Free Speech Movement, the Spark for a Decade of Upheaval, Turns 30 : Universities: Berkeley event was a harbinger for such issues as environmentalism and affirmative action. The upshot then was a voter backlash that swept Gov. Ronald Reagan into office.

It’s hard to remember there was a time when the free-spirited University of California, Berkeley banned political activity on campus.

It’s easy to forget that, before student protests of the 1960s and ‘70s culminated in sometimes violent denunciations of the Vietnam War, young people in dresses and ties staged a sit-in, got arrested and made a powerful institution change its mind.

Thirty years ago, the Free Speech Movement became a catalyst for a decade of political upheaval on America’s college campuses. For participants at a four-day reunion that started Dec. 1, it’s difficult to reckon the passage of time.

“I don’t think anyone involved in it planned on being 50 years old,” said David Goines, who is 49. He was among the first students arrested in the victorious 1964 movement known to veterans as FSM.

Like old soldiers revisiting a former battlefield haunted by their youth and memories, reunion participants culminated their return by standing Dec. 2 at the steps of Sproul Hall, UC Berkeley’s administration building, where they made history.

A registration reunion form advised out-of-towners looking for hotels to “ask about AARP discount, if you belong.” AARP stands for American Assn. of Retired Persons.

University administrators were expected to be conspicuously absent from the gathering.

Back in 1964, school officials took a firmer hand against activists. The big campus cause then was civil rights, driven by students who had spent their summers in the racially segregated South. The experience also gave them a taste for challenging authority.

Returning to Berkeley, some students wanted to raise money and recruit others to civil rights work. When university officials told them they could not, the students rebelled, invoking the First Amendment right to free expression.

Police moved in, arresting Congress of Racial Equality activist Jack Weinberg for passing out leaflets at a card table by the Sproul Hall steps.

Within minutes the car, with Weinberg inside, was marooned in a sea of seated bodies.

“You will find 100 people tell you they were the first person that sat down, and everyone is telling the truth,” said Michael Rossman, 54, a member of the FSM steering committee.

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For 32 hours, the students refused to budge, scrambling to the car’s roof to deliver impassioned speeches to a growing crowd. One speaker, Mario Savio, a graduate student in philosophy, was such an oratorical sensation his name became inextricably bound with the movement.

Eventually, students let the car go, but the conflict raged on.

Then on Dec. 2, a thousand students, serenaded by 23-year-old Joan Baez singing “We Shall Overcome,” marched into Sproul Hall to sit in for free speech. The protest ended several hours later with nearly 800 arrests.

An ensuing student strike shut down the campus for two days; on Dec. 8 the faculty Academic Senate voted overwhelmingly in favor of free speech and the university lifted the ban on politicking soon after.

A photograph of the protest shows a crowd of young women in skirts and fluffy sweaters and young men in button-down shirts and ties.

“These students were sincere and very orderly,” said Howard Jeter, a movement veteran who now teaches high school.

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Unlike the blue-jeaned firebrands to come, Goines described FSMers as “gently reared children” who lived in a world where “drugs, for one thing, hadn’t been invented yet. I heard about marijuana. I think what I actually smoked was oregano.”

In some ways the movement was too successful, said Goines, who wrote a book about the brief but intense episode called “The Free Speech Movement.”

“This colored our whole attitude toward political activism forever after. In our hearts, we believe we can win.”

John Searle, a UC Berkeley philosophy professor who was the first tenured faculty member to back the movement, had a more tart interpretation.

“The saddest thing was that it gave a whole lot of people a model of political life which is totally unrealistic,” he said. “They wanted to keep sitting in buildings and then finding that policies change.”

In fact, the immediate upshot of the movement was a voter backlash that in 1966 swept a new governor into office: Republican Ronald Reagan.

But Rossman, now a science teacher, looks at the movement as “one of the shining moments of the history of the ‘60s,” and a harbinger for such issues as environmentalism and affirmative action.