“Where y’all from?” a Negro girl in the CORE group asked one of them.
“From Wilmington, North Carolina,” one of the boys replied, and the black-jacketed group walked on silently.
We started toward the stage and happened to come across Bayard Rustin, the deputy director of the march, heading that way with Norman Thomas. Following them up to the stage, we found two other members of the march committee—Courtland Cox, of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee, and Norman Hill, of the Congress of Racial Equality—looking out at the people between the stage and the Monument and talking about the crowd.
At exactly nine-thirty, Ossie Davis, serving as master of ceremonies, tried to begin the pre-march program, but it had to be postponed, because Rustin and Thomas were the only two dignitaries on the stage and many more were expected.
“Oh, freedom,” said a voice over a loudspeaker a little later. The program had started, and Joan Baez began to sing in a wonderfully clear voice. “Oh, freedom,” she sang. “Oh, freedom over me. Before I’ll be a slave, I’ll be buried in my grave…”
Then came folk songs by Miss Baez; Peter, Paul, and Mary; Odetta; and Bob Dylan. Davis made the introductions, occasionally turning the microphone over to a marshal for an announcement, such as “Mr. Roosevelt Johnson. If you hear me, your child, Larry Johnson, is in the headquarters tent.” By ten-thirty, the expanse of grass that had been visible between the crowd around the stage and the crowd around the Monument had almost disappeared, and more people were still marching onto the lawn, carrying signs and banners. Most of the signs identified groups—such as the Alpha Phi Alpha Fraternity and the Detroit Catholics for Equality and Freedom—but some had slogans on them, and one, carried by a white woman who marched up and down the sidewalk in back of the stage, said “What We All Need Is Jesus and to Read the Bible.” Another folk singer, Josh White, arrived on the stage while Odetta was singing. White didn’t wait for an introduction. He merely unpacked his guitar, handed the cigarette he had been smoking to a bystander, and walked up to the microphone to join Odetta in singing “I’m on the Way to Canaan Land.” In a few moments, Miss Baez was also singing, and then all the folk singers gathered at the microphone to finish the song.
At about eleven, Davis announced that the crowd was now estimated at ninety thousand. From the stage, there was no longer any grass visible between the stage and the Monument. Next, Davis introduced a representative of the Elks, who presented the organizers of the march with an Elks contribution of ten thousand dollars; a girl who was the first Negro to be hired as an airline stewardess; Lena Horne; Daisy Bates, who shepherded the nine teen-agers who integrated Central High School in Little Rock; Miguel Abreu Castillo, the head of the San Juan Bar Association, who gave a short speech in Spanish; Bobby Darin; and Rosa Parks, the woman who started the Montgomery bus boycott by refusing to move to the back of the bus.
The official march signs had been passed out, and they began to bob up and down in the crowd: “No U.S. Dough to Help Jim Crow Grow,” “Civil Rights Plus Full Employment Equals Freedom.”
At about eleven-forty-five, Davis told the crowd that the march to the Lincoln Memorial was going to begin, and suggested that people standing near the Monument use Independence Avenue and people standing near the stage go down Constitution Avenue. We were closer to Constitution Avenue, and as we got onto the street there was a crush of people that for a moment brought back stories of the dangers inherent in a crowd of such a size. But almost immediately the crush eased, and we walked comfortably down shady Constitution Avenue. We noticed that practically nobody was watching the march from the sidelines, and that in the march itself there was a remarkable lack of noise. Occasionally, a song would start somewhere in the crowd, but to a large extent the marchers were silent. A few hundred yards from the Monument, the march was stopped by a man who was holding a sign that said “Lexington Civil Rights Committee” and wearing an armband that said “Mass. Freedom Rider.” He asked the people in the front row to link arms, and, beginning to sing “We Shall Overcome,” they moved on down the street.
“Slow down, slow down!” the man from Massachusetts shouted as he walked backward in front of the crowd. “Too fast! You’re going too fast! Half steps!”
A few hundred feet farther on, a policeman and an M.P. stood in the middle of the street and split the crowd down the middle. We followed the group to the left, and in a few minutes found ourself standing in a crowd, now even quieter, to the left of the reflecting pool in front of the Lincoln Memorial.
