Free Speech Movement
Also during her time at Berkeley, Waters became active in the Free Speech Movement, which was sweeping across campus at the time.
In response to a campus-wide ban on political involvement and activism, Berkeley students joined together to form the Free Speech Movement. One of the student leaders of this movement, Mario Savio, had a profound influence on Waters. Savio became famous in 1964 for delivering a speech inciting individual student protesters to take action against the “machine” of political oppression. In his Sproul Hall Steps speech he said: “There’s a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious…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”. Although her political aims have shifted, her approach to provoking change has remained constant over her tenure at Chez Panisse.
During this time, Waters worked on the congressional campaign of Robert Scheer, an anti-Vietnam War politician. She often cooked for and entertained her fellow campaigners, and for the first time was building her reputation as a cook in addition to an activist.
Read more about this topic: Alice Waters
Famous quotes containing the words free, speech and/or movement:
“Other roads do some violence to Nature, and bring the traveler to stare at her, but the river steals into the scenery it traverses without intrusion, silently creating and adorning it, and is as free to come and go as the zephyr.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“If the oarsmen of a fast-moving ship suddenly cease to row, the suspension of the driving force of the oars doesn’t prevent the vessel from continuing to move on its course. And with a speech it is much the same. After he has finished reciting the document, the speaker will still be able to maintain the same tone without a break, borrowing its momentum and impulse from the passage he has just read out.”
—Marcus Tullius Cicero (106–43 B.C)
“Christianity was only a very strong and singularly well-timed Salvation Army movement that happened to receive help from an unusual and highly dramatic incident. It was a Puritan reaction in an age when, no doubt, a Puritan reaction was much wanted; but like all sudden violent reactions, it soon wanted reacting against.”
—Samuel Butler (1835–1902)