More than 50 years have passed since a Berkeley student rebellion, known as the Free Speech Movement (FSM), helped to define the 1960s as an era of unprecedented and massive student protest in the United States. From the many history workshops that I have led on the 1960s with high school teachers and students, I know that the FSM receives little or no attention in social studies classrooms. The teachers with whom I have spoken cite two major reasons for this omission:

1. A lack of time. The academic year is almost over by the time teachers get to the 1960s, so that if they cover a mass protest movement from that era, it is likely to be the civil rights movement rather than the FSM
2. The teachers themselves learned little about the Berkeley rebellion in their own history education, and so they do not feel ready to teach the topic.
    

The story of the Berkeley rebellion is a dramatic one, filled with political confrontations that should be especially interesting to students since they involve conflicts between students and their elders—in this case, the administrators who set the rules for the Berkeley campus. The free speech crisis began at Berkeley in mid-September 1964 when the University of California administration ordered the closing of the students’ traditional free speech area, the strip of sidewalk on Bancroft Way and Telegraph Avenue, just outside of the campus’s southern entrance. This was the place where Berkeley student activist groups staffed card tables from which they leafleted, recruited members, and collected funds for political causes.

The closing of Berkeley’s free speech area might at first glance seem puzzling since the University of California’s president was not some intolerant reactionary, but Clark Kerr, a well-known liberal. Actually, the University of California had a long-standing free speech problem, created by the university administration’s fear of antagonizing the Golden State’s powerful conservative political and business establishment, whose leaders in the legislature might, if angered, cut the university’s funding. Such fears led Kerr’s predecessor, UC President Robert Gordon Sproul, to codify restrictions on political speakers and demonstrations in 1934 as part of the West Coast red scare sparked by the San Francisco General Strike. Under Sproul, and with the support of the UC Board of Regents (the anti-radical and big business-dominated UC governing body), political demonstrations and fund raising were barred from campus grounds. Later, in the Cold War era, under pressure from the state legislature’s Un-American Activities Committee, Sproul imposed an anti-Communist loyalty oath on the university faculty that led in 1950 to a purge of professors who refused to sign it: about 45 percent of all faculty nationwide who were fired for political reasons during this period taught at the University of California.1 Because of the restrictions on political speech and demonstrations on campus, the student free speech area was on what was thought to be city, not campus, property, just outside UC’s main southern entrance. After succeeding Sproul as president of UC in 1958, Kerr made some liberalizations of the campus speaker policy—most notably ending the ban on Communist speakers. However, Kerr was eager not to alienate California’s conservative political and business establishment, and was too cautious to challenge the old rules barring political demonstrations and fund-raising on campus. Indeed, as he would later acknowledge (shortly before his firing in 1967 by Governor Ronald Reagan), “The University of California had the most restrictive policies [on political speech] of any university I have known about outside of a dictatorship.”2

In the early 1960s, the free speech area on Bancroft and Telegraph Avenue had served as a kind of safety valve, enabling students to organize for a wide range of political causes just off the campus despite the lack of such freedom on the campus itself. The most controversial activity was the organizing of civil rights protests against Bay Area employers whose hiring policies discriminated against African Americans. Since these demonstrations often involved civil disobedience, including mass sit-ins, they antagonized conservatives, who viewed such protests as lawless and anti-business. Conservative legislators began pressuring the university to suppress this political activity, especially after the fair hiring demonstrations had led (in the spring semester of 1964) to a huge sit-in and mass arrests at the Sheraton Palace Hotel, one of the San Francisco tourist industry’s key employers.

Such pressure increased over the summer of 1964 when Berkeley students demonstrated against conservative Republican presidential candidate Barry Goldwater (who had opposed the Civil Rights Act of 1964) and cheered his moderate and pro-civil rights rival, William Scranton, at the Republican National Convention in San Francisco’s Cow Palace. This anti-Goldwater student organizing led the pro-Goldwater Oakland Tribune to send a reporter, Carl Irving, to Berkeley to investigate this political activism. Irving discovered, and alerted the UC administration to the fact, that the student political tables on the Bancroft Way and Telegraph Avenue sidewalk strip were at least partially on campus property, as marked by the plaques at its border. Kerr was abroad when this discovery was made.

But the campus administration, headed by Chancellor Edward Strong (note that there were two UC administrations, that of Berkeley under Strong and that of the statewide UC system headed by Kerr) and influenced by the conservative Vice Chancellor Alex Sherriffs, decided that since the Bancroft strip was on campus property it was therefore covered by UC’s rules against political advocacy, so such advocacy had to be banned there. The students learned of this decision in a letter from Dean Katherine Towle soon after the fall semester began in September 1964.

