Though nonviolent themselves, the protesters experienced bombings, physical beatings, and murder for their pains. Among those killed in the first five years were well-known personalities, such as Medgar Evers, and the lesser known, including four black girls in a church bombing in Birmingham, Alabama. Racial tensions eventually surfaced across the country as the decade wore on and came to a head in the long, hot summer of 1967, when race riots erupted in Newark and Detroit as Le Guin was writing The Left Hand of Darkness. Race, though an issue in her novel, is treated as a minor matter there: "Are they all as black as you?" the king asks the envoy, who replies "Some are blacker; we come in all colors," dismissing the issue of race and moving on to the matter of gender (Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness, p. 39).
Eastern religions in America. The late 1960s saw an unprecedented explosion of interest in alternative faiths, and Eastern religions were among the most popular. Such exploration into other cultures may have been the result of a relaxation of immigration laws, but the susceptibility of Americans to Eastern ideas lies primarily in the counterculture of the 1960s.
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