A more innocent time?

Until reading another thread on this board, I had never, in forty plus years, even weighed the possibilty of there being a racial element to Hunter's killing. In fact I'm not weighing it now, as plainly there wasn't. But with almost five decades of hindsight, people are now bringing race into it - it made me think that that would have happened automatically had this tragedy happened today. It would immediately have been branded a racially motivated killing, there would be riots in the streets and professional agitators would be getting rich off the back of it.

Another poster says Hunter went looking for trouble - a black man with a white woman at a gig with hundreds of thousand of white people. Well, there's an argument that he was looking for trouble (the gun, for instance) but there's no evidence that 300,000 people turned on him because he was with a white girl. In fact, I would like to defend my contemporaries - that kind of racism wasn't widespread. People might comment on it, but in most areas getting beaten up for it was rare. About as rare as getting beaten up for having long hair, no hair in later years a mohawk etc. We remember the killings, the church burnings etc, but those things happen nowadays too.

300,000 people were there to enjoy what they loved, music, and their behaviour was amazing when you consider the conditions and lack of security (proper security, that is).

The Angels were colour blind that night - THEY were probably looking for trouble, and had they not found it in Meredith Hunter, they would have found it somewhere else, regardless of colour.




No Guru, No Method, No Teacher.