Bancroft and Telegraph Avenues, University of California, Berkeley 94720
UC Berkeley is internationally famous for radical politics, in no small part because of the iconic images of student demonstrations in this plaza. It is not necessarily the institution, the city, or the state that are radical, however. It is the students, activists, and allies who have used this space for decades to demand their rights to free speech, community space, peace, and public education. The government’s violent repression of those demands—with police and the National Guard, with batons, rubber bullets, and tear gas—has kept Sproul in the limelight and brought generation after generation back to the same spot to demand their rights.
Sproul’s best-known images come out of the mid-1960s Free Speech movement protests. The plaza opened in 1962 as part of the UC’s physical expansion to accommodate massive post-WWII campus growth. Though this was designed as a public space, university administrators banned tabling in 1964 to appease Berkeley business owners wary about growing student involvement in civil rights activism.
Defiant students set up political information tables to challenge the ban, and when the university sent police to cite them, students continuously rotated through seats to keep the police busy and flustered. The tabling citations sparked a mass rally that galvanized a unified front of students, from the socialists to the Goldwater defenders (in other words, from the Left to the Right wing), all defending the right to table as “free speech.” The media captured the iconic image of Free Speech movement leader Mario Savio atop a police car surrounded by hundreds of protesting students unwilling to let the police haul him away. A few months later, from the steps of Sproul, he would deliver what would become perhaps his most-quoted call to protest: “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.”
Over the years, with Savio’s words reverberating among students, the plaza filled to overflowing time and time again as students at this flagship public institution became radicalized and learned firsthand about the top-down power of the state. The experience of mass protest on this plaza brought thousands together, and soon those vast numbers turned to focus on the many heated issues of the day threatening their communities and lives. The war in Vietnam escalated, and students organized with the growing peace movement to create mass marches through Oakland to protest the military draft—seeking to physically block draftees from enrolling. Some formed alliances with the Black Panther Party, and others went on to participate in the other major movements that coalesced at that time: second-wave feminism, the burgeoning LGBT movement, and a broad range of organizations founded around ethnic race-class struggles, like the American Indian Movement and the Third World Liberation Front.
Students continue to return to Sproul with creative protest, often centered around making the campus and its education accessible to more people. In the 2000s, students protesting fee hikes and financial austerity set up tents in the plaza, while teaching assistants graded papers to make their work visible. When police confiscated their tents, students returned with new tents attached to balloons so they would hover over the plaza. Campus administrators again called in the police. Echoing the 1960s, cops in riot gear marched on peaceful protesters, who wanted to attend classes in rooms with sufficient chairs and who sought tuition that they could afford without working three jobs.