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11: Divided We Stand- Activism and Politics, 1964–1970

  • Page ID
    127020
    • Robert W. Cherny, Gretchen Lemke-Santangelo, & Richard Griswold del Castillo
    • San Francisco State University, Saint Mary's College of California, & San Diego State University via Self Published
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    Main Topics

    • Seeds of Change
    • The Movement Expands
    • Politics in the Age of Dissent
    • Summary

    In the fall of 1964, Margot Adler left her home in New York City to attend college at U.C. Berkeley. Raised by left-wing parents during the McCarthy era, Margot was no stranger to political activism. While still in high school she joined the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), participated in civil rights demonstrations, and helped organize protests against civil defense drills. Berkeley, with its outstanding academic reputation and “rich history of student activism,” was a logical choice for this bright, idealistic young woman. But just as important, it provided Adler with the opportunity “to find a rich and interesting life” of her own.

    When she arrived at Berkeley, administrators had just prohibited on- and off-campus organizations from setting up tables at the south entrance of the campus, an area that had long been used by various groups to distribute their literature, recruit members, and engage in spirited political debate and discussion. The ban came during the national struggle for civil rights, when many Berkeley students joined protests against

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    discriminatory hiring practices of local businesses such as Mel’s Drive-In, the Sheraton Palace Hotel, and the Lucky supermarket chain. Other students had recently returned from Mississippi, where they had spent the summer volunteering with civil rights organizations like CORE and the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee to register black voters. For local activists and Mississippi volunteers, the tables on Bancroft and Telegraph— mistakenly thought by university administrators to be on campus property—were the primary means of attracting support for the growing civil rights movement.

    Not surprisingly, student activists, including some from conservative organizations like the Young Republicans, responded to the ban with anger. The university, they charged, cared more about maintaining good relations with local businesses by controlling campus political activity than about the constitutional right of free speech. The ban also brought other issues to the surface. Many felt that it was a paternalistic policy, designed to shelter students from unwholesome or “subversive” ideas—a policy that reflected the administration’s assumption that students were incapable of making informed, independent judgments. To others, the prohibition underscored the university’s lack of moral direction. Its officials, students maintained, were mainly interested in “turning out corporate drones for industry” rather than in cultivating critical thought, social responsibility, and civic virtue.

    These concerns were broad enough to capture the attention of several thousand students, who, like Adler, believed that “the right to political advocacy seemed obvious.” Even conservative student groups, usually at odds with “radical” campus activists, joined the emerging Free Speech Movement (FSM). After a semester-long series of protests, arrests, and fruitless negotiations with the administration, student activists obtained the support of the faculty senate. A week later, the Board of Regents struck down all prohibitions against political activity, affirming that students, like all other citizens, were entitled to the protections of the First and Fourteenth Amendments of the U.S. Constitution. For Adler and other FSM activists, the victory struck a deep chord: “We’d done something to transform the world around us, and we were forever marked by the belief that change was possible,” she said. “It would affect us for life, making us deep optimists about human possibility and influencing every choice from then on.”

    In the summer of 1965, Adler went to Mississippi to work on a voter registration project sponsored by the Student Non- Violent Coordinating Committee. Returning to Berkeley as a more seasoned activist, Adler joined the movement against the war in Vietnam—a movement that soon spread across the state, generated often-violent confrontations between police and demonstrators, disrupted “business as usual” on college campuses and in surrounding communities, and deeply polarized Californians.

    After graduating from Berkeley in 1968 with a degree in journalism, Adler’s desire to change the world—to create a society more rooted in cooperation, spiritual values, and meaningful work—continued to shape her life journey. Reflecting back on her experiences, Adler observed: “For all the limitations of my generation—our unconscious actions, our unexamined ideas, our often silly phrases—we were alive to the deepest spiritual values. We believed that exploration was life-long, that one’s life work had to be honorable, creative, and transformative. We seldom thought about consumption, or the eventual need to live the good life.... We believed that anything was possible and that everything was open to reexamination.”

    This “ecstatic sense of possibility” was shared by an entire generation of young Californians during the 1960s, and created the foundation for a broad range of social movements that altered the state’s cultural, political, and economic fabric. As the decade progressed, heady optimism was replaced with frustration over the slow pace of change, generating more militant activism. But to many Californians, particularly those outside the process of change, the state and nation as a whole appeared to be coming apart at the seams. In the presidential election of 1968, Richard Nixon adopted the successful strategy of claiming to speak for “the great majority of Americans, the non-shouters, the non-demonstrators … those who do not break the law, people who pay their taxes and go to work, who send their children to school, who go to their churches … people who love this country [and] cry out ... ‘that is enough, let’s get some new leadership.’”

    Just as California led the way for so many of the decade’s social movements, it also generated a conservative backlash against “disorder and chaos.” Two years before Nixon’s presidential campaign, Ronald Reagan, the state’s Republican candidate for governor, foreshadowed Nixon’s conservative appeal by blaming the “mess at Berkeley,” urban unrest, and moral decline on Pat Brown’s liberal administration. He also promised to cut taxes by reducing government spending on social programs “dreamed up for our supposed betterment,” and he attacked the Rumford Fair Housing Act for betraying “sacred” property rights. All of these positions appealed to the “forgotten” voters who believed that government should uphold traditional moral values and exercise economic restraint instead of “coddling” a vocal, disruptive minority at taxpayer expense. Although Reagan failed to reduce taxes, quell social unrest, or curb the growth of state government, his conservative rhetoric and his apparent sincerity carried him through two terms as governor, revitalized his party on the state and national level, and eventually won him the presidency.

    The ’60s, perhaps more than any other era, underscored California’s national influence and role as a bellwether state. The period’s social movements helped extend the democratic promise to a broader cross section of the population, created a greater appreciation of cultural diversity, and enhanced the state’s reputation for tolerance, openness, and innovation. They also fractured the postwar liberal consensus and precipitated a conservative reaction that reshaped national and state politics.

    Questions to Consider

    • What caused the shift from nonviolent civil rights protest to Black Power? How did the Black Power movement differ from earlier struggles for civil rights?
    • Was the formation of the United Farm Workers union a watershed for California’s Mexican Americans? Why or why not?
    • How did the youth movements of the 1960s, including the countercultural rebellion, affect California’s cultural, social, and political institutions?
    • What factors contributed to Ronald Reagan’s 1966 electoral victory and his subsequent popularity as governor?


    This page titled 11: Divided We Stand- Activism and Politics, 1964–1970 is shared under a CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 license and was authored, remixed, and/or curated by Robert W. Cherny, Gretchen Lemke-Santangelo, & Richard Griswold del Castillo (Self Published) via source content that was edited to the style and standards of the LibreTexts platform; a detailed edit history is available upon request.