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Photos from the 45th Anniversary Now Online!

Please find photos from this event at:

http://simoneanne.blogspot.com/

The Free Speech Movement Was Not About the Anti War Movement

One blogger seems to be under that misconception. FSM was about Free Speech for everybody — about not treating us like children just because we were students. About insisting that we had the same rights under the Constitution as other Americans.

Young Republicans as well as Young Democrats were part of the coalition. We had about 9 flavors of left wing groups, but also Students for Goldwater, the Chess and Science clubs, and the civil rights groups.

Mario Savio represented the Berkeley Friends of the Student Non-Violent Co-ordinating Committee (SNCC) whose main focus was supporting the voter registration drive in the southern states. (In those days racists in southern states put up many obstacles preventing blacks from registering to vote. Thus they had no political power.) Mario had just come back from working on voter registration in the south that summer, where 3 of his co-workers ( Cheney, Goodman and Schwerner) were missing and later found murdered.

As a result of the Free Speech Movement the following spring Berkeley held a 36 hour anti war teach-in. But that came later. We also had a Human Rights week that spring of ’65 when we brought Southern black civil rights fighters to talk on campus.

anya paradiso

45-years of Free Speech Anniversary, Event Schedule

Here is what we have planned for the event tomorrow…

UC condemns free speech; UC celebrates free speech

From the UC Academic Council’s letter, Nov 30, 2009, on protests to defend public education: "We are especially concerned about group protests in which a number of individuals attempted to move past police barricades … and surround vehicles to trap those within. These activities are unlawful and disrespectful of the rights of others"

Police Actions- How Far Is Too Far?

I have heard many opinions about the police action against those who were standing outside of Wheeler, but I was wondering what people’s opinions were about the intensity (or lack of intensity) of the cops’ actions. I have heard both sides of the story; first, the police were only doing their job, or second, this was brutal action against peaceful protesting.

I was researching this topic online and found a link to a UCSC protest in 2005.

In this video, the police are seen choking students who were peacefully disobeying. What do you suggest do if police are faced with crowds of peaceful people, but they have a mandate to fulfill?

Thoughts, thoughts!

They must be joking, right?

I heard someone tell a funny joke that some of the organizers had called for the commemoration of the Free-Speech movement to be "apolitical." That’s like calling for a war reenactment to refrain from showing violence.

how can the FSM anniversary event be apolitical?

The event organizer, Marcus Caimi, recently posted on one of the student organizing listserves that this anniversary event aims to be a non-political commemoration of the Free Speech Movement. While I am very glad that the ASUC and others have organized a commemoration of the FSM, such a statement betrays the organizers’ ignorance of the true issues the FSM formed to combat. That movement fought specifically to allow students to do political organizing on Berkeley’s campus–they were fighting to educate people about the anti-war movement, but Berkeley did not allow “political campaigning” on campus. The FSM fought to make this campus a space where political issues could be freely debated.

Marcus informed us that this event has been planned with people who were part of the FSM, I find it hard to believe that anyone present at the sit-in in 1964 would want this commemoration to be “apolitical.” It is impossible to commemorate the FSM without being political. And more importantly, this year our campus finds itself at the heart of a new political battle, one about the founding ideals of this institution. We current organizers owe a huge debt to the FSM for making Berkeley a politicized space. But the sanitized nature of this “commemoration” is just one more sign of how the battle for free speech was not won 45 years ago, it is a battle that each of us continues every day in our continued exercise of the right those students fought for.

A true commemoration of the FSM would be another protest against the UC administrations ongoing attempts to privatize our public university, under cover of the devastating budget cuts that we are suffering. I will be at the event, hoping to take part, in that spirit.

In Solidarity,
Mandy Cohen
Dept of Comp Lit

FREE SPEECH AT CAL

Free Speech is not alive at Cal. Students and our campus community are not aloud to voice their opinions on the UCB PUBLIC campus because police enforcement use brutal tactics to silence and repress the ideas and sentiments of the people. I would be very surprised if this comment even made it to the monitored blog post for free speech.

