1968 poster
(Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture)
He sent articles to the
Daily
about the emerging new Left. Back in Michigan, the university administration accused him of inventing the news rather than reporting on it. He knew that there was a new Left, but he realized that the faculty and most people in America were still completely unaware of it.
Hayden spent his senior year dreaming of going south and participating. He took food to blacks in Tennessee driven out of their homes for registering to vote. But he wanted to do more. “I was chafing to graduate; the South was beckoning,” he later wrote. He did graduate and went south as an SDS liaison with SNCC. But he quickly learned that SNCC was well staffed and didn’t need him. Hayden felt alone in his very arduous and at times dangerous task in the South. “I didn’t want to go from beating to beating, jail to jail,” Hayden wrote. In December 1961, from a jail cell in Albany, Georgia, he wrote to his fellow SDS organizers in Michigan proposing a meeting to try to make SDS a larger, more important organization like SNCC. SDS had eight hundred members around the United States paying $1 in dues a year. It needed to define itself in order to grow.
In June 1962, the small circle of young people who called themselves SDS activists, some sixty people, met in Port Huron, Michigan, where as a boy Tom Hayden used to fish with his father. Hayden, playing Jefferson to Haber’s Adams, was asked to draft a document that would be “an agenda for a generation.” Looking back, Hayden was amazed at the grandiose terms of the project. “I still don’t know,” he wrote decades later, “where this messianic sense, this belief in being right, this confidence that we could speak for a generation, came from.” But the resulting document, known as the Port Huron Statement, to a remarkable extent did capture the thoughts, sensibilities, and perspective of their generation. By 1968, when it had become clear to older people that a younger generation thought very differently, the Port Huron Statement was seized on as an insight into how they thought. College students of 1968 had been in junior high school when it was written but were now required to read it in sociology and political science courses.
It was not a manifesto for the entire generation. It was clearly addressed to upper-middle-class whites—privileged people who knew they were privileged and were angry about this injustice. The statement began:
We are people of this generation, bred in at least modest comfort, housed in the universities, looking uncomfortably to the world we inherit.
Remarking that neither southern blacks nor college students were allowed to vote, the statement called for participatory democracy. “The goal of society and man should be human independence.” The statement rebuked the United States for its use of military power, which it said had done more to stop democracy than stop communism. The document steered a careful course between communism and anticommunism, denying any support to either. What became known as the “New Left” had been defined, a Left that had little use for liberals, who could not be trusted, or communists, who were authoritarian, or capitalists, who robbed people of freedom, or anticommunists, who were bullies. And if the New Left was American, it sounded very much like the 1968 students of Poland, France, and Mexico. Allen Ginsberg, who always said things a little more forcefully than others around him, wrote:
And the Communists have nothing to offer but fat cheeks and eyeglasses and lying policemen
and the Capitalists proffer Napalm and money in green suitcases to the Naked . . .
The civil rights movement continued to dazzle with creative new approaches. In 1961 SNCC invented “Freedom Rides”—a good name always being important in the marketing of an idea. Freedom Riders rode on buses, blacks in white sections, whites in black sections, using the wrong rest rooms at each stop, provoking white racism all over the South. Freedom Riders became legendary. James Farmer, one of the creators of the tactic, said, “We felt that we could count on the racists of the South to create a crisis, so that the federal government would be compelled to enforce federal law.” White southerners responded with violence, and that attracted the kind of media coverage that made civil rights workers heroes around the world. A Montgomery, Alabama, newspaper reported on one of the first Freedom Rides:
Two adamant “Freedom Riders”—battered and bruised from beatings administered by a white mob—vowed Saturday afternoon to sacrifice their lives if necessary to break down racial barriers in the South. They were beaten into insensibility by the mob who attacked 22 integrationists after they debarked from a bus here Saturday morning.
Angry mobs reacted so violently to these integrated busloads that the Kennedy administration asked for “a cooling-off period” and CORE dropped Freedom Riding as too dangerous. This only made SNCC increase its riders, many of whom ended up spending forty-nine days in an antiquated dungeon fortress in Mississippi called Parchman Penitentiary.
