Free Speech Movement

Still Much to Say: 
40 Years After Clash, Students and 
Administration Collaborate to Honor Tumultuous Past 

[But It Has Little Value on the Berkeley Campus]

CATHERINE HO / The Daily Californian 1oct04

Forty years ago to the day, UC Berkeley sophomore Bettina Aptheker scrambled shoeless atop a police car in Sproul Plaza in front of a sea of blinding television lights and a roaring crowd of 2,000.

She read Frederick Douglass: “Power concedes nothing without a demand.”

Four years ago, Aptheker stood—this time with shoes on—in what seemed like a parallel universe, as then-Chancellor Robert Berdahl welcomed her as keynote speaker at the opening of the Free Speech Movement Cafe.

And today, as UC Berkeley kicks off a week of activities to remember the 40th anniversary of the Free Speech Movement, the university administration, once an old foe, is now a close ally intimately involved in planning eight days of events about the movement it once tried to suppress.

“In the last few years, Berkeley’s administration has incorporated the FSM as a prideful place in the history of the university,” Aptheker said.

The aging protesters, once clubbed and dragged down the steps of Sproul Hall by police, are returning to the university’s open arms as keynote speakers and panelists.

The police patrol car, once a searing symbol of police authority to the 2,000 students who swarmed beside it in 1964, is now on loan from the UCPD for next Friday’s noon rally. One-time presidential candidate Howard Dean will stand on top of it. ASUC President Misha Leybovich and movement veterans, including Aptheker and Assemblymember Jackie Goldberg, D-Los Angeles, will also take their turns on top of the car.

“The fact that the administration has partnered with the FSM Archives to celebrate the past and bring awareness to important issues of today demonstrates that they really learned from the administration’s mistakes in the 60s and is committed to help foster student activism,” Leybovich said.

Faculty, once deeply divided over whether to support the students, now can hold teach-ins in Sproul Hall.

And administrators, who once fought to keep students in line before the public and state Legislature, are beaming.

“We’re excited and proud of the history of the FSM,” said Dean of Students Karen Kenney. “What it accomplished was very important for the campus and the country—it clarified that students and individuals have the right to express themselves.”

Yet in 1964, Kenney’s counterparts, Deans Arleigh Williams and Katherine Towle at first prohibited students from passing out political fliers and tabling.

During that fall, the administration suspended eight students for violating tabling regulations, dissolved the Campus Committee on Political Activity, refused to clear the records of six suspended students or remove the probation sentence on two of the movement’s most prominent student leaders, Mario Savio and Art Goldberg.

Those reactions and the student frustration culminated on this day 40 years ago when police attempted to arrest demonstrator Jack Weinberg for tabling on Sproul. The police car he sat in became the center of a two-day demonstration that brought together 2,000 students.

As time has passed since 1964, protesters have moved on with their lives, administrators have passed away and faculty divisions have faded. The frosty antagonism thawed, marked by gestures such as the naming of the Savio Steps and the opening of the cafe.

Planning a week’s worth of events, however, has still been a delicate tug-of-war between students, movement veterans and administrators who are trying to navigate how best to remember the spirit of student activists four decades ago.

Several student leaders objected to using a police car in the rally.

“It represents police brutality and is offensive to many communities, especially communities of color,” said CalSERVE Senator Dena Takruri.

These recent disagreements, however, are internal to student body leadership, unlike the face-off between students and the university administration 40 years ago.

“(Administrators) have learned that they could not stop dissent with repression,” Goldberg said.

Although the administration has made overtures to incorporate the movement into its history, some veterans and students say the 180-degree turn-around by the university and police may only be on the surface.

“It doesn’t seem that the administration has changed since the 60s,” said Michael Rossman, President of Free Speech Movement Archives, who actively participated in the movement as a graduate student. “The administration is happy to rhetorically approve the FSM, but is not happy to approve any but the most innocuous kinds of student activism.”

Although today UC Berkeley students have what the original Free Speech Movement protesters demanded—the right to table and flyer on campus for political causes—more extreme forms of activism have met harsh university reactions.

When pro-Palestinian students held a sit-in in Wheeler Hall more than two years ago during a midterm, the demonstration turned into a semester-long struggle filled with conduct hearings and one student’s bachelor’s degree in jeopardy.

