[Download Film Betina 2006 Dodge
Jamar Lizarraga
In June of 1984, Mark Kitchell interviewed me for his film Berkeley in the Sixties. Twenty years had passed since 1964; as much time as had passed between World War II and the Free Speech Movement. When I was nineteen that war was ancient history. The FSM is ancient history now too, only I was in it.
Mark sent me a transcript of what I had said, and as I read it, that whole episode of my life came rushing back, murky and garbled, but with great intensity. I decided to copy the few pages of transcript, and flesh it out, to see just what I could dredge up out of the dim swamps of memory. The self-imposed task of auto-archaeology started getting out of hand; the more I wrote, the more I remembered. The initial mnemonic exploration was like the early excavations of Troy: great shovels-full of priceless treasure unearthed at every turn; even the clumsiest effort returning wonders and marvels. After a bit of this, the going got harder. I was down to the whisk broom and dental tool stage in no time at all, attempting to assemble a whole event from shards, hints, half-remembered conversations, bright fragments of broken images; a reflection in a shattered funhouse mirror. It's hard to get things in the right order, to integrate bits of memory into a coherent framework.
The reconstruction of history is easier done with the help of others; everybody remembers different things about the same events. Strangely enough, most memories seem random, without regard for the apparent gravity of the circumstance they call to mind. I'm as likely to recall a specific garment, meal or glance as I am to forget whole weeks of what had to be desperately interesting living. Others' recollections shed light on dark corners, unswept by thought for years.
Whenever I've had a chance to compare my own recollections with those of someone else, I've often been surprised to find them at considerable variance, even in large matters. This doesn't bother me too much because there's nothing I can do about it; who's right and who's wrong is not an important question. Alternate realities are the fabric of history.3
The children of my generation were raised under the shadow of The Bomb. In school, we endured monthly air raid drills: crouch under your desk, put newspaper over your head, stay away from windows, don't look at the flash, wait for the all-clear. We were shown demented Civil Defense films; animated characters instructed us in air raid procedure:
At Cal, fallout shelter signs were posted all over University buildings. We thought they were a joke, and it was the fashion amongst surly youth to steal as many of them as possible, using them for macabre room decorations. Worked on them in black and yellow was the symbol for radiation, and inside a little circle was the maximum occupancy of the shelter. An arrow showed the direction to run in case of atomic attack. I had dozens of the things.6
All through my childhood, I'd been frightened beyond fear, and there hadn't been any reason for it. Adults had been silly, and dead-ass wrong about Russia, and the Communists, and Nuclear War, and every chance they got they made a big to-do about nothing, frightened of their own shadows. By the time I reached my teens, steeped in phony terror all my life, I wasn't afraid of anything anymore. I didn't take seriously what adults said, or place much credence in their ideas. In fact, if an adult said something, that as much as gave it the cachet of nonsense. In turn, they didn't like my music, they didn't like my haircut, they didn't like my clothes, they didn't like my morals, they didn't like my ideas, they didn't like my friends and most of them didn't like me.
Like all children, we engaged our parents in a continual contest for independence. The difference between my generation and those which had gone before was twofold: First, there were more of us than there had ever been before, overwhelming our elders by sheer force of numbers. The population of the United States rose by 19 million between 1940 and 1950; between 1950 and 1960 by another 28 million; 4 million American children were born in 1947 alone. Between 1940 and 1950 California's population rose by 42 percent.
So what had been a matter of struggle and compromise for preceding generations became for the first wave of baby boomers a matter of fighting to win. We fought about hair, about clothes, about music, about books, about sex, about education, about language, politics and money. We fought about everything, and it got to be a habit.
The fight was a hard one, and we were lucky to hold the grown-ups to a draw: in early 1958 I heard a song that burned its way into my mind on one single hearing. The powerful fuzz-tone guitar and drum instrumental was titled Rumble, and even though I, and other kids, loved it, it mysteriously disappeared from the air and I never heard it broadcast again. In 1990 I heard the song for the second time, and in the liner notes I found out what had happened:
The "corrupting" influence of rock 'n' roll made some radio stations worry about offending parents, and a number of stations banned Link Wray's menacing guitar instrumental Rumble. Wray composed the song at a show in Fredericksburg, Virginia, after he was asked to play something for the popular dance, the stroll. Though Archie Bleyer hated it, he released the instrumental on his Cadence label because his daughter loved it (she named it after a scene in West Side Story). Rumble's thick power chords and distorted guitar tone, which Wray created by punching holes in his amplifier's speaker, have led some to call it the first heavy-metal record.6
The best-selling non-fiction book of 1959 was the treacle-voiced Pat Boone's pious fraud 'Twixt Twelve and Twenty, which gave detailed, fail-safe instructions on how to get kids to be good if you happened to live on Mars. The grown-ups of America were getting desperate.
