How time flies! This fall will be the 50th anniversary of
the Free Speech Movement, and FSM veterans will return to campus for a reunion
that will feature the usual events, plus some others you might not have anticipated.
For instance, are you ready for FSM: The Musical? Produced by Stagebridge in association with
Berkeley Repertory Theatre, the full-length musical production will have its
first performance September 27 on Berkeley Rep’s Thrust Stage, with two
additional performances the following day.
But wait! There’s more! The musical was composed by none
other than Mario Savio’s
son Daniel in
collaboration with two veterans of The San Francisco Mime Troupe, Joan Holden, M.A. ’64, and Bruce Barthol ’68. Bruce sat in at
Sproul Hall when he was a 16-year-old freshman.
“I feel a great responsibility to get it right for my
father’s sake, and also for Michael
Rossman and Reggie
Zelnik and my mom,” says Daniel, who looks just like his dad. “I
grew up with this history. I know it as well as anybody who was there.”
Daniel’s mom, Lynne
Hollander Savio ’65, is the show’s creative advisor and a
member of the 50th reunion committee.
The FSM began on September 14, 1964, when the University of
California at Berkeley, under pressure from Senate Majority Leader William F. Knowland ’29, who was
angered by Civil Rights sit-ins, announced that existing
University regulations banning political activity on campus would be “strictly enforced.”
The resulting protests, unprecedented in scope, were the
harbinger of the student power, civil liberties, and antiwar demonstrations
that convulsed college campuses throughout the country for the next decade.
They also triggered a voter backlash that many believe led to the election of
Ronald Reagan, who campaigned on a promise to “clean up the mess at Berkeley,”
as governor of California in 1966.
In the five decades since that memorable autumn, FSM has
become part of the popular culture. In 2006, an episode of Battlestar Gallactica featured a
character closely paraphrasing Mario Savio’s “bodies upon the gears” speech.
“I got an email from the producer wanting to know if he
could use it,” says Lynne. “He said his wife was at Cal at the time, and they
were both admirers. He gave the Mario Savio Memorial Lecture Fund a nice
contribution in exchange.”
This year’s annual Savio lecture—to be given by Saru
Jayaraman, director of the Food Labor Research Center at Cal—will be the last
one sponsored by Savio’s friends and admirers, who created the lecture series
after his death in 1996. From here on, it will be sponsored by the Social
Sciences Division in the College of Letters & Science.
“The timing seemed right to both its organizers and campus
leaders to ensure it would continue in perpetuity as a part of our academic
landscape and as a commemoration of a very important part of campus history,”
says Carla Hesse, Dean of Social Sciences and a member of the campus
coordinating committee for the 50th anniversary. Dean Hesse’s father, Siegfried Hesse, J.D. ’50, was one
of the lawyers for the Sproul Hall arrestees.
After decades of ambivalence, UC Berkeley is finally
embracing this important part of its history. “Though I cannot presume to speak
for our current administration, I think it is fair to say that the attitude of
campus leaders to the Free Speech Movement has evolved over the past 50 years,
from fear to pride in what the students at that time stood up for and what they
accomplished,” says Dean Hesse.
The official celebrations will start even before the fall
quarter begins, with freshman and new students in the On The Same Page program
being asked to read Freedom’s Orator,
a biography of Mario Savio written by NYU professor Robert Cohen, M.A. ’81, Ph.D. ’87.
The celebrations will continue throughout the fall, including a concert by
Mavis Staples, a hootenanny at Ashkenaz, exhibits at the Bancroft Library and
the Berkeley Historical Society, documentaries at the Pacific Film Archive, a
political poetry night at the FSM Café, freedom-of-speech symposia at the law
school, and the Academic Senate’s commemoration of their historic vote on Dec.
8, 1964.
The reunion itself will take place Sept. 26–Oct. 3,
climaxing with a rally at Sproul Plaza on Oct. 1, anniversary of the arrest of
former grad student Jack Weinberg—the
man who said, “Never trust anyone over 30.” Robert Reich, Dolores Huerta, and
FSM veterans will deliver speeches from the Sproul steps, which were officially
renamed the Mario Savio Steps in 1997.