Nonetheless, the Free Speech Movement set the precedent for activism on the UC Berkeley campus, and secured students’ rights to free speech.

“I think there’s no question that there have been big advances as a result of student activism and faculty support,” said Leon Wofsy, a retired biology professor who was part of the minority of faculty on campus who doggedly supported the movement. “It took some years, but eventually the administration embraced and celebrated the FSM.”

source: http://www.dailycal.org/particle.php?id=16315 1oct04

From Atop a Police Car, A Revolution Was Born

RICHARD BRENNEMAN / Berkeley Daily Planet 1oct04

Two major forces dominating American society in the 1950s—one waning, the other waxing—collided in Sproul Plaza 40 years ago today, Oct. 1, climaxing in an epochal moment. “The connections to the civil rights movement are extensive, along with a continuation of the organizing against McCarthyism,” said Bettina Aptheker, a participant in the events of that memorable day and today a professor and chair of Women’s Studies at UC Santa Cruz.

Many of the activists on Sproul Plaza that day had been active in the movement against McCarthyism and its embodiment in the notorious House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC).

Four years earlier, another UC Berkeley student coalition, SLATE, organized another memorable protest when HUAC came to San Francisco looking for Reds under beds in Berkeley and elsewhere around the bay, said Peter Franck, one of the group’s leading activists.

Hundreds of Berkeley students arrived outside San Francisco City Hall on the morning of May 13, 1960 to protest the HUAC hearings underway inside.

After denying students admission to the building, police brought in high pressure fire hoses and blasted them down the steps, arresting dozens, including 31 Cal students.

The next day brought 5,000 demonstrators.

Repercussions of the protest included the resignation en masse of the Daily Californian staff after a university crackdown on the publication for urging students to join the protest, the banning of SLATE from campus activities and the sowing of seeds that would burst forth four years later on Sproul Plaza.

Aptheker had arrived on campus two years after the HUAC protest, and she was on that plaza that day, Oct. 1, 1964, to set up a table for the W.E.B. Dubois Club, a prominent civil rights organization of the day with extensive ties to the Old Left.

As the daughter of leading Marxist journalist Herbert Aptheker, long reviled by the FBI, she knew first-hand the repressive passions nurtured by Wisconsin Republican Sen. Joseph McCarthy, and her childhood friendship with future African American organizer Angela Davis had deepened her sympathies with the rising demands for equality that were shaking the nation.

Tables on Bancroft Way at Telegraph Avenue had been banned by university officials on Sept. 14, but organizers for the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and other civil rights organizations defied the ban, Aptheker among them.

In retaliation, campus deans later came out and took the names of all those who were sitting at the tables—Aptheker included—for possible administrative action.

“For every person whose name was taken, another person would then sit down at the table,” she said. “The deans had taken the names of over 800 students by the end of the day.”

In response, members of the United Front, a coalition of 18 groups of all political persuasions, held a meeting where Mario Savio, a junior recently arrived form New York, spoke out.

“I remember him saying that the principle was freedom of speech on campus, not the tables. So he suggested moving the tables to Sproul Plaza. That was when the police car came,” she said.

Among those who had set up tables directly in front of the administration building was Jack Weinberg, a UC alum with a long involvement in civil rights who was organizing for CORE.

Bruce Africa, now a psychiatrist on the staff of Napa State Hospital, was one of those at the tables. “It was the first time in my life I ever did anything overtly against the law,” he recalled. “Jack Weinberg was one of those who emerged as a leader, and he’s been one ever since.”

When police asked Weinberg for his name and non-existent student ID card, the young radical stood mute and the officers arrested him. He went limp, and was carried into the car.

“I don’t know who shouted ‘Sit down!’ I was standing right by the driver’s side front fender, and sat,” Aptheker said. “There were thousands of us.

“And that was the beginning.”

In a brilliant bit of improvisation, the students quickly deflated the tires and the police car was trapped.

For 32 hours, thousands of students continued the sit-in.

It wasn’t long before they realized that the roof of the captive car offered a perfect soap box, and it was from there that Savio emerged as the voice of the movement, a figure who had in a few short hours captured the attention of the world.

“I remember him sitting on top of the police car, talking to a Chronicle reporter in his stocking feet,” said Marilyn Noble, who was to play a unique role in the ensuing events.

