© 2005, Pro-Youth Pages
Free Speech Movement:
When Berkeley was Ablaze
[This was
a research paper for a college course on California history. I post it here in
hopes of inspiring students today who find themselves oppressed, and to salute
those students and teachers who cared enough to fight to the good fight. While
this paper may get bogged down in dates and details, it lays out the strategies
and tactics that were used then and could be used today to further the cause of
freedom. It examines the dynamics of power and how they
contributed to the success of these protesters. Enjoy.]
Intro
Since the 1930s, UC Berkeley
had restricted political speech.[1]
Increased political activity during the Great Depression prompted University
President Robert Gordon Sproul in 1934 to ban all
political and religious meetings on campus.[2]
During the 1956 presidential campaign, candidate Adlai Stevenson was actually
forced to speak at the distant edge of campus to avoid violating this ban.[3]
Then in the Fall of 1964, all hell broke lose.
Out of nowhere, it seemed, thousands of students clashed with administrators
and police, demanding political freedom. This quiet institution became a symbol
of political combat. America watched as students seized a police car and used
it as their soapbox, standing on its roof to address the crowd of their peers.
America saw hundreds of police charge into a building to drag out students.
America saw the school’s administration crumble under the weight of student
anger.
I hope to examine how this
political firestorm ignited, how it continued burning for three months, and
what it accomplished.
A Gasoline Puddle
The Berkeley college students of
1964 were not the passive students of earlier years. They had been radicalized.
The seeds
of the Free Speech Movement were planted in May 1960 when Berkeley students
tried to attend the San Francisco hearings of the controversial House Un‑American
Activities Committee (HUAC).[4]
The hearings were advertised as being open to the public. The only members of
the public who actually got in, however, turned out to be those chosen by
organizations that supported the red-baiting work of HUAC.[5]
When
denied admission, students held a sit-in. Police used fire hoses to blast them
off the steps of city hall. Several students were arrested.[6]
HUAC made
a film about the event entitled Operation Abolition, which provoked
hostility from college students and inspired greater political activism.[7]
Protester Abbie Hoffman later described Operation
Abolition:
The film
proposed that the students, workers, and teachers who protested HUAC had been
duped by a handful of Communist agitators. I doubted more than a handful of
protesters had ever heard of the “ring leaders” being labeled as “ruthless,
cunning enemies of our system” by the southern congressman narrating the film.
I got so angry I jammed a pencil point into my hand.[8]
Hoffman
wasn’t the only one angered by the film’s attempt to demonize protesters. Yet
despite this attempt, many viewers saw the demonstrators in the film as heroes.
Steven Weissman, who would emerge among the students
in the Free Speech Movement, wrote, “If only HUAC knew how many of us first
thought of coming to Berkeley after seeing that film.”[9]
Furthermore,
the Civil Rights Movement was in full bloom, inspiring grassroots political
action on the part of students. Only one year before Berkeley ignited, hundreds
of Bay Area students had been arrested for sit-ins at the Sheraton Palace Hotel
among other businesses accused of racist hiring practices.[10]
As Free Speech Movement
leader Mario Savio later said, “The seemingly
inexhaustible energy which the Berkeley students had so long devoted to the
struggle for Negro rights was now aimed squarely on the vast, faceless
University administration. This is what gave the Free Speech Movement its
initial impetus.”[11]
Administrators
Drop the Match
While most political speech had long
been banned at UC Berkeley, this ban had not been strongly enforced. As
political activism increased, however, UC Berkeley’s administration and the UC
Board of Regents tightened restrictions on political activity on campus. In
1963, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled these restrictions violated free speech, but
administrators ignored the law and continued their restrictions.[12]
The Oakland
Tribune’s right-wing publisher, William Knowland,
pressured the university to end all political activity on campus.[13]
One reason may be that on September 4th of that year, students had picketed the
Tribune in a protest organized by the Ad Hoc Committee to End
Discrimination.[14]
The
administration now banned tabling, fund-raising, and recruiting for off‑campus political groups.[15]
(Nearly all student clubs were “off-campus” groups. School bureaucracy made it
too difficult to be an on-campus group.[16]
) Supporting off-campus political groups had been officially prohibited before
then, but that rule was not enforced until now. There had always been a little
free speech zone on the south edge of campus on the sidewalk at the corner of
Bancroft Way and Telegraph Avenue — free if only because it was unclear whether
this spot belonged to the school or to the city. Administrators now banned all
tabling at Bancroft and Telegraph on the pretext that it obstructed the flow of
foot-traffic entering the school.[17]
On September 14th, Dean of Students Kathryn Towle
sent letters to all student organizations informing them of this ban.[18]
The First
Flames – “United Front”
Students,
