First - I’m procrastinating and the clock is running out. But before my husband finds out that I’ve spent the last hour watching the new Andy Richter show on abc.com and takes away my internet connection, I needed to post this:

Bum Rush The Charts is a push to get a pod safe music network artist to the top of the I-tunes charts for one day. A portion of the proceeds will go to fund college scholarships. You can find out more about it by visiting the Bum Rush The Charts blog and listening to a promo.

And to relate this somehow to my research today, I argue that going up against the music industrial machine is just one way this youth generation can relate to the students at the University of California, Berkeley in 1964 during the Free Speech Movement. Inspired by the lessons they learned the previous summer in the Civil Rights Movement, and prohibited by an repressive, out of touch University administration, an organic, bi-partisan protest emerged aimed at extending free speech to students. When the University tried to silence an alumni organizing for CORE (Congress on Racial Equality) he refused to go away. A police car arrived and he was ushered into the car. Before the car could drive away, however, students started to sit down and become a human barricade. For 36 hours, Jack Weinberg sat in that police car, while students spontaneously turned the roof of the car into a speaker’s podium. At several points in time, over 3000 students and other sympathizers demonstrated in support of the right for students to actively recruit and solicit donations for politically motivated groups other than those sanctioned by the University (The College Republicans and the College Democrats). While the protesters included both liberals and republicans, they did face loud and threatening opposition from college fraternity members and the local police.

After 36 hours, and what we can imagine was an immense amount of pressure from the Governor of California towards University President Clark Kerr to contain those communist agitators , the University agreed to negotiate with representative of the student groups. Trusting that the administration was acting in good faith, the students dispersed and the nation breathed a collective sigh of relief that this isolated instance of student protest was contained.

Not long after, however, the negotiations between the student groups and the university came to a stand still, which resulted the students taking over the a university building. The police were called in again and this time, they forcibly removed and arrested over 770 students.

The citizens of California were appalled enough by what they pereceived as the lieniency taken by President Kerr and Governor Brown that elected a young Ronald Reagan into the Governor’s office based on his campaign promise to crack down on the protests at Berkeley (and crack down he did, 5 years later, during the protests at People’s Park, he sent in 2,200 state National Guard troops “If it’s to be a bloodbath, let it be now. Appeasement is not the answer.”).

President Clark Kerr, the father of the California University system and symbol — to the students protesters — of the University’s undemocratic ways — was ousted by Ronald Reagan and placed on the FBI’s watch list for being a communist sympathizer. Not long after this, President Johnson tried to appoint Kerr to a cabnit level position within the White House, but his name was revoked after Johnson saw the FBI files - which it was later revealed contained false information. You can read more about this at the San Fransisco Gate’s Site called “Hoover, Reagan and the Red Menace.”.

As I was digging around through the vast digital archives about Berkeley, I clicked through to this video of Mario Salvo, one of the students active in negotiating with the University (I won’t call him a leader, because he never saw himself as a leader, and the spontaneous nature of the protest was such that there was no organizational power behind it to support a leader). To the best of my knoweldge, this is the first white student protest that was documented on video, and was taken after the initial protest, but just prior to the second when the police arrested the large bulk of students.

You can watch Mario Salvo give his now infamous “gears in the machine” speech.