The year is 1964. Lyndon Baines Johnson sits in the oval office following the historic assassination of John F. Kennedy. Nikita Krushchev, after ruling from Moscow for six years, prepares to step down as premier of the Soviet Union. The Cold War burns around the globe, and ideologues wage decades-long moral crusades against one another. In America, the anti-communist movement, spearheaded by the likes of Joe McCarthy and Richard Nixon, frantically hounds real and perceived threats of subversion to America’s national security, culture, and “way of life.” Meanwhile, following centuries of subjugation, America’s black population is finally rising up from the margins of society and winning history-defining political victories for their freedom in the nation-sweeping Civil Rights Movement. In the Gulf of Tonkin off the coast of Vietnam, an American warship skirmishes with the North Vietnamese Navy, and in response, Congress empowers President Johnson to exercise essentially unlimited military force against America’s enemies in southeast Asia. Soon, America will be sucked into a bloody war in the region, and on the home front, its involvement in the conflict will be viciously—and even violently—controversial. Across the country, a new political paradigm is in the process of being born. A protest movement both overlooked and deeply intertwined to all of these great historical events is beginning on UC Berkeley’s campus: The Free Speech Movement.
In the late ‘50s and early ‘60s, college campuses were popular battlegrounds for America’s culture wars (which must be unthinkable to those reading today). McCarthyist sentiment was strong around the country, and many universities implemented bans on communist speakers. In 1950, the state of California passed a law requiring all public employees, including at the University of California, to take a loyalty oath forswearing radical beliefs. The University of California also had many restrictions in place regarding the speech and expression of students. The university administration wasn’t full of hardcore conservatives, but they were absolutely aligned with “establishment” politics, often clashing with increasingly progressive factions of student activists. For example, in 1958, some students attempted to organize a political party called SLATE, oriented towards promoting left-wing policies in student government. SLATE had a wide variety of supporters on campus, ranging from mainstream, New-Deal Democrats to full-blown Communists. SLATE opposed mandatory ROTC membership for students and the campus ban on communist speakers. It also took stances on many national political issues; it strongly supported civil rights and opposed capital punishment, nuclear testing, and, centrally, opposed HUAC, the House Un-American Activities Committee. HUAC was a central player in the “McCarthyist” culture of the time, investigating public and private figures suspected of being covert operatives of the Soviet Union. This investigation made them an ultimate symbolic enemy of any activists supporting a restoration of free political speech in America.
When SLATE was founded, UC Berkeley recognized it as a student organization, but not as a political party. In 1959, several SLATE candidates won elections to student government, including David Armor, who was elected student body president. A large portion of SLATE’s support came from graduate students, and after these elections, the university announced that graduate students would no longer be considered “associated students” and thus would be unable to vote in student elections moving forward. Later in 1959, the administration placed new restrictions on student groups, including banning student organizations from taking stances on “off-campus issues.” In 1961, the administration banned SLATE from campus, supposedly because they continued to brand and organize themselves as a “political party” despite not explicitly not being recognized as one by the university. SLATE continued to prolifically operate off-campus. The story of SLATE shows the growing tension at Berkeley between a growing demographic of left-wing student activists and their university’s administration.
In 1964, these tensions exploded when the Civil Rights Movement arrived on campus. That fall, student activists set up tables to solicit donations for civil rights causes. This tabling violated those campus regulations, which limited political fundraising to school-recognized Democratic and Republican clubs. On October 1st, these activists got into a dispute with the dean of students who insisted the activists were breaking campus policy. Some students refused to leave, including graduate student Jack Weinberg. When police arrived and arrested Weinberg after he refused to show them identification, thousands of students spontaneously swarmed the police car he was being carried in, surrounding it and preventing it from leaving with Weinberg. The car remained in the same place for 32 hours, with Weinberg inside, and became the epicenter of a massive protest against university policies. Eventually, the charges against Weinberg were dropped, and the crowd dispersed. This protest became the impetus for a massive, months-long series of student protests on campus, giving birth to the Free Speech Movement.
In the following months, acts of mass civil disobedience began on campus to protest the university’s restrictions on speech, political expression, and academic freedom. Thousands of students participated, and hundreds were arrested for breaking laws. In January of 1965, the movement finally won major policy concessions from the university: the steps of Sproul Hall, the location of an especially famous sit-in attended by thousands of students, became a designated forum for free, open discussion during the day, and information tables, such as the one Weinberg sat at, were allowed.
The Free Speech Movement is significant because, as an organized movement around academic freedom, it was an early move in a debate that is still fiercely argued today. It gave students at Berkeley the leverage to demonstrate on behalf of other political issues in the future, and, by importing civil disobedience tactics used in the Civil Rights Movement to college campuses, laid the groundwork for future mass student protest movements, especially those protesting against the Vietnam War. However, not everyone was in favor of the Free Speech Movement and its successors. One reason why Berkeley administration was hostile to the protesters was public sentiment beyond the university. Many thought that elements of these movements were too extreme, infiltrated by communists, and needed to be tamed. In 1966, Ronald Reagan ran for Governor of California. As part of his platform, he promised to “clean up the mess in Berkeley.” After he was elected, he directed the UC Board of Regents to dismiss Clark Kerr, the president of UC Berkeley, for being too soft on the protestors. Reagan’s campaign victory in California was the first step in his path to the presidency, with a powerful new conservative movement at his back.
None of these events were foreign to UVA. In 1970, students at our university participated in the May Strike, a nationwide strike of college students protesting further escalation of the Vietnam War. As part of the movement, students at UVA also protested for higher black enrollment, equal enrollment for women, unionization of employees, and against allowing armed police, as well as FBI or CIA recruiters, on grounds.
This Thursday, UVA will host a talk co-sponsored by Think Again and The Heterodox Academy centered around the legacy and future of the Free Speech Movement on college campuses. The talk will be preceded by a documentary centered around the just described beginnings of the Free Speech Movement by UVA professor and Academy Award-winning filmmaker Paul Wagner. Then, Mitch Daniels, former governor of Indiana and former president of Purdue, and Bari Weiss, founder of The Free Press, will discuss academic freedom, free speech on college campuses, and the meaning and future of the Free Speech Movement sixty years later. The talk will begin at 7:00 PM in Old Cabell Hall. More information can be found and tickets can be reserved here.
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