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By Lisa Rubens Steve Weissman recalls, “I asked a friend, ‘What do you think the chances are of getting thrown out of the University if we get involved in this?’ He said, ‘Well, they’re pretty good.’ I thought about it and decided, I’ll run that risk.” Weissman had grown up in a small Jewish community in Tampa, Florida and benefited from organized Judaism’s efforts to train future leaders. The training was not only religious, but also civic and political. “They taught us how to run an organization, how to run a meeting, how to organize, how to bring people in, about parliamentary procedure,” he says. Weissman exercised those skills as head of the Graduate Coordinating Committee and as a member of the FSM Steering Committee, but he says that the power of the FSM came primarily from its many participants. “The amazing thing was that people would come to rallies, hear discussions, talk with their professors, and then write stuff up,” he says. “Lots of people did things on their own. Because of the way the movement was operating, there was no need to get central authority for anything.” Charlie Powell ’64 was in his Student Union office when the police car was surrounded. “I hustled down and went out. I had no idea that there was such concern and fervor,” he says. A senior from Fresno, Powell was active in sports and the Band and had just begun his tenure as ASUC president. “In my own mind, I was a Republican,” he recalls. “But I wasn’t motivated by [politics]. I liked the challenge of being a leader of people.”
His role seemed clear. “Almost from instinct, I jumped up on the car and offered to go with Mario down to the chancellor’s office [to negotiate a resolution]. I felt the responsibility to try to do something. I’m a peacemaker at heart.” Yet Powell says he felt “overwhelmed by the potency of the number of folks who were willing to lay their life down for [their beliefs]” and “marginalized” by intransigence on both sides of the conflict. “I didn’t like seeing people so angry with each other, not being able to find a middle ground.” Now a Presbyterian minister in Virginia, he attributes the reaffirmation of his Christian faith to those trying times. Judy Allen ’67 was a sorority girl and member of Oski Dolls, a campus hospitality group which at one point was asked to distribute leaflets explaining the administration’s position. “I was not used to thinking on my own,” she says. “I was afraid of what was happening. In the fall of our freshman year Kennedy was assassinated, and in the fall of our sophomore year was the Free Speech Movement. Our world was never the same after that. I just have this image of a violent earthquake, you know; everything was shaken, severely shaken.” Allen witnessed the arrests after the December sit-in at Sproul Hall. “I had a very clear view,” she says. “I watched the police drag these kids down the front steps of Sproul Hall and put them in the wagon and take them away. That event gave me a new perspective in my life. I can’t say that at that moment I became a clear thinker, but to see this in front of me, it took my brain and remade it. It remade me.” Bill Sewell, a third-year history grad student at the time, recalls, “It was living through a revolution. There were various moments when you had to decide to take a risk and put your life or career on the line. The result was not actually a huge transformation of the University, although we won the small battle about free speech. But there was a huge transformation in the politics and the culture of that movement and then, indeed, of the country, and in some ways of the world.” Lisa Rubens ’67, a University historian and coordinator of the Free Speech Movement Oral History Project, has conducted nearly 50 interviews of people associated with the Free Speech Movement. Most of the interviews will be available online in December at bancroft.berkeley.edu/FSM/. |
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