Berkeley, California 1969

One of my most memorable experiences while living in the San Francisco Bay Area in the ‘60s was marching in the People’s Park demonstration in Berkeley in May of 1969.  It was a beautiful late spring afternoon.  There were 30,000 demonstrators marching up Telegraph Avenue toward the campus, most of them young people who were there mainly to protest the harsh “police state” actions taken by then first-term California Governor Ronald Reagan during an earlier People’s Park protest. 

People’s Park is located close to the university.  In the late ‘60s the 2.8 acre plot of land was acquired by Cal Berkeley with plans to use it for student housing and other university purposes.  But funding issues prevented them from moving forward, and the area became a derelict parking lot. 

The local merchants and residents formed a committee to look at ways to turn the area into a public park.  They were soon joined by student activists from Cal who sought to establish a “Free Speech Zone" away from the campus’s Sproul Plaza, which was becoming strictly controlled due to the anti-war demonstrations that were taking place there at the time. 

In the spring of 1969, the student activists managed to turn the dilapidated parking lot into a nicely landscaped “People’s Park.” 

However, this land was owned by the state of California, and Governor Reagan, who once called Cal Berkeley “a haven for communist sympathizers, protesters and sex deviants,” was not going to let the “dirty f*cking hippies”  take over his property.   

In the early morning hours of May 15th, Governor Reagan sent 300 California Highway Patrol officers into the park without notifying the university administration.  They cleared a large area around the park, destroyed much of the freshly planted park vegetation and put up a chain link fence around the perimeter. 

Later that day, 3,000 students marched from Sproul Plaza to the park to protest.  A riot ensued.  Overturned cars, tear gas and fighting between the unarmed protesters and the police turned the scene into an urban battleground.  The police opened fire on the crowd killing one person, James Rector, a student who was sitting on top of a nearby building.  Another 120 demonstrators were sent to the hospital with serious injuries. 

The march I attended on May 30th was mainly intended to protest the unwarranted police action taken earlier that month on "Bloody Thursday."  Governor Reagan ratcheted up the tension by declaring a state of emergency and sending in 1,200 National Guard troops to “control the situation.” 

Fortunately, the May 30 march turned out to be very peaceful.  Cal students were joined by Berkeley city leaders and community organizers from all over the Bay Area to show a unified message of solidarity.  In fact, most of the National Guard troops, who had just returned from active duty in Vietnam, were sympathetic with our cause.  The day will always be remembered by the image of people placing flowers in the barrels of the National Guard’s weapons along the parade route. 

At that time, there was a feeling that a strong message had been given to Governor Reagan that he had overplayed his “get tough on the peace movement” stand.  In actuality, the People’s Park demonstration had overlooked the “real” problem that was developing in America. 

Our focus at that time was on ending the war in Vietnam.  Little did we know that the People’s Park episode was just the beginning of a rightwing takeover of our country.  Reagan’s push onto the Berkeley campus was his first step into destroying the educational system in California.  As Gary Claybaugh, Education Professor at La Salle University, once pointed out, soon after the People’s Park demonstration Governor Reagan initiated his anti-public education agenda by:  

"a. calling for an end to free tuition for state college and university students,  

b. annually demanding 20% across-the-board cuts in higher education funding,  

c. repeatedly slashing construction funds for state campuses  

d. engineering the firing of Clark Kerr, the popular President of the University of California, and  

e. declaring that the state ‘should not subsidize intellectual curiosity,’       

Governor Reagan not only slashed spending on higher education. Throughout his tenure as governor Mr. Reagan consistently and effectively opposed additional funding for basic education. This led to painful increases in local taxes and the deterioration of California's public schools. Los Angeles voters got so fed up picking up the slack that on five separate occasions they refused to support any further increases in local school taxes. The consequent under-funding resulted in overcrowded classrooms, ancient worn-out textbooks, crumbling buildings and badly demoralized teachers. Ultimately half of the Los Angeles Unified School District's teachers walked off the job to protest conditions in their schools. 

Mr. Reagan was unmoved." 

Reagan didn’t stop there.  He managed to decimate the California mental health programs, the public employee health programs and the state welfare programs by massively cutting state funding, while at the same time enriching the propertied elite through his push toward Prop 13 tax reforms. 

We should have known back then that the most important threat to the United States was not actions being taken in Vietnam, but rather the Reagan-puppet led corporatist take-over of our country. 

I remember seeing a small helicopter flying around that day in May of 1969.  It had a banner which read “Let a Thousand Parks Bloom.” 

Perhaps that day has finally arrived:

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Zuccotti Park

New York, New York 2011