angry over these new restrictions, formed a “United Front.” This front included
political student groups ranging from right-wing Students for Goldwater to the
left-wing Young Socialist Alliance. As student Jackie Goldberg later put it,
“Groups that would shout at each other from card tables at Bancroft and
Telegraph were suddenly ... allies. Only the University administration could
have accomplished that.”[19]
On
September 21, the first day of classes, Dean Towle met
with the “United Front.” Towle tried to calm them by
clarifying the rules and announcing some new modifications. Tabling would be
permitted so long as students received University permits and so long as they
did not raise funds, recruit new members, or advocate a position on any
controversial issue. Students would be allowed to inform others of their
position on a controversial issue, but could not advocate. If that sounds
confusing, it should. This left administrators free to
decide which students were informing and which were advocating.[20]
Students
were not satisfied. They obtained permits, but used their tables to advocate,
raise funds, and recruit members.[21]
On
September 28th, as Chancellor Strong presented awards for athletes, 1,000
students picketed, requesting a change in the speech policies. Chancellor
Strong responded by modifying these rules. The University would now allow
advocating positions on ballot propositions and campaigning for or against
candidates who were up for election. No other changes would be made.[22]
For the
next two days, administrators warned various student groups to stop prohibited
tabling.[23]
On September 30th, the school began disciplinary proceedings against five
students for manning tables at Bancroft and Telegraph.[24]
The Students were cited and told to attend a 3:00 meeting with the deans.
Several other students who were manning tables asked to go to the meeting as
well. Between 400 and 600 students even signed statements declaring they were
equally responsible for tabling, figuring the school could not easily punish
them all and would therefore have to punish no one.[25]
[26]
At 3:00,
more than 300 students showed up for the disciplinary meeting. Only the five
cited students were allowed inside. Dean Williams then allowed three “leaders”
of the protesting students to join. Remaining students waited outside the
Dean's Office until the next morning, only to be told by Chancellor Strong the
eight students had been suspended indefinitely.[27]
The sit-in
continued for another three hours. Students also began flaunting their
rebellion by tabling right on the steps of Sproul
Hall (the administrative building).[28]
Explosion
On October
1st, angry students set up ten tables in front of the administration building.
They scheduled a protest rally for noon that day. They demanded a change in the
rules, and also demanded equal treatment for all students under the rules. They
further asked administrators to lift the eight suspensions.[29]
At 11:45,
Dean Van Houten brought one other dean and the campus
police chief to one of the tables in Sproul Plaza.[30]
[31]
The authorities, ignoring a dozen other people tabling, approached Jack
Weinberg.[32]
Weinberg’s table offered literature about the Congress of Racial Equality and
also held a collection jar for that civil rights organization. The authorities
told Weinberg he was violating the school’s policy. Weinberg refused to fold up
his table. The campus police chief arrested him.[33]
A crowd of
students gathered around, chanting, “Take all of us.” When the cop shoved Weinberg
into the back of a police car, students surrounded the car and sat down,
refusing to let the squad car leave with Weinberg.[34]
Mario Savio
jumped on the car’s roof. This philosophy major, a civil rights activist who
had just returned from Mississippi Freedom Summer, made a speech denouncing the
administration’s repression of free speech.[35]
Though Savio had suffered a stuttering problem in
high school,[36]
he now became “the student rebellion’s most eloquent orator.” [37]
Other students followed Savio’s example, lining up
one-by-one to climb on the roof the of the police car and speak.[38]
(All these students politely took off their shoes to minimize their damage to
the car.[39])
Administrators announced they
would not negotiate the school rules. Some frat boys threw lit cigarettes and
eggs at the protesters, but nothing seemed to break the protesters’
determination. The hecklers finally left, following an appeal from the school’s
Catholic chaplain.[40]
Students also occupied Sproul Hall, demanding an end to the suspension of the
eight students. Police ordered them out, and administrators closed Sproul Hall early. [41]
A group of faculty members
convinced President Kerr to meet with students. On October 2nd, Kerr met with Savio. Kerr also called in over 450 police officers to
disperse the protest if agreement was not reached.[42]
Savio soon
announced an agreement. Police left. Protesters disbursed. Weinberg was booked,
but the university dropped the charges, as agreed.[43] The agreement also included provisions that
would have the eight suspensions decided by a committee of the Academic Senate,
and have rule-changes examined by another committee.[44]
The squad
car had been held in place for 32 hours. The students now had an agreement with
the administration. Students even paid to repair the squad car roof that had
dented under the weight of various speakers.[45]
After the students’ victory, the school seemed ready to resume its quiet
operations.
