Dr. Robert Cohen
In the first edition of this blog post series we hoped to illuminate the history of the Free Speech Movement, and empower teachers to overcome the barriers to teaching this rich, relevant history in their respective classrooms. The second installment of this blogpost series provides us with the opportunity to continue to focus on the FMS’ significance to the American Civil Rights Movement, as well as share insights to empower educators to generate excitement and deep historical learning about mass protest, civil disobedience, and free speech amongst their students.
Winning the Free Speech Battle
By early November, however, negotiations had deadlocked as it became clear that the University of California’s administration would not allow students full freedom of speech on campus. Although a liberal, Kerr did not see his actions during the Free Speech Movement crisis as illiberal or hostile to free speech. He insisted that UC was restricting political advocacy, not speech—meaning that students were free to discuss any political ideas they liked, but not to use the campus as a base for political protest, and not to use the threat of civil disobedience as a means of forcing the university to change its policies.
The FSM responded to the breakdown of negotiations by resuming its defiance of the free speech ban, setting up its political advocacy tables on campus, and on November 20 holding a mass march outside the UC Board of Regents meeting. The Regents ignored the student march and refused to consider the protesters’ free speech demands. Worse still, over the Thanksgiving break the Berkeley administration announced that it was initiating disciplinary actions against Savio and three other FSM leaders.
Convinced that petitions and further negotiations were futile, the FSM in early December decided that the only way to win its free speech battle and to prevent the administration from punishing its leaders was to return to mass civil disobedience. So on December 2, 1964, after a huge FSM rally, some 1,500 students marched in and occupied Sproul Hall, joined by folk singer Joan Baez singing the civil rights anthem, “We Shall Overcome.” At the rally preceding the sit-in, Mario Savio gave his most eloquent speech—which became the most famous call to civil disobedience on a college campus. Criticizing the UC administration as “an autocracy which runs this university,” Savio compared it to an oppressive machine opposed to freedom, and in urging students to join the sit-in, Savio declared,
“There’s a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, it makes you so sick at heart that you can’t take part.… And you’ve got to put your bodies upon the gears, and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you’ve got to make it stop. And you’ve got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it that unless you’re free the machine will be prevented from working at all.”
California Governor Edmund “Pat” Brown responded to the mass sit-in by sending in an army of police, who in the middle of the night began making arrests of the protesters in Sproul Hall. The free speech demonstrators were non-violent and did not resist arrest. But in the classic style of civil rights demonstrators, the arrestees went limp, which slowed up the arrest process so that as students came to campus they witnessed the shock- ing sight of their fellow students—free speech protesters—being arrested and placed in police buses to be taken to jail. This helped to spark a strike by Berkeley teaching assistants and a student boycott of classes. In all, some 800 protesters were arrested at Sproul Hall, the largest mass arrest in California history, and by far the largest police invasion of a college campus in the United States. The mass arrest aroused deep concern and outrage among the faculty, who thought the free speech dispute could and should have been settled by the administration months prior and should not have ended with a police incursion onto the campus. Many faculty drove out to Santa Rita prison and posted bond to bail their students out of jail.
Realizing that the mass arrest had alienated many students and faculty, President Kerr suspended classes on the morning of December 7, to enable the university community to attend a meeting on ending the crisis. This meeting, held at UC Berkeley’s outdoor amphitheater, the Greek Theatre, drew some 15,000 students and faculty. But the meeting backfired badly on Kerr, so much so that columnist Ralph Gleason mockingly dubbed it the “Tragedy at the Greek.” Kerr’s mistake was in refusing to allow any students to speak at the meeting. As the Greek Theatre convocation was about to end when the last scheduled speaker had finished, Mario Savio walked on to the stage and up to the podium. But before Savio could utter a syllable he was grabbed by police officers who dragged him away, in plain view of the huge and now outraged crowd of faculty and students—who did not miss the symbolism of this censoring of the most prominent leader of Berkeley’s Free Speech Movement.
The fiasco at the Greek Theatre was viewed by many faculty as one more sign that the administration had lost control of the campus and was incapable of resolving the free speech dispute. So the next day, December 8, 1964, the faculty’s governing body, the Academic Senate, assembled and ended the crisis by voting with a 7–1 margin (824–115) “that the content of speech or advocacy shall not be restricted by the university.”
