The Berkeley Free Speech Movement

The civil rights movement in the United States began in earnest in the mid-1950s. In 1954, the Supreme Court decided Brown v. Board of Education, in which they ruled that segregated public schools violated the equal protection of law required by the United States Constitution. Then in 1955, Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat to a White passenger on a Montgomery, Alabama public bus. In support of Parks, then-president of the Montgomery Improvement Association Martin Luther King, Jr., led an ultimately successful bus boycott that would last more than a year and would catapult King and the civil rights movement to the forefront of American culture for the next two decades. The civil rights movement was instrumental in the genesis of the Berkeley Free Speech Movement (FSM).

In some ways, the Berkeley Free Speech Movement (FSM) was merely a student movement that adopted the rhetoric and tactics of civil disobedience followers to address campus issues. In other ways, however, the FSM demonstrated the profundity of the cultural turmoil of the time, as students traditionally sociologically aligned with the "establishment" aligned themselves with decidedly anti-establishment and minority protestors. Ultimately, the FSM demonstrated that the inequities the civil rights movement fought were only most obvious in that arena. Inequities that violated basic constitutional principles were present in even the most apparently benign places, such as privi

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Category: Philosophy - T