In this Minibabble with feminist scholar Bettina Aptheker, we visit a particular moment in time that has influenced social justice movements up to the present. This Minibabble is part of our longer interview with Bettina, “Riding the waves of feminism: A conversation with scholar Bettina Aptheker.”
The 1960s is well-known as a turbulent time, but in this memory, Bettina revisits a scene that was particularly influential in years to come. The Student Free Speech Movement has served as a template for protests by young people since, from the Vietnam War to Black Lives Matter. In this memory, Bettina reflects on how a fact of her upbringing led her to stand on a police car at a rally, in a scene reminiscent of fact and fiction that took place later.
Transcript:
Trying not to do damage: Bettina Aptheker on a pivotal moment in the Free Speech Movement
[00:00:31] VOICEOVER: I’m your host, Suki Wessling, and this is a Minibabble. Visit Babblery.com for the full episode on the life of feminist scholar Bettina Aptheker.
The United States has had its share of mass protests in recent years, but it’s hard to know yet whether any will have the lasting effect of the Free Spech Movement. Led by Mario Savio and a group of other UC Berkeley students in the 1964-1965 academic year,
The Free Speech Movement’s fingerprints are on every mass protest of young people since.
When I interviewed feminist scholar Bettina Aptheker recently, I was struck by an aspect of an anecdote she told about her involvement in the movement. It was just a small detail, but like many such details, it casts a light on controversies far beyond the day it happened.
Let’s set the stage by bringing Bettina from her Brooklyn home to Berkeley, California. Who was she?
[00:01:29] Bettina: My father was Herbert Aptheker and he was a quite prominent member of the Communist Party in the fifties and a scholar of African American history.
he was blacklisted from university teaching from Oh, forever. I mean, he never had a university job until student sit ins in the 60s got him a job.
Politically, I was not sheltered. In the sense of, like, a very great awareness of racism, when Emma Till was lynched, this was a big deal, I remember it vividly, the Rosenbergs were executed, that was a huge deal in my life I was about nine, I knew the Rosenberg children.
[00:02:09] VOICEOVER: As a teenager, Bettina was an unusual mix of worldly in her knowledge and sheltered in her experience. One of her childhood friends was Angela Davis, who Bettina would later help win the infamous trial when Davis was charged with conspiracy to murder. But Bettina was also, in a way, sheltered. Because her father had been surveilled constantly by the FBI due to his political activity, the family was protective. Bettina was attracted to the political bent of the UC Berkeley, but even more to its distance from home.
[00:02:39] Student Free Speech Movement
[00:02:39] Bettina: I wanted to get as far away from my parents as I possibly could without falling into the Pacific Ocean. , I wanted to leave my natal family, but I wasn’t going that far away in terms of politics, because the year before I was applying for schools was when HUAC, House Un American Activities Committee, came to San Francisco and the students organized this huge protest in front of City Hall in San Francisco.
And there’s very iconic images of them being washed down the steps of the City Hall by the fire department that turned their hoses on them.
So I left Brooklyn, right in time for the explosion of the student movement. And when I arrived in Berkeley, I was sort of ushered into the inner circle of the left as, quote, Aptheker’s daughter.
You know, that would be like a stage whisper. Somebody would say, this is Aptheker’s daughter, you know, like that.
[00:03:37] VOICEOVER: Bettina’s transition from sheltered child of radicals to public radical herself was echoed two generations later in the book The Hate U Give, in which author Angie Thomas depicts her teenage protagonist, Starr, being pulled into a protest, literally being lifted up onto a police car to speak to a crowd.
[00:03:55] Bettina: My first public speech was from the top of the police car. We, we had seized the police car to prevent the police from arresting one of our fellow students, Jack Weinberg, who had been a civil rights activist.
And we had surrounded the car. To everybody’s astonishment, including ours, and the police couldn’t move it. And so we were using the top of the police car as a podium from which to speak, and we took our shoes off and climbed up onto the roof, because we didn’t want to damage the car, which is crazy because we, of course we caved the roof in by the time we were done.
But it was our intention was not to do too much damage to the car. In any event, it was at night, I remember, and I climbed up on top of the police car. A lot of the guys, including Mario Savio, who later became very much identified as the leader of the movement, another fellow named Art Goldberg who later became a lawyer, civil rights lawyer in LA helped me up onto the car, and I gave the speech and, and the only thing I remember about it is I quoted the abolitionist Frederick Douglass, that, and he said, power concedes nothing without a demand, and I remember it was at night. I couldn’t see the audience because of the lights that were in my eyes, the television lights because there was so much media coverage. I mean, nothing like this had ever, certainly never happened very recently. When I said that I heard the roar of the, of the students and it flowed from my whole body and it was electrifying and it was an amazing moment and I still feel it, you know.
[00:05:30] VOICEOVER: That moment was thrilling, but Bettina’s future as an activist was not confirmed by the roar of the crowd or the approval of her peers. She was boosted by a factually incorrect statement by a person very much opposed to the movement.
[00:05:46] Bettina: Clark Kerr, who was the president of the university at the time, issued a statement in which he said that 49 percent of the demonstrators were communists or communist sympathizers, how we even got to 49%, I have no idea. And we were having a meeting and I was the only one at that particular meeting, who actually was a member of the communist party.
And Mario Savio slapped his knee. He said, I know what to do. We’re going to have Bettina speak at the next rally because he wanted to throw the one real communist in their faces. You know, that was the defiance, you see, that was very characteristic both of him and also of that movement. So, the next rally, which was that Monday, I got up and started speaking.
That’s how it happened. It was totally, a total fluke. If Clark Kerr hadn’t said that, I probably wouldn’t have, you know, gotten such prominence. Anyway, that’s what happened. And, and I liked, I liked it. I mean, I, I appreciated it and of course I loved all the people in the movement and we had a heck of a, we had a heck of a struggle and we won it.
[00:06:53] Bettina: And
[00:06:54] VOICEOVER: the legacy of the Student Free Speech movement, its leaders now our elders, lives on. Through planned engagement and random chance, young people continue to remind us that there’s more work to be done in order to attain a just and free society.
Thanks to Bettina Aptheker and the musician Unwoman for the lovely music.
