Safe Spaces, Brave Spaces by John Palfrey

Author:John Palfrey
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: free speech; freedom of speech; free expression; freedom of expression; diversity in education; equity; inclusion; racial diversity; students; campus; universities; schools; colleges; student activism; student protests; 1st Amendment; 1st Amendment protections; United States Constitution; Supreme Court; safe zones; safe spaces; microaggressions; stereotypes; trigger warnings; speech codes; policies; harassment; hate speech; bullying; race; discrimination; minorities; intolerance; tolerance; religious freedom; freedom of assembly; academic freedom; student journalism; free press; student surveys; Knight Foundation; Black Lives Matter; Adams; Justice Holmes; Fisher I; Fisher II
Publisher: The MIT Press
Published: 2017-10-27T04:00:00+00:00

In his “Plea,” Douglass presaged later debates about the importance of free expression by ensuring a right not only to speak but also to hear opinions that might be outside the mainstream discourse.

The abolitionists also helped to build the linkage between and among the various rights clustered in the First Amendment. The right to free expression arose alongside the other essential rights embedded in the First Amendment: the right to freedom of religion, the right to freedom of the press, the right to peaceable assembly, and the right to petition the government for a redress of grievances. William Lloyd Garrison, one of the leading abolitionists mentioned by Douglass, wrote to a correspondent: “Be assured, I clearly see the manly assertion of the right of free thought, free inquiry, and free speech, as against religious intolerance, theological dogmatism, ecclesiastical authority, Papal and Protestant infallibility.”14 For the abolitionists, support for a strong form of the First Amendment protections meant support for the movement to end slavery. The ideas, words, and actions of the abolitionists point toward the essential connections between free expression and related rights.

The women of nineteenth-century America did not have rights equal to those of men. Among other things, women did not have the right to vote. Those arguing for equal rights for women, led by activists such as Lucretia Mott and the Grimké sisters, met frequently with those who favored the abolition of slavery. They shared ideas and strategies. One strand of thinking that linked the women’s rights movement to the abolitionist movement was the importance of free speech. Without a right to free expression, the reasoning went, it would be difficult to make the case for change effectively. While there are exceptions to this pattern, as often happens in history, the primary spokespeople arguing for free expression did so in service of promoting systemic change. Those who sought to stifle the rights of free expression did so in the service of maintaining the status quo—the hegemony of men and of the property-owning whites of the Southern United States.

The case for free expression was important to those fighting for civil rights in the twentieth century, just as it was in the nineteenth century. At the University of California at Berkeley in 1964, campaigns for racial and gender equality gave rise to a renewed movement for free expression. In the words of professor and activist Bettina Aptheker:

On October 1, 1964, hundreds of us surrounded a police car on the Berkeley campus of the University of California and refused to allow the police to arrest Jack Weinberg, a graduate student in mathematics who was “manning” a table for the Congress of Racial Equality on the campus’s central Sproul Hall Plaza. We held the car for 32 hours with Jack inside and 950 police massed just outside the campus’s main entrance waiting for orders to commence an assault to break us up. Shortly before 7 PM on Friday, October 3, student negotiators led by Mario Savio, who was to become the primary spokesperson for the Movement, had reached an intermediary agreement with the University President.

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