Though FSM took place half a century ago, those who were
there remember the events as if they happened yesterday: the thousands of
students on Sproul Plaza surrounding the police car holding Weinberg; the mass
sit-in at Sproul Hall and the mass arrests that followed; the cops jumping on
Mario Savio as he attempted to speak at the Greek Theater; and the climactic
Academic Senate resolution.
“Jack and I set up the card table at 11:30 on that fateful
day when he was arrested,” recalls John
Sutake ’68. “The reason he was arrested and I wasn’t, was that
he was not a currently registered student and I was. It sort of hurt my feelings.”
Many of the FSM leaders were veterans of the Mississippi
Freedom Summer, where they were deeply influenced by the nonviolent militancy
of Bob Moses and Martin Luther King, Jr. But FSM drew support from across the
political spectrum, including fraternity boys, sorority girls, even Young
Republicans. Most had never before taken part in a demonstration.
“We were all sitting there, shivering for our careers,” the
late Michael Rossman ’63,
one of the first people to sit down around the police car, told me before his
death in 2008. “We had just come out of the McCarthy period, when people’s
lives were destroyed for walking a picket line, let alone sitting around a
police car in the middle of a plaza of a great university.”
“I had to make a choice,” says Lee Felsenstein ’72. “Was I a scared
kid who wanted to be safe at all costs? Or was I a person who had principles
and was willing to take a risk to follow them? It was like that moment in Huckleberry Finn when Huck says, ‘All
right, then, I’ll go to hell.’”
“I was coming out of class and saw them take him into the
car,” says Jeremy Bruenn ’65, Ph.D. ’70.
“Somebody said we should surround the car, and we did. I remember wondering
whether they would drive over us, and being happy when they didn’t. I thought
they showed fairly good judgment in not creating more of a situation than was necessary.”
“I was sitting by the front bumper,” remembers Damon Tempey ’66. “Weinberg was in
the back of the car for more than a day, so he peed into a Coke bottle and ate
sandwiches. He had a ringside seat for the speeches as people mounted the
police car and spoke.”
But not everyone on the plaza that day was a supporter.
“The vast majority of us were simply walking across campus
and stopped to find out what all the commotion was about,” says Phil Litts ’66, who was elected Head
Yell Leader later that year on a platform that mocked FSM. “I was on my way
back to Unit Three for lunch.”
Although he opposed their goals, Litts was still impressed
by the way they went about it.
“Mario Savio was very respectful of people with opposing
views. There was no name calling. And when people climbed up on the police car,
they took their shoes off first. There was no intent to damage. It was all done
civilly, and that’s something you don’t hear a lot about.”
That night, some fraternity boys started heckling the
seated protestors and flipping lighted cigarettes at them.
“A bunch of us formed a cordon line with our backs to the
frat boys and let them beat on us to protect the people sitting on the ground,”
Sutake told me. “Later, when we realized we had to reach out to these people,
we went to the frats and sororities giving little talks explaining what we were
all about. I don’t know if it changed any minds, but we were trying to build a
mass movement, and that included people who disagreed with us.”
The confrontation escalated in fits and starts over the
next two months, with rallies, sit-ins, cancelled classes, and picket lines
urging students to boycott the few classes that were still going on. Litts, who
crossed the picket lines, arrived at his lecture hall and found only two people
there: him and the professor.
“So I had a one-on-one tutorial. I sat in the front row, he
sat on top of his desk, and we talked, and it was great.”
Ginger Lapid-Bogda ’68 (née
Snapp), on the other hand, was an FSM sympathizer who wouldn’t have dreamed of
crossing a picket line. But some classes remained open by pre-arrangement
between the professor and the FSM leadership, including her anthropology course
in Wheeler Auditorium.
