Happy Birthday

"There is a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can't take part; you can't even passively take part, and you've got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you've got to make it stop. And you've got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it, that unless you're free, the machine will be prevented from working at all!"

Mario Savio,
Berkeley, CA
December 3rd,
1964

This week, the Free Speech Movement, or FSM, turns 40. The FSM, for those who are not familiar with it, was (from the FSM acrchive website) "based on a confederation of 19 student political, religious, social action, independent and other organizations" at the University of California at Berkeley. The Movement was a reaction to the University Administration's policy to ban student organizations from setting up information tables in and around Sproul Plaza. The FSM gave rise to the long string of sit-ins, protests, riots, and vigils that occurred on the Cal-Berkeley campus throughout the sixties, seventies and eighties. Here are some descriptive chronologies of the FSM-related events that took place in late 1964/early-mid 1965.