In 1963, an estimated 930 civil rights demonstrations were carried out in eleven southern states with twenty thousand people arrested. A young generation around the world grew up watching and thrilling to these David-against-Goliath tactics. To them the civil rights movement was a mesmerizing spectacle, nourishing idealism and schooling activism. There was also an appeal to machismo, because the civil rights worker always faced significant danger. The more the racists resisted, the more heroic the rights worker appeared. What could be more admirable than standing up to racist bullies who were filmed attacking peaceful young people?
Then in 1964 came the most influential strategy of all. It was called Mississippi Freedom Summer. Those old enough to participate, to act at last, would be—sometimes unwittingly—trained to lead their generation.
1964 began with the nation still in mourning for the murder of a young president in whom so much optimism had been invested. But as the year went on, there was an excitement in the air captured in a recording by Martha Reeves and the Vandellas, “Dancing in the Street.” 1964 was a year of new beginnings. It was the year Americans got their first glimpse of the Beatles, with their salad bowl haircuts and strange collarless suits, so sexless that the fashion was doomed not to last. It was the year liberalism overran conservatism in the Johnson-Goldwater election. It was the year the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was emphatically passed, despite the solid opposition of the entire congressional delegations of Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Virginia—not by chance, the only section of the country where Goldwater had done well against Johnson. But the most exciting event of the year was the Mississippi Freedom Summer.
Freedom Summer was the idea of Harlem-born, Harvard-educated SNCC leader and philosopher Bob Moses and activist and later U.S. congressman Allard Lowenstein. At a time when the civil rights movement was focused on the important but not visually dramatic work of registering black voters in the South, they realized that the work would get much more media attention if they put out a call for white northerners to come to Mississippi for the summer to register black voters.
If any of the almost one thousand volunteers had any doubt of the dangers of their work, early in the summer three SNCC workers, James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner, disappeared in a remote swampy section of Mississippi. Schwerner was an experienced civil rights worker, but Goodman was a fresh volunteer from the North and Chaney was a local black volunteer. The drama unfolded throughout the summer as SNCC struggled to get FBI cooperation, and each clue, such as the discovery of their car, painted an ever darker picture. Finally, on August 4, forty-four days after the three were reported missing, a tip by an FBI informer led to the discovery of their bodies twenty feet under an earthen dam south of the town of Philadelphia, Mississippi. All three had been shot to death. Chaney, the black man, had been brutally beaten first.
Yet not one volunteer backed down, although one underage volunteer was forced to leave by his parents. In fact, Moses had to ask that volunteers stop coming because SNCC workers could not train all the new recruits they were getting.
Among those who went south that summer was the son of an Italian machinist in Queens, New York, who was studying philosophy at Berkeley. Born in 1942, Mario Savio was six feet two inches tall, thin, and gentle in demeanor. He stammered so badly that he had struggled to deliver his high school valedictorian address. He was a Roman Catholic who like many Catholics embraced Catholic morality while being at odds with the Church itself. At a younger age he had dreamed of becoming a priest.
In 1964, twenty-one-year-old Savio was walking across the Berkeley campus, and at Telegraph and Bancroft, a narrow strip of land that had been designated the area for political activity, someone handed him a leaflet about a demonstration by the local civil rights movement against unfair hiring practices in San Francisco. Savio later remembered, “I said, ‘Oh, demonstration, okay.’ These demonstrations had the moral cachet of the campus. Absolutely, they had won out over football games, no doubt about it.”
So with little internal debate, Savio went to the demonstration. An elderly woman shouted at him, “Why don’t you go to Russia!” and he tried to explain to her that his family was from Italy.
For the first time in his life, Mario Savio was arrested. In the lockup a man named John King casually asked him, “Are you going to Mississippi?” When Savio learned of the Mississippi Freedom Summer, he knew he “had to be there.” Most of the volunteers felt that way, they had to be there. Savio went. In Mississippi he would knock on the screen door of a poor black sharecropper. Politely, the head of the household, looking a little scared, would say that he just didn’t want to vote. Savio would ask him if his father had ever voted.
