Free Speech Movement Historic Moment – Mario Savio Denounces “The System”
In what was probably the most dramatic moment in the Free Speech Movement at the University of California, Berkeley, student leader Mario Savio on this day gave an impassioned speech denouncing “the system.”
Savio’s speech immediately became one of the most famous statements of the emerging counterculture in 1960s America (see an excerpt below), and it has been widely quoted ever since.
The next day, police arrested 773 people for a sit-in demonstration on campus. More than 10,000 students went on strike, shutting down the university. For other key moments in the Free Speech Movement, go to September 16, 1964; October 1, 1964.
Before his involvement in the Free Speech Movement, Savio joined other UC Berkeley students in protesting discriminatory practices at San Franciso hotels. These actions angered San Francisco business leaders who pressured the university to limit off-campus student activism. In the summer of 1964 Savio joined Freedom Summer in Mississippi, which brought several hundred mostly white student volunteers to help register voters and to teach in community Freedom Schools.
Mario Savio died on November 6, 1996.
Savio: “There is a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can’t take part; you can’t even passively take part, and you’ve got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you’ve got to make it stop. And you’ve got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it, that unless you’re free, the machine will be prevented from working at all!”
Read his famous speech: http://www.fsm-a.org/stacks/mario/mario_speech.html
Read the biography of Savio: Robert Cohen, Freedom’s Orator: Mario Savio and the Radical Legacy of the 1960s (2009)
See and hear Savio’s famous speech: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tcx9BJRadfw
Read: David Lance Goines, The Free Speech Movement: Coming of Age in the 1960s (1993)
Read Mario Savio’s FBI File: http://vault.fbi.gov/mario-savio