At one point in his memoir, Brown discusses how the hippie counterculture stemmed from black roots, specifically revolving around music. He notes how at the time "ordinary Americans were tickled by the sounds of new music, which had originated in darkest Africa." Although it seemed that the musical styles so crucial to hippie culture were fresh, new, and unique, they had a certain lineage: not only did it extend to the Beats, but it continued, as Brown writes, to blacks as well. roots. In this way, hippie dominance resulted from a kind of process through which black culture was reappropriated and aestheticized. If this is true, then it is somewhat understandable how the notion of a black hippie simply didn't make much sense in the context of the 1960s. The civil rights movement and groups like the Black Panther Party existed in a space where black Americans were, fundamentally, attempting to ingratiate themselves with white American culture to achieve some sort of status quo in terms of racial equality. If this is true, then the galvanization of American social norms sought by civil rights leaders in the 1960s was not necessarily an entirely new concept, but rather was a question of inclusion and access above most other notions. Furthermore, this would mean that it simply may not have made sense for a black man or woman to want to join the hippie counterculture, which was attempting to disassociate itself from all of American society through the dissolution of post-war consumer culture, rather than attempting to create access for those who may not have the same opportunities within that existing structure based on a person's immutable qualities