ABSTRACT
The civil rights movement stirred up white middle-class kids who were bored by the conformity and McCarthyism of the 1950s. By 1967 they were hungry for Black friendship. The idea of rebelling without Blacks as beneficiaries seemed like a put-on. The movement's call to follow an ideal no matter the risk stood starkly against the moral compromises and deceits of their parents. The white kids came mostly from leftist and pacifist backgrounds at first, but the Vietnam War and the counterculture opened the social flood gates of one-dimensional America. The ranks of the white movement filled with an absolutely eclectic mixture, which saw children of labor organizers, wealthy capitalists, artists, Mafia dons, CIA founders, welfare recipients, and every imaginable stripe of middle-class and suburban material success and spiritual poverty.
