VLVL echoes/contrasts: FSM & PR3

[pynchonoid]

See the photo gallery at
<http://home.att.net/~enfield/fsm_gallery.htm>

...from the intro page to this exhibit:
"In 1964, student activists     returned to college
from a summer of civil rights protests in the American
South, to come     into conflict with administration
officials at the University     of California,
Berkeley over their right to use University facilities
for their     campaigns.
     The resulting confrontation marked the beginning
of a new wave of student protests as     civil rights
took a back seat to the antiwar movement. The first
drama peaked in December,     1964 when over 800
students were arrested for occupying the UC
Administration Building,     the largest mass arrest
of students in U.S. history up to that time. "

from
<http://www.english.upenn.edu/~afilreis/50s/berkeley.html>,
an article worth reading in its entirety:

[...]By the late fifties a new student left, some of
it led by children of liberal and radical
professionals, had begun to emerge on campuses.  At
Berkeley a student party named SLATE, dedicated to
ending nuclear testing, capital punishment, Cold War
rivalries, and other off-campus ills, began in 1957 to
run candidates for student affairs elections.  SLATE
then incorporated civil rights into its agenda.  Soon
after, at the University of Wisconsin, students in
history and the social sciences with a similar social
and political profile launched an ambitious journal,
Studies on the Left, committed to the "radicalism of
disclosure." A visit to Berkeley in 1960 by Tom
Hayden, editor of the Michigan Daily, the student
newspaper at Ann Arbor, led on the University of
Michigan campus to the formation of VOICE in imitation
of SLATE.  And there were stirrings of dissenting
politics on other campuses as the Red-baiting era
wound down in the late 1950s. 

        As early as 1960 Berkeley students delivered a
blow for dissent when several hundred protested the
hearings of the House Un-American Activities Committee
(HUAC) in San Francisco.  No group during that Cold
War era more vividly represented than HUAC the general
disregard for civil liberties.  Police arrested many
of the protesters or simply washed them down the steps
of the city hall with fire hoses.  The next day
thousands of demonstrators returned to chant, "Sieg
Heil!" and to bear witness that in California the days
of unchallenged Red-hunting were over. Operation
Abolition, a film put out by HUAC to show that these
demonstrations had been the work of subversives, was
so addlebrained that it strengthened the case of
liberals against HUAC.  Operation Abolition ultimately
became a cult movie among campus sophisticates and
dissenters. 

        In September 1964 Mario Savio, the son of a
Roman Catholic machinist proud of his son's commitment
to social justice, returned to campus after teaching
at a freedom school in McComb during that greatest of
Mississippi summers.  Savio discovered that the campus
authorities had declared off limits for advocates of
civil rights and other causes a stretch of Telegraph
Avenue, the Bancroft strip, just outside the main gate
to the Berkeley campus.  For years the strip had been
accepted as a place where students could hand out
pamphlets, solicit names for petitions, and sign
people up.  But recently it had become identified with
demonstrations against Berkeley and Oakland businesses
that practiced discrimination.  One of the
demonstrators' chief targets was the   Oakland
Tribune, the East Bay newspaper published by William
Knowland, the conservative United States Senator.  The
students' activities antagonized conservative
university Regents and they pressured Berkeley to
close the campus as a recruiting ground for activists
and restrict student agitation in adjacent areas. 

                 The ban set off a firestorm. 
Students who had taken on HUAC, Mississippi racists,
Senator Knowland, and the East Bay business community
were not about to be denied their rights by the likes
of Clark Kerr. Groups representing SLATE members,
anti-HUAC demonstrators, civil rights militants, and
ordinary students, some of them conservative,
protested the university's actions. 

                 On September 29 the demonstrators
defiantly set up tables on the Bancroft strip and
refused to leave when told to do so.  The next day
university officials took the names of five protesters
and ordered them to appear for disciplinary hearings
that afternoon.  Instead of five students, five
hundred, led by Mario Savio, marched to Sproul Hall,
the administration building, and demanded that they be
punished too.  Three leaders of the march were added
to the list of offenders, and all eight were
suspended. 

                 The event that converted protest into
rebellion occurred on October 1. As students arrived
for classes that morning they were greeted by
handbills declaring that if they allowed the
administration to "pick us off one by one. . . , we
have lost the fight for free speech at the University
of California." Soon after, CORE, SNCC, the Du Bois
Club, Students for a Democrat Society (SDS), and six
or seven other groups set up solicitation tables in
front of Sproul Hall, the administration building.  At
11:00 A.M. the assistant dean of students went up to
the CORE table and asked Jack Weinberg to identify
himself.  Weinberg refused, and the dean ordered
campus police to arrest him.  A veteran of the civil
rights movement, Weinberg went limp in standard civil
disobedience mode when the guards carried him to a
waiting car.  Bystanders and observers quickly came to
his rescue.  In minutes hundreds of protesters,
singing the civil rights anthem, "We Shall Overcome,"
and chanting, "Let him go! Let him go!"  surrounded
the car, preventing it from leaving to cart Weinberg
off to security headquarters.   

        For the next thirty-two hours Weinberg and his
police escort remained captive in the car while
speaker after speaker climbed atop the vehicle to
address the growing crowd.  Savio, here and later the
most civil of militants, removed his shoes so as not
to damage the police car. He compared the protesters
to Henry David Thoreau, who had briefly defied the
authorities to protest the Mexican War that would
enlarge United States slave territory.  He was
followed by other speakers, who were pelted with eggs
and lighted cigarettes by about one hundred fraternity
brothers and athletes. 

        The standoff ended with an agreement between
Kerr and the warring  parties that submitted to a
committee of faculty, students, and administrators all
issues of campus political behavior and turned over to
an academic senate committee the question of
suspending the eight students.  Weinberg would be
released without charges. 

        But the rebellion had only begun.  A new
organization, the Free Speech Movement (FSM), was
formed with a large executive committee representing
its constituent campus organizations.[...]


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