“The Times, They Are a’ Changin’”
Bancroft Launches Free Speech Movement Archive
In the fall of 1964, Mario Savio announced to a teeming crowd of 5,000 Berkeley students on Sproul Plaza: “There comes a time when the system becomes so odious that you can’t take part, you can’t even tacitly take part.”
1964: Students gather on Sproul Plaza. |
Today, 34 years later, thanks to a $3.5 million gift from Stephen Silberstein, the University Library has undertaken an ambitious project to document what came to be known as the Free Speech Movement — a movement whose legacy is still felt today.
Silberstein, BA ’64, MLS ’77, worked at the University Library for 10 years, becoming head of the Library Systems Office. He left to co-found Innovative Interfaces, a computer software company which, among other things, provides access software to most public and many university libraries.
“We owe no small debt to Mario Savio and the individuals who made up the Free Speech Movement,” Silberstein said last April, when he announced his gift in memory of Savio, who died in 1996. “Despite great personal and family sacrifice, they spoke up for the ideals upon which our society is based, and in which we all believe: a more just world, civil rights, and the removal of limitations on the free discussion and advocacy of ideas.”
Silberstein feels strongly that his support of “one of the world’s truly great libraries is something I imagine Mario would appreciate, given his love of learning and ideas.”
Clark Kerr addresses students in the Greek Theater. |
The Mario Savio/Free Speech Movement Endowment will supplement the Library’s collection budget, establish a Free Speech Movement Cafe in Moffitt Library, and support the Free Speech Movement Archives at Bancroft Library.
The Archives will collect, enhance, preserve, and make widely available FSM and University-related archival documents, ephemera, oral histories, and contemporary news coverage.
As director of the FSM Archives since July l998, my primary goal has been to establish a data base from which we will be able to provide access to the entire collection on the World Wide Web.
We have nearly completed identifying the many collections the University already possesses which touch on the Free Speech Movement; we have established a web site on FSM history (sunsite2.berkeley.edu:28008/dynaweb/oac/freesp); and we have identified and are contacting collections and libraries which have original and/or supplemental materials that bear on the movement, particularly in reference to the Civil Rights Movement and educational reform and similar student protests at other colleges and universities.
Mario Savio inspires the troops.
We are particularly proud and enthusiastic about the participation of the Free Speech Movement Archives (FSM-A; web site http://www.fsm-a.org) established by FSM veterans, including Lynne Hollander, Mario Savio’s widow, and Michael Rossman, long-time keeper of the memory, spirit, and artifacts of the movement. An FSM working committee, composed of FSMA representatives, mutually selected advisors, and Bancroft project staff meets regularly to identify holes or under-represented parts in the history and collections and to review the accuracy and usability of the material collected.
Students take over Sproul Hall. |
FSM-A has been generous in sharing material from its own collection, casting light on the University’s holdings, and steering veterans to the project’s oral history component, which has been launched by Lisa Rubens under the auspices of Bancroft’s Regional Oral History Office (ROHO).
Over the years ROHO has conducted numerous interviews with UC administrators and professors, including Dean of Students Katherine Towle, whose letter to student organizations forbidding distribution of political literature on University property ignited the Free Speech Movement. Towle’s interview will become our first online oral history.
Rubens’ interviews will focus on FSM participants, leaders, and witnesses who have not had adequate attention, including women and minority students, faculty-student relationships, legal counsel, and the press.
Sproul sit-inners are arrested. |
We are working with alumni groups, other universities, oral history listservs, and history, political science, and sociology networks from whom we have received letters, unusual materials — including unpublished FSM lyrics parodying then popular Beatle songs— and promising candidates for oral histories.
We like to imagine that people viewing the Free Speech Movement Project’s online exhibits will be inspired to join Savio in questioning society and having arrived at answers, to act on those answers. This is part of a growing understanding that history has not ended, that a better society is possible, and that it is worth dying for.”
If you have information, suggestions, memories, or artifacts you would like to share with us, please email me at estephen@library.berkeley.edu or phone (510) 642-8174.
Elizabeth Stephens is the
FSM Project Archivist.
Volume 114
Spring 1999
Table of Contents
Bancroft Launches Bioscience Program with Stellar Symposium March 12–13
From the Director: Just what is it that you do, exactly?
The Business of the Humanities The “Trade”— what it is and how Bancroft uses it
The Thrill of the Chase Or, How the Biography of Poet Jack Spicer Came To Be
“The Times, They Are a’ Changin’” Bancroft Launches Free Speech Movement Archive
The Many Uses of Bancroft Collections
Joseph Esherick’s Oral History Illuminates an Architectural Icon
Where Do You “Find” Mark Twain’s Letters?
1999’s Keepsake: San Francisco in the Early 1850s
Bancroft Fellows Research Women and Space, Tobacco and Chocolate
