Wandering through Time and Place

Exploring the world with Curtis and Peggy Mekemson
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    • 48 Years Later… The 1964 Free Speech Movement at UC Berkeley

      Posted at 9:45 am by Curt Mekemson
      Feb 4th

      This is the original sign I carried in the Free Speech Movement during the December 1964 police occupation of UC Berkeley and arrest of 800 students participating in the Sproul Hall Sit-in.

      I’ve been rooting thorough my old Free Speech Movement files, digging for treasure. Buried between aging, yellow copies of the Daily Cal and mimeographed handouts calling for action, I found the picket sign I carried when the police invaded UC Berkeley and arrested 800 students on December 3, 1964.

      There are numerous sources covering FSM and its impact including an excellent book, “The Free Speech Movement,” edited by Robert Cohen and Reginald Zelnik. FSM even has its own website, fsm@a.org. I visited the site and found pictures of aging white-haired men and women looking remarkably like me. 1964 is now ancient history.

      In preparation for this series of posts I also returned to UC Berkeley. Sitting on the edge of Ludwig’s fountain under a fine mist, I stared at the steps of Sproul Hall while searching my memory for ghostly reminders of past demonstrations.

      I actually found one. A long-haired African American was distributing protest arm bands. His effort would have been illegal in the fall of 1964.

      A stroll down Telegraph Avenue brought me to the Café Med, one of my favorite student hangouts. I stopped for an obligatory cup of cappuccino. I wrote notes in my journal and listened in on conversations. It seemed that neither the coffee house nor my behavior had changed much.

      Back on campus I visited the Free Speech Café in the Moffitt Undergraduate Library. Every seat was full so I wandered around and looked at photos. Mario Savio, who died in 1996, was there in spirit. A picture captured him in a characteristic pose, haranguing a sea of upturned faces. It was a fitting memorial.

      In hindsight, the Free Speech Movement has become an important part of Berkeley’s history, honored even by an Administration that once characterized it as a Communist inspired plot. And what about my hindsight; have the years blurred or substantially modified my vision of what took place?

      I tried, in writing this series on UC Berkeley’s Free Speech Movement, to be faithful to what I felt and experienced at the time. I feel now, as I did then, that it didn’t have to happen. The attitude the Administration demonstrated in the 1963 student leadership meeting I attended and described in an earlier post went beyond naïve to dangerous.

      If the more radical students found ground for ‘revolution,’ it was a ground fertilized and plowed by the Administration. The desire to protect the campus from outside influence became a willingness to limit the rights of students to participate in the critical issues of the day and, in so doing, take the side of powerful elites whose vested interest was in maintaining the status quo on civil and other human rights issues.

      What changed as a result of the Free Speech Movement?

      Certainly the concept of in locus parentis took a major hit. Students at Berkeley and other colleges across America would have much greater freedom in the future, on both a personal and political level. We had graduated from being older teenagers needing guidance to young adults capable of and responsible for our own decisions.

      While we were still a part of the future so popular with Commencement speakers, we were also a part of the now, helping to shape that future. Human rights and equality including women and gay rights, the anti-Vietnam campaign, and the environmental movement would all benefit. Berkeley students had participated in one of America’s great transformations.

      The New Left considers the Free Speech Movement as an important source of origin. A similar claim might be made for the New Right, the so-called Neo Cons.

      The outer fringes of liberal and conservative politics are two cats of the same color, feeding off of the same plate and necessary to each other’s success. Each functions with the tunnel vision of being right and with the belief that the ends of their particular vision justify whatever means necessary to get there. Not surprisingly, both the Left and the Right saw the unrest on the Berkeley Campus as an opportunity waiting to happen.

      The message was not lost on Ronald Reagan. Following the Free Speech Movement, he would exploit the student protests at Berkeley and other California colleges as a launching pad for his career in politics. One of his first moves as Governor was to fire Clark Kerr for being too soft on the students. There is a picture from the early 70s of Reagan turning around and flipping off student protestors at a U.C. Regent’s meeting. It was a clear message of intent.

      It may be somewhat instructive that his future Attorney General, Edwin Meese, was the Deputy District Attorney in Oakland at the time of the Free Speech Movement. Meese’s role had been to oversee the Sproul Hall arrests and serve as liaison with the FBI.

      There is a story, which may be apocryphal, that it was Meese who persuaded Governor Pat Brown to send in the troops on the night of the Sproul Hall sit-in by claiming students were tearing up the Dean’s office. If so, it was a deliberate lie or at least an exaggeration. The worst vandalism I witnessed was my standing on the Dean’s desk in my socks so I wouldn’t scratch the surface.

      My speculation is that the forces on the right, like the forces on the left, wanted a confrontation. Kerr was planning to address the sit-in the next day in an effort to persuade the students to leave the building. A peaceful solution would not have served the agenda of Meese, Knowland, Hoover, etc. Serious head bashing leading to a full-scaled riot was called for. If it took lies to bring it about, so be it.

      Or am I just being paranoid?

      Later, when I chaired a committee for the Free Student Union, I witnessed a similar attitude on the part of the Left. A confrontation with students getting their heads bashed was good. It would radicalize moderates and lead to further violent confrontations.

      While both the Left and Right worked to subvert what happened at Berkeley for their own objectives, I believe that the Free Speech Movement was what it claimed to be: a fight for free speech, the right to assemble, and the right to participate in the critical issues of the day. It was a fight that still rings true today.

