By the fall of 1964, students from the Berkeley campus of the University of California had succeeded in enraging Republican senator William F. Knowland, darling of the anti-communist “China Lobby.” Knowland owned the Oakland Tribune, then a mighty newspaper and right-wing center of California politics, which students had criticized for refusing to hire black people.
Several Berkeley students had gone south during Freedom Summer to register black voters. On their return, they decided to sit in at San Francisco’s luxurious Sheraton Palace Hotel and the auto dealers on Cadillac Row, protesting hiring discrimination there as well. Knowland fulminated against them in angry editorials, demanding that the university ban the tables in front of Sproul Hall where students recruited for these sit-ins.
Administrators complied. And when the tables remained, university police arrived in a patrol car, arresting former student Jack Weinberg for sitting at one. They were quickly surrounded by hundreds of chanting, shouting students. The Free Speech Movement was on. Speakers mounted the police cruiser’s roof to denounce the university’s cowardice.
I climbed up with them and held a microphone to record the many speeches, later broadcast on our local community radio station, KPFA.
Negotiations stalled for weeks until, on December 2, hundreds marched into Sproul Hall. There we sang civil rights songs and articulated our vision of a “free university.” And in the dark hours of early morning, the police dragged us out to waiting buses.
I was sixteen. We were told to go limp, so I did. A cop dragged me by the ankles, my head bumping down the hall’s marble steps. At each landing, he’d swing me so I’d hit each wall before bouncing down the next…
Auteur: David Bacon
