Truth and Love: Finding the Soul of the Sixties

In 1967, tour buses drove through the Haight-Ashbury neighborhood to see the Hippies. San Francisco of the late 1960s became legendary as the epicenter for lifestyle experimentation—including plenty of sex, a new selection of drugs, and some mighty fine rock ’n’ roll.
San Francisco native and journalist Carol Blackman was there, and in Truth and Love she tells the “betcha didn’t know” stories of this exciting era in San Francisco’s history, including memories from sixty first-person interviews.
While investigating the mysterious death of a pivotal figure in SF State’s student strike—a man who changed her life—Carol peels back the layers of myth to reveal the real stories of Hippies, Black Panthers, and San Franciscans who blurred the lines between the traditional and avant-garde. These folks were responsible for many ideas that were considered radical then but are now accepted as mainstream.
The legend of the Summer of Love looms large, but it is the real people of the city that have had a lasting impact, with ideas that could only have been fostered by San Francisco in the late 1960s.