The Fire
Rekindled: FSM
Following
the initial victory, the broad coalition of student groups that had formed the
“United Front” now created the more formal organization to enforce the
agreement: the Free Speech Movement (FSM). This organization was structured as
follows: Each student group sent representatives to a large committee. That
committee elected delegates to a steering committee that made day-to-day
tactical decisions by arriving at consensus after thorough debate. These
leaders kept the student body informed by printing leaflets describing the day’s
events, distributing 20,000 copies each day.[46]
FSM’s organization was
effective. As FSM steering committee member Jackie Goldberg later wrote:
We were
able to write, publish, and distribute ten to twenty thousand leaflets within
hours. We communicated regularly with the press, with other campuses, with
elected officials, and with an enormous Berkeley campus. We fed people at mass
rallies and at long meetings. We were able to speak to living groups, apartment
dwellers, and commuters at a variety of venues. All this with
no real money coming in and while under attack from virtually all corners of
mainstream society.[47]
The
division of labor, though, was tainted by sexism. Bettina Aptheker,
a prominent member of FSM, later wrote, “it was men
who dominated our meetings and discussions. Women did most of the clerical work
and fundraising and provided food. None of this was particularly recognized as
work, and I never questioned this division of labor or even saw it as an issue!”[48]
On October
5th, the Chancellor put together a committee to explore the problems raised by
the students, as agreed.[49]
He did not, however, wait to receive recommendations from students or faculty
before appointing 10 members of the Campus Committee on Political Activity
(CCPA). He also announced the Faculty Committee on Student Conduct, appointed
by the Chancellor, would decide the cases of the eight suspended students, not
the Academic Senate as earlier agreed.[50]
The CCPA
held its first public meeting on October 13th. About 50 students spoke at the
meeting; all but one called for the Committee to be disbanded and reformed in a
way that kept better faith with the October 2nd agreement. The next day, the
FSM announced they would start protesting again if the administration would not
sit down with them and discuss their differences in interpreting the October
2nd agreement. [51]
On October
15th, President Kerr finally sat down with student leaders. Arthur Ross, a
Professor of Industrial Relations, mediated. President Kerr agreed to send the
cases of the eight suspended students to an Academic Senate committee. He also
agreed to restructure the CCPA with eighteen members, including four from the
FSM, to discuss changing rules on speech.[52]
(Originally, the CCPA was to have only 2 members selected by FSM.)[53]
The CCPA later agreed that all its decisions would be by consensus, with each
group (students, faculty, administration) getting one
vote.[54]
That same
day Kerr made this agreement, the Academic Senate, at President Kerr’s request,
put together an ad hoc committee to decide on disciplining the eight suspended
students. Law professor Ira Heyman led this
committee.[55] [56]
After another six days, the Heyman committee
requested the eight students be invited back to school temporarily until the
matter was resolved. Kerr refused.[57]
On
November 7th, the CCPA’s administration faction announced it would never
support the students’ position on political advocacy.[58]
The FSM began protests.
Two days
later, 1,200 students rallied on the steps of Sproul
Hall. Students also ended their moratorium on tabling by setting up tables in
front of Sproul Hall. University officials took the
names of students who tabled. Then 800 students signed statements insisting
they, too, had manned tables. The next day, Chancellor Strong responded by
dissolving the CCPA, ending all discussion of rule-changes.[59]
On
November 12th, the Heyman committee made its decision
about the suspensions. They recommended that six of the eight suspended
students be immediately reinstated and the discipline expunged from their
records. It recommended the remaining two students (Savio
and Art Goldberg[60])
be officially suspended for six-weeks, less than the time they had already
served in suspension. Chancellor Strong announced he would not act on these
recommendations until after December 8th, when the Academic Senate
held its next official meeting.[61]
On
November 20th, over 3,000 students rallied, with Joan Baez singing, while
waiting for the Regents to weigh in with their decision.[62]
Following a recommendation from Kerr and Strong,[63]
the Regents finally ended the suspensions of the eight students but refused to
clear their records. Savio and Goldberg were placed
on probation. The Regents also agreed to allow fund‑raising and recruitment, and allow some political advocacy.