“I said, ‘Who does your laundry? You don’t have time any more.’ Then I got his address,” she said.

Before the sit-in ended, campus officials released Weinberg, refusing to press charges.

Yet at the moment, Aptheker and her friends had no sense they were participants in an historic moment. “None of us understood that until much later.”

For her, the recognition came on Nov. 20., when the UC regents met in University Hall on Oxford Street.

“We organized a rally on the Sproul footsteps and we marched to the regents’ meeting. There were 5,000 of us, and for me that was when I understood that we had a huge movement and I began to feel that we were part of something that was historic,” she said.

In the interim, Marilyn Noble had emerged as the caretaker of the core leadership of what had become the Free Speech Movement.

She fed them and kept them in clean clothes—suits and ties for Savio and the other men in those short-haired, clean-shaven pre-Hippie days.

When it came time for the November march on the regents, “I took one of Jackie Goldberg’s sorority bed sheets and made a sign” that students carried at the head of the march as the paraded through Sather Gate and on to the regents’ meeting.

Perhaps the most fitting memorial to those events of 400 years ago will come Friday noon, Oct. 8, during the upcoming Free Speech Movement 40th anniversary, from atop the roof of another police car in Sproul when FSM participants will seize the moment to dissect the latest challenge to free speech in America, the Patriot Act.

“That’s the best way to commemorate the signal victory of the Free Speech Movement,” said Michael Rossman, a key organizer of the week-long celebration.

source: http://www.berkeleydailyplanet.com/article.cfm?issue=10-01-04&storyID=19756 1oct04

Berkeley Cops Ticketed Claremont Protest Supporters

JAKOB SCHILLER / Berkeley Daily Planet 1oct04

After nine straight hours on her feet as an event usher, Carol Harris could sympathize with the workers she passed at 11:30 p.m. who were walking a 24-hour picket outside the Claremont Hotel at the end of August. That’s why Harris honked three short times in support as she headed up through the heavy traffic on Ashby Avenue, past the hotel and towards her Oakland home. The next thing she knew, Harris saw flashing lights. A Berkeley police officer pulled her over and issued a ticket for unreasonable use of her horn.

“I could see if I laid on the horn for 50 years, but three short beeps?” said Harris, who thought about fighting the ticket but finally decided to pay it, but not before calling the Daily Planet to complain. Nonetheless, she is still wondering why she was pulled over for such a minor infraction. “I was so pissed off, just because I empathize with these people who are making slave wages, they must have really meant it if they were out there at 11 p.m.”

According to Joe Oakies, the Public Information Officer for the Berkeley Police, Berkeley and Oakland officers responded to the picket after neighbors complained about the noise created by the picket, including the car horns. He said officers were in the area from around 11 p.m. to 2 a.m. and issued roughly 30 citations.

The picket, which started on the night of Aug. 27 and lasted for the next 27 hours, was organized by the Oakland-based Hotel and Restaurant Employees (HERE) union local 2850. It was meant to commemorate the three-year anniversary of their boycott against the hotel which has refused to sign a union contract for spa workers and renew two existing contracts for other employees.

Before the police showed up, some neighbors came down to the picket and respectfully asked the union to give them warning before scheduling another all-night picket, according to Claire Darby, an organizer with the union.

“There were one or two that said ‘you are driving me crazy, please go away,’” she said.

Before issuing the honking tickets, officers also forced the union to shut down their amplified sound in compliance with the sound permit issued by the Oakland city clerk.

The union did so, but asked the officer’s to refrain from issuing tickets. They told officers that motorists would have no way to know they would violate the law by honking. Picketers tried to make a sign that told passersby not to honk, according to Darby, but they couldn’t find anything big enough to convey the message in the dark. They resorted to using hand gestures to deter people from honking but were not very successful.

“I think there is a lot of support for Claremont workers in Berkeley and Oakland and you cannot shut it down,” said Darby. It was also ironic, said Darby, because one of the officers issuing citations was on a motorcycle that made noise every time the officer started it up to chase a car.

“The motorcycle was making more noise that we were,” said Darby.

source: http://www.berkeleydailyplanet.com/article.cfm?issue=10-01-04&storyID=19758 1oct04