In the 1 960s, my generation set out on a journey of change.
Coming out of an atmosphere of conformity,
a new spirit began to appear.
One of the first signs was a demonstration
organised by Berkeley students in May of 1 960
against the House Un-American Activities Committee.
What we are here to do is to gather information
as we are ordered to do by an act of congress
with respect to the general operation of communist conspiracies.
I'm not in the habit of being intimidated and I won't start now.
- Next question. - What was your question?
Are you a member of the Communist Party?
We came out to protest
because we were against HUAC's suppression of political freedom.
In the '50s, HUAC created a climate of fear
by putting people on trial for their political beliefs.
Any views left of centre were labelled subversive.
We refused to go back to McCarthyism.
If you think that I am going to cooperate
with this collection of Judases,
of men who sit there in violation of the United States Constitution,
if you think I'll cooperate with you in any way, you are insane.
As witness after witness denounced the committee,
the hearings grew stormy.
The halls outside were filled with students seeking admission.
Suddenly the police turned fire hoses full force
on the demonstrators inside the rotunda
and then dragged them down the steps of City Hall.
It turned out to be a political baptism
that transformed fear into determination.
Something had changed. After this, it would never be the same.
The whole thing might have died down
except for the fact that the committee made a film.
It was called Operation Abolition.
The film presented all of us... I had been in these demonstrations.
It presented all of us as, somehow or other,
engaged in a vast communist plot,
not only to try to overthrow the US government,
but, worse, to abolish the House Un-American Activities Committee.
Operation Abolition.
This is what the communists call their current drive
to destroy the House Committee on Un-American Activities
and to render sterile the security laws of our government.
You will see revealed the long-time classic communist tactic
in which a relatively few well-trained hard-core communist agents
are able to incite non-communists
to perform the dirty work of the Communist Party.
That movie was scheduled to be shown
at the Harvard ROTC class.
The ROTC had a class on campus.
They were going to show Operation Abolition.
I'd heard all about Operation Abolition and I was opposed to it.
So a bunch of us decided to go to the class to protest.
I remember very well the way we protested.
In the film, the students stand up singing The Star-Spangled Banner
to show HUAC don't pull you're more American than us on us.
The group of us stood up in the ROTC class
to show that we're in solidarity with the students in San Francisco.
But what I really remember clearly
is thinking, ''Wait a minute. What am I doing here?''
''Why aren't I there?''
And I checked this story out with people who were at Berkeley
and they told me the exact same story,
that Operation Abolition had recruited them to Berkeley,
that they had seen it round the country
and gone in to see it as a protest
and they'd thought, ''Wow! Let's go there.''
The university's been called upon
to educate previously unimagined numbers of students,
to respond to the expanding claims of national service,
to merge its activities with industry as never before.
Characteristic of this transformation
is the growth of the knowledge industry
which is permeating government and business and to draw into it
more and more people raised to higher and higher levels of skill.
The production, distribution and consumption of knowledge
is said to account for 29 percent of gross national product.
Knowledge production is growing
at about twice the rate of the rest of the economy.
What the railroads did for the second half of the last century
and the automobile for the first half of this century
may be done for the second half of this century
by the knowledge industry
and that is to service the focal point for national growth.
When we went to college, President Kerr's vision became our reality.
The University of California was a knowledge factory,
the biggest public university in America.
It did research for major corporations
and it ran the government's nuclear weapons labs.
Of the seven campuses, Berkeley was the jewel in the crown
with the most prestigious faculty.
Within the sea of students, there was little evidence of political life.
But a few of us, who were interested in politics, found each other
and started an organisation called SLATE.
Some radical students had gotten together
to run a slate of candidates in the student elections.
Although SLATE was not solely about student elections,
the student elections were used as a kind of platform
through which we could educate other students
and reach them about the various issues
that were alive during that time.
Friends wrote me letters of the discussions happening
in the coffee shops of Berkeley.
People were interested in politics there.
They'd already organised some little student activist group on campus
that was starting to experiment with doing things.
I grew up in a small ethnic community in Buffalo, New York.
I knew I couldn't live within its limitations.
I had a couple of years at college. I quit. I hitchhiked around.
I ended up in San Francisco. I got married.
Then I went back to school. I came to Berkeley really...
I was looking for truth. I was looking for meaning in my life.
One of the most distressing tasks of a university president
is to pretend that the protest and outrage
of each new generation of undergraduates
is really fresh and meaningful.
In fact, it is one of the most predictable controversies we know.
The participants go through a ritual of hackneyed complaints
almost as ancient as academe,
while believing that what is said is radical and new.
From the beginning, the administration at Cal
was trying to undermine and prevent what we were trying to do.
They were very upset
about the introduction of what they called off-campus issues.
Anything to do with civil rights
or with the testing of nuclear weapons
or apartheid in South Africa, these were off-campus issues.
This was what we were attacking. We were opposed to sandbox politics.
The administration started turning the screws.
They disenfranchised the graduate students,
because that was a big block of the SLATE vote.
Then they threw the organisation off campus.
There was a big outrage at that.
We got reinstated.
So there was a growing community of people
who wanted to make liberal or left or radical,
however they thought about it, politics legitimate in a country.
When we look at modern man, we have to face the fact...
..that modern man suffers
from a kind of poverty of the spirit...
..which stands in glaring contrast
to his scientific and technological abundance.
We've learned to fly the air like birds.
We've learned to swim the seas like fish.
Yet we haven't learned to walk the earth as brothers and sisters.
More than any other cause, the civil rights movement
became the wellspring of student activism
and inspired our entire generation.
In 1 963, Berkeley students began to band together
with black activists to protest discriminatory hiring practices
of Bay Area businesses. We sat in at restaurants,
supermarkets and automobile showrooms.
Our biggest challenge came when we tried to secure jobs
for blacks and other minorities in the hotels of San Francisco.
A picket line formed around the Sheraton Palace,
while negotiations with the Hotel Owners Association took place inside.
It was getting to the point where we were saying,
''We are going to create a confrontation.''
''We're going to create a situation that's intolerable
and we're going to force you to respond to it.''
''We're willing to get arrested in order to do it.''
''And now the ball's in your court.''
All of us in this elegant lobby, I can't convey to you the effect.
It was like the riffraff coming to the White House.
The real democratic masses had moved in and taken over,
saying, ''No, you cannot continue
to run this hotel in this racist fashion.''
''The world is being redefined. Things cannot continue on that way.''
We just entered into discussions
with the Sheraton Palace for the last eight hours.
We were given a seven-page document
which was supposed to summarise the agreement.
But there was a hitch, the Sheraton Palace wasn't willing to sign.
It was the first major victory of anything l'd been involved in.
The Sheraton Palace Hotel arrests
and convictions and trials and so forth
led to the first agreement, that I knew of in the north, of its kind.
That was an agreement between the entire hotel industry
and the ad hoc committee to end discrimination,
to hire minority individuals
in all levels of employment, including management.
It was very historic and very elevating
and it really pumped us all up to think,
''My God, we really could have an effect on history.''
''We could have an effect on lives of people we'd never know or meet.''
It was simply by taking seriously the words of the Constitution
and the preamble in The Declaration of lndependence
and all that stuff that we believed in with great vim and vigour.
Here we just saw it happen and it worked.
It was a very thrilling experience for us,
but the flip side of it is other people saw it in a different light.
That is, the business community saw it as a threat,
as something that would cause them problems.
The fact that 1 00 Berkeley students were arrested,
probably 500, 600, 800 Berkeley students were involved in the thing,
it was a portent of things to come.
Very quickly pressure was put on the university.
''You've got to stop this.'' The terms that were used were,
''The university cannot be used as a base for attacks on the community.''
