At Berkeley in the Sixties: The Education of an Activist, 1961–1965. By Jo Freeman. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004. xxvi, 358 pp. Cloth, $49.95, ISBN 0-253-34283-X. Paper, $21.95, ISBN 0-253-21622-2.)

Abstract

Jo Freeman's carefully researched, gracefully written, but curiously subdued book, part memoir and part scholarship, joins a growing list of works about the free speech movement (fsm) at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1964. Other recent additions include President Clark Kerr's self-serving memoirs, the activist David Lance Goines's exuberant account, and the excellent collection of essays edited by the historians Robert Cohen and Reginald Zelnik. The first half of Freeman's book is insightful about the years preceding the fsm. In 1957 Berkeley's radical students tried to win campus elections by founding slate (a name picked to field a slate of candidates). When an activist narrowly won in 1959, the administration banned graduate student votes, thus leaving conservative fraternities and sororities in control. In 1960 Berkeley radicals picketed the hearings of the House Committee on Un-American Activities (huac) in San Francisco. huac retaliated by producing an anticommu-nist film, Operation Abolition, which spurred radicals to move to Berkeley. Bettina Aptheker, daughter of a prominent Communist, arrived in 1962; Mario Savio, a devout social justice Catholic, the next year. Both became fsm leaders. As Freeman emphasizes, the civil rights movement inspired Berkeley activists. In 1963 and 1964 numerous protests were held in the Bay Area to open jobs for African Americans. More than a hundred University of California, Berkeley, students, including Freeman, were arrested in these demonstrations.