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 By Michael Rossman Looking back at the Free Speech Movement after 40 years, I am struck by several things. I’m looking at the picture of us seated around a police car in Sproul Plaza, in the afternoon sun of October 2, 1964. We’re listening to someone speaking from atop the car. A few policemen lean casually on the car; you can’t see the guy within. A crowd of thousands of students fills the Plaza around us, spills out Sather Gate, floods the rooftops of the cafeteria, listening, just listening. You can’t smell how hot and tired we’ve gotten since yesterday noon, sitting to keep the car from taking him away to jail for offering information, for soliciting money and members for a student civil rights group. You can’t see the 650 cops arming behind Sproul Hall, with orders literally to beat our heads into the ground if we resist. (Nor could we, but the vibes were clear.) You can’t hear us singing, “We shall not be moved… we are not afraid,” an hour later, our voices shaking with fear, as the administration’s refusal to negotiate, to call off the cops it had summoned, stretches on and on. And what strikes me, beside the raw feeling still, is how few we were. We were down to three hundred by then, ringed by twenty times as many uncertain people. As news spread about the police and we prepared to be attacked, maybe two hundred more returned or chose to sit with us. We couldn’t know we’d be ten thousand strong in two months, and win. We all knew that our careers were up for grabs in the act, and our bodies too; we were desperate, driven, beside ourselves, brave only with each other’s help. What could have driven us so, the better students of a great university, headed for privileged lives? Was it an idea or a mania that drove us to risk and hope? Were we reaching for our souls in some way, each and all together? And what might that soul be called? What strikes me, looking back, is that we were possessed. We were conduits; the spirits of Liberty and Democracy were manifest through us. No, I don’t mean metaphorically, but literally. Something deep happened that we still don’t have a language for. I can hardly say much other than that actual spirits worked through us. Go wonder. So take it just as metaphor, if you want, as I say that such spirits continued to work through us: through one who helped pioneer the personal computer revolution, another who leads us toward a gentle revolution in what we eat, another who organized a chain of Hispanic radio stations, another who illuminates the experiences of immigrant and hybrid generations, another whose ministry is legal service to the urban poor, another committed to public radio, and through many less well-known people. In endlessly diverse ways, these spirits still work on in the lives of hundreds, of thousands, who participated in the event we called the FSM. Call it “Power to the People.” The FSM made it real. For many of us, life thereafter was permanently transformed, in partial and subtle and wondrous ways. Looking back now, what strikes me is how neatly the FSM divided the Sixties, and what that division meant, how seminal it was. The Sixties ran from 1958 through 1971 or so, and the FSM came right in the middle. Before that, we young activists were a “New” Left, mainly in having abandoned some mental shackles and social contradictions of the Old Left. But we were still firmly in its tradition of Doing Good for Others, of working for the poor oppressed Negroes, or humanity-as-a-whole in banning the bomb. Which was necessary and nifty, yet also a displacement from ourselves. In the FSM, for the first time, our energy and critique focused on the institution we inhabited. Many of us felt that we revolted against the administration mainly because its decree kept us from continuing to serve others. Yet even this was personal, selfish, in being our deeper education, a reaching for soul. So, immediately, our focus turned from the threatened Civil Rights Movement to ourselves; it was our own state as political citizens that was being threatened, abused, that was to be fought for. This was the deep revolution of the FSM, our utter break with past tradition: turning inward to focus on our own conditions. Immediately the focus moved from our political condition to our condition as students, as learners. Throughout the conflict, culminating in the brief birth of the first “free university” during the climactic sit-in in Sproul, a broad movement of educational reform began--questioning and remaking curricula, classroom processes, student living, the board of regents--and echoed across the nation. Our free speech led immediately to Vietnam Day and the Vietnam Day Committee, the first mass organization against that war; and to the Third World struggles in the later Sixties that ultimately transformed the student body, the curricula, and the professoriate. These struggles grew nationally and are still continuing. By then, the deeper consequences of our revolution were apparent. I don’t think that the FSM “caused” anything to happen, in any simple or tangible ways. But signals do travel and resonate, in many ways. On the surface, our action was replicated elsewhere, as twenty universities convulsed that spring, fifty the next fall, in time two thousand, as issues of speech, of education, of the war, of affirmative action spread. And deep within, our action resonated as the turn within, to deal with our own condition, continued. Here in Berkeley, and afar as signals spread all around, vital movements burgeoned. We focused on our nature as women, as queers, as the “handicapped,” as the “insane,” making movements large and small. We focused on our own conditions as people in bodies, as animals on a planet, as technological creatures, as spiritual beings--and movements flowered for holistic health, natural foods, ecology and the environment, appropriate technology, alternatives to traditional religion. In the process, the traditional language and spheres of politics were radically enlarged. And the process is going on still. Something seminal went on as the first serious revolt of our class against its governing institution became also the public moment of this turning-inward, this re-possession of our selves. Again, I’m not saying it “caused” the women’s movement, even though some of our female comrades digested FSM experience in re-starting that movement. But there’s something uncannily coincidental about the way the Civil Rights Movement, which had been concerned mainly with laws, morphed towards Black Power after the FSM. To its social concerns was added suddenly a focus on identity: What did it mean to be Black? What did it mean to be Hispanic, Asian American, Native American? That these followed as natural questions just as we were asking what it meant to be female, queer, animal, spiritual, etc. seems to me additional testament that some coherent impulse acted through us. Surely the FSM was a vital pivot. In the plain denim of the New Left, we faced ourselves in its mirror and spun back the next moment in the intricate feathers of Counterculture, in the wonder of who we are and who we might become, still undigested in history. As an aging hippie, I hope I will be pardoned for thinking that those Sixties are still going on and that the FSM’s spirit is pertinent still. In commemorating FSM in October, in an extensive program on campus, we focused less on past glory than on issues of the moment. We stood again on a police car in Sproul Plaza with current students, this time supported by a campus administration that joined us in condemning government acts that erode civil liberties. Corny though it sounds, it’s an impulse that can drive one for a lifetime, as it has driven so many of us. Michael Rossman ’63 came to Berkeley in 1958, dropped out after the HUAC protests in 1960, then earned his degree in mathematics. He was a T.A. and Woodrow Wilson Fellow during and after the Free Speech Movement, and then worked for 29 years as a teacher of science in elementary schools. The author of several books, including The Wedding Within the War (a chronicle of the movement in the Sixties) and New Age Blues, he headed the FSM’s 20th, 30th, and 40th anniversary commemorations. He is preparing books on the FSM, on teaching science to children, and on the political poster workshops of the Bay Area. |
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