They would not, however, allow advocacy of illegal action such as sit-ins and
other civil disobedience.[64]
“In principle,” Bettina Aptheker wrote later, “this
was unacceptable because the advocacy in such cases was still protected by the
First Amendment. In practice it was unacceptable because at the height of the
Civil Rights Movement it was precisely the advocacy of nonviolent civil
disobedience that assured the promise of success.”[65]
Two days
later, students held a sit-in at Sproul Hall that
lasted only three hours. [66]
After weeks of rallies and finally a partial victory, the Free Speech Movement
was losing energy. The student body was losing its anger. The fire, it seemed,
had finally smoldered out.
Then the
Chancellor fanned the flames by bringing new charges against FSM leaders. Mario
Savio, Art Goldberg, Jackie Goldberg, and Brian
Turner all faced new disciplinary action. The FSM, burning with renewed
passion, immediately demanded the school drop charges against these leaders
within 24 hours or face demonstrations.[67]
Another
Explosion: the Sit-In
Administrators refused to drop the charges.
The next day, as threatened, 6,000 students attended a rally denouncing the
administration’s action. Students took over the administration headquarters in Sproul Hall with a sit-in, and singer Joan Baez showed up
to lead the protesters in singing “We Shall Overcome.”[68]
How many students were involved in this sit-in? Reports vary, ranging from 800[69]
to 1,500[70].
Students
spent the night eating peanut butter sandwiches, watching Charlie Chaplin
films, and enjoying “Free University” classes.[71]
The next day (December 3), Governor Pat Brown ordered in over 600 cops.[72]
The police dragged out protesters one floor at a time.[73] They arrested over 700 students. More than
600 students would be convicted of trespassing, resisting arrest, or both.[74]
While cops were dragging out protesters, more students arrived to picket
outside Sproul Hall, protesting the police action.[75]
Faculty
members raised bail money for students.[76]
About 900 faculty members met and called for free speech and amnesty for the
protesters. All day on December 3rd, teachers who tried to contact
administration could not get through. All administrators were apparently under
orders not to talk to faculty.[77]
The next
day, many students refused to attend classes. Two departments cancelled all
their classes, and many professors refused to cross picket lines to teach.[78]
Administrators
Learn not to Play with Matches
Protesters
were now demanding more than before. No longer did they merely want the right
to free speech in one small zone. They wanted free speech campus‑wide.[79]
In Savio’s words, “only the courts have the power to
determine and punish abuses of freedom of speech.”[80]
If the FSM
was in any danger of flagging again, the administration reenergized the group
on December 7th. At the Berkeley Greek Theatre, the administration held a
meeting with students. When Mario Savio attempted to
speak, he was grabbed off the stage by campus police in front of 16,000 fellow
students.[81]
As Savio later recalled:
There was
this meeting at the Greek Theatre. [University President] Clark Kerr had
decided on the solution. He had his plan. His plan had nothing in it about free
speech. No correspondence at all between his plan for
solving the “campus chaos,” which was all he was concerned about. Nothing at
all in his plan that was responsive to any of the things that we had said. ...
The speech was over. They turned off the microphone. I walked to the center of
the stage to tell people, to announce simply that we’re going to have a meeting
down in [Sproul] Plaza. That was my intention. To discuss these issues. We were afraid of losing [the
battle] at that very moment. And we could have. And fortunately, they had ready
their cops, and they came and they pulled me down.”[82]
The
administration’s public behavior contrasted sharply with that of the FSM. As
Steven Weissman wrote, “Meetings of the FSM’s
Executive Committee and Graduate Coordinating Committee, both of which I came
to chair, encouraged vigorous, often rollicking debate. We even opened the
floor to those in our midst who were conniving with administration envoys to
scuttle the movement.”[83]
Angered by
the administration’s suppression of dissent, graduate students responded with a
strike that shut down the university. On December 8th, the Academic Senate
voted in support of the FSM demands.[84] By a vote of 824 to 115, they supported
repealing all university restrictions on the content of speech.[85]
Students cheered; many cried.[86]
In
January, a new campus chancellor was appointed.[87]
The chancellor followed the faculty recommendations. The Regents declared the
university would no longer violate free speech.[88]
The FSM had victory at last.
A Fireplace
in History
The first
white student movement since the 1930’s was a success.[89]
But it did not end there. This success inspired more students to stand up.
