Margot Adler

Note: I edited this down to make it shorter and more readable. There are probably places where I’ve messed up and I am no longer sure about the footnotes.

It's a sunlit morning in 1964. My mother and I are traveling across the country on our way to Berkeley, and she is slowly coming to terms with the departure of her only child for college. I'm floating in a swimming pool somewhere in the Midwest, saying various syllables over and over, like "Oregon" and "all." I am trying to lose my New York accent; like so many immigrants, I am trying to remake myself.

Living in New York City, I looked upon Berkeley as so many Americans have looked throughout history upon the West as an escape from everything that defined my past. For me Berkeley was not only an excellent =school, and a place with a rich history of student activism; going to Berkeley meant also fleeing New York, my parents, the memories of four depressing high school years during which I had few real friends. Most of all, I was fleeing from myself and from the large one-hundred-and-eighty-pound body that encased me. California, a place I had never seen, seemed a place of open space, infinite possibilities-radicals, surfers, palm trees, the Beach Boys, and not necessarily in that order. I was determined to enter this mythical realm and to claim it as my own.

Although no one (including myself?) would admit it at the time, I was the kind of applicant that gives college administrators pause. Visibly over. '' weight and wearing dark, oversized tent dresses, with my hair short and shapeless, I was not the type to inspire confidence, despite an energetic even bubbly nature. And I was sure every interviewer could see through my outer facade, into the dark, angst- filled, daydream-laden creature below who was secretly spending two or three hours a day living out various historical and science fiction fantasies.

Going to Berkeley was my own attempt—which seemed feeble at the time-to find a rich and interesting life of my own. And it worked: for the next eight years, everywhere I went I found myself mysteriously at the center of extraordinary events. True, my Berkeley was not the only one. It was a center of bohemianism, yet Ronald Reagan was the governor of the state when I graduated, in 1968, and his signature is on my diploma. Berkeley had the largest number of Nobel laureates and Peace Corps volunteers of any university but also the largest number of federal contracts for nuclear weapons research. The 1968 yearbook portrays the conventional Berkeley I did not know—sports teams and glee clubs, cheerleaders—but not a single mention of anyone I knew. The student protests are relegated to one or two snapshots. The seven professors who inspired me are neither listed nor photographed. I am not there, either. It almost seems as if the Berkeley I knew was purposely rubbed out by the official chroniclers of the time, its radical legacy denied.

Berkeley was like a fantasy of the agora in ancient Athens (forgetting for the moment that there were slaves in Athens and women were second-class citizens expected to stay indoors). Much of Berkeley's social life took place outside, and except for the three-month rainy season, the sky seemed eternally blue. The older structures on the campus, white buildings with Spanish terra-cotta tile roofs, glistened in the sunlight. As dusk approached and the sky darkened into an intense and vibrant blue, the cedars and fir trees were tinged with a golden light and the entire campus seemed bathed in radiance. Sproul Hall, with its four huge Doric columns, looked out on our agora, Sproul Plaza. At noon it often seemed that the entire population of thirty thousand students would pour into the plaza. No stranger to crowds and large city life, I found Berkeley an appropriate size—like a Greek polis.

As an only child I had lived alone most of my life, and unlike many dents whose thirst for independence is symbolized by the quest for their own apartment, I had no desire to live on my own. What I desperately wanted was company. Living in a boardinghouse for young women, mostly freshmen, brought the comfort of neighbors and friends—an entry into an instant and easy community I had never had. I privately exulted at this abundance of companionship.

Even those things that irked radical students the most and were the seeds from which rebellion was already sprouting—the machinelike quality of some of the education, the huge lecture classes with eight hundred students, the small sections led by bored and immature teaching assistants, the inadequate counseling, the invisibility of each person among a student body of almost thirty thousand-those things, at least at the beginning, were liberating. "There is something wonderful about being able to lose oneself in a crowd," I wrote to my mother two weeks after school began. "Knowing that no one knows me,... there is a beautiful feeling knowing that I am like a thousand normal people!

The part of campus life that quickly became confusing was the dizzying array of choices. "This school is beginning to overwhelm me," I wrote home only a week later.

