Week 7- Deon Anthony A01

Deon Anthony

Week7

A01

In the article, “Berkeley Free Speech Movement: Paving the Way for Campus Activism”, Robby Cohen discusses the movement of Berkeley activists and their protest for freedom of speech and their right to campus political advocacy in the 1960s. UC Berkeley officials prohibited student activists to advocate support for the civil rights movement to specifically end racial discrimination and segregation. This began when former graduate student, Jack Weinberg, was arrested for refusing a dean’s order to take down his table in campaign for the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE). After a lieutenant attempted to arrest Weinberg, hundreds of students surrounded the police car, chanted together, and used the vehicle as a podium to speak upon their beliefs. The university had Weinberg freed from arrest in order to stop the student activists from surrounding the area, but still denied allowance for political activism on campus. To be quite honest, I wasn’t surprised to read how UC Berkeley’s officials were against student advocacy and their right to freedom of speech. Issue’s like this still remain today. For instance, UC Davis’ pepper spray incident also showed how, to this day, our rights are still being held against. How can we improve our university system in terms of our rights in the constitution? How can we get school officials to be one with its students, rather than be the enemy?

Resources:

1. The Free Speech Movement. (n.d.). Retrieved November 05, 2017, from https://calisphere.org/exhibitions/43/the-free-speech-movement/
2. Cohen, Robby. “Berkeley Free Speech Movement: Paving the Way for Campus Activism.”OAH Magazine of History, Vol. 1, No. 1, Teaching about the 60's (Apr. 1985), Pp. 16-18, 6 Jan. 2012, www.jstor.org/stable/25162448.