Passage IV

In Remembrance of a Student Hero

[1] When Mario Savio died in 1996, newspaper stories recounted the events that had put him in the national spotlight more than thirty years earlier. [2] In 1964, Savio was a philosophy major and a member of the executive committee of the Free Speech Movement at the University of California at Berkeley. [3] During the height of the United States presidential election campaign, the Free Speech Movement had organized to fight the university’s decision to limit the activities of those groups on campus. [4] The son of working-class parents, Savio grew up in Queens, New York. [5] He had volunteered to do civil rights work in Mississippi, the twentieth state admitted to the Union, during the Freedom Summer of 1964 before returning to classes that fall. [6] Along with many others, Savio reacted fiercely when the university banned civil rights groups from setting up information tables on the campus plaza. [7] That stuff led to a student strike and a sit-in protest at the main administration building. (51)

On December 2, 1964, Savio spoke insistently to a countless group of protesters: “There is a time when the operation of the machine . . . makes you so sick at heart that you can’t take part. . . and you've got to make it stop.” That day, Savio and 800 other protesters were taken to jail in the largest mass arrest in California history. Days later, the California Board of Regents voted to override the university ban and granted full speech rights on the Berkeley campus. (56)

The Free Speech Movement changed campus life in the United States. It made a powerful case for the students’ right to freedom of speech. It also popularized the sit-in, as a protest tactic, became a model for student rallies and protests across the country. As for Mario Savio, he went on to earn a master’s degree in physics. He then taught mathematics and physics in high schools and, for his last six years, at Sonoma State University, where he led protests against student fee increases. Whether a student or a teacher, Savio applied the belief that ordinary people banding together can make change happen.