I want to try everything( But already I wonder if I am taking too much? I guess I am in a weird mood because a girl who lives in this house just had something akin to a nervous breakdown. I hear that this is a common enough, occurrence in college.... so it makes you wonder, . . . [W] hen you are assigned over one weekend 400 pages of reading from Plato, Sophocles, Epic of Gilgamesh, Homer and modem political analysis, it's fair to cry out, "My God, give me a little time to do this, so that I can go folk dancing or go to a movie." There are so many choices each night -a party, a meeting, a movie, or realis-tically, getting some of this damn reading done.

The Free Speech Movement had just begun when I arrived at Berkeley, although it would be another month before there was an organization with that name. Having already taken part in many political activities in New York, I thought the right to political advocacy seemed obvious, and I was soon handing out leaflets, attending rallies, and sitting behind tables filled with political literature-activities that were forbidden under the new campus regulations.

In the beginning, the FSM focused exclusively on campus free speech, but eventually it went much further: it demanded that students be treated "like citizens, subject to regulation only by the courts. I embraced that goal since I had become enraged at California's paternalism within days of my arrival. (When my mother and I tried to enter a San Francisco cabaret to see a show, we were told that, since drinks were available and the drinking age was twenty-one, I was too young to attend, even though a parent was accompanying me. I was livid. In those days the drinking age in New York was eighteen, and I was accustomed to being treated as an adult.)

Later, the FSM also mounted a blistering critique of the University as a "knowledge factory" turning out corporate drones for industry. With a student body of nearly thirty thousand, resources at Berkeley were strained; it was easy for students to feel they were being pressed out like so many pieces of sausage. And this idea of the University as a factory that would train bureaucrats, engineers, and politicians to keep the establishment going seemed the antithesis of any real quest for knowledge. (It still does.) Twenty years later, Michael Rossman would bring an audience of Berkeley students to hysterical laughter by framing the FSM critique this way: "We were being prepped to run the society for the students at Harvard and Yale, who were being prepped to own it."

By September 28 the ban on political activity had become so divisive that all classes stopped that day at 11:00 A.M. for an address to all students by Chancellor Edward Strong and President Clark Kerr. As Strong introduced new student officers and gave his views on the controversy-words that seemed turgid and bland-about four hundred students paraded through the aisles carrying signs: "Vote for X (Censored)" and "Ban the Ban." To many of us in the audience, the protesters, unlike the speakers, seemed to radiate life.

On October 1 I wandered over to Sproul Plaza for the noon rally and arrived just after Jack Weinberg's arrest. It was extraordinary to see this police car immobile, surrounded by a growing crowd. As a freshman, I felt too timid to make a speech, although I thought of several as I listened; I felt excited by the sense of community among the protesters. It seemed ridiculous that Weinberg had been arrested for sitting behind a table covered with civil rights literature, something I had been doing myself just days before. It seemed easy and appropriate to sit down on the ground with the other students. The police car, usually such a powerful symbol of authority, seemed tiny and helpless in the face of our growing numbers. As we sat around the car, blocking its movement, preventing this arrest from occurring, I felt a sense of exhilaration. But there were moments of fear and terror as we wondered what action the authorities would take. Most of the protesters had never participated in any political demonstration before. Many cried or laughed, or were uncertain what to do. We had turned the world upside down, stopped the machinery of the state. There was a feeling of instant community and internal power. We had no name for the power that we felt. Years later, spiritual feminists would call it “evoking power-from-within.”

The FSM was at war with a notion that was central to the thinking of many of Berkeley's faculty and even some of its students: that the University was a place outside of space and time, with different rules from those of the society at large. Many University administrators couldn't honestly understand why students would want to give up the loving hand of paternalistic parents for the colder, harder justice of the outside world.'

December 2nd, 1964, 9:00 P.M.

Dear Mom:

This is a really incredible situation. I am sitting on the floor of Sproul Hall.... On each window is a big letter: FSM, so it looks like the building is really ours. Four students were threatened with further disciplinary action and received letters threatening expulsion. We are sitting-in in protest of that, and what started as a demand for free speech and advocacy has changed to include the whole meaning of education. There is anger at being only an IBM card, anger at the bureaucracy, at the money going to technology. The main issue remains that students should have to abide only by the laws of the government and the US Constitution in matters of civil liberties—they should not need to abide by special regulations.