For
another five years, the UC Berkeley students, now broken-in to civil
disobedience, continued disrupting school activity while fighting for various
causes.[90]
By 1966,
conservative Ronald Reagan moaned:
There has been a ... morality and decency gap at the
University of California at Berkeley where a small minority of beatniks,
radicals, and filthy speech advocates have brought such shame to and such a
loss of confidence in a great University that applications for enrollment were
down 21% in 1967 and are expected to decline even further.[91]
The
university had changed greatly since its days of quiet compliance.
Apatheker later reported that her visibility as a woman in the
FSM inspired other women. “I had no idea of the extent to which my
participation was significant to other women simply because I was female. Years
later I learned that there were women who left abusive marriages because they
saw me on television, women who decided to speak up in their classes or to say
what they really thought to a male companion or lover, because they heard me
speak at a rally on Sproul Hall steps.”[92]
In their
patriotic fight for American freedom, these protesters became the symbol of an
era. It is hard to say how much credit these protesters really deserve. Much of
their success derived from an administration that tried to beat them into
submission and saw its efforts backfire. Administrators should have learned
here the lesson Princess Leia tried to teach the evil
governor in Star Wars: the more that a leader tightens his grip, the
more subjects slip through his fingers.
Yet the
students deserve credit. When the time came for action, they were ready. They
had the courage, the dedication, and the organization to take on the
administration. And they won.
Bibliography
Primary Sources
Aptheker, Bettina. “Gender Politics and the FSM: A Meditation
on Women and Freedom of Speech.” The Free Speech Movement: Reflections on
Berkeley in the 1960s. Ed. Robert Cohen and Reginald E. Zelnik. Berkeley: University of California Press.
2002. An essay by an FSM leader.
“The Berkeley Free Speech Controversy (Preliminary
Report).” December 13, 1964. A report by a
fact-finding committee of graduate political scientists.
Goldberg, Jackie. “War is Declared!”
The Free Speech Movement: Reflections on Berkeley in the 1960s. Ed. Robert Cohen and Reginald E. Zelnik.
Berkeley: University of California Press. 2002. An essay by a woman who served
on the FSM’s steering committee.
Hoffman, Abbie. Soon to be a Major Motion Picture. New York: Berkley
Books, 1980. Hoffman’s autobiography.
Kerr, Clark. Letter to Phillip Burton. May 29, 1964. Online
at http://ark.cdlib.org/
Reagan, Ronald. “Ronald Reagan Denounces the Morality
Gap at Berkeley, 1966.” Major Problems in California
History. Ed. Sucheng
Chan and Spencer Olin. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company. 1997. A speech
by the actor turned politician.
Savio, Mario. “Mario Savio Defends
the Free Speech Movement at Berkeley, 1965.” Major
Problems in California History. Ed. Sucheng Chan and Spencer Olin. Boston: Houghton
Mifflin Company. 1997. An essay by the FSM’s most prominent leader.
Savio, Mario. “Thirty Years Later.” The Free Speech
Movement: Reflections on Berkeley in the 1960s. Ed.
Robert Cohen and Reginald E. Zelnik. Berkeley:
University of California Press. 2002. A transcription of a speech Savio gave three decades later.
Weissman, Steven. “Endgame.” The
Free Speech Movement: Reflections on Berkeley in the 1960s. Ed. Robert Cohen and Reginald E. Zelnik.
Berkeley: University of California Press. 2002. An article by a member of the
FSM steering committee.
Secondary Sources
Burns, Stewart. Social
Movements of the 1960’s: Searching for Democracy. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1990. A history of
several grass-roots movements including FSM.
Cohen, Robert. “The Many Meanings of
the FSM.” The Free Speech Movement: Reflections on Berkeley in the
1960s. Ed. Robert Cohen and Reginald E. Zelnik. Berkeley: University of California Press.
2002. An essay by a historian.
Lustig, R. Jeffrey. “The Free Speech Movement: Protest and
Community.” The Whole World’s Watching: Peace and Social Justice Movements of the 1960’s
& 1970’s. Berkeley: Berkeley Art Center Association, 2001. An essay by a political science professor.
Rice, Richard B. and William A Bullough
and Richard J. Orsi. The Elusive Eden: A New History of
California. Boston: McGraw Hill, 2002. A textbook.
Those Who Make the Waves: Vol. 3,
No. 1. Online at: http://ark.cdlib.org/ark:/13030/kt4489n6q1. A thorough article including a timeline.
