Berkeley Bans Activist Student Organization — Free Speech Movement Ahead
Administrators at the University of California, Berkeley, on this day banned the student activist organization SLATE because of its off-campus political activities.
The ban was one of several steps taken by the administration to limit student political activity that eventually led to the famous Free Speech Movement at Berkeley — the first major campus protest of the 1960s — particularly after the university announced that it would enforce the ban on September 16, 1964.
See the dramatic Free Speech Movement events: the massive sit-in on October 1, 1964, and Mario Savio’s historic speech denouncing “the system” on December 2, 1964. The Free Speech Movement provided a model for the campus anti-Vietnam War protests later in the 1960s.
View the records of the Free Speech Movement: http://bancroft.berkeley.edu/collections/fsm.html
Read: David Lance Goines, The Free Speech Movement: Coming of Age in the 1960s (1993)
Watch a documentary on the Free Speech Movement: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=28aPyBrP0Yc
Read the biography of Mario Savio: Robert Cohen, Freedom’s Orator: Mario Savio and the Radical Legacy of the 1960s (2009)
Learn about the 100 Year fight for free speech in America: Lee C. Bollinger and Geoffrey Stone, The Free Speech Century (2018)