This afternoon, there was an inspired rally where all the FSM leaders spoke, and Joan Baez sang. Everyone called for a tremendous sit-in, and then Joan Baez and Mario Savio led about 2,000 people into Sproul Hall. Charles Powell, the president of the student government, made a feeble statement which was hissed down, telling people to have faith in the administration.

We went into Sproul Hall, and all the employees left At 7 P.M., the police asked us to leave, but we refused. We were given instructions in non-violent civil disobedience, how to go limp when arrested. Then a truly extraordinary evening began.

We sang songs. There were rooms available for studying. There was a Chanukah service and folk dancing. In another room, they showed the Charlie Chaplin film The Rink. Professors and teaching assistants created "Freedom chools," gave classes in non-violence, political science, mathematics, Spanish, and the history of the civil rights movement in the Bay Area. There's been more singing and speeches. Joan Baez is still here. Food and drink are being passed around. We may be here a long time. If we are still here by tomorrow morning, there may be a strike by students and teaching assistants.

The press is here in droves: newspapers, Life, NBC, ABC, KPIX. A reporter saw me reading Thucydides and wrote it down. I swear it is the most stimulating experience I've ever had. It's a pretty mixed group. There are even three Goldwater Republicans here who write for the conservative journal Man and State, although the tendency is definitely toward the left.

December 3rd, 6:45 A.M.

Things look quite different at 6:45 A.M. For one thing, I am tired. At 11p.m., Mario Savio spoke and said it looked as if Clark Kerr was going to stall us out that is, not bring the police-and that we would have to stay a long time. So at ^11:3o^,after more singing, a bunch of us went to sleep until 2 A.M., when I awoke to hear a complete change in the situation. We were sleeping near the telephone the FSM was using, so we heard all the important news. It seems the Alameda County Sheriff and police will come soon and arrest us. So we were given more instructions in non-violence, and all of us on the first floor went to the second and third and fourth. Then Chancellor Strong came, along with the Chief of Police, and gave us five minutes to leave the building, before being arrested. By 5:00 A.M., they had only arrested thirty people, but by now they have arrested about seventy-five, including all of those on the fourth floor. There are about 1,000 of us altogether. Some people even managed to be hoisted up into the building on ropes, so we have thirty-five new people.

Here's what we have heard: Students for a Democratic Society-remember that's the organization I belonged to-has promised sympathy demonstrations on 100 campuses. Governor Brown plans to come to Berkeley today. Many reporters are still here. Many employees are not going to work, there is a picket line in front of the Student Union and many people will not cross. The Teamsters Union has refused to cross the picket line and therefore the University is without food in the cafeterias. A strike has been moved up to today at noon Many faculty are with us, including the entire math department, which is the most radical department They have started arresting people on the third floor... Dawn has come. Nothing like this has happened, I guess, since the thirties. The people here are really marvelous and hopefully comprise the future. A great number of students seem vitally concerned with education, a true and meaningful education. And of course, this is an educational experience in itself.

12:10 P.M.

I feel sick inside and out. I feel depressed and ashamed of my society, afraid, sick and weird-a feeling of half not feeling anything and half wanting to cry on someone's shoulder. I am sitting with fifty other girls in an Oakland police station.... Now, you must understand that there were two police forces involved. . . . The Berkeley police were quite civil, even kind at times, and, as policemen go, understanding. The Oakland cops were brutal. They ran up and grabbed Jack Weinberg who was speaking over a microphone and dragged him down the stairs. For each arrest, an officer came up, asked us to leave, gave us a number, photographed us and asked if we would walk. We went limp and they (the Berkeley police) dragged us rather nicely to the elevator. The boys got dragged down the stairs. When we got to the basement, we refused to walk, and the Oakland police dragged us horribly. This guy twists my arm back in a hammer lock, and forces me up, so I have to give in and walk. Then came the most Kafkaesque part you get fingerprinted, photographed against a wall, and searched, they even undid my bra. Then we waited, singing freedom songs, until we were marched with our photos, a group of twelve, into a paddy wagon where, still singing, we were taken to a police station in Oakland where we are sitting, talking, singing, and studying.

But the worst thing we saw was the brutality before our arrest. One boy was clubbed; several were treated brutally. One girl was dragged and thrown crying into the police wagon. The worst moments were when the police went after the PA system. The first time they got Jack Weinberg; the second time, they tried to get Steve Weissman, but he slipped outside and escaped down a rope. At that moment the place went into bedlam, and two or three students threw boxes and books; fortunately they didn't hit anyone and they were told to stop.

