs, and rock and roll, but in the courts of law and in Congress.
During those riotous months, laws forbidding interracial marriage were struck down. Thurgood Marshall became the first African-American Supreme Court justice. Muhammad Ali was convicted of draft evasion for opposing the Vietnam War. J. Edgar Hoover and his FBI had to issue new guidelines for agents to control mobs and riots, for there were so many of them.
All that and much more emerges from one vitrine, surrounded by a display of biographies, manuals, and publications, many from the era, that comprise the exhibition organized by law librarians Stacia Stein and Jordan Jefferson.
The show runs through Aug. 18.
As a participant in some of the many anti-Vietnam War demonstrations of that summer, I particularly enjoyed leafing through (nobody stopped me!) the several mimeographed items on display, including the “Vietnam Summer Organizer’s Manual,” published by the Vietnam Summer National Office, headquartered in Cambridge, Mass.
Therein I learned from Robert Greenstein, who wrote the introduction, “anti-war organizing is largely an unchartered field.”
I’ll say. But people learned fast. With anti-war demonstrations and the lethal riots in Los Angeles and in Detroit, among many other cities, the FBI issued new recommendations to law enforcement on how to control those crowds that the organizers had put together.
The view is both national and local. In a page opened up from Laura Kalman’s Yale Law School and The Sixties, the author writes of the serious tension between those law students who were part of a “resistance” and those who decided to “stay within the system.”
Further down the page we learn of one professor at the school, who along with colleagues “signed a letter warning those who had turned in their draft cards against talking with FBI agents who questioned them without first obtaining information about their rights.”
I found myself going back again and again to those ephemeral publications, including several copies of the Library of Congress’ Legislative Reference Service reports.
These were compendiums of news articles, press clippings, and historical materials assembled to address the pressing issues not only of the period, but of the week, and moment.
Other reports include assembled remarks by famous folks. James Baldwin said, basically, that he told us this was going to happen. Jackie Robinson was quoted as saying on May 1, 1967: “People have been saying to me, ‘Why should we run around shooting and looting in our areas? If we are going to create the problem, we’ll create it in other areas.’”
And Michigan Senator Phillip Hart reported on Aug. 3, 1967 about civil rights legislation and riots :“This bill and 97 more like it would not have stopped Detroit.”
Stein said that when she started doing research for the show, a marker for the 50th anniversary of the Summer of Love, she noticed “a lot of the issues that defined a summer 50 years ago are still very relevant today. For example, freedom to marry, civil rights, and concerns over police brutality,” she reported in an email.
Or as Jefferson told me in an email, “it’s a visceral display that juxtaposes what people think about the Summer of Love and what actually happened.”
The show succeeds in being an excellent legal snapshot of the moment. I do wish there were a little more material about the eponymous case. Last summer’s wonderful Jeff Nichols film, Loving, a biopic of the principals in the case, piqued my interest, especially as the Lovings were a remarkable couple who just wanted to be left alone to love each other and their kids.
The only material in the show dealing with the case appears to be, in the center of the one vitrine, a book for kids explaining how people’s skin hues in Central Point, Va. in 1958 ranged from “chamomile tea to summer midnight” and yet folks seemed to live together happily.
Just asking for a little more Loving.
The Lillian Goldman Law Library is on the third floor of the Yale Law School at 127 Wall St. The exhibition, which runs through Aug. 18, is open during regular library hours.
