Notes from a revolution

The social upheaval of the sixties gave rise to many fascinating coalitions and communes, but the Diggers, a little-known and short-lived group, stand apart from them all. Formed in Haight-Ashbury in 1966 by members of R.G. Davis's subversive theater company, the San Francisco Mime Troupe, the Diggers took their name from the English Diggers, a seventeenth century agrarian collective devoted to creating a utopian society free of ownership and commerce. The San Francisco Diggers, under the leadership of Peter Berg, Emmett Grogan, Peter Coyote, and Billy Murcott, were true anarchists, with…