[Mb-hair] Kent State (tangent: the flower power of George (Hibiscus) Harris, 10-22-67)

[Sibley Smith]

Date: Thu, 05 May 2005 21:27:34 GMT
From: "Barbara Siomos" <barbarasiomos38 at msn.com>

I tried to find that photo on the internet of Hibiscus (George) putting the flower into the rifle barrel and could not... I tried for over an hour... Any suggestions? I am guessing Life magazine has such a hold on that photo no one has it.

peace,
barbara

===================================

FYI, for those who don't know, our dearly departed Hibiscus (aka George Harris, American performance artist, 1950 - 1982) was the brother of our own dear Walter Michael Harris, who's sweet voice is heard in the Original Broadway Cast recording of HAIR in the duet, "What a Piece of Work Is Man."

It's not the clearest reproduction of that famous photograph, but go to http://home.sandiego.edu/~hbarns/1967.htm.  

Excerpts from that page read as follows:

"The October [22] 1967 march on the Pentagon held the 'largest mass draft card burning in the history of protest against Vietnam... ."

"The initial rally of over seventy thousand demonstrators outside of the Lincoln Memorial 'was entirely peaceful and conventional'."  [things did change, however, from peace to violence as the demonstration wore on]

"... At the major point of confrontation, ... young people challenged soldiers with flowers, ...."

The photo is also found on the cover of "A Nation Divided" (pub. 1984) from the Boston Publishing Company's "The Vietnam Experience" series.  The caption from the credits page reads as follows:

"Cover photo: Before a violent clash between peace demonstrators and National Guardsmen at the Pentagon on October 23, 1967, a protestor plants pink carnations in the guardsmen's rifle barrels.  By then, the nation was begining to come apart over the Vietnam War."

For more about Hibiscus, go to http://www.cockettes.com/, or better yet, rent the movie, "The Cockettes: The Rise and Fall of the Legendary San Francisco Theatrical Troupe, 1969-1972," a feature length documentary by David Weissman and Bill Weber.

peace,

Sibley J. Smith, Jr., Director of Education
Vietnam Era Educational Center at the 
New Jersey Vietnam Veterans' Memorial
1 Memorial Lane, P.O. Box 648
Holmdel, New Jersey 07733
1-800-648-VETS
www.njvvmf.org 
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-hair/attachments/20050610/7ed86dbe/attachment.htm