When students at UCLA recently demonstrated against tuition hikes and as a result were treated like children and warned about the "limits of protest," my mind immediately raced back to October 1964 when officials at Berkeley expressed similar finger-wagging contempt for students who believed that the First Amendment didn't end at the gates to the campus. Out of that sprung the Free Speech Movement, the first mass protest on a college campus since the 1930s. The FSM not only helped light the fire of student activism in Berkeley and across the country, it also spawned one of the most memorable quotes to come out of the '60s as well as maybe the decade's best student speech. First, the quote. The protest was ignited when a graduate student and civil rights activist named Jack Weinberg was arrested for "illegal activity" on the campus -- the illegal activity being the manning of a CORE (Congress of Racial Equality) table on the school's plaza. After Weinberg was placed in the back of a police car, several thousand students surrounded it, beginning a bladder-busting stand-off that lasted thirty-two hours until charges against Weinberg were dropped. I visited Weinberg fifteen years ago while researching a book on the '60s. Let him tell the rest of the story:
"A few weeks after the police police car incident, the San Francisco Chronicle's education reporter, James Benet, interviewed a number of the protest leaders for a Sunday newspaper story. He started to ask me questions about what was behind the movement and I [mistakenly] thought he was fishing for quotes to back up the "communist conspiracy" theory. "…We young people were the driving force behind our own movement. I wanted to make this point as forcefully as possible. I wanted to get the reporter thinking about why people his age were incapable of giving people my age credit for our own accomplishments. To razz him I said, 'We have a saying in the movement that you can't trust anyone over thirty.' "
With that comment, the generation gap, as it came to be known, was born. I should say that although he was a pleasant host, Weinberg was clearly tired of retelling the story. "I'm proud of the many important things I did during my years as a movement activist," he told me. "It's a bit disappointing that the one event that puts me in the history books -- the one thing people ask me to comment on -- is an off-the-wall put down I once made to a reporter." Then there was the speech. Like Weinberg, Mario Savio was also a civil rights activist and grad student at Berkeley when the protest erupted , and as Weinberg sat in the back of the police cruiser, Savio climbed onto the hood and made a galvanizing speech to the crowd. But it was some two months later when negotiations failed to establish free speech on the campus that Savio led a sit-in at the campus's Sproul Hall uttered the words that made him famous (and also got him arrested):
"There is a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can't take part; you can't even passively take part, and you've got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you've got to make it stop. And you've got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it, that unless you're free, the machine will be prevented from working at all."
Savio died in 1996. The gears, of course, continue to turn. Here's The Nation's story on the FSM from 1964.
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