I feel weird and scared. Even though I believe in what I did, I still have that weird feeling of being stamped for life, always having a police record next to my name. Of course I am in good company, but still.... I will write again when I know more about the future—bail, charges, etc.

2:00 P .M.

I'm still in this room, only 23 of us are left. We have heard that at least 600 were arrested, and there are rumors that the Santa Rita jail can't hold us and we will be put in navy barracks.

9:45 PM., San Leandro Armory

Finally at about 4:00 P.M. we were put into this bus with barred windows. We were in that 20 by 20 room-a shifting population of 20-55. But our group stayed longest. The facilities were deplorable. There was no toilet paper. We finally got some. There was one toilet, which was open and in full view. We sat on the floor. By 4 P.M., people who hadn't eaten since last night were starved. Then, for the first time, even though I had only been arrested for several hours, I realized whatlack of physical freedom means: the fact that I could not go out that door-that I was completely at their power and mercy, that my world had become 2o' by 20', and it was packed with others-no room to move. I tried reading Thucydides, but I just couldn't concentrate. I was nervous and had no outlet, not even the usual escape-food. Many of the people around me were smoking, but I had no way to calm myself. And worst of all, I had my period, and it had leaked and there was no way to change, and nothing to do.

So finally we were taken in this barred bus to the armory-it seems the jails were overcrowded-so they created a jail here. We were finally given some tepid tea and a cold cut sandwich at 5p.m. More people have arrived, but our knowledge of what is going on at the University is limited. Until half an hour ago we had no contact. Now, after we have been booked for the second time, we can use the phone. My fingerprints will go to the FBI. I guess when the thought gets depressing one can always remember that conversation between Thoreau and Emerson when Thoreau was in jail: Emerson: “What are you doing in there?” Thoreau: “What are you doing out there?” So now we are trying to go to sleep on the floor of the Armory with some thin blankets. It's 10:15 P.M., and I only had one and a half hours sleep on the floor last night. I will try to sleep until we go to Santa Rita and get our mug shots.

December 4th, 12:45 A.M., Santa Rita

Nine of us were awakened. We got packed into a car to drive-to the Santa Rita jail. I felt sicker than ever, woke up cold, shivering with spasms of cold tiredness. I had only slept an hour and the blanket was thin and the air freezing. We walked out into the cold air and a shivering fit really hit me. I just couldn't stop shaking. We were packed into a police barred car, very tight, which was good because it warmed us and we joked about such things as, "misery is a stone cold floor" and talked about "The Brig" and "Mario, Mario my Savio," until laughter threw off the cold and we were heated by each other's bodies and by the car itself. We arrived at Santa Rita and filed in to be mugged. Funny, I always associated the word "mugging" with the antithesis of police-something that happens in Central Park, for example, but they seem to use it for those pictures, you know, those front and side shots with the numbers below, that make you look like a criminal no matter what. I figured out why. They don't let you smile, and by then we were all so miserable looking anyway. So then we were put in some kind of cell, then taken to another regular room, although it was locked, and now there are rumors that we will get out soon, or that we won't get out soon and will have cold showers. But now it seems we may get out.

December 5th

Eventually we were released and taken in a bus to the gates of Santa Rita; there, a faculty-student carpool was waiting to pick us up. These supporters had raised our bail, and were now driving us home. I finally got home at 2:30 A.M. and managed to get five hours of sleep. I couldn't sleep well, nor do I seem able to study effectively. I keep thinking about the past few days. Last night I was terribly depressed. Everything I had been thinking about the two levels of existencehow at the higher level we are ants in a meaningless universe--seemed true. At the moment, I feel so insignificant. It seems as if the truth will never conquer and that it was of no consequence that there were 800 of us and that the majority of the faculty supported us. The press still shouts, “communist,” and there are calls for the FSM to be investigated by a committee like HUAC.

Sometimes I think that I could become an anarchist, if law means the action of the police. Jail affected me. The loss of physical freedom was a shock. The frisking was humiliating; the fingerprinting feels weird. It all has the feel of forever. You feel trapped and powerless. The police have the power to do anything they want to you for 48 hours-after that they must book you. You have practically no rights, and after a while, the police seem to be an evil power, because by this time you no longer associate them with law and order, but with hittingnonviolent students, wrenching, throwing, dragging people down stairs, and you realize that they have the backing of the society and you have nothing but your convictions.