In the fall of the school year '64-'65,
we returned to campus to find out the tables on Bancroft and Telegraph
which had historically been the campus political activity lifeline
were banned.
Tables have been permitted out in front of Bancroft and Telegraph
to distribute literature,
including the ideas of policy and advocating stands.
At this particular point, we have been denied this.
We think, whether or not this is true or not
as far as why they're doing it,
the effect of cutting this off
is to stop political activity on this campus.
We knew at the time that it was aimed at the civil rights movement
and at progressive organisations
and at those interested in the peace movement and civil rights.
Mainly civil rights.
But by banning all of us, they created an enormous reaction
because they united a group of people around the need to have those tables
that couldn't have united themselves under any other circumstances.
We told them they had to go back on the streets
for this kind of activity. They then took the position
that, ''We want to undertake these activities on campus property,''
and we said, ''This is not possible.''
When the university banned political action at Bancroft and Telegraph,
they said it was the same as the rest of the campus.
We said, ''If it's the same as the rest of the campus,
then we can do this anywhere.''
We decided to move our tables to Sather Gate.
Five students were sitting at tables and deans came by
and said, ''If you don't leave, we have to cite you.''
One of the students said, ''I'm sorry, sir,
my organisation has not authorised me to leave.''
And so he was cited.
As soon as the student was cited, the dean would cite the next student.
Somebody would sit in their place.
After they cited the five people, they didn't want to be there all day,
so the deans started leaving. People said, ''Me, too!''
At three o'clock, 500 people marched into Sproul Hall saying,
''Whatever you do to those people, you've got to do to us.''
If you don't stand up for your freedom now, you're dead, guys.
The deans wanted the students who were cited
to go into the deans' office.
We said, ''We all did it. You have to treat us all the same.''
We were out in the halls and nobody would go into the office.
At about nine o'clock, they announced that those five people
plus three demonstration leaders were suspended.
The next morning, we really knew it was going to happen.
We set our tables up in front of Sproul Hall.
I guess I was one of the more noisy people so a dean came up to me.
He asked me to identify myself and I refused.
He said if I didn't identify myself, I would be arrested.
It wasn't the first time that I had been threatened with arrest.
Two policemen took me under the arms. I went limp.
They dragged me into the police car.
Before I got into the police car, it was surrounded with people.
It was two minutes to 1 2.
There's a commotion going on.
Some people are joining in or stopping to watch.
This police car is going nowhere.
I just did what any of my fellow students
or fellows in other organisations would've done.
I was just singled out. Chance selected me. l'm no martyr.
I couldn't understand why people were prohibited from speaking in the plaza.
And if this demonstration around this police car
was some way to indicate it was wrong, it seemed like a good idea.
I didn't like the idea of seizing a police car very much
but it was certainly a peaceful seizing.
People began to speak.
The only reason I took part in this is because I like Cal very much.
l'd like to see it better.
And they'd stand on the car. People were very careful about the car.
People would take their shoes off and gently climb up on the car.
They moved from the hood of the car up onto the roof of the car.
Then the argument raged. Are you with us or against us?
I wasn't either. I was watching and listening to speeches.
There was an open microphone on top of the police car.
Anybody who wanted to speak signed up on a list.
They had three minutes to say anything they wanted.
Hour after hour, people were getting up and orating.
It was like an explosion of ideas.
Aristotle said,
''lf you are not a citizen, you are either a beast or a god!''
Now, I ask you a very simple question...
People start talking, bringing in the Greek philosophers,
the French Revolution, talking about all the ideas,
constitutional liberties, as if they had meaning.
Late at night some fraternity people came down.
There was some confrontation.
They were heckling from the back so someone said, ''Come on up.''
They got one of the fraternity boys to say his thing on the mic.
By the time he got there,
he forgot why he was against it and his friends booed him.
It really was a political awakening.
There was a political issue and we were all part of this.
We weren't observing it on television.
We were part of deciding what would happen,
as was the university administration.
No one from the university administration came to speak.
No one came to present any reasoned point of view
about why the arrest had occurred
or why the rules restricting political speech were justifiable.
Nothing.
I ended up sitting in that police car for 32 hours
and, at the maximum time, there were as many as 6,000 people
sitting down around the police car.
At various points when arrests were threatened,
people didn't run away. More people sat down.
People felt they had to sit down.
People were saying, ''Join us. Join us.''
Mario and a delegation is off negotiating with the administration.
At the final minute, they arrive and a settlement has been reached.
May I please have a decision?
What's the word now?
- There's been an agreement signed. - An agreement signed?
Yes, by the student groups and by me, as president of the university,
which has several points to it.
The first point is that the student demonstrators
shall desist from their illegal actions,
protesting university regulations.
We've also agreed to set up a committee to examine the rules.
The remarkable thing about this entire situation
is that there's been a coalition, that I think is unusual in politics.
A coalition from Youth for Goldwater to the Young Socialist Alliance.
Usually these groups don't speak together,
let alone sit on the same table and work out policies and platforms.
l'm proud to say that American students are united on one issue
and that's the First Amendment privileges of freedom of speech,
the right to advocate and discuss at any time, at any place,
as long as it doesn't disturb classes and interfere with traffic.
Our meetings lasted 1 0, 1 2, 1 5, 1 8 hours.
People slept at different times during some of them and came back
because we had two goals, to figure out what to do
and to try to keep this enormous coalition together.
Understanding the power of all of these groups
moving in the same direction around this issue.
That takes a long time because you can't do it by a majority vote.
The minority just says, ''OK, l'm gone.''
It had to be by consensus. People had to agree.
And it took forever.
We called it boring, disgusting, time-consuming democracy.
I remember one administrator described the Free Speech Movement
as a civil rights panty raid.
That's not such a dumb description.
He did see kids having a good time. It was very exciting.
Instead of being about panties, it's about civil rights.
But what he failed to see
is that there was a real underlying seriousness to this.
There was a tremendous sense of community.
It's as if all these students had been waiting to work together
and suddenly they did it.
Six weeks ago, they promised us
that they would negotiate on their regulations of free speech.
Yes, they negotiated. They have blocked every attempt we have made.
If they refuse to come to a stand,
we will also consider negotiations as being broken by them.
However we will continue to try
and get them to come to a vote or take a stand or make a decision.
As Mario Savio would talk about a meeting
and tell what happened in the meeting
and explain the positions taken by the administration
and, from what I could tell, would tell exactly what had gone on,...
..l would then contrast that with the administration's explanation.
Muffled, guarded.
The administration would not explain what had happened.
They wouldn't tell the truth.
A lot of people became very upset
about what administration spokesmen would say was going on
when they knew it wasn't true.
What you have there
are a few of these rather bearded, unwashed characters
with sandals and long hair
who normally would be regarded tolerantly as a lunatic fringe
which you put up with but you do not necessarily encourage.
In effect, the campus has been turned over to these characters.
Somewhere in the process of the FSM, for the very first time
the young, privileged, affluent children of the culture
began to see themselves as an oppressed class.
It was an astounding perception
because here we were at the height of the privileged,
the best students at the best multiversity
destined to be the managers of the society.
In the middle of this,
we turned around and looked at our education and said,
''Wait a minute. Somehow the best is the worst.''
It put us out of touch with the society.
It severed technology from values, the intellect from the heart.
For many people, this was the only educational activity
that we were involved in that was deeply meaningful.
In late November, it became clear
that the administration had finally figured out
how to break us apart as a coalition.
That was they said we could have our tables back.
We could do the things we wanted to
but we couldn't advocate unlawful activity,
less we'd still be liable for discipline as students on the campus.
