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.