![]() ![]() ![]() The flower children who dominate mythic perceptions of the 60s show up here only peripherally, as minor roles in a larger drama The 1960s, after all, have been subjected to the same sort of censorial mythmaking as the city itself, facing, in the authors’ words, a “relentless campaign” to “rewrite history from the standpoint of wealthy white men”, cutting out the black, brown and working-class men and women – and often boys and girls – who are the heroes of this book, along with the feminist, gay and white radical activists who fought alongside them in parallel and often intersecting struggles. In their introduction they classify Set the Night on Fire as a “movement history” – an attempt to gain ground in the battle for LA’s soul by rescuing the city’s past from the strategic amnesia and propagandistic whitewashing that the great LA poet Sesshu Foster calls the “poison alzheimer’s of the apartheid imagination”. Photograph: Bill Ray/The LIFE Picture Collection via ![]()
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