“No, sir.”
“Did your grandfather ever vote?”
“No, sir.”
“Do you want your children to vote?”
Then he had them, and they would come with him into town, averting the glares of hatred of half the citizens, and risk their lives to register to vote. “I don’t know where I got the nerve to say such a thing,” Savio said years later. But he always remembered those people he had persuaded to risk their lives.
The experience shaped Savio and a generation of white northerners. They arrived in Mississippi looking clean and young. They were greeted by local workers, and they crossed arms and held hands to form a tight chain, singing “We Shall Overcome,” swaying sightly as they sang of “white and black together,” which for that moment they were. They spent the summer being young and brave, risking their lives, getting beaten and jailed. Like Albert Camus’s doctor in
The Plague,
which everyone was reading, they were doing something, fighting society’s pestilence. They left in September, experienced activists. Freedom Summer probably did more to develop radical campus leadership than all the efforts of SDS. The volunteers returned north in the fall energized, moved, committed to political change, and trained in one of the finest schools of civil disobedience in American history.
Savio returned to Berkeley, the incoming president of the local Friends of SNCC, in a fever of political commitment, only to find that the university had rescinded the right to political advocacy on campus even from that small strip of land at Telegraph and Bancroft where he had first learned of a demonstration. How could he say nothing in defense of his own rights when he had convinced those Mississippians to risk everything for theirs? He remembered them in their silence and dignity, demanding softly in rural Mississippi accents to “reddish,” to register.
“Am I a Judas?” Savio asked himself, still steeped in the imagery of the Church. “I am going to betray the people that I endangered now that I am back home? Forget all about that. Was that reality? Or is it just a fantasy? A little childish game? I did my little childish game in Mississippi, and now I am back to the serious stuff of becoming whatever I was going to become (I had no idea what that was anyway)?”
Drawing from the lessons of Mississippi, where even knocking on doors was done in pairs, the Berkeley free speech advocates did nothing alone, always en masse. On October 1, 1964, a civil rights worker named Jack Weinberg, who had also gone to Mississippi for Freedom Summer, was arrested on the Berkeley campus. He had defied the prohibition of political advocacy on campus by sitting at a table filled with civil rights literature. He was placed in a police car, which was surrounded by protesters. With no real plan, students trained in the civil rights movement sat down. More and more students came, immobilizing the car for thirty-two hours.
When Mario Savio leaped on top of the police car to make a speech, he first removed his shoes so as not to damage the car. Later, he did not even recall when he had decided to jump on the car. He just did it. He stammered no longer, and his eloquence instantly anointed him the spokesperson of what came to be known as the Berkeley Free Speech Movement.
A graduate philosophy student, Suzanne Goldberg, who later married Savio, said that “his charisma came from sincerity.” She remembered, “I would see him around Berkeley carrying signs, but when I heard him speak I was amazed at the sincerity. Mario had the ability to make things ordinary and understandable without using rhetoric. He believed that if people knew all the facts, they couldn’t help but do the right thing—which most of us know is not true. He had a naïve faith in people. He would talk to people at great length, certain that he could convince them.”
Though Mario Savio did not have the eloquence of Martin Luther King, or the lawyerly precision of Tom Hayden, he loved language and used it to simplify. At Berkeley his stammer appeared only occasionally, the Queens accent remained. His speeches, devoid of rhetorical flourish, always seemed to say “It’s all so clear.” Only in his eyes could a real fire be seen. The sweep of his arms and his persistent hand gestures reflected his Sicilian origins. The tall, lanky, bowed stance revealed his humility, recalling Gandhi’s teaching that a political activist should be so mild that the adversary, once defeated, does not feel humiliated. A favorite Savio phrase was “I ask you to consider.” According to legend, Savio, during one of his stays in prison, approached a large, burly inmate and, apropos of nothing, bet him that if he poured a glass of water on the man’s head, the inmate would do nothing to retaliate against his skinny attacker. The man took the bet, and Savio filled two glasses of water. He simultaneously poured one glass on the other inmate’s head and one on his own. He won the bet.