St. Louis Post-Dispatch, November 4, 2014
Recently, thousands of Jefferson County, Colorado, high school and
middle school students walked out of class and picketed their schools
in protest of proposed changes in the Advanced Placement history
curriculum. A majority on the school board in the state’s
second-largest district worries that the AP curriculum, with its
emphasis on interpretation of primary documents and the development
of critical thinking skills, might offer too negative a view of
American history. Instead, the majority wants American history
classes to emphasize "patriotic material, respect for authority,
and the free-market system.”
The emphasis on respect for authority might be a difficult task in a
nation founded on people's right "to alter or abolish"
their government. And as the students understand—though the
school board has yet to grasp—in order to make a reality of the
ideals on which the nation was founded, America has a long history of
civil (and sometimes not-so-civil) disobedience. From the
Boston Tea Party through the struggles of abolitionists to the
efforts of labor, women's and civil rights activists to create a more
democratic society, resistance to authority runs deep in the American
grain.
In one of those interesting historical coincidences, the Colorado
student protests come almost exactly fifty years after one of the
major student rebellions in American history, the 1964 Free Speech
Movement at the University of California at Berkeley.
The background of the Free Speech Movement (FSM) lies in the civil rights movement, which in
the summer of 1964 had reached a peak when more than 1,000 northern
college students, most of them white, traveled to Mississippi to help
with voter registration efforts in the Freedom Summer Project. As
these students returned to campus for the fall term, they continued
their civil rights activity.
At Berkeley, students traditionally had been allowed to set up tables
for recruitment and soliciting funds on a sidewalk immediately
outside the campus’ main gates. When a group began picketing the
Oakland Tribune, accusing it of racist practices, a Tribune executive
called a university official to complain that the organization was
recruiting members on university property. On September 14, the
university announced a ban on setting up tables to recruit members or
solicit funds, a policy that drew protests across the political
spectrum, from civil rights groups to the Youth for Goldwater.
Students continued setting up tables in defiance of the ban. On
October 1, police arrested a student manning a table for the Congress
of Racial Equality. As he was put in the squad car, a large crowd
spontaneously surrounded the car and sat down, preventing it from
moving. For the next thirty-two hours the car stayed put as students
took turns climbing on top of it and using it as a makeshift soap
box.
Over the next few months, as the administration responded in a clumsy
and often heavy-handed fashion—with police in full riot gear
manhandling nonviolently protesting students—the FSM took shape. As one of its leaders, Mario Savio,
pointed out, the students drew a direct connection between the FSM
and the civil rights struggle. “Last summer I went to Mississippi
to join the struggle there for civil rights. This fall I am engaged
in another phase of the same struggle, this time in Berkeley. The
two battlefields may seem quite different, but this is not the case.
The same rights are at stake in both places—the right to
participate as citizens in democratic society and the right to due
process of law.”
With the administration’s crackdown, more and more students began
to rethink the nature of power and oppression. As historian Godfrey
Hodgson says, “It suddenly became possible for students on every
campus in America to ask themselves whether there wasn’t a little
bit of Mississippi in all America.”
At the height of the struggle, Savio said, “There's 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.”
The Colorado students have thrown their bodies upon the gears to make
the machine stop. Good for them. They've learned one of
the first lessons of American history.
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