“There were movie cameras in the room, and for some reason
I could tell one of the cameras was doing a close-up of me. I thought, ‘Can
they do this without my permission?’ But I didn’t think any more about it until
a few weeks later, when I was back home in L.A. having Thanksgiving dinner with
my parents. We were watching Walter Cronkite, and one of the stories was a
report from Berkeley. The reporter was saying, ‘Students are crossing picket
lines in droves, like this coed.’
“Lo and behold, it was my anthro class, and the coed the
camera was zeroing in on was me! I was watching myself being misused by the
media to state something that was totally untrue about what was going on at
Berkeley. It was my radicalizing moment, and I have never trusted the media
ever since.”
Aside from Mario Savio, the best-known FSM leader was Bettina Aptheker ’66, whom the media
portrayed as an intransigent hardliner because she was a Communist.
“The irony is that Bettina was one of the moderates,” says
Sutake. “She was always saying, ‘Go slow’ and ‘Be reasonable.’ But she was a
convenient target.”
The nightly FSM executive committee meetings often lasted
into the next morning because everyone had to be heard.
“I sometimes went nuts listening, but you had to do it, and
some of the speechifying was great,” declares Kate Coleman ’65. “Like the time we were trying to
decide if Mario should lead us into a sit-in—I forget which one—and Barbara
Garson in her Brooklynese said, ‘I don’t believe in the cult of the personality
… (pause) … but if you have one—use him!’
We all laughed, because of course it was fitting that Mario lead us that day.”
The crisis finally came to a head on December 2, when Joan
Baez led about a thousand students singing “We Shall Overcome” into Sproul Hall
for a mass sit-in.
Some passed the hours by doing homework, some sang
Civil Rights songs, some watched Laurel and Hardy movies, and a sizable group
of Jewish students celebrated Hanukkah by dancing the hora.
“I ran into my Anthro 1 T.A., who was just a wonderful guy,”
recalls Bob Kroll ’68.
“I asked him how I did on the midterm, and he said, ‘Terrible. I was going to
give you a D, but since you’re here in Sproul, I’m going to raise it to a B.’”
At 3:05 a.m. on Dec. 3, Chancellor Edward Strong ordered
the building locked and gave the students an ultimatum: Get out now or be arrested.
A few avoided arrest by climbing down a rope from the
second floor balcony, including Sutake. “I was only 18 and already on probation
from an arrest from a previous Civil Rights demonstration, so the sit-in
leaders told me I could do more good on the outside by raising bail money and
organizing transportation to Santa Rita,” he says.
But as soon as he climbed down the rope, others on the
ground outside started climbing up.
“I heard on the radio that the arrests had started, so I
got on my bike and rode to campus as fast as I could,” says Paula Shatkin ’67 (then Kogan). “Now,
I am no athlete, but somehow I got hold of that rope and was pulled up to the
balcony. That was the most physically daring act of my life, before or since.
But, goddammit, I was not going to miss getting arrested after all that work
and sitting in and demonstrating!”
The arrests began at 3:45 a.m. It took more than 12 hours
to arrest them all.
“The cop who arrested me said, ‘Do you want us to carry you
out? Or do you want to leave like a gentleman?’” says Malcolm Zaretzky, Ph.D. ’71. “They
were dragging people down those marble steps, so I elected to walk.”
“Some were being dropped, so they would go bump, bump, bump
as they were dragged,” Linda Rosen ’66
remembers. “It was so frightening.”
The arrestees were cheered by onlookers as they were put on
busses and driven to Santa Rita. But the feeling wasn’t unanimous.
“As we got to the corner of Telegraph and Channing I looked
out the window and saw this little old lady, who was probably younger than I am
now,” says Glenn Lyons ’65, Ph.D. ’71.
“I flashed her the peace sign, and she shook her fist at me. That was my first
inkling that not everyone in the world thought we were doing a great thing.”
Neither did some of their fellow students.
“I belonged to a politically conservative group called
Students For Law And Order. We had funding from one of the UC regents,”
explains Bruce Roberts ’68.
“Our job was to go onto campus with flyers and talk about why [FSM] was an
inappropriate thing for the University.”
Their families weren’t always supportive, either.