It was very clear to us
that the only groups that last part of the rule were aimed at
were those who used civil disobedience in their strategies.
That meant the left and the civil rights movement.
We felt quite defeated.
This position on the question of advocacy,
which the president recommended and the regents approved,
is far severer than any recommended by any faculty committee
and, of course, is totally unacceptable to the students.
It constitutes, in fact, prior restraint on speech,
on political expression on campus.
So, you've lost a lot of ground?
Well, it's very hard to say.
Fortunately, the university committed another atrocity.
They could not end this whole incident without punishing somebody
and teaching a lesson that this should never again happen.
So when students got back after Thanksgiving break,
they found out that the eight people originally cited
had received letters saying that disciplinary proceedings
leading to expulsion had begun against them.
So here we are. Four students are getting the axe,
six organisations are getting the axe for standing up this semester
and for fighting for these things.
They're getting the axe not for what they did but for what we have done.
They spoke for us. They were part of us.
They have been singled out and will be chopped off.
We were told the following.
If Kerr tried to get something more liberal out of the regents,
why didn't he make a public statement to that effect?
The answer we received
from a well-meaning liberal was the following.
He said, ''Would you ever imagine the manager of a firm
making a statement publicly in opposition to his directors?''
That's the answer.
I ask you to consider if this is a firm
and if the regents are the directors
and if President Kerr is the manager,
then, I tell you something, the faculty are a bunch of employees
and we're the raw materials, but we're raw materials
that don't mean to have any process upon us,
don't mean to be made into a product,
don't mean to end up being bought by some clients of the university,
be they the government, industry, organised labour, be they anyone.
We're human beings.
There's 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.
You've got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels,
upon the levers, upon the apparatus and you've got to make it stop
and you've got to indicate to the people who run it
that unless you're free,
the machine will be prevented from working at all.
How could you not go into Sproul Hall?
Everybody was going into Sproul Hall. It was a...
What other alternative did you have
to say that you weren't happy with the way things were going?
I hesitated for about two seconds and I thought...
I got a picture of my husband's face and I thought,
''What is this going to do?''
''What is it going to do to my career, to my life?''
Then I just said, ''To hell with it, I don't care what it does.''
''This is my chance to do something.''
The fourth, third and second floors are filled. Stay downstairs.
Members of the Bay Area Civil Rights Movement in the stairwell over there.
People were dancing in the hallways. People were studying.
People were just sitting on the cold floors,
wandering around, talking with each other.
It was chaos and confusion and it was sort of like a party
and it went on and on and on.
Finally, the police decided that if you wanted to go out,
you could go out, but you couldn't get back in.
I debated about this for...
I don't think I was in the position of deciding to make witness
or not make witness, a great moral decision.
It was getting to be dinnertime. It was getting in or not getting in.
I had no idea this was going to go on for a long time.
When I came back,
people were climbing with ropes up the front of Sproul Hall.
It was clear that something was happening but it wasn't clear what.
May I have your attention, please?
I am Dr Edward Strong, chancellor of the Berkeley campus.
I have an announcement.
This assemblage has developed to such a point
that the purpose and work of the university
have been materially impaired.
Please go.
I wanted to run. My impulse was to run.
I was hanging on to the people next to me to keep myself from jumping up.
Then something really neat happened.
That was... Art Goldberg was the leader of our floor.
He was in charge of us. He was standing there.
He heard they were coming up
so he was giving us a speech on what you do,
how you go limp.
He said, ''When the cops come at you, don't fight them.''
''You just want to go limp.''
As he's saying this, the cops are coming at him.
He talked all the way down to the floor.
I know this because I was looking between their legs.
It was really an inspiration.
I said, ''lf he can do that, that's what l'm going to try to do.''
When they got to me, they said,
''Do you want to walk out like a lady or get dragged out?''
I said, ''l want to get dragged out like a lady.''
With the arrests came a massive collapse of the authority
of the campus administration.
Now, they made a desperate attempt to regain that authority
in a big meeting at the Greek Theater.
The departmental chairmen believe that the acts of civil disobedience
on December 2nd and 3rd were unwarranted
and that they obstruct rational and fair consideration
of the grievances brought forward by the students.
There are a small number of individuals, I regret to say,
who are interested in fomenting a crisis merely for the sake of crisis.
They hope that continuing chaos will bring about a total revolution
and their own particular concept of utopia.
The university supports the powers of persuasion
against the use of force,
the constructive act as against the destructive blow,
respect for the rights of others, opposition to passion and hate,
the reasoned argument as against the simplistic slogan.
The academic world and the people of this state
expect of us conduct commensurate
with our past achievements and our high capacities.
We should expect no less of ourselves. Thank you.
We want Mario!
The police have got Mario.
They are pulling him away...
The police have pulled Mario away from the speaker stand.
He tried to exercise free speech.
When he stood up here, the police took him away.
That shows the entire process that's going on campus.
We, of course, had no notion
that Mr Savio was going to try to speak at the end of this meeting.
He asked... Just a moment.
Just a moment. He asked...
- Just a moment. - Just let him speak.
He asked...
He asked me at the beginning of the meeting
whether he would be allowed to speak at this meeting.
I said he would not
because this was a structured meeting, not an open forum,
and we had a programme which had been approved.
They're hypocrites and bastards.
Even if the Greek Theater had gone exactly according to plan,
it still would've been a flop.
But it was worse than a flop, it was a fiasco,
and there was a kind of pandemonium on the campus.
There was a power vacuum.
Who the hell was in charge? Nobody knew.
A bunch of us drafted a resolution.
We took that resolution into the academic senate
and it passed by over seven to one.
The overwhelming majority of the faculty
had come down firmly on the side of free speech.
So when the faculty marched out
into this cheering mob of students,
we knew that was it, that was victory.
We had achieved everything we had set out to achieve in the FSM.
Student rallies at the University of California
over the past two months have become commonplace.
But today's rally in front of Sproul Hall has taken on a different tone.
Several thousand students have gathered
for what has been billed as a victory celebration,
a victory the students feel is assured
as a result of yesterday's action by the academic senate.
We're asking that there be no restrictions
on the content of speech, save those provided by the courts.
That's an enormous amount of freedom.
People can say things within that area of freedom
which are not responsible.
Now, that's... We've finally gotten into a position
where we have to consider being responsible
because now we have the freedom within which to be responsible.
l'd like to say that at this time l'm confident...
l'm confident that the students
and the faculty in the University of California
will exercise their freedom
with the same responsibility they've shown in winning their freedom.
People thought, ''This is it. This is day one of a new era.''
We're going to have a different university.
We can re-plan the whole structure of the university.
If we want, we can have the administrators sweeping sidewalks.
That was a popular slogan in those days.
We can have a different conception of education.
Worse yet, we attracted to Berkeley
the worst collection of kooks and nuts you've ever seen.
Everybody saw this on television
and they had a distorted conception of it.
They thought what you do is you go to Berkeley, riot and have a great time.
lt's one big political, sexual, drug feast.
Didn't Ronald Reagan himself say
that it was all drugs and sex and radical politics?
They had this absurd conception of what was going on.
The media exaggerated it in a certain way.
We had created a set of expectations that were really not satisfiable.
What irritated me most in the stuff that came out about that period
was the description of us as alienated and cynical.
We were the absolute antithesis of that.
We were so committed and so involved,
we risked our careers, our jobs, our education
and we did it because we were so tied into this system,
to this country, to this culture.
We believed in it so much
that we were willing to take those risks
at a time when it wasn't popular to do so.
l'd never realised people would lie to maintain their positions of power.
Then I saw it.
I don't think people were evil to lie, but they did it.
They altered the way things were to maintain their positions of power
and they did it in a way that was wrong.