Calvin Trillin
MARCH 13, 1965 (THE FREE SPEECH MOVEMENT)
MARCH 3
ONE AFTERNOON JUST after the spring semester began at the University of California, I paused on my way to the Berkeley campus to make a tour of the card tables that had been set up that day by student political organizations on the Bancroft strip—a wide brick sidewalk, outside the main entrance to the campus, that had been the original battlefield of a free-speech controversy that embroiled and threatened the university for the entire fall semester. There were half a dozen tables, lined up, as usual, along the campus edge of the sidewalk, and hundreds of students were streaming past them onto the campus. By the time I had crossed the sidewalk to the tables, standup hawkers had presented me with a flyer announcing the picketing of Oakland restaurants by the Congress of Racial Equality, a flyer asking for contributions to raise bail for some earlier demonstrators from the Ad Hoc Committee to End Discrimination, and a homemade pamphlet called “Some Organizing Ideas: Excerpts from Idea Essay by Lee Felsenstein.” The table at one end of the line was sponsored by the Young Socialist Alliance, an organization that is ordinarily referred to as Trotskyist, though few people seem to know just what the implications of that position are in Berkeley, California, in 1965. The Y.S.A. table was being watched over rather casually by a collegiate-looking young man in a blue blazer; he was reading a book, but would glance up occasionally at students who stopped to look at his display, which included leaflets in support of a local City Council candidate, pamphlets introducing the Y.S.A., and a number of booklets on the order of “Fidel Castro Denounces Bureaucracy and Sectarianism, Speech of March 26.”
The Y.S.A. table was separated from the table of Slate, a campus political party of left-wing but non-sectarian views, by a cardboard sign announcing that placards for the CORE picketing of Oakland restaurants would be made on the steps of Sproul Hall, the administration building, the following afternoon. A young man wearing a lapel button reading “Free Oakland Now” was sitting behind the Slate table and calling out at intervals that he was selling the “Slate Supplement,” a student critique of the university’s courses. His table held not only a pile of “Slate Supplement”s but also leaflets protesting discrimination in Oakland, a mailing list to be added to by those interested in receiving Slate literature, a stack of pamphlets about Mississippi put out by the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, and a pile of buttons that included two varieties of the “One Man, One Vote” buttons produced by S.N.C.C., along with several of the “Free Speech” buttons worn by supporters of Berkeley’s Free Speech Movement, a few “Free Oakland Now” buttons, and one button that said “Slate.” A student stopped at the Slate table and, indicating a sign that asked for contributions to the bail fund for the Ad Hoc Committee demonstrators, asked the Slate representative, “Did you hear about the DuBois Club pulling out of the Ad Hoc Committee?”
“That’s not what happened at all,” the Slate representative replied. “The Ad Hoc Committee broke up. They’re having a press conference at one o’clock, and Mike Myerson’s going to explain it.”
“Do you expect me to believe anything in the press?” the student asked.
“It’s their press conference,” said the Slate man. “Mike Myerson is the president of the Ad Hoc Committee.”
“That doesn’t make any difference,” said the student, and wandered off.
The DuBois Club had the table on the other side of Slate’s. A co
uple of students were looking over the literature available there—mostly pamphlets describing the DuBois Club, plus the various magazines of the American Communist Party—while the young man in charge discussed the relative merits of two sociology courses with a friend. At the table next to his, a representative of the California College Republican Club was explaining to a passing student that that club was the only moderate Republican club on campus, and, at the table beyond, the Independent Socialist Club was selling “The Mind of Clark Kerr,” a pamphlet criticizing the president of the university, by the Independent Socialist Club’s leader, Hal Draper, which had been one of the popular pamphlets of the free-speech controversy. At the end of the row, a girl wearing a button that said “I Care” was sitting behind a table sponsored by the Student Committee for Agricultural Labor arguing patiently with a young man who had stopped by to offer his suggestions. “I think we have to concentrate on organization at this stage,” the girl was saying.
“No, no, no!” the young man exclaimed. “The thing to do now is to picket the grocery stores. Then we sit in at the factories.”
