Will Bunch writes:

Years later, somebody would dub them “the Silent Generation.” But on Oct. 1, 1964 — 60 years ago this Tuesday — a cohort of young people born mostly during World War II, raised in consumer affluence and under the threat of nuclear annihilation, could not keep it bottled up any longer.

The place was the University of California, Berkeley, and the trigger was school administrators telling students that the strip where students passed out political literature — from support for voting rights in Mississippi to backing of right-wing Barry Goldwater for president — was now off limits. What amounted to a campuswide ban on political activity simmered from the start of 1964’s fall semester and finally boiled over on Oct. 1, when police arrived at a demonstration and arrested a recent grad named Jack Weinberg who refused to give them an ID.

The hapless Berkeley city cops seemed to have no idea that the sleepy 1950s of crew cuts and sexist fraternity pranks had passed its expiration date. Instead of scattering, a few hundred students surrounded the police car and, with Weinberg in the back seat, prevented it from going anywhere. Protest leaders not only continued the rally but decided to use the blockaded police car as a stage to address a crowd that kept getting bigger and bigger.

“I went up to the police car, and asked if we could use the car to speak from,” Jackie Goldberg, a leader of what was becoming known as the Berkeley Free Speech Movement, recalled in an oral history. “And the policeman said, ‘Sure, if you take your shoes off.’” Upon hearing that, the fiery activist Mario Savio jumped on the roof of the cop cruiser, addressing the throng in his white socks.

That really captured the moment — a generation raised to respect authority, yet bubbling up with defiance against their elders’ hypocrisy. The Berkeley Free Speech Movement proved to be about much, much more than passing out leaflets on Telegraph Avenue. It was an unavoidable battle between an outdated notion that college students were still wards under the smothering in loco parentis of their universities, and the growing idea that free speech — especially for undergrads — is essential to the academy’s mission of promoting critical thinking. [Continue reading…]