Students reacted joyfully to the Academic Senate’s December 8 resolutions, applauding and cheering for the faculty as they exited the Wheeler Hall auditorium in which they had taken their decisive vote. The FSM responded with a rally celebrating this stunning victory for freedom of speech. At the rally, Savio noted that now at the University of California there would be “no restrictions on the content of speech save those provided by the courts.” While aware that such freedom could be abused if students did not behave responsibly, Savio expressed confidence “that the students and the faculty of the University of California will exercise their freedom with the same responsibility they’ve shown in winning their freedom.”
Teaching about the Free Speech Movement and Civil Disobedience
The history of the Free Speech Movement affords teachers a great opportunity to explore with their students the nature, ethics, risks, rewards, and strategic issues involved in deciding when and whether to engage in civil dis-obedience. To help motivate the discussion of civil disobedience, show students clips of the FSM’s mass sit-ins from the documentary film “Berkeley in the 60s” (these are in the first segment of the film, which is devoted to the FSM).5 The clips show a kind of ordered chaos, with students marching into the administration building, sitting-in along its corridors, studying, holding classes, dancing, and then preparing for arrest. Finally they begin to be dragged away by the arresting police officers.
Once students have screened these film clips they will know what a campus sit-in looks and sounds like. To put them into the shoes of Berkeley free speech activists of 1964, ask them to examine letters written by arrestees (when they were about to be sentenced for participating in the final sit-in at Sproul Hall6) to the judge (Rupert Crittenden) at the FSM trial. Most FSM activists were quite mindful of the risks they were taking in breaking the law and facing arrest, even though it was for the sake of a political cause they cherished (free speech). The letters will show your students the kinds of ideas and thinkers, from Thoreau to Gandhi and King, that Berkeley students invoked as they explained their decision to sit-in. There are hundreds of these letters in an online collection that is part of UC Berkeley Bancroft Library’s Digital Free Speech Movement Archive:
A class discussion can focus on the two contrasting primary sources presented in the sidebar to this article: Savio’s call for civil disobedience, compared with excerpts from an essay against civil disobedience by FSM critic Nathan Glazer. As a written homework assignment, students can answer the questions presented in the sidebar and present their answers in a subsequent class discuss.
The Importance of the Free Speech Movement
Much as the civil rights movement helped to make possible the emergence of the free speech movement, the FSM in turn helped to pave the way for all kinds of subsequent student movements on a range of issues, from abolishing paternalistic (in loco parentis) campus restrictions on student social life to creating Black Studies and Women’s Studies Programs, to challenging university programs that served the Pentagon and the Vietnam War. The FSM was influential because it won, demonstrating to student activists across the United States and the globe that they could use non-violent civil disobedience to change policy and maybe even change the world. The precedents that the FSM set for militant student protest were particularly influential for those who in the semesters following the Berkeley rebellion began to organize a mass national student movement against the escalating war in Vietnam. This movement would oppose campus military training (the ROTC), the use of university academic records for the draft, and campus recruitment for companies like Dow Chemical whose military products, including napalm, bombed and burned civilians in Vietnam. The FSM is an excellent case study of civic action that was initiated by young people, became a historic symbol of the 1960s, and changed America.
Notes
- Bob Blauner, Resisting McCarthyism: To Sign or Not to Sign California’s Loyalty Oath (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2009): xiii.
- “The Big UC Question: Will Kerr Stay or Go?”, Los Angeles Times, December 4, 1966.
- Clark Kerr, The Gold and the Blue: A Personal Memoir of the University of California, 19 Volume Two, Political Turmoil (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 2003): 161.
- Ibid., 154.
- “Berkeley in the 60’s,” produced by Mark Kitchell, DVD (First Run Features, 2002).
- It will likely help teachers leading class discussions if they read the analysis of the FSM letters to Judge Crittenden in Robert Cohen, “’This Was The Fight and They Had to Fight It’: The FSM’s Non-Radical Rank and File,” in Robert Cohen and Reginald E. Zelnik (editors), The Free Speech Movement: Reflections on Berkeley in the 1960s (Berkeley, Calif.:University of California Press, 2002), 227