In his memoir, The Gold and the Blue, Kerr later stated that it had been a huge mistake to close the free speech area by the south campus entrance in 1964. In fact, Kerr termed this “the second greatest administrative blunder... in university history [the first being Sproul’s imposition of the loyalty oath],”3 but he blamed Berkeley chancellor Edward Strong for ordering the closing. Kerr came to regret that he had not overruled Strong on this, and in his memoir termed that failure on his part “the third” greatest mistake in UC’s history, but explained that in 1964 he was “obsessed” with the need to decentralize decision making at UC, so that his respect for the chancellor’s autonomy had prevented him from overruling Strong.4

Confrontation on Sprout Plaza

Outraged at the closing of their free speech area, a broad coalition of student groups—from Left to Right—met with the dean, asking that the ban on political advocacy be lifted. But when it became evident that the administration would not lift the ban, the students began to defy it by staffing their political tables right in the middle of the campus’s main thoroughfare, Sproul Plaza.

The administration responded to this defiance on September 30 by citing five of the protesting students for violating university regulations, and summoning them to the deans’ offices for disciplinary action. But hundreds of students quickly demonstrated their solidarity with the cited students by signing a statement indicating that they too had violated the free speech ban and that if the administration wanted to punish students for resisting the ban, it could not single out a few but would have to discipline all of them. This solidarity was expressed even more dramatically later that day when the five cited students showed up for their disciplinary appointments accompanied by hundreds of student free-speech protesters, who demanded that the deans meet with all of them. When the deans refused this demand, hundreds of students staged a sit-in outside the deans’ office in Sproul Hall. This first free speech sit-in lasted past midnight, when the protesters voted to leave the building and resume their defiance of the ban the next day on Sproul Plaza—agreeing to do so even more militantly by refusing to identify themselves when asked to give their names by deans seeking to cite them.

The conflict escalated shortly before noon on the following day, October 1, when two Berkeley deans sought to cite civil rights activist and former math graduate student Jack Weinberg for defying the free speech ban. Weinberg had been staffing the table of one of Berkeley’s most active civil rights group, Campus CORE [Congress of Racial Equality] on the Sproul steps. When the deans ordered him to identify himself and then leave, Weinberg refused. The deans then contacted the police, who drove a squad car on to Sproul Plaza and sought to arrest Weinberg. But this attempted arrest occurred at the most inopportune time, lunch hour, when many students who were just out of classes were walking through the Plaza. Before the police could place Weinberg in their car, protesting students shouted “Take All of Us!” Then there were shouts of “Sit Down,” and first dozens, then hundreds, and finally thousands of students sat-in around the police car, forming a non-violent human blockade that made it impossible for the police car to move and the arrest to be completed.

The blockade around the police car would last 32 hours and was to that point the longest, most massive and disruptive act of civil disobedience ever committed on an American college or university campus. Just moments after the blockade began, Mario Savio, a 21-year-old philosophy major, civil rights activist, and vocal critic of the university’s free speech ban, ascended to the top of the police car (after removing his shoes so as not to damage the car) and used its roof as a platform to speak to the crowd of students on the Plaza. Savio, who would become the Free Speech Movement’s most famous orator, explained why the blockade had begun and urged students to join the free speech sit-in. Savio would be the first of dozens of students to speak from the car-top, night and day, discussing free speech ideals that had led to the protest, and calling for an end to the university’s ban on political advocacy.

The appeal of Savio’s oratory was the same as that of the Free Speech Movement itself in that it centered on freedom, democracy, civil rights, and fairness. Savio was a veteran of both the Bay Area and deep South civil rights movements, who had been arrested in the Sheraton Palace sit-in and risked his life as a volunteer in the voting rights crusade in Mississippi during the Freedom Summer of 1964. His movement experience gave him the moral authority to make a powerful case that the closing of Berkeley’s free speech area was a blatant attempt to disable the student wing of the civil rights movement. Though the FSM’s use of sit-ins might seem radical, since such civil disobedience tactics violated the university’s regulations and the law, the student movement was committed to non-violence and only engaged in non-violent sit-ins as a last resort (in the face of administration stonewalling). This, in addition to student concern that the administration unfairly singled out FSM leaders for punishment, added to its appeal to mainstream students. Over the course of the semester, these same factors would also attract support from the faculty, which increasingly viewed the turmoil as a sign that the administration lacked the competence to govern the campus and settle what should have been an easily resolved dispute over free speech.

Though initially the campus administration, headed by Chancellor Edward Strong, refused to negotiate with the free speech protesters, President Clark Kerr, who headed the statewide University of California administration, agreed to negotiate in the hope of avoiding a dangerous confrontation with police— who were angry that their squad car had been blockaded. Kerr and the protesters came up with a preliminary agreement— known as the Pact of October 2—which was a compromise of sorts that deferred, but did not settle, the free speech dispute.

The protesters agreed to end their blockade, and in exchange, the University administration agreed not to press charges against Weinberg, who was booked and released by the police. The Pact also provided for the establishment of a faculty committee to resolve the disciplinary cases against students who had defied the ban, and created a student- faculty-administration committee to evaluate the campus rules on political speech. For several weeks, the FSM tried to work through this last committee to end the ban on political advocacy, and during this period of negotiation the students did not engage in demonstrations.

In the second text of this blog post series, we will continue to delve into the history of the Berkeley Free Speech Movement, its 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.