When students could seize a police car

Mario Savio speaking from the top of the police car. By Steven Marcus. Oct. 1, 1964.

It’s the last week of the semester, and once again I ended my course in American Political Thought with a discussion of different views on the purpose of university education. My students read essays by John Dewey, Clark Kerr, Alan Bloom, and my late friend and colleague Jeff Lustig. As in past semesters, we also discussed the 1964 Berkeley Free Speech Movement (FSM), this time in light of the fiftieth anniversary, which has been marked by various events and publications this fall.

This time around, our discussions of the FSM quickly turned to the recent widespread protests against the killing of Michael Brown, Eric Garner, and other unarmed black men by police. Hundreds of Berkeley students have joined protests during the past week.

Fifty years ago, student protesters were galvanized by the arrest of Jack Weinberg for violating a university ban on political advocacy on campus. Weinberg was put in a police car parked in the center of campus, but hundreds of students spontaneously surrounded the car and prevented it from leaving. For the next 32 hours, students gave speeches from the top of the police car, many removing their shoes to avoid damaging the car.

The police did little to get their car back, and they apparently tolerated the affront with relative patience. The film Berkeley in the Sixties shows police carefully stepping among throngs of students sitting on the pavement.

At one point, according to an account by David Lance Goines, when police attempted to prevent students from entering Sproul Hall, the main administration building, students used their bodies to hold open the doors, leading to a scuffle with the police. Goines writes,

One larger-than-ordinary policeman started walking through the dense group, avoiding toes and legs until his second trip, when he became careless. We said, “Hey, you’re stepping on us. Take off your shoes, at least, if you’re going to walk on us.” Officer Philip E. Mower (badge number 24), with a high and mighty look, glanced down at the crowd from his cloudy height and kept on walking. So we pushed him down and took off his shoes.

More police got involved and further scuffling ensued, but no serious violence.

It’s hard to imagine police today showing such restraint.

Police obviously have an extremely difficult job and most are well-intentioned, but since 9/11 local police have increasingly adopted military tactics and equipment. They now show up for peaceful protests with riot gear, armored vehicles, and an apparent willingness to err on the side of excessive force.

The police response to protests in Ferguson is just the most prominent recent example. The Occupy protests of 2011 also led to many cases of police using excessive force, including the infamous pepper-spraying at UC Davis. At UC Berkeley, police beat student and faculty protesters, including the US poet laureate Robert Haas. Members of the English department returned the next day with the memorable protest sign, “Beat Poets, not beat poets.”

Of course, police brutality is nothing new, especially for people of color. Among other things, the militarization of police has long been part of the “war on drugs” in minority communities.

The FSM included a wide range of student groups united around the principle of free speech, but many of the more radical students saw a close link between free speech and racial justice. Many were inspired by the civil rights movement, and Mario Savio and other Berkeley students had participated in the 1964 Freedom Summer campaign to register black voters in the South. Jack Weinberg was arrested while representing the Campus Congress of Racial Equality.

But Berkeley students in 1964 didn’t face the police dogs, billy clubs, and fire hoses that police turned on civil rights protesters in Birmingham, Selma, and elsewhere. To be sure, many of the students surrounding the police car feared an attack by police, and there was a potential for violence, but negotiations between students and administrators brought the incident to a peaceful conclusion.

Although many factors played a role, it’s certainly not irrelevant that the vast majority of the students were white. We might even say that the Berkeley students who seized a police car in 1964 were “criming while white.”

Last week the Twitter hashtag #crimingwhilewhite became a vehicle for tales of white privilege, with thousands of whites posting anecdotes of committing various crimes (drunk driving, shoplifting) and being let-off easy by police, when people of color most likely would not have been.

To say that the FSM began by “seizing a police car while white” does not diminish its achievement. But perhaps it highlights how much work remains to be done.