Berkeley Free Speech Movement

[synthesis]

I have a rather specific question, to which my various sources of information have provided no leads. Does anyone have any concrete idea as to what extent the Berkeley Free Speech Movement of 1964 was influenced or abetted by the Students for a Democratic Society? Links would be very helpful.

[redstar2000]

If anything, the influence was the other way around -- that is, the Free Speech Movement had a substantial impact on SDS (which was concentrated on the east coast and in the midwest) and which was still quite small in 1964.

In fact it's one of the historical oddities of that period that SDS was never really significant at the UC-Berkeley campus until 1969/70 -- when SDS was disintegrating at the national level.

In all of the national SDS meetings I attended (lots!), I can't honestly recall ever meeting a delegate from Berkeley or hearing one speak.(!)

:redstar2000:

The Redstar2000 Papers (http://www.redstar2000papers.fightcapitalism.net)
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[synthesis]

That's really interesting, considering that those are the two names many people would conjure when hearkening back to the days of student radicalism. Any idea why?

[EneME]

side note: There is "The Free Speech Movement Cafe" on the Berkeley campus if anyone is interested. The walls are covered with the black and white pictures of the movement in the 60's and the tables all have articles about the movement imbedded in it.

http://www.fsm-a.org/stacks/cafe/cafe_02-03-00a.html

[redstar2000]

Originally posted by Dyer[email protected] 6 2005, 11:37 PM
That's really interesting, considering that those are the two names many people would conjure when hearkening back to the days of student radicalism. Any idea why?
I can offer a subjective impression; when I lived in the San Francisco Bay Area, I got the distinct feeling that people in Berkeley regarded themselves almost as "citizens of another country"...there was even a popular saying -- "well, there's the United States and then there's also the People's Republic of Berkeley".

Even lefties in Oakland or San Francisco didn't seem to have much contact with people in Berkeley...it was almost regarded as "another country". (Berkeley was then about 40 minutes from downtown San Francisco and even less, of course, from Oakland.)

I was once involved in an effort to put together a group of libertarian Marxists and anarchists from Berkeley, Oakland, and San Francisco...but it didn't come off and I wonder to this day if this sort of strange geographical alienation didn't play a part in that.

But given this feeling, it would make a kind of "sense" that lefties in Berkeley would see no need to get involved in SDS...they possibly thought that SDS was too "backward" for them.

(SDS was well represented at San Francisco State, where there was a large student strike in 1968.)

:redstar2000:

The Redstar2000 Papers (http://www.redstar2000papers.fightcapitalism.net)
A site about communist ideas