Documentary Viewing & Discussion: Inside the Free Speech Movement

Created for the Sixtieth Anniversary of the Free Speech Movement
A Berkeley Historical Society & Museum Production

Director: Linda P. Rosen
Video editors: Jay Jay Noire and Tonya Staros with Melanie Mentzel

Watch key FSM leaders and supporters tell this groundbreaking story in their own words.

The Free Speech Movement (FSM) at Berkeley in 1964-65 began the national student rights movement of the mid-sixties and seventies, using civil disobedience for mass activism. Defending constitutional rights against efforts to repress them is uncannily prescient today. Watch and learn how they did it.

This newly edited video, based on oral history interviews, is augmented with historic photographs and original sound recordings. This final version combines the previous Parts One and Two and has a few revisions.

Includes:
• Precursors to the Free Speech Movement
• Free Speech Zone, Administrative Crackdown
• United Front
• Police Car Scene
• March on the Regents’ Meeting
• Sit-In and Arrests
• The Strike
• The Arraignment
• Faculty Role
• Drama at the Greek Theatre
• Administration’s positions
• Board of Regents’ positions
• “Filthy Speech Movement” distraction
• Positive and negative consequences
• Legacy

Featuring:
Bettina Aptheker, Laurie Baumgarten, Victor Bonilla-Sosa, David Lance Goines, Patti Iiyama, Anita Medal, Kathleen Piper, Jack Radey, Seth Rosenfeld, Peter Dale Scott, Louise Weiler, and Leon Wofsy

Cover photo credit: March on Regents' Meeting, Ronald L. Enfield
We are indebted to the Free Speech Movement Archive and to the photographers and reporters who captured the times.