Caption on reverse side of photograph: "Humor in Eyes of Beholder, Bettina Aptheker Kurzweil [she was married at the time] got a big laugh out of a cake with a hacksaw Friday in Oakland. Friends prepared the cake as a sort of going-away present for the student leader of a December, 1964, Free Speech Movement sit-in at the University of California. She was sentenced recently to 45 days in jail for her part in the episode.—A.P. Wirephoto." Date stamped on back: "July 2 1967." Also, stamped there is "Copyright, Seattle Sun Times Co." Credit: The Seattle Sun Times Company. Photo credit: Associated Press Wirephoto. Trial for the Free Speech activists began in April 1965. Their defense strategy involved convincing the judge that their action was justifiable civil disobedience on behalf of constitutional principles.[21] They were found guilty of trespassing and resisting arrest (because of going limp when carried from the protest site).[22][23] In late June 1967, After a failed appeal to the US Supreme Court, the activists surrendered themselves for imprisonment. Soon after her arrival at the prison, the supervisor of the the facility warned her, stating "I won't tolerate protest." Aptheker replied, "If there are no violations of our constitutional rights, there will be no need for any."[24]

A pin from the F. S. M.—Free Speech Movement. (Actual size is 1".)

Yellow leaflet titled "Provisional Platform of the Free Speech Movement" issued November 1964.[25] Among its demands was that the "appropriate channel for enacting and interpreting the regulations governing the exercise of civil liberties on the campus shall be a tripartite board with equal representation of students . . . faculty . . . and members of the administration."[26]

Photo caption: "(FX5) Berkeley, Calif. Dec. 3—STUDENT DEMONSTATORS FACE POLICE—University of California students protesting the university's disciplinary action against four self-styled free speech leaders, face a line of California Highway Patrolmen as they wait for the group inside the building to be brought out. The rebel students, who took over the building last night, were dragged through the thick cordon of police and put in bus background. Photographers were barred from the bus area also. (APWIREPHOTO) (s50640ekb) 1964." Photo credit: Associated Press Wirephoto. Aptheker wrote that the response by officials to the occupation of Sproul Hall by free speech activists brought the university to a "standstill."[27] Graduate students went on strike, students picketed academic buildings, faculty cancelled lectures, and impassioned messages were chalked on blackboards.[28] One read, "I will not teach while police occupy the university."[29]  

Publication, from 1965, titled FSM: the Free Speech Movement at Berkeley, an Historical Narrative by Bettina Aptheker. In her first paragraph she writes: "The following story [about the Free Speech Movement] is true. All resemblance to persons living and events lived is purely intentional. Only the names have been unchanged to detect the guilty and praise the courageous."[30]

Pamphlet, published in 1966, titled Big Business and the American University by Bettina Aptheker. Participating "in the miracle of learning" ought to be "the greatest joy," but "[i]nstead it becomes a nightmare," Aptheker points out in her indictment of America's higher education system.[31] In her opinion, the "source of the problem" is that "our universities . . . are controlled by and serve the interests of the giant monopolies and corporations."[32]

Photo of Bettina Aptheker addressing Berkeley students. in January 1967. In her remarks, she refers to Ronald Reagan, then governor of California, and Clark Kerr, Berkeley university president during the free speech actions there in '64. Photo caption: "(FX4) Berkeley, Calif., Jan. 24—URGES STUDENTS TO ORGANIZE—Bettina Aptheker, admitted Communist and leader in prior Berkeley disturbances, talks to some 2,000 University of California students during a noon rally today. She urged students and faculty to organize into a power bloc so they could have the say in who will be the new president of the university, after the firing of Clark Kerr last Friday. She told the group at the rally, "we have to push Reagan right back to  the wall. If we have to we will push him right through the wall." (APWiIREPHOTO) (s31500bf) (See AP Wire Story) 1967." Date stamped on back: January 25, 1967. Photo credit: Associated Press Wirephoto.

Bettina Aptheker, who at the age of five fell in love with her first woman, has dedicated her life to social justice.[1] The daughter of a renowned Marxist scholar, she herself was a devoted member of the Communist Party until later leaving it. She is now a professor in feminist studies.

