December 2, 1964: The Occupation of Sproul Hall and the Berkeley Free Speech Movement
Sixty years ago today, on December 2, 1964, students on the Berkeley campus of the University of California took over Sproul Hall, the university’s main administrative building
Remembering Barbara Dane: Artist and Freedom Fighter
On October 20, singer, songwriter and activist Barbara Dane died at the age of 97 in Oakland, California, where she had lived for decades. She was suffering from heart failure and died through assisted suicide. Dane experienced racial and class antagonisms in her earliest years growing up in Detroit during the Great Depression. From her […]
Birmingham 1963 and the Racist Violence of the United States
On Sunday, September 15, 1963, a bomb blast shattered preparations for church service in the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, injuring dozens and killing four Black girls ages 11-14. The now infamous bombing showed the heinous nature of the racist structures that had been set up during the Jim Crow era, and the […]
A Long History of Campus Repression
As university presidents, their capitalist Boards of Directors and politicians call in local police, state troopers and national guards to attempt to crush student protests against the genocide in Gaza, we are reminded that those same forces have a long history of violently repressing student voices. One of the worst examples of this occurred on […]
People’s Park – A Legacy of Protest and Possibility
In 1969, a small plot of land near the University of California (U.C.) Berkeley became a site of symbolic protest against war and racism, a place where students and community members came together to imagine a better world, and to demonstrate their vision of the future they wanted to create. They took this small plot […]
Staughton Lynd: Scholar and Defender of the Working Class
On Thursday, November 17, scholar of the people and lifelong activist Staughton Lynd died at the age of 92. Lynd was part of a generation of young scholars who came of age in the 1960s, perhaps best exemplified by himself and Howard Zinn, who sought to pursue knowledge and scholarship in the struggle to make […]