And then I saw that, then I saw that everywhere.
I saw that in the structures of political power in Oakland.
I saw that in the structures of political power in the South.
I began to see that the mechanisms
that the Free Speech Movement was attempting to change
were mechanisms that operated everywhere.
I was at a rally where Mario was speaking.
He was the speaker.
It was some kind of wrap-up rally.
Maybe it was right after the trial or something like that.
It was sort of like, ''Well, the FSM is over.''
''We've got it all. That's all settled.''
My feeling was, ''OK, that's settled. I can go on with my life.''
I was even walking away from the rally before Mario was finished.
I have this very clear memory of his voice ringing out
as l'm leaving Sproul Plaza.
He's saying, ''Don't walk away because we've still got a war to stop.''
I just looked around real startled and I thought, ''War? What war?''
Then it turned out that it was the Vietnam War.
If I can have your help, if I can have your hand,
if I can have your heart, if I can have your prayers...
If the good Lord is willing, I will continue
to try to lead this nation and this world to peace.
Victory in our struggle for civil rights and free speech
made us confident that we could change the course of history.
Then we learned about Vietnam
and stopping the war became our consuming cause.
The first large activity in opposition to the Vietnam War
was Vietnam Day in May 1 965.
There was a parade of speakers that, one after another,
started telling us something that we really didn't know
which was what our country was doing in Vietnam.
Most of us grew up thinking that that United States
was a great and humble nation
that involved itself in the affairs of other countries reluctantly
as a last and final resort.
But now, the war in Vietnam
has provided the incredibly sharp razor
that has finally separated thousands and thousands of people
from their illusions about the morality and integrity
of this country's purposes internationally.
Never again will the self-righteous saccharine moralism
of promising a billion dollars of economic aid
while we spend billions and billions of dollars to destroy them,
never again will that moralism have the power to persuade people
of the essential decency of this country's aims.
What kind of a system is it
that allows decent men, good men, to make the decisions
that have led to the thousands and thousands of deaths
that have happened in Vietnam?
What kind of a system is it that justifies the United States
in seizing the destinies of other people
and using them callously for our own ends?
We must name that system
and we must change it and control it,
else it will destroy us.
The war escalated rapidly.
Every month another 20,000 soldiers shipped out to Vietnam.
Many of them came through Berkeley.
Some of us decided to stop the trains.
I was walking next to a woman and she told me that she was a Buddhist
and that she had been pulled into stopping the war
by the immolations of the priests.
She said she was going to sit on the tracks
and so I said, ''OK, I will, too.''
As the train came around the bend, I thought, ''lt has to slow down.''
But it sped up.
Then as it got closer to us, it began shooting out steam.
As the steam hit me, I jumped out of the steam.
I looked at the woman l'd been talking to
and she was sitting in a full lotus position in the middle of the tracks.
As the train went rushing by, I thought she was under it.
When the train got past, I expected to see a big pile of blood.
There was nothing. She had just disappeared.
A few days later, the woman walked into the museum where I was working,
leading a big group of children on a tour.
I said, ''What happened? What did you do?''
She said, ''The plain-clothes policeman
snatched me off the track before the train got there.''
I said, ''Were you going to stay there?''
''Were you going to let the train kill you?''
She said, ''Yes, I was going to, but that isn't what happened
so now l'm here taking these children through the museum.''
And it really struck me. It really hit my heart
that here was a person who was ready to give her life
to try to stop the war.
That's when it came through to me just how important it was.
What we have to do is get rid of this tactical point.
In the fall of '65, the Vietnam Day Committee
organised its first anti-war march.
The destination was the Oakland army terminal.
The City of Oakland refused a permit. The VDC voted to march anyway.
All in favour of the motion to march regardless of permit?
All opposed?
The Vietnam Day Committee
intends to have a peaceful march through Oakland.
We intend no civil disobedience.
We do not intend to break any laws. We've made this point quite clear.
We think it's incredible that the Oakland authorities
have denied us a permit for this march.
Our policy is the following.
We are going to march down Telegraph Avenue.
We hear that a cordon
is very likely to be formed right past the Oakland City line.
It is a very dangerous situation.
We can create a great peace movement or destroy it.
We urge your cooperation.
We had a problem. The police had put up a barricade at the Oakland line.
We had to deal with what we were going to do
when the march got to that point.
Some of us ran ahead to see if we could bluff our way through.
It was clear it was going to be a bloody situation.
I just decided that we were turning.
l, basically, was the person who made that decision.
For years afterwards, I got great degrees of shit for it.
Never knew if I did right or wrong.
I still don't know if it was the right decision.
The next day, a larger march made a second attempt to cross into Oakland.
Once again, a police cordon was waiting.
This time the marchers faced another obstacle. Hell's Angels.
Why don't you people go home?
Get out of here!
Back off. Back off.
Each attempt to stop the anti-war movement
seemed to make our numbers grow.
A month later, a third march, far greater than the first two,
finally made it into Oakland.
The whole national mythology was that Vietnam was a consensus war,
was bipartisan foreign policy,
all significant sectors of the American public accepted the war
and the people who opposed it were marginalised freaks, kooks,
unimportant people.
It was a real statement to say,
''Yes, I am willing to march against the war.''
When thousands of people did that, it broke that consensus.
That's what the anti-Vietnam War movement did.
It broke that consensus.
- Go ahead, react. - React to what?
React to the greatness of the march on the day. Are you happy with that?
Ronald Reagan walked onto the political stage
as a candidate for governor in 1 966. During his campaign,
he found that attacking what he called ''the mess at Berkeley''
pleased the crowds.
It began a year ago when the so-called free speech advocates,
who in truth have no appreciation for freedom,
were allowed to assault and humiliate
the symbol of law and order, the policemen, on the campus.
That was the moment when the ringleaders
should've been thrown out of the university once and for all.
He won by pandering to a citizenry that was outraged
by what these insolent, ungrateful children
were doing on the campuses.
As a matter of fact, I have here
a copy of a report of the district attorney of Alameda County.
It concerns a dance sponsored by the Vietnam Day Committee,
sanctioned by the university as a student activity,
and was held in the men's gymnasium of the University of California.
The incidents are so bad,
so contrary to our standards of human behaviour
that I couldn't possibly recite them to you here in detail.
But there is evidence of things
that shouldn't be permitted on a university campus.
Let me just read a few excerpts.
''The total crowd at the dance was in excess of 3,000,
including a number of less-than-college-aged juveniles.''
''Three rock'n'roll bands were in the gymnasium
playing simultaneously
and all during the dance movies were shown on two screens
at the opposite ends of the gymnasium.''
''These movies were the only lights in the gym.''
''They consisted of colour sequences,
different coloured liquids spreading across the screen,
followed by shots of men and women on occasion.''
''Shots where the men and women's nude torsos on occasion...''
''And persons twisted and gyrated in provocative and sensual fashion.''
This portion of the Gray Line in the city
is the first and only foreign tour within the continental limits.
The fountainhead of the hippie subculture.
The hippies' is often a strange world which they live in.
They take many trips.
And the trip of a hippie is generally an unusual one.
Across the bay from Berkeley,
a counterculture emerged on the streets of San Francisco.
Descended from beatnik era hipsters,
hippies further exposed the chasm
between our parents' generation and our own.
By 1 966, more and more of us
were turning on, tuning in and dropping out.
Our alienation ran much deeper than political protest.
We were all beginning to see that it was much bigger than the war.
It was much, much bigger than the civil rights movement.
There were major things wrong.
I think the people who got involved in the counterculture
perceived that they did not want to be a part
of what was wrong with a culture that was destroying the world.
I can see that much better in retrospect than I could right then.
