On August 8th, 1973, a small group of hackers and activists calling themselves the Community Memory Project, placed an unusual device just outside the entrance to student-owned cooperative Leopold’s Records.
Posted on June 20, 2019 - 3:30pm
It was the summer of 1970, and the war in Vietnam was never going to end. B-52s were carpet-bombing Cambodia, gouging craters into its eastern hills; across the border, angry G.I.s were fragging their officers. Back home, radicals were bombing police stations and burning down banks. In May, the National Guard shot four students dead at Kent State. To paraphrase Yeats, things were falling apart; the center couldn’t hold.
At 15, she was a class-skipping, catch-me-if-you-can maverick hitchhiking to D.C. to protest the Vietnam War. Looking back on those years now, Frances Arnold says, “Fifteen is one of those terrifying ages, where you’re frustrated because you know something’s wrong, but you have no idea how to fix it. So I did what I could, which is protest.
“But as I’ve gone through my life,” she continues, “I know that it’s my responsibility to fix it. I’m much better at fixing things than protesting.”
She pauses.
It was in the 1990s that Pat Thomas read Growing (Up) at Thirty-Seven by Youth International Party (Yippies) co-founder and Jerry Rubin. Then in his mid-30s, a little depressed and not sure what to do with his life, Thomas describes the book as a little bit autobiography and a little bit self help.
Posted on April 16, 2018 - 4:13pm
The radio station we now call KALX began life as an oddity in the basement of Ehrman Hall, a dormitory on Dwight Way. It had at its disposal a collection of records, mostly classical, a couple mics, a cheap recorder, and a Corina cigar box containing the most basic of mixing boards. The year was 1962.
This was not a sanctioned operation. It was not a political statement. It was barely even art. Radio KAL was, in fact, the work of geeks; driven, visionary, persistent, highly resourceful geeks.
Posted on January 17, 2018 - 1:24pm
UC Berkeley played host to myriad free speech controversies this year—including violent Antifa protests of conservative pundit Milo Yiannopoulos and a proposed faculty boycott of classes during Free Speech Week—much of it predicated on the assumption that speech is harmful.
Posted on November 6, 2017 - 2:20pm
In 1961, the space race between the Soviet Union and the United States was heating up, relations between Cuba and the U.S. were cold, and soon after John F. Kennedy’s inauguration as America’s youngest president, he asked Congress to fund a new Peace Corps. The Peace Corps had its inception in a campaign speech Kennedy gave on the Michigan campus in October 1960, when he challenged students to consider spending at least part of their lives helping the poor overseas.
When telling a story, and it doesn’t matter if that story is long or short, fiction or nonfiction, the marginalized writer must be defiant.
So says writer Viet Thanh Nguyen.
Defiant is not the first descriptor that comes to mind for this particular writer, a Vietnamese refugee and UC Berkeley alumnus, who in fall 2016 wore a royal blue suit, purple tie, and orange socks at the Pulitzer awards banquet in Manhattan to accept the Fiction award for his debut novel, The Sympathizer (Grove Press, 2015). Flamboyant, maybe. Defiant, no.
I enlisted in 1966, in the Navy, so that I wouldn’t be sent to Vietnam. But it didn’t work out that way. I was sent to work as an advisor to the Vietnamese Navy’s swift boat operations in Qui Nhon, north of Nha Trang; beautiful country, beautiful people.
We had about ten boats operating there, and about 20 U.S. personnel. The mission was to patrol the coast to make sure the North Vietnamese weren’t coming in with contraband. We also worked with Seal Team One insertions and did MEDCAPs, where we’d take corpsmen or doctors in to treat villagers without medical care.
Lately, I’ve been thinking about an incident that happened in 1965, seven years before I was born. It centered on an antiwar protest in Berkeley, one of the first of countless such protests to come. Though just a blip in the grand scheme of Vietnam era turmoil, it seems to point to something important about America and the nature of patriotism.
It starts with a guy named “Tiny.” Tiny was 6’7” and 300 pounds. And he really liked to fight.