In addition to stacks of literature and a paper to be signed by those interested in becoming members of the organization or receiving its mail, nearly every one of the tables set up on the Bancroft strip has a pile of political buttons, the sale of buttons having become a popular way to raise money for student organizations at Berkeley. Students who want to protest against the House Un-American Activities Committee—and that seems to include most of the students who stop at the Bancroft strip—can usually buy a “Sack HUAC” button from the University Society of Libertarians or a “HUAC Eccch!” button from the Bay Area Council for Democracy; some of them already have a button that says “I Am Not Now Nor Have I Ever Been a Member of the House Un-American Activities Committee.” Another popular button says “A Free University in a Free Society,” and is sold by Students for a Democratic Society, an organization affiliated with but often to the left of the League for Industrial Democracy, and someone has attempted the succinct approach with a button that says simply “I am an Enemy of the State.” The Cal Conservatives for Political Action, who are sufficiently outnumbered to find humor their most effective weapon, wear buttons that say “I Am a Right Wing Extremist.” During my stay in Berkeley, one of the most popular new buttons has been one saying “Abolish the Regents.” It is being sold by Ed Rosenfeld, a young man with a shaggy beard who has been an active worker in the Free Speech Movement. Rosenfeld ordinarily mans a table of his own, holding up a sign decorated with covers of “The Regents”—a pamphlet that the F.S.M. published during the controversy in an attempt to show that the University Board of Regents represented corporate wealth in the state rather than the people—and shouting, “ ‘Abolish the Regents,’ twenty-five cents!”
“Does this money go for political activity?” a prospective customer asked while I was standing at Rosenfeld’s table.
“Clearly,” said Rosenfeld, who was himself wearing a “Get Out of Vietnam” button on one lapel and, on the other, the pin of the National Liberation Front, which is also known as the Vietcong, though rarely in Berkeley. “In this case, it will go to send a student to the Youth Festival in Algeria next summer.”
“Who is the student?” asked the customer.
“I am the student,” Rosenfeld said. “Naturally.”
The customer bought a button, and Rosenfeld continued his chant. “ ‘Abolish the Regents,’ twenty-five cents!” he called out. “Send your favorite regent to Vietnam!”
· · ·
With the start of the spring semester, the leaders of the Free Speech Movement find themselves in a perhaps unexpected position—that of revolutionaries whose revolution has succeeded. The F.S.M. headquarters—a casually furnished storefront office where businesslike girls carefully compile logs of phone calls and cover the wall with messages written in marker pencil—bears a startling resemblance to the headquarters of the Council of Federated Organizations in Jackson, Mississippi. But, unlike COFO workers, who still can’t be sure that their civil-rights campaign has made any significant change in conditions in Mississippi, F.S.M. workers need only walk a block or two to witness unrestricted campus political activity of the kind that was the goal of their movement, and, to anyone who has spent some time listening to their reminiscences, the F.S.M. headquarters, which is a relatively recent acquisition, seems to be a make-work echo of the days when the F.S.M. had a series of command posts, with names like Strike Central and Press Central—a system of walkie-talkies for communication among its scouts on the campus—and an emergency telephone number, called Nexus, to be used when the regular number was busy. During the fall semester, the free-speech controversy demanded the attention, and often the full-time participation, of a large number of Berkeley students, administrators, and faculty members; it involved an unprecedented use of mass action by students and two potentially disastrous confrontations between hundreds of students and hundreds of policemen; and it eventually produced a situation in which a distinguished university of twenty-seven thousand students nearly came to a halt—a situation that the chairman of the Emergency Executive Committee of the Academic Senate called, with little disagreement from anybody who spent the fall in Berkeley, “one of the critical episodes in American higher education.” Those events are in the past, however, and unless another issue involving free speech arises on the campus—or, as many F.S.M. adherents would put it, “unless the administration commits another atrocity”—quite a few of the leaders of the Free Speech Movement are, in the words of one participant, “between movements.”
According to the best-known F.S.M. leader, an intense, intellectually aggressive young man named Mario Savio, who was studying philosophy before he became involved in the controversy, “All that’s left is the trial—legal and political defense—and making sure that the final rules on political activity are acceptable. Then, as far as the F.S.M. goes, that’s it; we disband.” The trial he referred to is that of some eight hundred students who were arrested, on the orders of the governor of California, when they refused to leave Sproul Hall during the protest sit-in that is generally considered to have been the climactic event of the controversy. Political defense can be carried out through activities familiar to participants in mass movements (during the first week of the new semester, the F.S.M. held a rally on “The Berkeley Trials: Justice or Vengeance”), but legal defense is another matter. The same students who, wearing blue jeans and singing hymns, had to be carried out of Sproul Hall by the police have conscientiously presented themselves, in quiet, well-dressed groups of fifty, in a makeshift courtroom in the auditorium of the Berkeley Veterans Building to enter their pleas. (For making a comment to the judge about “shameless hypocrisy” that would have been only a warmup for stronger language on the steps of Sproul Hall, Savio was given a two-day jail sentence for contempt.) The defendants have had to elect a Council of Twenty to deal with their staff of attorneys, who number at least twenty themselves, and F.S.M. leaders have acknowledged, with some embarrassment, that their movement, which once attacked the computer as the symbolic agent of its followers’ alienation and which adopted “Do Not Fold, Spindle, or Mutilate” as one of its war cries, has lately been borrowing the university’s I.B.M. machine to keep track of all the people involved in its legal affairs.
