The Groovy Monteray Bus

The Summer of Love was a social phenomenon that occurred during the summer of 1967, when as many as 100,000 people converged on the Haight-Ashbury neighborhood of San Francisco, thus initiating a major cultural and political shift. While hippies also gathered in New York, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Seattle, Portland, Washington, D.C., Chicago, Miami, Montreal, Toronto, Vancouver, and across Europe, San Francisco was the center of the hippie revolution, a melting pot of music, psychoactive drugs, sexual freedom, creative expression, and politics. The Summer of Love became a defining moment of the 1960s, as the hippie counterculture movement came into public awareness. This unprecedented gathering of young people is often considered to have been a social experiment, because of alternative lifestyles that became common, both during the summer itself and during subsequent years. These lifestyles included communal living; the free and communal sharing of resources, often among total strangers; and free love.

In contrast, the summer of 1967 also saw some of the worst violence in US cities in the country's history — this was because of the race riots/insurrections that occurred in places such as Detroit and Newark. This aspect of the summer of 1967 is often called "The Long, Hot Summer". The cause of this violence is generally attributed to racial discrimination against African-Americans and the frustration and anger it inspired in black people.