As a child she protested on behalf of the Rosenbergs, an American couple many believed were unjustly accused of being Russian spies and, in 1953, executed. (At an Eisenhower White House picketing she insisted on carrying her own sign: “Save the Rosenbergs.”[2]) At seventeen, while participating in a peaceful “Ban the Bomb” anti-nuclear rally attacked by police, she “went down” after feeling a policeman's “club crash across [her] ribs.”[3]

In college she co-led events known as the “Free Speech Movement” by serving on its Steering Committee.[4][5] Taking place at the University of California in Berkeley, the movement was energized by civil rights activities happening in the South. It began in the fall of 1964 in response to the University's ban on student political activity. On campus property, according to Aptheker's FSM narrative published the following year, students could “no longer advocate off-campus political and social action” or even “take partisan views in the [1964] election.”[6] In response, FSM activists claimed the “right to advocate freely on the campus without being subject to University discipline.”[7] As stated in one of their leaflets: “The range of civil liberties and political freedoms” “constitutionally protected” off campus should be “equally protected” on campus.[8] When, while tabling on campus for the civil rights group, the Congress of Racial Equality, a student was arrested and put in a police car, hundreds of students blocked its exit. On a speaker's platform—the roof of the police car—Aptheker, quoting Frederick Douglass, declared, “Power concedes nothing without a demand!”[9]

“Free speech” was considered to be no mere abstraction.[10] Protecting it was deemed a crucial test of political liberty.[11] For students a “maximization of political freedom” was essential.[12] To help achieve it, they organized a non-violent sit-in at Sproul Hall, an administrative building, on December third. Their action was met by club-wielding cops. Aptheker noted that police “hurled epithets,” “dug their nails into the bare skin of girls' stomachs,” clubbed the guys and “kicked [them] in the groin,” and dragged students “up and down stairs.”[13] She also was kicked and punched and, though she was born on U.S. soil, called “a goddamn Russian Jew” by law enforcers.[14] With nearly eight hundred students arrested, it was the largest mass arrest in California's history.[15][16]

Yet, on December 14, University regents announced that regulations governing free speech and assembly would henceforth “not go beyond the purview of the First and Fourteenth Amendments to the U.S. Constitution.”[17] As a result, freer speech appeared on college campuses throughout the country. At the time Aptheker pinpointed the University's Board of Regents, comprised of the “Big Business elite,” as the “real force seeking the suppression of the rights of the students.”[18] In 1966, in a booklet titled Big Business and the American University, she elaborated: “Indeed, the universities are controlled by the most reactionary sections of this corporate elite,” who emphasize “training students rather than teaching them.”[19] “It has led,” she maintained, “toward computerized education in the 'knowledge factory' to serve society as it is, instead of academic institutions dedicated to the improvement and progress of society as a whole.”[20]

Sources:

1. Bettina F. Aptheker, Intimate Politics: How I Grew Up Red, Fought for Free Speech, and Became a Feminist Rebel (Emeryville: Seal, 2006), 23.

2. Intimate, 21.

3. Intimate, 69.

4. Intimate, 133.

5. Bettina Aptheker, “Women and the FSM,” “from the panel 'The Story of the Free Speech Movement' at the 1984 FSM Reunion,”Free Speech Movement Archives, http://www.fsm-a.org/stacks/b_aptheker84.html.

6. Bettina Aptheker, FSM: The Free Speech Movement at Berkeley: An Historical Narrative (San Francisco: W.E.B. DuBois Clubs of America, 1965), 2.

7. FSM, 10.

8. “Provisional Platform of the Free Speech Movement,” (n.d.), 1, a leaflet.

9. Intimate, 131.

10. Intimate, 159.

11. Intimate, 159.

12. FSM, 15.

13. FSM, 17.

14. Intimate, 145.

15. Jo Freeman, The Berkeley Free Speech Movement, http://www.uic.edu/orgs/cwluherstory/jofreeman/sixtiesprotest/berkeley.htm.

16. David Burner, Berkeley Free Speech Movement, 1963-64: A Narrative Summary, http://www.writing.upenn.edu/~afilreis/50s/berkeley.html.

17. Intimate, 152.

18. Bettina Aptheker, Big Business and the American University (New York: New Outlook, 1966), [2].

19. Big, 5.

20. Big, 5.

21. Intimate, 157.

22. Intimate, 155.

23. Intimate, 162.

24. Intimate, 199.

25. Chronological Index of the Archives of the Free Speech Movement, Part 1, Sept to End Nov. 1964, Free Speech Movement Archives, http://www.fsm-a.org/stacks/chrono-table1.html.

26. "Provisional Platform of the Free Speech Movement," [1964], 2.

27. Intimate, 146.

28. Intimate, 146.

29. Intimate, 146.

30. Bettina Aptheker, FSM: the Free Speech Movement at Berkeley, an Historical Narrative (San Francisco: W. E. B. DuBois Clubs of America, 1965), 1.

31. Bettina Aptheker, Big Business and the American University (New York: New Outlook, 1966), 5.

32. Big, 5.