Specific regions or localities can have immense drawing power. They may come to symbolize hope, opportunities for the future, freedom to move, flexibility, tolerance and innovation. The Bay Area played this role in the 1960s; but it did not just happen that way, it was a product of history. The Bay Area's radical tradition provided an essential framework for activists there, giving them a particular identity. Moreover, a powerful sense of place helped shape their political and cultural perspectives. The Bay Area constituted a critical venue for political and cultural dissent throughout the 1960s. San Francisco and Berkeley, in particular, pointed the way forward, signalled potentialities and drew many radicals from other regions into their orbits. Along the way, a cultural and political tendency, borne of the politics of space, marked out the Bay Area as different and injected radicalism there with a strong regional flavour.

Bay Area Exceptionalism

Regional differences within America make it difficult to speak of a national identity. It is not so much that there is no national identity but that it is structured regionally, experienced as a fractured sense of belonging to the whole. The same is true of the Movement. To a degree, the Movement was an accumulation of local organizations, circumstances and events rather than a coherent national movement. The relative geographical mobility of leaders and some participants did not lessen the extent to which a local identity could develop.