"Bettina Aptheker was a 20-year-old sophomore at UC Berkeley when she climbed on top of a police car, barefoot so she wouldn't damage it, and helped start the Free Speech Movement. "Power concedes nothing without a demand," she told a crowd gathered in Sproul Plaza on that October Thursday in 1964, quoting abolitionist Frederick Douglass. She was blinded by the lights of the television cameras, but the students roared back approval, and "their energy just sort of went through my whole body," she told me."
"Well-versed in those non-violent methods that were finally winning a bit of equality for Black Americans, hundreds of students sat down around the cruiser, remaining there more than 30 hours - while hecklers threw eggs and cigarette butts and police massed at the periphery - before the protesters successfully negotiated with the university to restore free speech on campus. History was made, and the Free Speech Movement born through the most American of traits - courage, passion and the invincibility of youth."
Bettina Aptheker, a 20-year-old UC Berkeley sophomore, climbed on top of a police car barefoot and helped start the Free Speech Movement. She invoked Frederick Douglass: "Power concedes nothing without a demand." Berkeley still bore vestiges of 1950s McCarthyism, and administrators had enacted rules restricting political speech. Police arrested graduate student Jack Weinberg, prompting hundreds of students skilled in nonviolent civil-rights tactics to sit around the cruiser for more than 30 hours amid heckling and massed police. Protesters negotiated with the university to restore free speech, and the movement emphasized courage, passion and youthful invincibility. Aptheker said the repression felt similar today and that under President Trump’s proposed university standards she would likely be arrested.
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