But the point is that it was the culture that was sick.
It was the whole American way of looking at things that was sick.
So I think we came to a realisation that one way to change that
is to just live it differently.
lnstead of trying to change the structure
in a direct confrontational way,
you just drop out and live it the way you think it ought to be.
Do you play anything besides a sweet potato?
Just the drums and the trumpet.
Yeah, and I go up in the mountains and yell now and then.
- You do what? - Go up in the mountains and yell.
Way up high in the mountains and yell as hard as I can.
- What's the purpose of that? - To greet the dawn
and the greet the noonday sun and to greet the sunset.
You stay all day yelling at morning, noon and night?
Right. And standing on my head and making gardens
and painting pictures.
You not only play the sweet potato, you also grow them?
Right.
Why do you indulge in smoking this... these narcotic cigarettes?
Why do people drink alcohol?
- lt's the same reason. - lt's a big Ping-Pong table.
You say why do we do this and we say, ''Why do you do this?''
We don't agree... You're the mess. We're trying to change it.
Why? What are you trying to change it to?
What are your principles? Do you have any?
We're not trying to change anything. We're just trying to be ourselves
- and do what we think is right. - Why don't you go out in the desert
instead of dirtying up a community?
We're not dirtying up anything.
My parents sent away to the Bay Area a serious young folk singer.
I came back with long hair down to there.
I was wearing an enormous amount of beads around my neck.
They figured I had abandoned everything I was taught.
I realised...
We had big arguments about this stuff.
I tried to convince them to sell their furniture and go to lndia.
And they weren't going for it.
I realised that no matter how far out their political views were,
because they were mighty unpopular,
my parents were pretty left wing,
that really they were materialists.
They were concerned about how the wealth was divided up.
At that point, in my consciousness, I didn't care about wealth.
We were actually living communally,
rather than talking about communism.
Sell that radio. Get rid of the subscription.
Tune in to those other bands that do not broadcast in words,
that broadcast in joy.
The form of God is the joy of his discovery.
Up, up, up.
Everybody goes up.
The counterculture burst onto the Berkeley campus
during a strike in the fall of '66.
At the close of a meeting,
students started to sing Solidarity Forever
then suddenly switched to Yellow Submarine.
They're singing, ''We all live in a yellow submarine.''
- What does this mean? - Again, it's difficult to explain.
I think... We take this music seriously and there's a meaning.
A meaning which everyone can interpret differently
about the yellow submarine.
lt's a sort of...
lt's an understanding that we're banding together
in a yellow submarine
and it represents a new way of looking at life.
The radicals of Berkeley and the hippies of Haight-Ashbury
had a natural affinity.
We were visionaries, critical of conventional society.
But we disagreed about how to change the world.
This running argument came to a head over the war in Vietnam.
Sometime in late 1 966,
Bill Miller, who'd been active in the Vietnam War movement
and ran a bar in Berkeley,
called some people active in the anti-war movement
to a meeting behind his bar.
Some people from Haight-Ashbury were organising some kind of activity.
They wanted to tell us about it and ask for support.
It was going to be the first be-in.
There was one this fella in particular,
he was trying to really get us excited about the plan.
He said, ''We're going to have so much music
and so much love and so much energy
that we're going to stop the war in Vietnam!''
The politics of hip is that we were setting up a new world, as it were,
that would run parallel to the old world
but have as little to do with it as possible.
We just weren't going to deal with straight people.
And to us, the politicals,
a lot of the leaders of the anti-war movement were straight people,
as they were still concerned with the government.
They were going to march on Washington.
We didn't even want to know that Washington was there!
We thought that eventually the whole world would stop all this nonsense
and start loving each other as soon as they all got turned on.
lt's amazing that these movements coexisted at the same time,
and were in stark contrast in certain respects,
but as the 1 960s progressed, they drew closer together
and began taking on aspects of the other.
As Burns stumbled out of that bunker
dazed, with blood on him, parts of his friends on him,
he collapsed into the arms of Larry Craig,
and he mumbled to Larry Craig.
He didn't mumble, ''Those bastard Vietcong.''
He didn't mumble, ''Those bastard communists.''
He didn't mumble, ''Those slope-eyed bastards.''
He mumbled only one thing over and over.
''That bastard Johnson. That bastard Johnson.''
The aim is to build a powerful peace block
that can really have influence in the 1 968 elections,
and we must make it clear
that we are not going to let our political forces and the politicians
ignore Vietnam in 1 968.
This must be an issue if that tragic war is still going on.
And so, as the war hawks escalate the war in Vietnam,
we must escalate our protest against the war.
We're in front of the Oakland lnduction Center today
because this place is going to be closed down
October 1 6th to 21 st.
We are declaring a draft holiday for that period,
and we're going to close this building down.
The movement from protest to resistance,
which was the official slogan of Stop The Draft Week
and became a major slogan within the anti-war movement,
had something to do with the logic of the anti-war movement.
There'd been six, seven, eight years
of educating people about the war and of protesting it.
Meanwhile, the war was being escalated all the time,
getting worse and worse,
and there was a feeling of impotence
in the face of the further escalation of the war.
We were becoming much more alienated from American society
and much more willing to be disruptive of that society,
and, basically, we began moving toward the view
that we wanted to make the cost of pursuing the war abroad
the ungovernability of the society at home.
l'd been very influenced by Martin Luther King and Gandhi,
I believed very deeply in non-violent civil disobedience,
and here were these leaders on campus... I was a graduate student,
and they were saying, ''We have to raise the stakes.''
''We have to stop the war in a much more militant way.''
I found their rhetoric seductive.
I think we were pretty convinced
that we were going to shut down the induction centre when we went there.
We felt strong, there were a lot of us,
we felt well organised, we had a lot of planning meetings.
We didn't want to say, ''We don't cooperate with the war.''
We wanted to say, ''We aren't going to allow you to wage the war.''
''We're going to fight you.''
Tuesday morning, the police came in, wielding their clubs.
They took us seriously.
We said we were going to fight them, so they fought us. lt was a disaster.
We just melted. They wiped us out.
Now it was, ''Here come the buses,
and there is not a damn thing you can do about it.''
I began seeing all these young faces in the windows going by me
and I just wanted to reach out and just grab them and stop them
and say, ''Listen, this is your life you're putting on the line here.''
But what came out was, ''Don't go.''
Join our lines. You don't have to go. All you do is say no.
Say no. You don't have to go. You don't have to go.
You don't have to go.
There were bus-load after bus-load after bus-load
of young men that day, and they were going off to die.
And I remember being physically sickened,
realising that I couldn't affect even that part of the war.
Here I was, face to face with these young men,
and yet not one of them turned back.
I don't think we stopped one inductee from making that critical choice
of stepping across the line and going to Vietnam.
I don't think we made one bit of difference that day.
- Does the demonstration bother you? - No, I think it's funny.
All them bums running round, doing nothing.
Tomorrow we go down there twice as strong as we did today.
We go down there with twice as many shields as we did today,
and we go down there with everybody wearing one of these.
If you can see the dents in there,
I don't know if you can see it from here,
but that's what stands between me and a cracked skull
from the highway patrol of the state of California.
- Where do we get the hats? - Where do you get the hats?
- Army & Navy Surplus. - Army & Navy Surplus.
We didn't give up. We didn't say, ''lt didn't work.''
We were able to build for another demonstration on Friday,
and on Friday we, in fact, had our riot,
the riot that we had planned.
The event that I remember the most
was when the students surged and pushed against the police
and pushed them back, block after block.
I remember thinking, ''This is like a metaphor.''
''lf enough Americans believed the war were wrong, we could end it.''
We controlled the downtown area of Oakland for most of the day,
and the cops were outnumbered and confused and scared.