Faculty letter to Chancellor Robert J. Birgeneau calling for accountability and investigation

On behalf of free speech and human rights, on 23 Nov 09 numerous UC Berkeley faculty signed a letter to the Chancellor, delivered at 10:30 a.m.:

Open Letter from Concerned Members of the Faculty to Chancellor Robert J. Birgeneau,

We, the undersigned faculty, are writing to voice our strenuous objection to the use of unwarranted violence by the police forces enlisted by the University of California at Berkeley to patrol the student demonstration outside of Wheeler Hall on Friday, November 20th. It is now abundantly clear that in addition to UC Police, there were squads from the City of Berkeley and Alameda County, and that some of these police forces acted with undue violence at various points during the day, most conspicuously at mid-day and then again in late afternoon when they used batons against students and a faculty member. In some cases this occurred to defenseless people who had already been pushed to the ground, among them several who sustained injuries to hands, heads, and stomachs, and were forced to seek urgent medical care. These abuses of police power were captured on video recordings and in photographs, corroborated by numerous witnesses. They have now been widely circulated on the web and throughout the national and international media. We will send you a composite of those websites and testimonies under separate cover.

These documents clearly show that the students were acting in a non-violent manner when their civil rights were abrogated by police harassment and assault. Such instances of unprovoked police brutality would be appalling and objectionable anywhere, but we find it most painful for these events to have taken place on the UC Berkeley campus, given the important tradition of protecting free speech that you, Chancellor Birgeneau, have only very recently defended. Hence we regard with dismay and astonishment your euphemistic reference to these Friday’s violence: “a few members of our campus community may have found themselves in conflict with law enforcement officers.” There is no doubt that our students and colleagues did find themselves subject to unwarranted and illegal police brutality. It is therefore incumbent on the Chancellor of UC Berkeley to condemn such actions unequivocally and to make sure that such actions are subject to comprehensive review and disciplinary action.

Accordingly, we the undersigned demand that the university assume full accountability for the actions of the police forces active on campus on Friday, November 20th. We call for the administration immediately to convene an impartial and comprehensive investigation of the abuse of police power that resulted, making broad use of available testimony on the part of victims and observers, including photographic images, video and personal narration of those at the scene in order to establish a clear record of the facts. We ask as well that you speak directly and honestly to the students about what has happened. They are entitled to know that the university does not condone acts of police violence such as these; as of this writing, they have received no word from the administration acknowledging accountability for such appalling actions. Indeed, the administration was markedly unreachable on Friday, when faculty were most pressed to take on a mediating role.

We ask that you widely publicize the current protocols governing police conduct at demonstrations, and ascertain whether protocol was followed or abrogated on Friday. The entire community is also surely entitled to know that clear steps will be taken to revise protocols regarding police conduct at student demonstrations–protocols that will be binding on any police force brought on campus. It should also make clear that disciplinary actions will be taken against police officers found guilty of assault. Finally we ask for a public statement reconfirming the University’s commitment to protect the rights of free expression and assembly for students on the Berkeley campus.

We want to underscore how important it is for the campus for you to convene an investigation and to take administrative responsibility for protecting the safety of students as well as their rights of assembly and expression. Friday’s failure to do so is a most painful public display of how far UC Berkeley has strayed from its historical responsibility as a national and international institution pledged to rights of free speech and assembly and to the ideals of social justice. It is surely difficult enough to see our reputation as an excellent and affordable university jeopardized through budget cuts and fee hikes. Must we see as well the dissolution of the ideal of protecting free speech for students for whom the very future of their education is at stake?

Elizabeth Abel, English
Alice Merner Agogino, Mechanical Engineering
Déborah Blocker, French
Judith Butler, Rhetoric and Comparative Literature
Catherine Cole, Theatre, Dance and Performance Studies
Suzanne Guerlac, French
Gillian Hart, Geography
Charles Hirschkind, Anthropology
Saba Mahmood, Anthropology
Ramona Naddaff, Rhetoric
Stefania Pandolfo, Anthropology
Ananya Roy, City and Regional Planning
Scott Saul, English
Shannon Steen, Theatre, Dance, and Performance Studies
Anne Wagner, History of Art

…. and more probably signed before it was delivered …