Violence, & the Rule of Law
from “Living Life Well”
On Thursday, May 12th, 1960, several students gathered in a peaceful demonstration against the House UnAmerican Activities Committee (HUAC), which had come to San Francisco to investigate suspected communist infiltration of the public schools. Tension had been growing ever since 31 UC Berkeley professors had been fired for not signing oaths of loyalty to our country. These oaths were widely required in those days after strident McCarthyism had become institutionalized, despite the burgeoning Civil Rights movement modeled upon Gandhi’s nonviolent protests that had defeated British rule.
When the protest in San Francisco had grown to 700 people on the following day, Friday the 13th, the police turned firehoses on them without warning, washing them down the marble stairway in the rotunda of City Hall. Twelve people were hospitalized. The next day I joined 5,000 others to protest the police violence against what had been a non-violent demonstration. I was graduating from SRJC that month, and had been accepted at Berkeley for the coming fall. This was to be my initiation into a full decade of history shaping tumult, at Berkeley.
On March 23rd, 1962, President Kennedy came to speak to us in our stadium, with acknowledgement and appreciation for the rigor of our university’s commitment to intellectual freedom. I remember so clearly him telling us, “This University of California will continue to grow as an intellectual center, because your presidents and your chancellors and your professors have rigorously defended that unhampered freedom of discussion and inquiry, which is the soul of the intellectual enterprise and the heart of a free university.” We cheered, and our cheers filled the stadium, just as tears filled our hearts the following year when JFK was assassinated.
Public discourse is of course not always safe, because the world itself is not always safe. There comes a time for speaking up, for having the courage of one’s conviction when a violation has been recognized— especially when the rule of law, itself, violates. We learned this from activist students returning to Berkeley from the Freedom Rides of the Deep South, where nonviolent civil disobedience was met by brutal attacks and arrests.
At the university there had already been demonstrations against the war and racism, and controversy hung thick in the air. Tables were set up on campus in Sproul Plaza by several political organizations for announcing meetings, gathering signatures, and promoting protests. Tension grew as the administration began feeling pressure from the government to invoke the doctrine of in loco parentis, a widely accepted doctrine that stated the university had inherited a parental role over the students once they had left their family home.
On September 21st, 1964, new regulations were issued banning all political activities on campus, which the students defied. Finally, Jack Weinberg was arrested while manning one of the tables, and hundreds of students, in an act of non-violent protest, quickly surrounded the police car holding Weinberg. This led to a 32-hour standoff, during which speaker after speaker climbed on the roof of the car to speak out against the ban, against in loco parentis, and against the institutional violation of human rights. The Free Speech Movement (FSM) was born that day.
As managing editor of the university’s Graduate Student Journal at the time, I assembled several articles and photographs about the FSM for the Spring 1965 issue, with an introductory editorial. What we wrote 59 years ago remains relevant for today’s students: “If you were to ask FSM supporters about the causes of the conditions they protest, many would point to the weight of hypocrisy which we and our society bear.” It was time to speak up, and we were heard— gradually, and with a certain resistance recognizable to this day.
So let’s talk about violence, and the rule of law. The rule of law acts as a guardrail to guide society in a positive direction. However, laws can be unjust, or enforced in ways that restrict progress while protecting opportunists that prefer personal gain over public good. Mario Savio said it most clearly in Sproul Plaza: “when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can't take part… 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!”
A dynamic balance between order and freedom must of course be maintained; too much regulation can be oppressive, while continued deregulation will lead to social collapse. Dissent must be allowed, for even if the demands can’t be met they must be heard— every voice must be heard in a true democracy, to shape a just society. The late Congressman John Lewis, who marched with Martin Luther King, coined the phrase "good trouble" to describe the need for non-violent civil disobedience to achieve a greater good in a fight for justice and equality.
The FSM became the centerpiece of that decade for me, midway between the authoritarian devastation of the HUAC in 1960 and the public celebration of Peoples’ Park in 1969— the year I graduated. It underscored JFK’s message to us, that we have the responsibility of contributing to an informed moral public discourse to address the irrational hatred and fear, racism and revenge, that only perpetuate the violence that we would otherwise suffer.
The heartbreaking carnage at the Nova music festival in Israel, and the extremely brutal reaction to that savagery now spreading like a disease in Gaza, is not good trouble— it is absolutely hideous. And what is happening on our campuses in reaction to that horror today hangs suspended, in an uneasy balance between good trouble and bad, faltering in the chaotic fog of war between pervasive atrocity and true morality.
I have this to say to the students: violence of any sort, by anyone, violates the boundaries of the rule of law; but when the rule of law itself violates the boundaries of human rights, in Savio’s words, it must be stopped. Remember too what JFK had to say to us that day, long ago: that an unhampered freedom of discussion is the soul of intellectual enterprise— and the very heart of a civilized discourse.
This article originally appeared in The Kenwood Press June 1st, 2024