We shut down the induction centre.
We did what we said we'd do, we shut the mother down.
I went to the Stop The Draft Week protests.
And what I saw there made me convinced
that action in the streets of that sort
was not going to lead to the kind of change necessary to stop the war.
I saw a lot of people from Berkeley tear people's fences down.
Fences that belonged to people that probably made $5,000 a year
were ripped out to block people's cars.
Bobby Avakian, son of a judge, a well-known young would-be radical,
let the air out of the tyres of the district attorney.
This was going to stop the war?
I just thought this was a burlesque of opposition to the war.
There's nothing else to do.
The picketing and all of that wasn't working.
lt's time for confrontation.
We did stumble upon a strategy where we said,
''lf you continue that war in Vietnam,
there's going to be chaos here in the streets of the United States.''
''Every place you try to do anything to do with the war,
there's going to be thousands of young people rioting,
trying to stop you from doing it.''
While it was a great success a turning point,
it was also the first clear demonstration
that the radical part of the anti-Vietnam War movement
was coming up against its own limitations.
It didn't really have the weight in society to stop the war.
I think that it was after that
that the Berkeley radical scene
became more and more cut off from reality,
and the question of moving American society,
changing people, really was getting lost.
- Move. l've got to go to work. - There's a war on.
I don't care. l've got to go to work.
We began to see ourselves as, you know, glue in the keyholes.
We began to see ourselves as obstacles
in the way of the system fulfilling its potential
for wreaking destruction all over the world.
I think we began to see ourselves
as being as big a pain in the butt as we could,
and I think we lost the idea that we could be victorious.
As confrontation and sit-in and street demonstrations escalated,
the rest of the United States' political community was left behind.
I was interested in the rest of the United States, in the Newport Beach.
Those people l'd failed with
in the Thanksgiving vacation Free Speech Movement
were the people you had to reach if you were going to stop the war,
and the way to do that was not to go down and sit in in the streets
in front of the Oakland Draft lnduction Center
and tear up fences and block streets.
The way to do that was to be active electorally.
After the Tet Offensive, when Westmoreland came to Johnson,
and said, ''ln order to continue the land war in Vietnam,
we're going to need a million men,''
Johnson was told by J Edgar Hoover
that if we tried to get a million men out of this country,
he could not ensure the domestic security of this country.
And that was one of the questions, one of the considerations he made,
when he decided to end the land war,
to begin to pull back from the land war, and to resign
as an expression of the failure of his policy
to win the war in Vietnam.
And Hoover saying that he couldn't protect,
he couldn't ensure domestic security, was a truthful statement
about the power of the anti-war movement at that time.
We did put limits on America's ability to wage the war in Vietnam.
I shall not seek
and I will not accept
the nomination of my party for another term as your president.
We want to talk about this thing called violence
that everybody is so afraid about.
Here you are, talking about you're afraid of violence,
and the honky drafted you out of school to go fight in Vietnam.
You sit in front of your TV sets and listen to LBJ tell you
that violence never accomplishes anything, my fellow Americans.
You ought to tell him clear, ''lf you don't want any trouble,
keep your filthy white hands off our beautiful black skin.''
Keep them off. Keep them off.
In the streets of Oakland, a few miles from the Berkeley campus,
the Black Panthers came forward as the cutting edge of Black Power.
Their militancy had a magnetic effect on the student movement.
We want the Panthers to be our friends.
We want to follow their lead
in some fashion that's confusing, that's mysterious.
All we are aware of, we want to go, black and white together,
into some positive future against the oppressor
who was feeling ever more oppressive.
Bobby Seale and Huey Newton formed the Black Panther Party
in the fall of '66.
They drew up a ten-point platform
addressing community needs from education to housing.
The most pressing issue was police violence
against Oakland's black community.
The Panthers decided to arm themselves and patrol the police.
People might imagine we were right behind the police car.
No. We may be four blocks away. We just drive through.
If we see the police arrest somebody, we'd get out of the car
with our guns, tape recorders, law books.
By now, we have six, seven members doing this, all with guns.
How we got our guns was fantastic, too, the first guns.
The Little Red Book, The Thoughts Of Chairman Mao Tse-Tung.
Huey calls me and says, ''l know how we can raise some money for guns.''
I said, ''How?'' He said, ''The Little Red Book. lt's all over the news.''
''l heard you can buy them at the China bookstore in Frisco.''
''How much money have you got?'' I said, ''50 bucks.''
We run to the China bookstore, buy about 1 00 of these books.
We got our guns strapped on our side. I got a .45,
Huey's holding a shotgun, Little Bobby's got a Carbine.
We got these bags over our shoulders with Little Red Books.
''Red Books! $1 !'' We were buying them for 20 cents and selling them for $1 ,
Berkeley Campus, at Sather Gate right there!
We sold out in the matter of an hour.
We took this 1 00 bucks and we'd buy some more Red Books.
We made $200, $300. We went out and bought two shotguns that day
with The Little Red Book! We hadn't even read the thing.
People think we came up with this hardcore ideology related to Mao...
We must have sold the book two or three months
before we decided to open the thing and actually read it.
Anyway, the next thing I know, l'm marching on the Capitol.
Because we were up there to protest a bill they were trying to put in
to keep us from carrying guns.
Ronald Reagan is over here on the big front lawn.
I got a statement to read.
The Black Panther Party calls upon American people in general
and the black people in particular
to take note of the racist California legislature,
which is considering legislation
aimed at keeping black people disarmed and powerless
at the very same time racist police agencies throughout the country
are intensifying the terror, brutality, murder and repression of black people.
Ronald Reagan is escorted off the lawn by the state capitol police.
I said, ''We can go inside somewhere. lsn't there a spectator section?''
I have these Black Panthers up here.
Can we get in here?
- Wait a minute. Wait a minute. - Are you going to arrest him?
- Am I under arrest? - Did you place him under arrest?
Am I under arrest? Take your hands off me if l'm not under arrest.
- Am I under arrest? - Take your hands off me!
They've put trumped-up charges of conspiracy and felonies
on everyone who went in to exercise a constitutional right
and said they had no right to bear arms in a public place.
The California penal code, section 1 2020 through 1 2027,
and the Second Amendment of the Constitution
guarantees the citizen a right to bear arms on public property.
Our organisation was like a social evolutionary accident, so to speak.
When you compare the NAACP from 1 908
and other organisations, etc,
and all the years they put in to become established,
in just six months the Black Panther Party has international notoriety.
We're on the front page of the London Times and papers in Africa somewhere.
We were a broke little organisation with a number of shotguns,
a very weak treasury, and we were worried about how to pay the rent.
And, boom. I mean, we were shocking people.
We have probably said to white America...
The people who were observing us when we came out with the guns
are saying, ''Niggers with guns!''
lt's like a fear. They don't even have to say it.
Their faces said it. ''There's too many niggers with guns.''
Like they know that they repressed us,
and now we were organised with guns. This is the new step.
lt's symbolic that, ''They're not going to be non-violent any more.''
On the night of October 28th 1 967,
Huey Newton was stopped by police. There was gunfire.
Officer Fry was killed, and Huey Newton was arrested for murder.
His trial drew the student movement
into an alliance with the Black Panthers.
''Free Huey'' became our rallying cry.
The organisation just propelled.
It took off like a prairie fire, it spread everywhere.
Certainly beyond my imagination.
After Huey's arrest,
that's when things really started rolling.
Free Huey now or else! Free Huey now or else!
The Panthers exercised a heavy influence
in the imagination of the white left,
partly because the white left was confused about who it was
and what it ought to do.