      Posted in Memoirs | Tagged 1964 Free Speech Movement at UC Berkeley, Cafe Med, Civil Rights, Cody's Book Store, Daily Cal, Edwin Meese, Free Speech Cafe, Free Speech Movement at Berkeley, FSM, Governor Pat Brown, in locus parentis, Mario Savio, New Left, New Right, picket sign, Police Occupy UC Berkeley Campus, Ronald Reagan and UC Berkeley, Sproul Hall sit-in, Vietnam War, Women's Rights
    • UC Berkeley on Strike… The 1964 Free Speech Movement

      Posted at 11:40 am by Curt Mekemson
      Jan 24th

      When police occupied the UC Berkeley Campus in early December of 1964 and arrested the protestors in Sproul Hall, the University went on strike. I joined a picket line on the edge of Telegraph Avenue next to Sproul Plaza.

      My bed was indeed much softer that the marble floors of Sproul Hall.

      After a quick breakfast I hurried back to campus to rejoin the sit-in. I was too late.

      Armed men in uniforms formed a cordon around the Administration Building where students were being dragged down the stairs and loaded into police vans. Windows had been taped over so neither protestors or media could not see what was transpiring inside.

      We had an occupied campus.

      The great liberal governor of California had acted to “end the anarchy and maintain law and order in California.”

      Whereas Jack Kennedy had used troops to protect civil rights in the South, Pat Brown was using them to stifle civil rights in the West. Of course Brown didn’t see it that way; he was taking a courageous stand against anarchy, the anarchy I described in my last blog.

      I am sure Laurel and Hardy would have seen something to laugh about. Dragging kids down stairs on their butts while their heads bounced along behind could easily have been a scene in one of the old Keystone Cop films. The Oakland police weren’t nearly as funny as the Keystone Cops, however.

      As for Clark Kerr, President of the University, he felt we were getting what we deserved and argued that the FSM leaders and their followers “are now finding in their effort to escape the gentle discipline of the University, they have thrown themselves into the arms of the less understanding discipline of the community at large.”

      The campus came to a grinding halt and a great deal of fence-sitting ended. Whole departments shut down in strike. Sproul Hall plaza filled with several thousand students in protest of the police presence. When the police made a flying wedge to grab a speaker system students were using, we were electrified and protected the system with our bodies.

      It was the closest I have ever come to being in a riot; thousands of thinking, caring students teetered on the edge of becoming an infuriated, unthinking mob. Violence and bloodshed, egged on by police action, would have been the result. Kerr, Brown, Knowland and company would have had the anarchy they were claiming, after the fact.

      A few days later we were to come close again.

      Kerr, in a series of around the clock meetings with a select committee of Department Chairs, had arrived at a compromise he felt would provide for the extended freedom being demanded on campus while also diffusing the outside pressure to crack open student heads.

      Sit-in participants arrested in the Sproul Hall would be left to the tender mercies of the outside legal system and not disciplined by the University. Rights to free speech and organization on campus would be restored as long as civil disobedience was not advocated.

      Kerr and Robert Scalapino, Chair of the Political Science Department, presented the compromise to a hastily called all-campus meeting of 15,000 students and faculty at the Greek Theater. There was to be no discussion and no other speakers.

      When Mario Savio approached the podium following the presentation, he was grabbed by police, thrown down, and dragged off the stage. Apparently he had wanted to announce a meeting in Sproul Plaza to discuss Kerr’s proposal. Once again, Berkeley teetered on the edge of a riot. We moved from silent, shocked disbelief to shouting our objections.

      Mario, released from the room where he was held captive, urged us to stay calm and leave the area. We did, but Kerr’s compromise had become compromised.

      A full meeting of the Academic Senate was to be held the next day and all of us waited in anticipation to hear what stand Berkeley’s faculty would take.  We knew that most faculty members deplored the presence of police on campus and the violent way they had responded to the nonviolent demonstrators. Dragging Mario off the stage had not helped the Administration’s case.

      Some departments such as math, philosophy, anthropology and English were clearly on the side of FSM while others including business and engineering were in opposition.

      My own department of political science was clearly divided. Some professors believed that nonviolent civil disobedience threatened the stability of government. Others recognized how critical it was for helping the powerless gain power. To them, having large blocks of disenfranchised, alienated people in America seemed to be a greater threat to democracy than civil disobedience.

      The Senate met on December 8 in Wheeler Hall, ironically in the same auditorium where Peter Odegard had lectured on the meaning of democracy to my Poly Sci 1 class during my first day at Berkeley. Some 5000 of us gathered outside to wait for the results and listen to the proceedings over a loud-speaker.

      To the students who had fought so hard and risked so much, and to those of us who had joined their cause, the results were close to euphoric. On a vote of 824-115 the faculty voted that all disciplinary actions prior to December 8 should be dropped, that students should have the right to organize on campus for off-campus political activity, and that the University should not regulate the content of speech or advocacy.

      Two weeks later, the Regents confirmed our hard-won freedom. We had won the battle but not necessarily the war.

      Next Blog: Looking back at the long-term results of the Free Speech Movement

      Posted in Memoirs | Tagged 1964 UC Berkeley Free Speech Movement, Clark Kerr, Free Speech Movement, Governor Pat Brown, Mario Savio, Police Occupy UC Berkeley Campus, UC Berkeley, UC Berkeley on Strike, UC Regents
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