Which Side Are You On?: 20th Century American History in 100 Protest Songs by James Sullivan

Author:James Sullivan [Sullivan, James]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: music, History & Criticism
ISBN: 9780190660307
Google: t9B2DwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2019-11-15T00:30:41.001550+00:00

The bittersweet melody was another prominent feature of the demonstrations of the 1960s, sung at countless rallies and recorded by Peter, Paul & Mary, Dave Van Ronk, and many others.

When Baez finished singing, a cheer erupted, and then the students once again climbed the steps from the plaza to the Administration building, singing “We Shall Overcome” as they went. They occupied the building and staged a sit-down strike in the halls and offices inside. They watched films, including Operation Abolition, a documentary on the 1960 HUAC protest in San Francisco. On the third floor, they heard from teaching assistants and others, including the poet Gary Snyder, who agreed to lead “freedom schools” on the importance of the First and Fourteenth Amendments. Baez served as co-instructor of a class on “Music and Non-Violence.” Savio, meanwhile, delivered a speech in which he compared the civil rights movement and the fight for free speech. The two “battlefields” were not quite so different as they might appear, he argued. The two critical problems of the era, he said, were racial injustice and automation. Both groups wanted “the right to participate as citizens in democratic society and the right to due process of law.” Both were confronting an “impersonal bureaucracy . . . in a ‘Brave New World.’ ”

History had not “ended,” he said, though the bureaucrats would have you believe that no substantial changes to American society were forthcoming. “A better society is possible,” Savio concluded, and it “is worth dying for.”11

At three o’clock in the morning, under orders from California governor Edmund G. “Pat” Brown, Sr., Berkeley police began the systematic process of arresting the protesters for trespassing. By three o’clock the following afternoon, 773 demonstrators, most of them students, had been removed to detention centers. These demonstrators became known as “the Eight Hundred.”

The free speech movement would continue on the campus through the decade, in what has been called the “six-year war.” The Board of Regents, while making certain concessions about what constituted permissible campus activism, continued to insist upon a “law and order” culture. In the spring of 1965 the activists drew unwanted national attention when one demonstrator carried a sign onto Sproul Plaza hand-lettered with a single word: “Fuck.” Still forbidden at the time—the comedian Lenny Bruce was then spending his last days in court, fighting charges of obscenity in his stage act—the word on the sign helped create a public backlash to the student protesters. The regents once again increased their calls for more discipline; Ronald Reagan, then preparing to run for governor of California, would demand the activists’ expulsion. “They are spoiled and don’t deserve the education they are getting,” he said. “They don’t have a right to take advantage of our system of education.”12

Kerr, caught between the students and the regents, became a scapegoat. He was dismissed as chancellor of the University of California system three weeks after Reagan’s election. The new governor would go on to wage a protracted battle against the Berkeley activists, who by the late 1960s had shifted much of their focus to the Vietnam War.

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