They were fascinated by this tough, macho image
and they followed it not so much wilfully but involuntarily,
because it was a projection out there of the thing in their own actions
that thrilled them most.
We had captured the imagination of the white radical left
to a point that its whole identification
became connected with what the Black Panther Party was doing,
how it was personifying things.
And it was like we influenced them
in whatever direction we thought that they should go.
I don't like to say suck up, but they were awed by the Panthers.
The Panthers were somehow confronting the white power structure
the way they would have liked to have done, some of them.
But not all. Many of the whites who led the Stop The Draft Week
could have been involved with it.
Many of those people who had been in some parts of the early SDS
was as sceptical as I was.
But no one would, of course, say any of these remarks publicly.
I mean, you didn't need that hassle.
So, what a lot of us did,
I think to the detriment of the black movement, perhaps,
and to the left movement in general,
a lot of us with years of political experience
and organisational skills dropped out.
If not dropped out, stepped to the side in this period.
Huey P Newton is the only leader that black people should recognise!
A man who is willing to stand up and face that pig,
and on his own terms.
Gun for gun if necessary.
This must be done!
You cannot sit there
and allow that man to be railroaded any more.
You must free our leader. He must be freed, and he will be freed.
Two days after the assassination of Martin Luther King,
the war of nerves between the Black Panthers and the Oakland police
came to a climax.
On April 6th 1 968,
a shoot-out erupted in which Eldridge Cleaver was wounded
and Bobby Hutton was killed.
Bobby Hutton was instructed by the cops
to run from here to the police car, or the area where it was,
and was literally shot down.
He was shot over ten times.
He had five pistol bullets in his head.
A clear-cut case of murder.
As brother Huey P Newton says,
racist pig cops must stop their wanton murder and brutality
or suffer the wrath of armed black people
and the black communities defending themselves.
Historically, in retrospect,
those guns were somewhat our nemesis.
We were never really able to play that down.
The police, the media, used that.
We got hung up into a confrontational thing with the police over those guns
that we were never really able to live down.
We say, bring it on. If you want war, let there be war.
This is what we say. ls that clear?
In other words, if he is convicted and sentenced to death,
Oakland will erupt.
This whole country will erupt. We're going to do everything we can
to see to it that the whole world erupts. ls that clear?
The Panthers seemed even crazier than they were
because they were playing the media and the media was loving them.
The media picked up their current,
fed the narrowest parts of their image back to us
in the most dramatic, hyped terms,
that the Panthers themselves wanted them to be projected.
It drove the police crazy.
They were furious and wanted to get them all over the country,
and it drove some of us...
Well, it incited some of us with superficial fantasies
of a kind of revolution that was completely inappropriate.
It had nothing to do with the actual landscape of possibility.
It was interesting to me more deeply and metaphorically.
If that was what they were doing,
what was appropriate in our community?
The Panthers, in a sense, let, in my opinion,
white radicals off the hook,
some white radicals, not all, some white radicals off the hook
for what SNCC had challenged them about three years earlier.
That was to organise the white community.
They could say they supported the Panthers as they were the vanguard.
They assumed the movement could only be led by blacks.
They made it clear blacks would be the group to start the revolution,
and that the Panthers were the army of that black vanguard.
I was taken up with,
''Now we're not only a protest movement,
we're not only a movement to end the war in Vietnam,
but we are a revolutionary movement.''
We were wrong. It wasn't a revolutionary situation.
But it was a mistake.
Everybody can make a few mistakes.
And, at the time, it had a lot of the aspects to us
of a revolutionary situation.
'68 was a real high time, what we were doing.
We identified with the student movement
and the large protest movement in Paris.
There was the Prague Spring
and the feeling that revolution was in the air, east and west,
capitalist and communist.
It was all coming apart in a new spirit.
A new wave of liberation was in the air.
I felt that the world was unravelling, history had speeded up,
that the world was swirling around me.
The movement had expanded. The anti-war movement was immense.
The women's liberation movement had begun.
The world was undergoing change at a rate that I could hardly comprehend,
and yet I was in it and I was part of it, and I was changing.
I always remember this particular period of time,
because the change was so phenomenal.
I went to sleep one night
and I was a woman who was dissatisfied
with my position as a woman in society,
but I felt solitary in that dissatisfaction.
And suddenly I wake up and, right and left,
everybody is speaking about it.
I have women who agree with me everywhere.
We start to form a sisterhood.
Everything in my life that has disturbed me is being challenged.
Things that haven't disturbed me before, suddenly they do.
When we began to try to take a more active role
in steering committees and decision-making forums
in the movement,
we began to see our comrades resisting our input.
And we looked at them and we said, ''What?''
''How can they do this to us? These are our brothers.''
''Why aren't they interested in what we have to say?''
''They're only interested in the fact that we're always there for them.''
''And we always make the coffee and we run off the leaflets
and we make all the telephone calls late into the night,
and yet when we try to participate on a more active level,
we meet resistance.''
What you see here is the beginning of a movement
that women are human beings and that we have equal rights.
We intend to go to school and have childcare so we can go to school.
We want the university to run classes that teach us about our history,
the same as black people want to learn about their history.
That's what is happening today. This is just the beginning.
One of the ways the women's movement
is the logical and maybe even inevitable conclusion of the '60s
is that throughout the '60s we were trying to imagine
how to live differently, how to change the world.
The women's movement took much from the civil-rights movement,
the new left, the anti-war movement, but we brought it home.
We brought it into the kitchen, we brought it into the bedroom,
we brought it into the most personal, intimate aspects of people's lives.
It was hard to deny there.
It was hard to ignore those issues.
When I thought of revolution then,
the whole idea had assumed complex, enormous dimensions.
It didn't mean a simple change in the institutional order.
It meant a coordinated change in all the dimensions,
all the aspects of life.
How we were with ourselves, how we were with each other.
This was so complex a programme, you couldn't write it down
as the 1 3-point programme of the Berkeley Revolutionary Front.
This was something that would take thousands, millions of people
engaged all their lives in exploring this end of it and this end of it
and how these ends might fit together,
and it was clear by then
that all this exploration was there to do.
People had begun each part of the exploration.
I forbear to list them, OK?
And, at the same time, it seemed impossible. There was no time.
The war got worse faster, the political activity got worse faster,
they were killing more and more people.
Every time you placed some degree of hope in a national leader...
So much life, so much death.
So much possibility, so much impossibility.
There we were, attempting to change national politics,
and found ourselves at the Chicago Convention.
It changed American politics in unpredictable ways.
We had not anticipated,
speaking for those involved in the electoral side of politics,
we did not anticipate the arbitrary exercise of authority
that Mayor Daley would bring to bear in Chicago.
And it was phenomenal.
Mr Chairman, most delegates to this convention
do not know that thousands of young people are being beaten
in the streets of Chicago.
And for that reason and that reason alone,
I request the suspension of the rules for the purpose of adjournment
for two weeks to relocate the convention in another city
of the choosing of the Democratic National Committee
and the presidential candidates...
Wisconsin is not recognised for that purpose!
There was a side of American politics that was vicious and violent,
and that's what we saw in Chicago.
Daley rolled over the anti-war forces,
and it was a destruction of the Democratic Party.
It seemed impossible
that there could be any significant electoral path toward ending the war
following the convention.
It seemed that what had happened in the parks of Chicago
made the anti-war movement destined for direct action
for quite a period of time.
The violence in Chicago
triggered confrontations on campuses across the country.
Berkeley students calling for a Third World College initiated a strike
which provoked daily battles between police and protestors.
After eight weeks, Governor Reagan sent in the National Guard
and the strike died down.
Eventually, an ethnic studies programme was established,
but in the wake of the strike, an atmosphere of tension remained.
