Berkeley in the Sixties
118 minutes. 1990. Thurs., Oct. 2. 7 p.m. Calhoun Hall 100.
This film was nominated for an Academy Award for the Best Documentary Feature of 1990. The issues discussed in the film remain largely unanswered, except for one narrator’s comment that U.S. society was changed when people were shown how to think on a larger scale, to imagine different roles for women and people of color and different possible lifestyles. Besides the Black Panthers Eldridge Cleaver, Stokely Carmichael, Bobby Seale, and Huey Newton, the best known people for whom archival footage is shown are probably Martin Luther King, Jr., Ronald Reagan, Lyndon B. Johnson, the poet Allen Ginsberg, the student leader Mario Savio, the women’s history scholar Ruth Rosen and the philosophy professor John Searle.
The documentary begins as the Free Speech Movement began in 1960, with demonstrations against the investigations of the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC). HUAC essentially invited the demonstrations by filming their interviews with student activists and showing this film, “Operation Abolition,” to a Harvard University ROTC class. The film presented the students as agents and the dupes of agents “engaged in a vast communist plot [. . .] to try to overthrow the U.S. government [and to] abolish HUAC.”
The students from the University of California at Berkeley who were in the film showed up at Harvard to protest and found out that the film was functioning in an unintended way, actually recruiting students to attend Berkeley.
Initially the main object of protest was the pressure on universities to merge their activities with the needs of business and of the government’s nuclear weapons labs. The “knowledge industry” was a focal point for national growth. Universities asked students not to introduce “off-campus issues” such as civil rights, apartheid in South Africa, and nuclear weapons testing at the student activity tables that had traditionally been allowed on campus.
In 1963, students protested discriminatory hiring practices of San Francisco Bay Area businesses, trying to get more middle-level jobs for blacks and other minorities and asking hotels to integrate. For every hundred students who were arrested, 800 were involved in protests.
At the University of California at Berkeley in 1964 the primary issue between the administration and the students was the Free Speech Movement. Students wanted to use the student government as a way to educate other students, and they wanted no other restrictions on their freedom of speech on campus except those imposed by the courts. The administration’s position was that a small group of students, to whom they referred as the “lunatic fringe,” were producing a crisis in order to bring about utopia, believing that they could change the course of history. They said that student demonstrations such as sit-ins were interfering with the work of the university, but the student leader Mario Savio pointed out that the university was not a business. It was meant to save human beings from ignorance. If the smooth workings of the administrative machine were valued more highly than student communication among themselves and with the administration, then the students had to “put their bodies on the machine and make it stop working.” Students were taught how to make their bodies go limp when the police came to drag them out of buildings that they had occupied.
Lyndon Johnson had run for election on a peace platform in 1964, and when students found out in 1965 what their country had been doing, they spoke out against the hypocrisy of talking about generously aiding other countries and actually killing thousands of people, using the destinies of other nations for the ends of a portion of the ruling class of the United States.
The first large activity was “Vietnam Day” in May 1965. As the war continued to escalate and 20,000 soldiers were shipped out every month, the students decided to stop the trains by lying down on the tracks. The trains moved ahead, and policemen snatched some demonstrators off the tracks just before the trains would have run over them.
In Fall 1965 students organized an anti-war march of several thousand into Oakland despite not having received the permit for which they applied. They did not plan to break any laws. Despite being turned back by police on the first day and the Hell’s Angels on the second day, the third attempt at a march finally made it into Oakland. The writers Allen Ginsberg and Ken Kesey played a key role in preventing disruption by the Hell’s Angels on the third day, and Ginsberg appears in this documentary. The students managed to control the downtown area of Oakland for most of a day.
A counter-culture emerged in San Francisco from the poetry of the Beat generation, notably Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs, and Jack Kerouac. The San Francisco Renaissance of the Beats in the 1950s included the other well-known poets William Carlos Williams, Kenneth Rexroth, and Gary Snyder. Ginsberg left San Francisco in 1957 and went on to meet other well-known writers such as Gregory Corso, Robert Creeley, Denise Levertov, Frank O’Hara, and Kenneth Koch. Ginsberg formed a bridge between the beat movement of the 1950s and the hippies of the 1960s, including Timothy Leary and Bob Dylan among others. The first “Be-In” was planned for late 1966.
A narrator of the film states that the students’ alienation ran much deeper than the civil rights movement and the war: they questioned the whole life style of the majority in the United States. They came to doubt whether their protests were having any effect. They stated this symbolically: “We switched from singing ‘Solidarity Forever’ to singing ‘We All Live in a Yellow Submarine.’” Some came to feel that if they first learned how to “live right,” wars would stop. One thing they did was to turn a university parking lot into a People’s Park. It was a way of saying, “If we had control over our lives, this is what it would look like. We want to develop a culture for us rather than a culture for profit.” But the University seized People’s Park; teargas was used, and students were clubbed and arrested. One demonstrator was killed.
Another reaction was the formation of the Black Panther party by Bobby Seale and Huey Newton in Fall 1966, relying on the constitutional guarantee of the right to bear arms. Within six months they were internationally known. In October 1967 Huey Newton was arrested on a charge of murder, and a “Free Huey” movement was formed. On April 6, 1968, Eldridge Cleaver was wounded and another Black Panther was killed.
Students declared a “Stop the Draft Week” to shut down induction centers for a few days in October 1967. They realized that they needed to show that the cost of the Vietnam War would be civil unrest at home. When they were beaten by the police, they decided to go back the next day with twice as many students, all wearing construction helmets, and twice as many shields. Eventually J. Edgar Hoover of the FBI told Lyndon Johnson that he could not guarantee domestic security if they continued the land war, and Johnson decided not to seek another term.
Women who were activists began to notice that the men in the movement did not always listen to them, and started to form a sisterhood. “It means a coordinated change in all our lives,” one said, “the various ways in which we connect with each other.”
At the Democratic National Convention in Chicago in 1968 thousands of young people were beaten in the streets of Chicago. It seemed to students that what had happened in Chicago called for change all over the country. They also identified with protest movements in Paris and Prague.
In Spring 1969 the counterculture turned a parking lot owned by the University of California into the People’s Park and celebrated there. Governor Reagan brought in the National Guard to occupy San Francisco for a month and helicopters gased a student protest on campus about the university’s overreaction against the People’s Park.
Music heard in the film includes “Keep A-Knockin’” by Little Richard, “No Hole in My Head” by Malvina Reynolds, “Woke Up This Morning with My Mind on Freedom” by the SNCC Freedom Singers, “We Shall Not Be Moved,” “I Ain’t Marchin’ Any More,” “Purple Haze” by Jimi Hendrix, “Section 43,” “Viola Lee Blues,” “Fixin’-to-Die-Rag,” “Fortunate Son” by Creedence Clearwater Revival, “The Revolution Will Not be Televised” by Gil Scott Heron, “Did You Go Downtown,” “Death Sound Blues,” “The Weight,” “All My Trials” and “We Shall Overcome” by Joan Baez, “This Little Light of Mine,” “Solidarity Forever,” “Joe Hill,” “Union Maid,” “They All Sang Bread and Roses,” “The Universal Soldier,” “Embryonic Journey,” “Oski Dolls.”
This film will be shown in
Celluloid for Social Justice: The Legacy of 1968 in Documentaries
Mini-Film-Series Honoring the 40th Anniversary of California Newsreel; http://www.newsreel.org consisting of documentaries provided by California Newsreel
The film series precedes 1968: A Global Perspective --
An Interdisciplinary Conference at the University of Texas at Austin
October 10-12, 2008; http://www.1968conf.org