March 24—Today's post is provided by Ruth Tenzer Feldman and Bettina Aptheker
The
Free Speech Movement: 50th Anniversary
By
Bettina Aptheker
![]() |
Berkeley students dress in their best to support First
Amendment freedoms on campus, 1964.
|
I was 20, a sophomore at the
University of California, Berkeley at the FSM launch. I came from a prominent
Communist family, raised in Brooklyn, New York, in the 1950s, through the worst
of the McCarthy Era. I went to Berkeley intent on a pre-med major and escape
from parental strictures. Steeped in politics all my life, myself ‘manning’ a
table for the W.E.B. Du Bois Club (a socialist organization I had helped launch
two years earlier) I was in Sproul Hall Plaza as Jack was arrested. As cries
went up, “Sit down! Sit down!” I did, and launched my foray into the Movement.
My first public speech was from the top of that police car at night, the guys
helping me to scramble up to the roof of the car and offering encouragement,
television news camera lights blinding my view of the students around it. When
I quoted abolitionist Frederick Douglass, “Power concedes nothing without a
demand,” the crowd of thousands roared its approval. The roar soared through my
body with an energy that propelled me into co-leadership of the Movement, and
most importantly into a sense of personal and political empowerment I was never
to forget. A year later my picture appeared in the Sunday New York Times under the headline, “The American Communist Party’s
Foremost Ingenue”! None of the male leaders of the movement ever received the
“ingénue” distinction!
![]() |
FSM leader Bettina Apthecker sits on the police car housing Jack Weinberg, October, 1964. Students surrounding the car prevented the police from taking Weinberg off campus. |
On the occasion of this 50th
anniversary of the FSM, and as we recognize March as Women’s History Month, it
is worth pausing for a moment to consider the ways in which gender, race,
class, and sexuality may effect one’s access to freedom of speech. Although the
First Amendment embraces a universal ideal in its wording, it was written by
white, propertied men in the 18th century, who never likely imagined
that it might apply to women, and/or people of color, and/or all those who were
not propertied, and even, perhaps, not citizens, and/or undocumented
immigrants. A woman’s freedom of speech is often inhibited by fears of
reprisal, for example, if she reveals sexual or domestic violence. There is
almost always denial, her speech vilified, her character assassinated. Incest
survivors seeking acknowledgement of their suffering and redress are viciously
attacked virtually without exception, even the men who as boys were molested by
their parish priests, until it became too many, the evidence too overwhelming
to sustain the denial. In other words, freedom of speech is a Constitutional
guarantee, but who gets to exercise it without the chilling restraints of
censure depends very much on one’s location in the political and social
cartography.
We veterans of FSM were too young
and inexperienced in 1964 to know this, but we do now, and we speak with a new
awareness, a new consciousness, and a new urgency that the wisdom of a true
freedom is inexorably tied to who exercises power and for what ends.
![]() |
Berkeley students now study at the Free Speech Movement
Café.
|
---
Bettina Aptheker is a Professor of Feminist Studies at the University of California,
Santa Cruz where she has taught for more than 30 years. Her most recent book is
a memoir, Intimate Politics: How I Fought
for Free Speech, and Became a Feminist Rebel (Seal Press, 2006). She is
married to Kate Miller, her partner of 34 years. They have three children,
three grandchildren, and live in Santa Cruz, California.
Ruth Tenzer Feldman has been an attorney, editor, research analyst, ticket seller, and keypunch operator. After writing ten nonfiction books on history, she turned to historical fiction/fantasy. Blue Thread (Ooligan Press, 2012) features the woman suffrage campaign, and won Oregon's top literary award for young adult literature. A companion novel, The Ninth Day (Ooligan Press, 2013) features the 1964 Free Speech Movement in Berkeley, California. Ruth lives in Portland, Oregon, with her husband and numerous dust mites.
I was there! I had just transferred to Berkeley from a small east coast women's college in the fall of '64, and the FSM jolted me into a different world. Thanks Bettina and cohorts! Ruth, I look forward to reading The Ninth Day.
ReplyDeleteI was also there, part of the crowd, recently transferred from an eastern university. I felt proud at the range of the movement, from left to (initially, at least) Goldwater Republican. And that the Steering Committe as it evolved included, without comment, a member identified as communist.
DeleteIn my view, "free speech" was a great selling point. But it wasn't really about free speech. No one denied the right of students to speak freely. What the university relinquished, in response to student and then faculty demand, was its role of protecting students in loco parentis. The issue at the time was off-campus Civil Rights groups recruiting students on campus for off campus demonstrations where they were subject to arrest. For example, at the Cadillac dealership in San Franciso. I recall a discussion about the sidewalks at the edge of campus--did they belong to the city or the university. (Answer: the city. And tabling was unhindered there.) By the way, Jack Weinberg, the trigger, was not at the time a student. He was a recruiter for CORE (Congress of Racial Equality). But the question went back several years to the student organization SLATE and and a demonstration in San Francisco against hearings by HUAC (House Unamerican Activities Committee). The argument was, students are adults; let the civil authorities deal with any alleged criminal conduct. Of interest, there is now a resurgence of interest in university adminstration resuming its role in loco parentis to protect students from sexual assault by other students. -
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I was there in 1964 and Bettina Aptheker's mind and self remain as unattractive now as they were then. Quit making a diseased person into some sort of hero. She wasn't and isn't.
ReplyDeleteMiss Aptheker, you are a vile individual. People like you are the reasons for why democracies fail.
ReplyDeleteI was not there. However, those are the kind of seminal events or moments that inspired me to come to America for my grad schooling and settle down here. Sadly, this country has been growing the wrong way for the past few decades. While conservatives' power continues, the increasing intolerance and perversion of the political correct is worse. In fact, I'm horrified and disappointed at how organic the PC culture has become to our life in the USA. It's disgusting. Aptheker and her logic is indeed scary and disgusting. She was right then. She is wrong now.
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