When people look back at the sixties era in the United States, they often picture long-haired hippies smoking marijuana, flashing peace signs, and urging people to “Make Love, Not War.” There’s certainly some truth to that clichéd image. By the end of the 1960s, millions of young people did wear their hair long and flowing, and marijuana use had become commonplace on college campuses and even among high school youths. But those images belie a more complex historical record.

While youth lifestyle did change dramatically during the 1960s, most young people were less interested in fundamentally challenging America life than they were in having a good time. Their lifestyles were, in many ways, simply extensions of the consumer ethos that dominated American culture. Many so-called hippies were just experimenting with a new set of consumer choices that Americans’ long love affair with the free market made widely available.

In the 1960s, millions of Americans, many of them young people, dedicated themselves to grassroots activism. They took to the streets to protest against injustices in the United States. They demanded racial justice, student rights, economic equality, an end to the Vietnam War, and more direct democracy. Some advocated, too, for feminism, gay liberation, environmentalism, and a host of other causes. While leftists dominated the activists’ ranks, young conservatives also made their voices heard during this era, calling for a return to greater economic liberty.

While most sixties-era activists were forthrightly political in their demands, some radicals expressed their discontent with mainstream society and established authority by rebelling against many of the core values of American society. They insisted that real change in the United States depended less on fighting specific political policies and much more on challenging Americans’ basic way of life. The argued that materialism, consumerism, and the competitive, individualistic, hierarchical, money-grubbing, dog-eat-dog ethos of American culture had to be challenged and changed. Many young people simply used lifestyle choices—such as long hair, “groovy” clothes, and the use of illegal drugs such as marijuana and LSD—to display their embrace of an alternative culture. Others, however, worked hard to forge their own communities dedicated to building a new way of life. In the mid-1960s, the San Francisco Diggers, operating in the Haight-Ashbury district, helped lead this cultural rebellion.

See a map of the Haight-Ashbury neighborhood of San Francisco here.