What prior experience did Mario Savio have that made him adamant about the importance of fighting for the right to free speech on the campus of the University of California, Berkeley, in 1964?
Subject: Free Speech - Campus Sit-ins
Event: Mario Savio’s Sit-in Address, 1964
The most beautiful thing in the world is freedom of speech. -Diogenes
In 1964, protests broke out on the campus of the University of California, Berkeley, when campus officials began placing restrictions on students’ political activities and free speech on campus. The leader of the student Free Speech Movement was Mario Savio, who organized a staged sit-in on campus on this day in 1964.
Image by Dean Moriarty from Pixabay
The prior summer, Savio had been a part of the Mississippi Summer Project, an effort to register black voters after the signing of the Civil Rights Act on July 2, 1964. That summer, three activists were murdered in Philadelphia, Mississippi.
Savio explained how his Civil Rights work related to free speech at Berkeley: ''I spent the summer in Mississippi. I witnessed tyranny. I saw groups of men in the minority working their wills over the majority. Then I came back here and found the university preventing us from collecting money for use there and even stopping us from getting people to go to Mississippi to help.''
As a crowd of protestors gathered in front of Berkeley’s main administration building, Savio addressed the crowd, urging them to take part in the sit-in inside of the administration building:
There is a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can’t take part; you can’t even passively take part, and you’ve got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you’ve got to make it stop. And you’ve got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it, that unless you’re free, the machine will be prevented from working at all!
Nearly 800 protestors were arrested that day, but by December 8, 1964, the university’s Board of Regents hired a new chancellor, who granted the demands of the Free Speech Movement.
More than one hundred years earlier, in 1859, the English philosopher John Stuart Mill wrote about the importance of free speech. In Chapter two of his book On Liberty, Mill argues the essential nature of allowing the voicing of all opinions, especially those in the minority:
If all mankind minus one were of one opinion, mankind would be no more justified in silencing that one person than he, if he had the power, would be justified in silencing mankind.
Mill further argues that only through a diversity of opinions can we generate the kind of necessary debate that will prevent dogmatism:
In his book The Constitution of Knowledge: A Defense of Truth, Jonathan Rauch credits Mill, explaining that his insights are as relevant today as they have ever been and that we only can get closer to the truth by comparing diverse points of view:
Without pluralism and viewpoint diversity, transcending our biases is impossible, even in principle. Perfect objectivity will always elude us, but we can come much closer if we follow the empirical rule by checking our views against others’ different views, which of course is possible only where these disagree. (3)
Recall, Retrieve, Recite, Ruminate, Reflect, Reason: What was John Stuart Mill’s argument for why free speech is so important?
Challenge - Speak Up: What is the best thing that anyone has ever said about free speech? Do some research to find some quotations on the topic. Write down the one you like the best, and explain why you find it insightful.
Sources:
1-Pace, Eric. “Mario Savio, Protest Leader Who Set a Style, Dies at 53.” The New York Times 8 Nov. 1996.
2. Mill, John Stuart. On Liberty. Project Gutenberg, 10 January 2011.
3. Rauch, Jonathan. The Constitution of Knowledge: A Defense of Truth. Washington D.C.: Brookings Institution Press, 2021: 193.
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