How does a community rise from the ashes of tragedy, phoenix-like, to make itself anew?
That was the question for young and old at “The Beloved Community,” the first annual Isla Vista Conference, held partly at UCSB’s Embarcadero Hall, the very site where rioting students burned down the Bank of America in 1970, enraged by the Vietnam War, the draft, and their own disenfranchisement.
The bank was “the biggest capitalist thing” in Isla Vista, said Dick Flacks, a UCSB professor emeritus of sociology, speaking to an audience of about 30 people on Saturday and recalling the chaotic Year of Rebellion. But in the aftermath of vandalism, riots, beatings, arrests, and the police shooting of a UCSB student (the police called it accidental), came a “tremendous period of ferment and activity,” Flacks said.