Berkeley In the Sixties Flashcards
To be able to summarize the movie, and know the main points and players
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From the Free Speech Movement to the anti-war protests to the last stand over People’s Park, Berkeley, California became synonymous with a generation’s quest for social, political, and cultural transformation. Six years in the making, Mark Kitchell’s extraordinary chronicle of those years was named Best Documentary of 1990 by the National Society of Film Critics and was nominated for an Oscar in 1991.
The Main Object of Protest
The pressure on universities to merge their activities with the needs of business and of the government’s nuclear weapons labs.
The “knowledge industry”
was a focal point for national growth. Universities asked students not to introduce “off-campus issues” such as civil rights, apartheid in South Africa, and nuclear weapons testing at the student activity tables that had traditionally been allowed on campus.
In 1963, students protested discriminatory hiring practices of San Francisco Bay Area businesses - WHY?
…to get more middle-level jobs for blacks and other minorities and asking hotels to integrate. For every hundred students who were arrested, 800 were involved in protests.
1964 the primary issue between the administration and the students - WAS WHAT?
… the Free Speech Movement. Students wanted to use the student government as a way to educate other students, and they wanted no other restrictions on their freedom of speech on campus except those imposed by the courts.
The administration’s position - WAS WHAT?
…that a small group of students, to whom they referred as the “lunatic fringe,” were producing a crisis in order to bring about utopia, believing that they could change the course of history. They said that student demonstrations such as sit-ins were interfering with the work of the university.
How did students physically oppose the police?
Students were taught how to make their bodies go limp when the police came to drag them out of buildings that they had occupied.
Mario Savio pointed out - WHAT?
…the university was not a business. It was meant to save human beings from ignorance. If the smooth workings of the administrative machine were valued more highly than student communication among themselves and with the administration, then the students had to “put their bodies on the machine and make it stop working.”
The first large activity was what?
“Vietnam Day” in May 1965. As the war continued to escalate and 20,000 soldiers were shipped out every month, the students decided to stop the trains by lying down on the tracks. The trains moved ahead, and policemen snatched some demonstrators off the tracks just before the trains would have run over them.
Oakland Fall of 1965?
Students organized an anti-war march of several thousand, despite not having received the permit for which they applied.Did not plan to break any laws. Despite being turned back by police on the first day and the Hell’s Angels on the second day, the third attempt at a march finally made it into Oakland. The writers Allen Ginsberg and Ken Kesey played a key role in preventing disruption by the Hell’s Angels on the third day. The students managed to control the downtown area of Oakland for most of a day.
People’s Park
Turned a university parking lot into a People’s Park. It was a way of saying, “If we had control over our lives, this is what it would look like. We want to develop a culture for us rather than a culture for profit.” But the University seized People’s Park; teargas was used, and students were clubbed and arrested. One demonstrator was killed.
Governor Reagan brought in the National Guard to occupy San Francisco for a month and helicopters gased a student protest on campus about the university’s overreaction against the People’s Park
Black Panther party
By Bobby Seale and Huey Newton in Fall 1966, relying on the constitutional guarantee of the right to bear arms. Within six months they were internationally known. In October 1967 Huey Newton was arrested on a charge of murder, and a “Free Huey” movement was formed. On April 6, 1968, Eldridge Cleaver was wounded and another Black Panther was killed.
“Stop the Draft Week”
…to shut down induction centers for a few days in October 1967. Realizing they needed to show the cost of the Vietnam War would be civil unrest at home. When they were beaten by the police, they decided to go back the next day with twice as many students, all wearing construction helmets, and twice as many shields. Eventually J. Edgar Hoover of the FBI told Lyndon Johnson that he could not guarantee domestic security if they continued the land war, and Johnson decided not to seek another term.
Women who were activists?
…noticed that the men in the movement did not always listen to them, and started to form a sisterhood. “It means a coordinated change in all our lives,” one said, “the various ways in which we connect with each other.”
Democratic National Convention in Chicago in 1968?
thousands of young people were beaten in the streets of Chicago. It seemed to students that what had happened in Chicago called for change all over the country. They also identified with protest movements in Paris and Prague.
