new book: _AT BERKELEY IN THE SIXTIES The Education of an Activist, 1961-1965_

[pynchonoid]

AT BERKELEY IN THE SIXTIES
 The Education of an Activist, 1961-1965.
 By Jo Freeman.
 Indiana University, cloth, $49.95;  paper, $21.95.
 When Jo Freeman began her undergraduate education in
1961, the University of California, Berkeley, like
many colleges then, took in loco parentis seriously.
Administrative rules enforced curfews, banned
political groups from operating on campuses and forced
professors to sign loyalty oaths. Freeman and other
students joined Slate, ''a permanent student political
party'' that began by protesting racial segregation in
fraternities and sororities, then quickly moved on to
demonstrate against the death penalty, for civil
rights in the South and for fair housing in Berkeley.
They joined the Urban League and the N.A.A.C.P. in
picketing local hotels and auto dealerships ''because
so many local Negroes complained that they could not
get jobs in San Francisco that they had held in
Southern cities.'' The more the university attempted
to crack down on student unrest, the larger the
dissident groups grew. The arrest of one alumnus for
handing out leaflets at a student-only table led to
the birth of the Free Speech Movement. At the height
of the protests in the fall of 1964, 1,500 students
occupied an academic building. Almost 800 were
arrested and charged with trespassing. By the
following spring, students were rallying and being
arrested for the right to use four-letter words.
Freeman, author of ''A Room at a Time: How Women
Entered Party Politics'' and other works about
feminism, brings enormous research to bear on her
heady college days. In a book that is less memoir than
political history, the descriptions of some of the
players and of her own life pale against the campus
uprisings -- sparks that allowed later protests
against the war in Vietnam to ignite. 
KARLA JAY 

<http://www.nytimes.com/2004/02/01/books/review/0201br-briefs.html>
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