Jo Freeman - Student Activist at Berkeley

Student Activist At Berkeley

At Berkeley Freeman was active in the University Young Democrats and the campus political party, SLATE. SLATE worked to abolish nuclear testing, to eliminate the University’s ban on controversial speakers, and to improve undergraduate education at Cal. It developed a guide to classes and professors entitled the SLATE Supplement to the General Catalog, for which Freeman wrote reviews of professors and their courses. One of SLATE’s fundamental principles was that students should have the same rights to take stands on issues on campus that they had as citizens off campus. The University had restricted such activity since the 1930s. It became a major issue when the civil rights movement came to the Bay Area in the fall of 1963 because students wanted to support the movement on campus as well as off.

In the fall of 1964 the question was dramatized when student organizations set up tables on campus to solicit money and recruit students for off-campus political action in defiance of the ban. One person was arrested and several students were issued administrative citations. After a mass arrest was narrowly avoided by last minute negotiations with University president Clark Kerr, the Free Speech Movement (FSM) was formed by the student groups to continue the struggle. Freeman represented the University Young Democrats on the FSM executive committee. After two months of fruitless negotiations, Freeman was one of “the 800” students who were arrested for sitting in at the main administration building on December 2–3, 1964. This was the biggest mass arrest in California history. The publicity it generated compelled the Regents of the University to change the rules so that students could pursue political issues on campus.