Today is the 45th anniversary of the Free Speech Movement at Cal Berkeley. The protest was not about civil rights or the war in Vietnam. It was simply about the right for political action on campus (fundraising and membership drives, for example).
An excerpt from a good, brief history at The Writer’s Almanac with Garrison Keillor:
At 10 a.m. on this day, they set up tables on the steps of Sproul Plaza. Fifteen minutes before noon, police went up to a guy manning one of the CORE tables. A former math grad student, he refused to identify himself or leave, and so the police arrested him [for] trespassing. He went limp. They brought in a police car to remove him (Jack Weinberg), but by now there was a huge crowd, which had gathered for the publicized noon rally. Nearly 200 students surrounded the car that the police had stuck Weinberg into, and they chanted, “Release him! Release him!” Dozens lay down in front of the squadron car and dozens more sat behind the car so that it could not move. For 32 hours, Jack Weinberg stayed inside that police car, surrounded by demonstrators. People fed him sandwiches and handed him milk through a rolled-down window of the police car.
The crowd grew to 7,000 and the number of police 500, but it was all over — peacefully ended — by the next evening.
We tend to think in terms of decades, but “The Sixties” began in 1964.
Photo from F S M.