A month later, student and community activists
came together to create People's Park.
I was one of those people who believed that the counterculture
could be revolutionary.
lt's hard to talk about that without talking about People's Park.
A group of people took some corporate land
owned by the University of California that was a parking lot,
turned it into a park
and then said, ''We're using the land better than you used it,
and it's ours.''
For a brief moment in history, in People's Park,
the counterculture and political activists
had a magical fusion.
It was a way of looking at the future. lt was utopian.
It was a way of saying, ''lf we had control of our lives,
this is what it would look like.''
In a down-to-earth way,
we were showing in our very activity the image of a new society.
Our job is to form a counterculture,
a more rural culture, a more decentralised culture,
to develop counter-values of cooperation,
of a production for use rather than a production for profit,
develop that culture in hope that that culture would be
in revolutionary contradiction to a bourgeois culture.
And that we should view ourselves as revolutionaries
but really as founding mothers and fathers of this counterculture.
I can almost convince myself now!
As I see it, the great hope implicit in the People's Park
is that in our leisure time, so to speak,
we will make the social revolution.
Property is not a thing to keep men apart and at war,
but rather a medium by which men can come together to play,
a people's park.
People's Park managed to focus all of the frustrations
as well as some of the ideals of the '60s.
There was a belief in the environment,
a belief in the participation of ordinary people
in political decision-making,
a belief that a lot of things ought to count
that traditionally don't count
when they're caught up in government and university bureaucracy.
There was all of that.
But the fact remains that I believe the People's Park incident
was extremely cynical on the part of the demonstrators.
They wanted a confrontation.
What mattered was getting people out in the streets, demonstrating.
Roger Hinds and the regents and Ronald Reagan
can't allow this to go on.
If there's one liberated territory,
people may get the idea there could be other liberated territories.
The park issue is not the issue.
The issue is, ''We must have a confrontation throughout the summer.''
They were out of confrontation issues.
And as soon as you give them a park,
they'll dream up another confrontation.
We have been invaded by people outside of the state,
outside of the cities, we have been invaded by militants.
This is... We're in a revolution,
and the only thing, don't ever say we're going into a revolution.
We're in a revolution! Now the question is, who will win it?
When Jesus disrupted the foreign recruiters, his followers said...
''Power to the people. Out, demons, out.''
I declare this place decontaminated
from poisons, chains and lies, from the abomination that defiles.
The demons have returned to the nothingness from which they came.
Earth, water, air and fire, witness our liberation.
This property is private.
You are now trespassing.
Unless you leave, you will be arrested for trespassing.
If they didn't want the park, they should've stopped us when we started,
and not let us work on it every day and then just take it away.
lt's their park now. What can we do?
I have a suggestion.
Let's go down to the People's Park, because we are the people!
We want the park! We want the park!
Here they come.
Those people told you for days in advance
that if the university sought to go ahead with that construction
on that property, they would physically destroy the university.
Governor, we offered to negotiate many times.
Negotiate? What is to negotiate? What is...?
Wait a minute. On that issue, don't you simply explain to these students
that the university has a piece of property that it bought
for future construction of the campus
and it was now going ahead with the plan? What do you mean, negotiate?
Governor Reagan, the time has passed
when the university can just ride roughshod
over the desires of the majority of its student body.
The university is a public institution,
an important institution for all of its own community
and for the Berkeley community around it.
All of it began the first time some of you who know better
and are old enough to know better
let young people think that they had the right
to choose the laws they would obey,
as long as they were doing it in the name of social protest.
When the fence went up, the whole experience of People's Park changed.
Governor Reagan brought in the National Guard,
the city was occupied for a month,
and what happened is, the worst aspects of the movement emerged.
People did things that were totally counterproductive.
They tried to provoke the National Guard into fixing their bayonets.
They tried to cause skirmishes on the campus.
I found it possible to resist the feeling,
the collective hallucination,
that we were involved in a revolutionary struggle.
But there was one moment when I became immersed in that feeling.
There was a peaceful demonstration on Sproul Plaza
denouncing the university's overreaction to the park,
the police brutality towards students,
the National Guard on campus, occupying the city.
My boyfriend and I and a friend of mine
went down to the plaza to hear the rally,
and as we got there,
we realised that the police were letting people into the plaza
but they were not letting people out.
My friend, by that time, had already gone through the police lines
and I motioned for her to come back, and they wouldn't let her out.
Pigs off campus! Pigs off campus!
Killers off campus! Killers off campus!
..requesting you all to leave the plaza.
If you don't leave, you're going to be shot in the next five minutes.
I started hearing the sounds of a helicopter,
and it came closer and closer and the sound got louder and louder
and suddenly the helicopter swooped over the whole campus,
over all the students, and I thought,
''We're going to be shot at. We're the Vietcong.''
Everybody on the outside of the police line was running
to try to get away from the gas.
Everybody on the inside of the police line was trying to get out.
And the police were beating people as they tried to get out.
We went back to Kroeber Hall and waited for my friend to show up.
She'd been through the mill. She had been throwing up, it was nausea gas.
So we drove up to the rose garden.
We were standing there, looking out across the roses and the campus,
and there were still helicopters circling around.
She looked at me and said, ''l can't stand this. l'm going to get out.''
I said, ''l think you're right. I think it's all over.''
''l don't think we can stay here any more.'' lt was a poignant moment.
And a year later, we were all gone.
We all felt very defeated.
It was a horrible experience to gas students at a peaceful rally.
And it was one reason
why people began to feel that we had to reassert what we really stood for,
that we really had to protest the park
in a dignified and peaceful way,
and recapture the original spirit of the park.
And that led to the Memorial Day march.
We'll get People's Park back eventually.
Everybody who's ever done any hitchhiking
knows that basically we can't lose. When you sit out and hitchhike,
in the front seat are the parents
and they give you this real scared, contemptuous look as they drive by,
but then, in the back seat, as they drive away, you see the kids going...
We got the kids on our side and we can't lose. We just can't lose.
When you're in a mass movement to change society,
when you're in this experience of this democracy breaking out,
you don't want it to end. You want the storm to continue.
You want to keep that sense of change and overwhelming power
that one gets from the ocean.
You might not be able to keep the rowboat straight or up,
but you don't want the storm to die.
There was no vision, no articulate philosophy,
no conception of social organisation and social change.
What there were were a series of emotional moments,
a series of passions, a series of desperately important issues.
But you can't beat something with nothing,
and if you're going to fight this kind of long cultural battle,
you are bound to lose
if you don't have a coherent, articulate, well-worked-out vision
of what you're trying to do and that they didn't have.
We had taken what we had as far as we could go.
I think that it's important
not to lose sight of what that movement accomplished.
That is, it was part of the struggle for civil rights.
It was part of the movement in this country
that broke down the Jim Crow barriers
and changed the caste relationships
of blacks and other minorities in our society.
It was part of the movement that liberalised American culture.
It was part of the movement that gave way
to the ideas of women's equality and women's liberation.
It was part of a movement
that ultimately made it impossible
to carry out so blatantly the kind of imperialistic foreign policy
that characterised the period after World War Two.
American society was profoundly changed by the movements of the '60s.
In the '60s, we came at a certain point in the Cold War
to reject the ideologies of both sides,
and our declaration of freedom was a political freedom,
but it had a larger dimension,
that is, the freedom of imagination.
Having gained the freedom to see the world freshly
and the ability to act for change,
we carried what we'd learned into the rest of our lives.
From personal issues to planetary concerns,
we continued to explore the potential for change.
And as we watch activists for human rights and democracy around the world
challenge the powers that be,
we know that each generation has its chance to make things change,
and that no generation can do it alone.
We shall live in peace!
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