Linda Rosen says, “My parents down in
Orange County were so mad at me, they took away the Mustang they had bought me
for graduation and gave it to my sister,”
“My parents’ reactions were classic,” remembers Susan Peterson, a grad student in
literature back in the day. “My father said, ‘They’re just a bunch of Commies!’
My mother said, ‘You’re our daughter, and we love you no matter what.’”
Jentri Anders ’67 (then
Barbara Samuels) returned home from Santa Rita the next morning to be greeted
by her husband, who hugged her and said, “Take a bath. You stink.”
“We split up and were officially divorced two years later,”
Anders says.
On Dec. 7, President Clark Kerr attempted to defuse the
crisis with a kiss-and-make-up convocation at the Greek Theater. All seemed to
go well until the end, when Savio approached the microphone. He was jumped by
campus cops who wrestled him to the ground, ripping his suit to shreds and
turning the convocation into an uproar.
Indeed, the regents, at Kerr’s urging, rejected the
Academic Senate vote. But after another month of moves and countermoves, the
first legal political rally finally was held at Sproul Plaza on Jan. 4.
Some of the arrestees suffered repercussions for years
afterwards; others didn’t.
Jentri Anders was puzzled why she kept getting turned down
for federal jobs until somebody referred her to an FBI agent who told her, “You
have an arrest record and a file with us because of your participation in the
Free Speech Movement in Berkeley. I am going to fix it so that you will never
work for the federal government.”
On the other hand, Susan Peterson tells me, “Every time I
apply for a new teaching job and have to go through a criminal background
check, I delight in giving them more information than they want about FSM.”
Bob Kroll adds, “When I applied for the bar years later,
they asked me, ‘Have you ever been arrested?’ I said, ‘Twice. Once for sitting
in at Sproul Hall, and once for coming through LAX with a joint in my pocket.
They wrote me back and said, ‘No problem.’”
And famed poster artist David Lance Goines, who would have graduated in 1967,
insists that “FSM changed my life. I was studying classics and headed for an
academic career. Instead, I was expelled from school and became an apprentice
printer, which led to my artistic career, which would never have come to pass
had I not been forcibly removed from the arms of my alma mater.”
So was FSM a good thing or a bad thing? Fifty years later,
they’re still debating that.
“On the night I graduated, I went to Sproul steps and
screamed at the top of my lungs, ‘You screwed our University!’” says Bruce
Roberts about the protests. “I was so angry. The things I wanted to do, the fun
I wanted to have, were taken away from me. And not just from me—from the entire
student body.”
Paul Coopersmith ’68
disagrees. “For all that happened at Berkeley in the ’60s and early ’70s
subsequent to the FSM, it never approached the pure, non-egotistical,
lets-make-the-world-a-better-place idealism of that movement. I attribute much
of that to Mario, who, looking back from this distance of half a century,
strikes me as the most selfless leader this country has produced in a very long
time. Without Mario, there may have been a Free Speech Movement. But it would
not have been the FSM we came to know and so fervently believe in.”
“FSM was not a hate-filled movement, and so much of what
came after was,” says Kate Coleman. “And a lot of it has to be credited to
Mario. A lot of guys in the movement were arrogant jerks, but not him. He was
so humble. I don’t think I really appreciated that until later, as the left got
ugly and started to eat its own.”
But I think the late Reggie
Zelnik, a junior faculty member in 1964 who became chairman of
the Department of History and co-editor (with Robert Cohen) of a great history
of FSM called The Free Speech Movement:
Reflections on Berkeley in the 1960s, summed it up best when we
talked about FSM shortly before his untimely death in 2004.
“As a historian, I always like to remind people that
nothing is as beautiful as it appears on the surface,” he said. “But FSM was as
good as it gets. It certainly never got that good again.”
For more information and updates on the FSM reunion, check
the FSM Archives website at fsm.berkeley.edu (Twitter hashtag #FSM50), the
campus FSM website at fsm.staging.wpengine.com, and the On The Same Page
website at onthesamepage.berkeley.edu.
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