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NEWS & LETTERS, November 2004View of 'FSM' at 40
Arrested many years ago in the Free Speech Movement in
Berkeley, I returned to this University of California campus for the 40th
anniversary of the event. The weeklong celebration of the "FSM"
featured a rally that attracted 3,000 students; 10 workshops; '60s films; two
poetry readings; a night of folk song; journalist Seymour Hersh talking about
Abu Ghraib prison and Iraq, and a rock concert. The Oct. 7 panel "Berkeley and the Black Freedom
Struggle: Then and Now" explored the 50-year history of civil rights
activism. Taman Moncour (Traci Seams), a leader of the Bay Area sit-ins in 1963;
Mike Miller, the Bay Area organizer for Students for a Non-Violent Coordinating
Committee (SNCC) during the 1960s; Hardy Frye, a SNCC organizer in Sacramento,
Cal. and Mississippi from 1964–1967, and Cassie Lopez, an organizer for jobs,
education and housing in Detroit--all shared histories of the '60s civil rights
struggles. Frye told how he learned to make coalitions between
civil rights groups and farm workers; to change Mississippi and Alabama politics
as well as to challenge the national Democratic Party, and to bring these ideas
to the rest of the county. STRUGGLE CONTINUES The last speaker, Josie Heinman, is a senior at UC
Berkeley and activist with the Coalition to Defend Affirmative Action,
Integration and Immigrant Rights. In a powerful speech she told how the
coalition helped organize 50,000 students to go to Washington, D.C. on April 1,
2004 to demonstrate for affirmative action at the Supreme Court. Concerned that
too few students of color are enrolling in UC Berkeley, the coalition is trying
to restore affirmative action there. That evening’s panel, "Focus on the FSM: Its
Genesis, Meanings and Consequences," had six political activists from the
late 1950s and 1960s. Ken Cloke, former chairman of SLATE, a leading dissident
student group of the early 1960s, said he was afraid he would never get a job if
he signed a petition, but he, like all the others, overcame this fear. Jo
Freeman, a leader of the Young Democrats in the 1960s at Berkeley, argued that
although the FSM clearly came out of the civil rights movements, its main
accomplishment was helping to end McCarthyism and red-baiting. For author Greil Marcus, "the FSM was a great
conversation," while Michael Rossman, a mainstay of the FSM for 40 years,
said, "I learned the difference between a ‘mob’ and a ‘public.’ We
were called a ‘mob’ but we really were the first democracy that we had ever
experienced." Rossman added that UC Berkeley President Clark Kerr, who saw
himself as a liberal fighting for civil rights, red-baited the FSM in the
newspapers though he knew it wasn’t true. Kerr’s red-baiting gave ammunition
to such right-wing politicians as Ronald Reagan who, when elected governor in
1966, fired Kerr for being too soft on the student radicals. SQUAD CAR APPROPRIATED At the noon rally on Oct. 8, 3,000, mostly students, sat
around a police car on Sproul Plaza. They were reenacting the 1964 student
capture of a Berkeley police car containing civil rights activist Jack Weinberg
who had been arrested for sitting at an allegedly illegal political table near
Sather Gate. Three months later the UC Berkeley faculty voted eight to one that
all we had asked for around the police car should be given as our constitutional
rights. In 2004 speakers spoke from a wooden stage over the
police car. The current student body president, Misha Leybovich, said,
"Seeing the strength of the '60s gives me hope and confidence for my
generation. It’s a fallacy that we’re no longer passionate. It’s a fallacy
that we’re no longer active." He apologized that the DAILY CAL (the
student newspaper), the administration, and the student goverment (the ASUC),
were all against the FSM in 1964, but was happy that all three groups supported
the FSM in 2004. As if to underscore his point, Leybovich introduced UC
Berkeley’s new Chancellor Birgeneau who said that while doing civil rights
work in South Carolina in 1965, he received his political education from two FSM
leaders. Rosha Jones and Hiraa Khan, two students from campus
Berkeley ACLU, were concerned about government attacks on civil liberties. They
said that the students had gotten the student government to pass a resolution
condemning the USA PATRIOT Act. This next year students will focus on ending
racial profiling, defeating the USA PATRIOT Act, and restoring affirmative
action. --Julia Stein |
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