Set the Night on Fire: L.A. in the Sixties

Set the Night on Fire: L.A. in the Sixties by Jon Wiener and Mike Davis is a detailed and scholarly account of Los Angeles counterculture. The main focus is on LA in the 60s, of course, but occasionally an event has a wider scope or the authors give some information from outside these boundaries to give even more context. The book changes between being a narrative and almost a sociological study, arranged mostly chronologically and mostly by topic, but with connections drawn between different events of the time. With such a massive scale of coverage, sometimes the amount of information presented to readers is overwhelming.

I usually associate American civil rights in the sixties with Freedom Rides and sit-ins in the south, but this book shows the role of Los Angeles too. The accounts of racial tension, police corruption and violent protests are particularly relevant for our time, especially the wildly different depictions of events from mainstream, conservative media, and the accounts in the counterculture Los Angeles Free Press. Concerns about peaceful protests turning violent, or about profiling and arrests seem really familiar. This is an eerily relevant book right now, with a similarly wide gap between mainstream media’s accounts of protests and riots, and what can be found on Twitter or blogs.

Police bias and corruption is a major part of these accounts. The book recounts glaring and upsetting examples of discrimination and exploitation, and then a police cover-up, again and again. LAPD not only covered up police profiling and brutality, but seemed to regularly promote corrupt, racist officers. Reading about systemic corruption and racial discrimination makes it harder and harder to believe that modern police officers engaging in violence honestly misunderstood a situation, believed there was a credible threat, or that there was “one bad apple” in an otherwise moral police force.

Many times in this bool, the Los Angeles Free Press, or Freep, provided valuable information that other outlets couldn’t or wouldn’t cover. In the time of print-only media, we also see LA police officers harassing people selling physical copies of this paper. One section explains how potentially contaminated LSD could be dropped off at the Free Clinic for safe, non-judgmental testing. The Free Clinic also provided other aid, including STD testing and treatment, contraception, and general medical care, with the same non-judgmental view to care and harm reduction.  After testing, drug results and information were sent to the Freep, and published there, using numbers and not names, allowing users to find out what was really in their drugs and avoid poisoning. Stories like this show how the Freep took their role in community safety seriously.

There’s much more, this is a massive book covering so many counterculture movements, and drawing connections between them. The whole book is well-researched and detailed. But right now, after protests in many cities that seem almost eerily similar to the ones described here, it’s hard not to focus on the sections about police profiling, harassment, brutality, and dishonesty.