The First Amendment, "refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and of tyrants,"1 guarantees us the right to speak; as citizens of this democracy we have an obligation both to speak and to act when fools and demagogues endanger our welfare and liberty.
We must be careful to recognize that the substance of much speech that today is taken for granted was, within living memory, and despite the black letter of the Bill of Rights, effectively illegal, for which the speaker, author, printer and publisher could be fined and imprisoned. That the battle for free speech is going on now and will continue forever has been illustrated not only by the Reagan and Bush administrations' apparent hostility towards the very idea of the Bill of Rights, as manifested in efforts to restrict, control and manipulate information that should without prejudice be available to the public, but in a recrudescence of arrests and convictions for images, words and actions displeasing to the reactionary sensibility, as well as a galloping erosion of the entire Bill of Rights under these administrations' Supreme Courts.2
In 1919, in the matter of Schenck v United States, the renowned jurist Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., proclaimed for a unanimous court what has since become the watchword of all who would muzzle inconvenient expression:
When Tennessee's new law prohibiting the teaching of evolution became effective in March of 1925, the ACLU at once sought a test of the statute's attack on free speech and secured John Thomas Scopes, a science teacher, as the defendant. William Jennings Bryan, three times the Democratic candidate for president and a rock-ribbed fundamentalist, volunteered to serve as chief counsel for the prosecution; Clarence Darrow, a member of the ACLU's National Committee and an agnostic, headed the volunteer defense team. Scopes was convicted and fined one hundred dollars. On appeal, the Tennessee Supreme Court upheld the statute but reversed the conviction, which made it impossible to appeal to the United States Supreme Court. The trial, however, played a major part in hastening the departure of religious indoctrination from the public schools.
On an everyday level, however, free speech still struggled. In 1939, Mayor Frank "I Am the Law" Hague of Jersey City claimed the right to deny free speech to anyone he thought radical. Of his critics he said,
This gradual expansion of First Amendment rights came to an abrupt halt on February 7, 1950, in Wheeling, West Virginia, when Wisconsin Democrat Senator Joseph R. McCarthy announced to the Republican Women's Club,
The atmosphere of idealism and utopianism that surrounded the "Athens of the West" was reflected in the larger community. In such matters as progressive zoning regulations, a city-manager form of government to eliminate machine politics, vigorous public health measures and a forward-looking police force and fire department, the city was in the vanguard of civic consciousness from its earliest beginnings.
In matters of race relations, Berkeley was neither better nor worse than most other American cities. There were anti-Asian riots around the turn of the century, and as late as 1961 almost no Black employment in good mercantile or civic jobs.
When, however, the civil-rights movement at last sparked the conscience of the community, Berkeley made dramatic, sweeping changes far in advance of others. In 1961 Berkeley elected Wilmont Sweeney, its first Black city councilman. Berkeley schools had never been overtly segregated, and the city was in the vanguard of bussing to rectify racial imbalance in public schools. University students and citizens picketed and boycotted downtown businesses that refused Black trade and did not employ Black people in good, conspicuous jobs, thereby forcing considerable change.
In the late 1950s and early 1960s the intellectual climate was one far more tolerant and welcoming of change than that of surrounding municipalities. Somewhat isolated geographically as well as culturally, the city is cut off by the San Francisco Bay from its glittering big sister, and from the mono-culture suburbs to the east by a high hill range. Despite apparent blurring of civic boundaries to the north and south, Berkeley almost aggressively holds itself separate and maintains a clear civic identity, conspicuously contrasting itself to both the characterless bedroom communities of Albany and El Cerrito and the proletarian miasma of Oakland. Even the climate is distinctively its own; directly in line with the Golden Gate, Berkeley is cooler and foggier than the rest of the Bay Area.
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