“Take a Cop to Dinner” reprint, from the final edition of The Digger Papers (August 1968). — “Take a Cop to Dinner” reprint, from the final edition of *The Digger Papers* (August 1968).

Haight-Ashbury, Fall 1966: Drug busts are on the rise. The “hip merchants” (stores cashing in on the hippie phenomenon) are under pressure not to serve “shabbily dressed clientele” and “unkempt loiterers,” and they begin supporting efforts to remove panhandlers from the neighborhood. To improve relations with the police, the owner of the Psychedelic Shop posts a sign urging Haight residents to “Take a Cop to Dinner.” Several other shop owners follow suit.

At the same time, the Diggers—the legendary anarcho-communist collective and guerilla theater troupe of Haight-Ashbury—begin circulating their first broadsides or “Digger Papers.” One of these early sheets is “Take a Cop to Dinner,” which excoriates the hip merchants for sucking up to the cops—the brutal enforcers of a corrupt and exploitative way of life. Less than a week later, on September 27, a white police officer shoots and kills a sixteen-year-old black youth named Matthew Johnson, which ignites six days of rioting in Hunters Point and other San Francisco neighborhoods. Mayor John Shelley deploys local police to “restore order,” and institutes a dusk-to-dawn curfew in many neighborhoods, including Haight-Ashbury.

The same story over and over ... the same story over and over ...

Original “Take a Cop to Dinner” broadside (Sept. 1966).