In Atlanta we stayed with the editors of The Great Speckled Bird, the Hippie, underground LNS paper for there. He lived on 14th Street in Atlanta, the street on which all the hippies live. It's much more difficult being a hippie in the South than it is in the North. In the North the hippies are just normal people like you and me who hold jobs or go to school and just happen to be transcendent in their private lives. There are only about 300 hippies in Atlanta estimates this editor of The Great Speckled Bird friend of ours. The only job any of these people can get is to sell The Great Speckled Bird. They sell 15,000 copies of it every week, which goes to show how many latent hippies there are in Atlanta. They have to make great sacrifices to be what they are. They sleep wall to wall in unclean falling apart houses, all of which are in this one small area of 14th St. because no one else will rent to them. When we first pulled up in front of the Bird's offices, immediately, before we were out of the car, the nearest hippie rushed up to sell us acid-speed-or-hash. It's the first time that's happened since when I was in Casablanca last summer where the incredibly poor arabs kept trying for a cut of your white wealth. The Atlanta guys have reasons to be as desperate.

There are grusome tales in the pages of the Bird, itself, telling how longhaired people get arrested for jaywalking and then thrown in jail. The Bird is now on trial for, of all things, obscenity. I don't have to tell you that this stuff against the Bird is political suppression. But through it all I truly believe that it's the hip cultural movement that's eventually got to save the South. The South so eagerly gobbles up everything that's shiny and new in America. Right now it's Playboy Clubs and Tastees. But they drink our rock music, too. That's where we'll start to get them--through what they think of as being their fun. As soon as we convince them that it's more fun on our side, they'll want to be like us, they'll take drugs, they'll wear clothes like us, and riot at the beach on their spring vacations. The kids will. As soon as they get jobs, they become part of the air conditioned system. But we've all seen how this youth revolution can spread. It sems to be a product of our increasingly dense population that kids are becoming more and more independent. No one can protect themselves from their youths.

They have incredibly antique tax systems everywhere you go here in the South. Mostly a 6 per cent sales tax that covers everything--even food. There's no personal income tax and only low property taxes. Wallace used to attract industry to Alabama by giving them tax-free status for their first five years of operation. All of which is unspeakably hard on the poor for the benefit of the air conditioned ones.

New Orleans gives you the feeling of having the whole United States balancing on your fulcrum. I have a very strong sense of the Mississippi River being the trunk of the America tree. When the country falls over, New Orleans will drift out into the Gulf as the stump.

The military, of course, has tremendous bases all over the South. There's a big Air Force one right across the street from the MG dealer's in Montgomery. Hitchhiking back from picking up a new water pump, we got a ride from a big smiling native Brazilian para-medic in his air conditioned Volkswagen bus with two little children. During the week he flies over to Vietnam and parachutes into the combat areas to save the wounded soldiers. He does stuff for them right there while the shooting is still going on, and then flies all the way back to San Francisco with the men. Sometimes while he's on the job, they live for a while in the Phillipines, Taiwan, and Japan. He's parachuted out of airplanes over 700 times and has 11,000 hours of flying time. It's not too dangerous because they keep in training; they run about ten miles every day. He gave us a ride all the way across town to the highway, smiling and radiating happiness from his own Volkswagen-driving head and from his fidgeting, sun-tanned kids. We were happy to be riding in his Volkswagen. And he was happy to be living in Montgomery and zooming all over the world every week.

We were driving west out highway 80 towards Selma, Alabama, cruising into the sunset. Every town we passed through had been the scene of adventures four years earlier when I had been on the Courier. I remember that every time we went out to dig up information on a story I was sure we were going to be shot. Civil Rights workers were murdered all the time in '66. A lady from Detroit, Mrs. Luizzo, had been killed in 1965 near Selma for riding in a car with some Negro guys. On my first story for the Courier, I and another guy were jumped by three men who tried to beat us up. We used to be stopped all the time by the local police, who committed most of the CR murders. But the biggest change now is probably in us. Even with our hair, which seems to bother them, we're not afraid of anybody