Free Speech Movement

FREE SPEECH MOVEMENT. In the fall of 1964, white student veterans of the civil rights movement led University of California (UC) students in the post-World War II era’s first major northern student uprising. When UC Berkeley administrators tried to halt growing civil rights activism among UC students by banning campus fund-raising activity for off-campus causes, activists from the Friends of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) mobilized a coalition of groups from the Young Republicans to the Independent Socialists and the youth group of the Communist Party to defy the ban. On 19 October, campus police arrested Jack Weinberg for staffing a CORE fund-raising table; but when they tried to put him in their car and drive him away, hundreds of students spontaneously sat down around the car and prevented it from leaving. In the course of a thirty-six-hour sit-down, the students won Weinberg’s release and initiated a dynamic campaign that came to be known as the free speech movement (FSM).

Over the next three months, the FSM battled the university with rallies, marches, sit-ins and, ultimately, a massive student strike. UC administrators, led by President Clark Kerr, alienated many UC students with their refusal to consider any concessions and their clumsy attempts at forceful repression of the FSM. When administrators threatened disciplinary action against Mario Savio and other FSM leaders, thousands of students responded with a massive 5 December 1964 rally and occupation of Sproul Hall. By calling in the police and the National Guard to arrest those sitting in, marking the largest mass arrest in the state’s history, California Governor Edmund “Pat” Brown prompted a student strike and faculty walkout that ended only when UC gave in to FSM demands for campus freedom of political activity.

Over the course of the campaign, the FSM developed a pointed critique of the university as a servant of the status quo and a tool of social control. Analyzing the writings of President Kerr, who minimized undergraduate education and boasted instead of the university’s service to corporations and the State, former Shachtmanite Hal Draper and other FSM leaders developed an ideology that linked student dissatisfaction at UC to the larger political and economic forces changing the university and American society. The transformation of students’ individual concerns into collective political issues was essential to the FSM’s success in building a broad-based campus movement.

The other key factor undergirding the FSM’s success was its ability to adapt the tactics, philosophy, and organizational structure of the civil rights movement to a new context and constituency. Many key FSM activists had taken part in local civil rights campaigns, and leaders such as Mario Savio had gone South to work with SNCC in the 1964 Mississippi Freedom Summer. Drawing on this experience, the activists built a highly democratic, almost anarchic organizational structure, prefiguring their goal of a university where students could participate in the decisions that shaped their lives. Like early SNCC activists, they gained a wide audience by using the language of traditional American values such as democracy, community, and freedom, and avoiding the “alien rhetoric” of class conflict.

The size and militancy of the FSM startled observers who still thought that America’s white college students were politically conservative and apathetic. Intensive media coverage of the FSM broadcast the unexpected image of bright, white young Americans braving arrest to mount a radical challenge to a highly respected liberal institution. Many veterans of the student movement of the late 1960s in America and Western Europe have since recalled that watching news reports on the FSM encouraged them to begin thinking of themselves as radical student activists.

A few months after the triumph of the FSM, the United States escalated the war in Vietnam, and student protests helped initiate the anti-war movement. In the years that followed, student activists across the country drew upon the fresh language, tactics, and organizational style modeled by the FSM in protesting campus militarism, racism, and authoritarianism. The FSM not only revealed the contradictions of the modern “multiversity,” but also demonstrated that white, middle-class students could be a significant force for social change in the postwar world. Historically linking the civil rights protests of the early 1960s to the anti-war and student power demonstrations of the later years, the FSM served as a catalyst for the explosive growth of the New Left in America and around the world.

Aptheker, Bettina. Intimate Politics: How I Grew Up Red, Fought for Free Speech and Became A Feminist Rebel. Emeryville: Avalon, 2011.

Cohen, Robert and Reginald E. Zelnik, eds. The Free Speech Movement: Reflections on Berkeley in the 1960s. Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 2002.

Cohen, Robert. Freedom’s Orator: Mario Savio and the Radical Legacy of the 1960s. New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 2009.

Cohen, Robert. The Essential Mario Savio: Speeches and Writings That Changed America. Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 2014.

Draper, Hal. Berkeley: The New Student Revolt. New York: Grove Press, 1965.

Free Speech Movement Digital Archives. Bancroft Library. University of California, Berkeley.
https://bancroft.berkeley.edu/FSM/

Guide to the Free Speech Movement Participant Papers, 1959-1997. Collection Guide. Online Archives of California. http://www.oac.cdlib.org/findaid/ark:/13030/kt3p30030s/?query=Free%2520Speech%2520Movement