This café-cluttered college town of Berkeley is where it all happened 50 years ago; in January 1961, when our nation’s youth wanted to overcome their own alienation and shape their own lives while helping others achieve true freedom in what became the start of the “Free Speech Movement.”
Some 50 years later, it’s still “very cool, man” to visit Berkeley, and view Sixties photo exhibits at the University of California. “This is the place that inspired the sit-ins and the anti-everything demonstrations,” states a billboard on campus with a big peace sign over it.
Moreover, there’s dozens of vintage Sixties signs displayed at Berkeley today. Some include:
-- Suppose they gave a war and nobody came
-- Warning: Your local police are armed and dangerous
-- Peace now if you want it
-- America means Free Speech
-- Don’t trust anyone over 30
“For me, the start of 1961 is when the Fifties expired and college youth groups were forming, and Berkeley was the place to be,” says former Berkeley student and “Baby Boomer” Emily Gelman.
“I moved down to the Bay area from Eugene to be at Berkeley, but you had lots of student protest back in New York City and Boston. There were plenty of students in Ann Arbor and Madison who also promoted something we called ‘reflection.’ It was us saying no to McCarthyism and yes to freedom for all Americans to say what they felt. It was more than great, it was liberating,” adds Gelman as she picked up the strings of time that we know call the Sixties.
For the 1960’s youth culture, Berkeley was where the Free Speech Movement “really came to life. It’s the place that gave birth to the Free Speech Movement that later turned into the Civil Rights, Women’s Rights and anti-Vietnam War protest movements,” explained Berkeley historian Mark Rossiter.
“If you’d visit Berkeley back in 1960, the students would be in clothing of respectability: jackets and ties and gals in clean-cut dresses. The male students had short haircuts with no sideburns. The female students looked more like Nancy Reagan and someone’s mom than university gals," noted Rossiter with an emotional resonance that seem to linger during a coffee chat interview.
Then, in 1961, the clothing turned to jeans, denim jackets, blue work shirts and bib overalls for both males and females, he added.
"It was a first protest of sorts, and it included how we wore our hair and how we dressed. This was the start of the Free Speech Movement,” explained Rossiter who knew the famous Berkeley student protester Mario Savio.
At the same time, a demographer today might point to 1961, some 50 years ago this month, as the year when the first “Baby Boomer” was reaching college age and, thus, telling their parents back home that “true freedom is Freedom of Speech in all of its forms.”
Today, for example, we’re reminded that even obscure UFO organizations are attempting to “control” that same Free Speech by trying to limit people outside of their group to speak about UFOs. Thus, today’s youth may only imagine what it must have been like to simply want to speak up on a college campus.
“It was not known at the time that the University of California ran the government’s secret nuclear weapons labs. Leadership wanted to keep students in line and not speak up about anything. This was the start of Sixties. But, all hell broke loose in 1961 when student government groups , such as SLATE, said no more,” stated an exhibit panel at Berkeley.
“What we’re dealing with is bearded, unwashed characters with sandals and long hair that are part of this lunatic fringe,” said then California Governor Ronald Reagan.
“Ronnie didn’t get that the so-called ‘unwashed’ were the students at Berkeley and throughout the country in the Sixties,” asserted former Berkeley student Jerry Clarkson.
“Our parents didn’t get the Fifties were over, man. It was the dawn of a new age that said ‘the Constitution of the United States was right, we want Free Speech.’ It was about students like myself who came out West for truth. I was looking for truth. I was looking for meaning in my life,” added Charkson.
At the same time, this “Baby Boomer” said “there was so much passion back then that we even had a soundtrack thanks to Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, the Grateful Dead, Jimi Hendrix and the Jefferson Airplane. Tell me youth of today, what do you got that can touch this?”
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