BONUS EP: The History of the Free Speech Movement with FSM veteran Joel Geier - a podcast by Too Long 4 Twitter

The Free Speech Movement was an outgrowth of the civil rights movement. Legal segregation existed in the South. In the North there was de facto segregation, racism in practice. In the liberal San Francisco Bay Area employers refused to hire Blacks as bank tellers, car salesmen, hotel waiters, supermarket clerks, among other jobs.
In 1964, amidst major fights over civil rights in the Bay Area, the UC Berkeley administration banned all student political organizations from campus. For the first three weeks of its existence the FSM was not called the FSM. Its original name was “The United Front.” It took in all campus organizations that were against the university rules that attempted to restrict student political activity. And The Free Speech Movement demanded and won the right to free speech on campus.

In that four-month-long struggle the radicals who led it won the active support and involvement of the entire campus. For the first time since the 1930s, the Left proved that it could lead and gain the allegiance of thousands. Following the FSM as radicalization spread through the national student movement it became clear that we were at a turning point in the New Left of the 1960’s, where activism against the Vietnam War was the most prominent issue, and that a whole generation was open to radical politics.

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