The Berkeley Free Speech Movement, 56 Years Later
The Free Speech Movement at Berkeley was a watershed moment in 1960s student organizing. Through unprecedented mobilization, rejecting the expansion of McCarthyist-inspired rules to strangle political activities on campus, and a refusal to allow the administration's efforts to split the movement, students won their basic rights to free speech on campus.
Mario Savio, leader of the students’ Free Speech Movement at UC Berkeley, speaks to several thousand students before leading them in an invasion of Sproul Hall, 1964. (Peter Whitney / Getty Images)
At the beginning of the fall in 1964, a group of undergraduate and graduate students at the University of California at Berkeley began a protest against the campus administration in defense of their right to free speech. In a short time, the protest grew to involve large numbers of students supported by significant groups of faculty and staff; and by December, the movement had won its main demands: the ability to conduct political activity on the border of the campus and, even beyond that, inside the campus itself.
The movement also politicized and radicalized hundreds of students, many of whom joined the ongoing struggle of the Civil Rights Movement in Oakland, Berkeley, and San Francisco, and the movement against the war in Vietnam the following semester.
No one was better positioned to write about this movement than Hal Draper, then a fifty-year-old librarian at the university, who was at the center of the movement from beginning to end, and who played an extremely influential role as a political mentor for many of the leaders and student activists involved.
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