Week 7 - Jo Kawabata

In this week's reading, "Berkeley Free Speech Movement: Paving the way for campus activism" by Robby Cohen, the author discusses the activist movements in 1960s Berkeley. In 1964, movements began to support civil rights at the University of California Berkeley campus. The movement had been promoted to fight against decisions regarding policies which supported racist segregation and discrimination across the nation. The campus tried to work against it but students who founded the Free Speech Movement began fighting for the right to speak up and peacefully protest. This movement began spreading across the nation and was a crutial movement in making peaceful protest recognized as a right.

I believe that the Free Speech Movement was an absolutely essential movement to have occured as this movement began the support for both on and off campus protesting more recognized. I believe being able to speak up for what you believe in is very important so long as it is peaceful and does not harm anybody. Incidents like the pepper spray in ident here at UC Davis makes it imperative for people to understand that it is the people's right to protest what they believe in; if people understand that, perhaps violent incidents like that would diminish in numbers.



The pepper spray incident is still one of the defining images of UC Davis. It is unfortunate to see that the university, in the public eye, is seen as the enemy of the students when in reaity they should be the biggest supporters of the students. I hope to see changes made to policies so things like this never occur again.

Question:
How come authorities sometimes misunderstand the people's right to be able to peacefully protest?

References:
Parvini, S. (2016, April 15). UC Davis defends paying to remove pepper-spray references from Internet. Retrieved May 14, 2017, from https://www.google.com/amp/www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-uc-davis-pepper-spray-internet-20160415-story,amp.html

Cohen, R. (1985). Berkeley Free Speech Movement: Paving the way for campus activism. OAH Magazine of History, 1(1), 16-18. doi:10.1093/maghis/1.1.16