Officially, the issues that divided the Free Speech Movement and the university administration have not yet been completely settled. The Board of Regents, which has final authority over Berkeley and the eight other campuses of the University of California, still has a committee working to determine what its final policy on political activity should be; the Berkeley chancellor’s office has yet to announce permanent campus regulations governing the precise times and places for holding the demonstrations that are now allowed, and ways of holding them that will not interfere with education; and the final point at issue between the administration and the F.S.M.—whether the university would discipline those who advocate or org
anize illegal actions on its campuses—is settled mainly by the willingness of both sides to interpret each other’s ambiguous statements with a minimum of conflict. However, there is so little disagreement left about the basic changes made in university policy during the controversy that President Kerr, who became the chief adversary of the F.S.M., has lately acknowledged in several speeches that the rules in effect before this fall—rules that prohibited students from planning, soliciting for, or advocating off-campus causes on university property—were of “doubtful legality.” The dispute actually arose over the sudden application of these rules to the Bancroft strip—where until last September they had been unenforced, in the belief (or pretense) that the property belonged to the city—but before it ended the regents had officially removed such restrictions entirely. The Bancroft strip, where thousands of students enter the busiest plaza of the campus every day, has remained the area of greatest political activity, but now there is also a line of tables near the fountain in front of the Student Union, a group of three buildings that stand on one side of the plaza, and on the other side of the plaza political rallies are held on the steps of Sproul Hall itself. Martin Meyerson, a social scientist who was formerly dean of the College of Environmental Design and in January was appointed acting chancellor, has gained wide confidence among students and faculty—around the university the belief is widespread that his appointment was one of the chief benefits to come out of the dispute—and he is considered quite unlikely to commit an atrocity. Under the regents’ new policy, the Berkeley campus is now operating peacefully, and, all in all, most people look upon the free-speech controversy as settled….
· · ·
The Free Speech Movement was originally formed in the early fall by a decision to unite all the groups that had a stake in using the Bancroft strip for political activity, whether they were interested in distributing pamphlets for the Young Socialist Alliance or in recruiting students to ring doorbells for Barry Goldwater. It is now agreed in Berkeley that the F.S.M. eventually had the participation of a large number of the university’s outstanding students—not to mention many of the ex-students, part-time students, and non-students who make up what is sometimes called the Hidden Community in Berkeley—and that although it had the almost constant opposition of the student newspaper and the student government, it attracted wide support within the student population. The Sociology 105 poll indicates that two-thirds of the Berkeley students approved of the F.S.M.’s goals and one-third of them approved of both its goals and its methods. It is also agreed that despite the presence of a representative of Students for Goldwater among the twelve members of F.S.M.’s Steering Committee, the committee was considerably more radical than most of its supporters. Although radicalism during the controversy was more a matter of tactics than of political beliefs, a good deal of attention was given to the left-wing politics of those who led the F.S.M. There was wide circulation of a statement, credited to President Kerr, that 40 percent of the F.S.M.’s members were Maoists or Castroites—he later denied having made such a statement—and wide discussion, some of it in a humorous key, of the exotic political beliefs of some of those involved. “I’d considered my views rather far to the left until I went to an F.S.M. meeting after Kerr’s statement,” I was told by an English girl doing graduate work. “Some speaker was saying that it was actually Kerr who was using Maoist tactics. The conservatives—the Young Democrats, for instance—were applauding, but then some people started booing. They were angry at what they considered a slur on Mao.” In actuality, the only Steering Committee member who has been known, on occasion, to refer to himself as a Maoist is Art Goldberg, a large, amiable, sleepy-looking young man from Los Angeles, and his commitment to Peking is not taken very seriously, despite such gestures as carrying a sign at the CORE picketing which said “Racism Is a Paper Tiger.”
The 60s Page 20
