Maybe there would be other stories?
Reading this piece about The Last Glimpses of California's Vanishing Hippie Utopias I do wonder if the people who are still there have a different and mellower vision of what it was like than the ones who left - though there is some acknowledgement that people did leave, and we see that there doesn't seem to be much generational continuation of the lifestyle.
It does seem as though there were was quite a bit of difference between the various individuals and groups escaping into the woods? It's all just a little bit vague and elegiac in this article.
Maybe because I also more or less simultaneously came across this review of a book, Shelter from the Machine: Homesteaders in the Age of Capitalism. about different groups of homesteaders in the rather different milieu of Kentucky’s Bear Lick Valley. A rather different picture.
Thinking of that not entirely happy gay black guy among the Californian hippie redwoods, urban spaces tended to be if not exactly more accepting, at least to provide spaces for meeting like souls: Julius Caesar Taylor's Molly House - Tottenham Court Road.
Further on the long history of London's Black population, proposal to put up a Blue Plaque for Olaudah Equiano in Greenwich;
And there is already a Blue Plaque in Peckham for Dr Harold Moody, GP and founder of the League of Coloured Peoples.
Rather grimmer history: A Business Archive of the French Illegal Slave Trade in the Nineteenth Century - very rare to find actual records of how this illicit enterprise was carried on: [T]wo ship’s journals, records of the outfitting and completion of the expedition, false papers, an insurance contract, letters from the ship’s owner to the captain, the captain’s letter book, crew lists, and records of negotiations with slave dealers in West Africa.
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