The feelings I experienced inside Sproul Hall and, later, in jail were a complex mix: an ecstasy of community bonding and collective power followed by a sense of total powerlessness. There were moments where all potential and possibility opened, and moments of utter futility when a thousand students seemed nothing more than a thousand grains of sand. A few years later, when I would enter the imposing court buildings in lower Manhattan for political trials-first as a journalist, later as a juror, but never again as a defendant -I was still close enough to the events of the sixties that I retained a clear understanding of the true meaning of the massive structures I was entering: the towering columns of the federal court building; the barred windows rising so high at 100 Center Street, the seat of the criminal courts. And I understood that the rooms within, with their thirty-foot ceilings and the judge sitting many feet above ordinary citizens, had been carefully designed to show the insignificance of the individual human being in the face of government power.

Back on campus the atmosphere was electric. Most classes were canceled, and there was a very effective student strike. Graduate students picketed many buildings and the almost eight hundred who had been arrested returned to the campus wearing black armbands with a V emblazoned on them. You could see their armbands all over the campus. The time felt incredibly special, as if my own action was part of something that had caused a shift in the world.

Later, the coldness of the law and the brutality of the Oakland police sank in. And as I read the biased reports of our struggle in the newspapers (in which we were portrayed as Communist dupes or outside agitators—accounts which bore no relation to the events we had witnessed), I felt, as if for the first time, that the society around me was a place of distortion, lies, and evil. The FSM gave me a profound understanding of the unseen institutions of this country-the courts, the jails, and the police-institutions which had never before touched my life and which remain hidden for most white middle-class people.

But more importantly, the FSM gave me an experience of a new kind of freedom, not to speak, to act, or to buy, but to claim the power to come together with others in community to transform and to change. And the FSM was emotionally powerful also because it seemed to be a battle to wrest the control of our lives away from the clerks, files, and forms that seemed increasingly to dominate our lives as students-in other words, from the seemingly invulnerable giants of technology and bureaucracy. In my own life, I had gone from a small private school filled with liberty and creativity to a high school where creativity was mixed with bureaucracy and rigidity, to a huge university where the most popular slogan referred to students as IBM computer cards ("Do not fold, spindle, or mutilate!"). The FSM gave me and many others a sense of personal power and control over our lives.

This is true for me even though I was just a grunt, a foot soldier, in this battle. I was a lowly freshman and few people knew my name. I made no speeches from the steps of Sproul Plaza, and I was never quoted in the newspapers. I sat at tables, picketed, went to meetings, listened to speeches, handed out leaflets, marched, satin, and went to jail.

I resisted some of the activities of day-by-day political organizing—the staffing of offices, the cooking of food. In part, this was because I knew that I was a person of ideas, not of day-to-day action. I was fascinated by theory and philosophy, but I found many political meetings deadly dull. And I also intuitively knew, without benefit of feminist analysis, that it was the female students (then called "coeds") who were generally making the coffee and running the mimeograph machines. The FSM retained, as did all left movements of the day, its sexist baggage, and few were the women who made names for themselves on their own. Most of the movement's women leaders were some man's sister or lover.

Six months later I went to Mississippi as a civil rights worker.

NOTES

1. Bettina Aptheker, The Academic Rebellion in the United States (Secaucus, NJ.: Citadel Press, 1972), 157-58.

2. Starhawk, Truth or Dare (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1987), 6.

3. David Lance Goines, The Free Speech Movement. Coming of Age in the 1960s (Berkeley: Ten Speed Press, 1993), 188.

4. Students for a Democratic Society, The Port Huron Statement (2nd printing, Dec. 1964), 7.

5. Savio quoted in Goines, 361. 6. Ibid., 4¹⁰.

7. Ibid., 429.

8. Aptheker's speech is from her essay in Robert Cohen, ed., "The Free Speech Movement and Beyond: Berkeley Student Protest and Social Change in the 1960s (unpublished manuscript, Berkeley, 1994, available in Bancroft Library), 65.

9. W .J. Rorabaugh, Berkeley at War (NewYork: Oxford University Press, 1989), 47•