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Though four decades have passed since the Free Speech Movement (FSM) rocked the world, many of the same threats that galvanized the movement then have returned full force, say participants organizing the upcoming 40th anniversary commemoration. 

Just as the movement was created in September 1964 by the attempt of Berkeley campus officials to bar recruiting tables for the civil rights movement from Sproul Plaza, similar dangers confront today’s activists, organizers said. 

“The 20th and 30th anniversaries were largely retrospective,” said Michael Rossman, who’s been devoting 10 to 12 hours a day for the last few months to arranging events for Oct. 5-10. “This year there’s widespread unanimity that we’re living in a really dangerous time.” 

Gar Smith, another FSM participant agrees. “Free speech is in pretty bad shape these days,” said the former Berkeley Barb editor who now runs The Edge, the online webzine of the Earth Island Institute, and in January 2003, co-founded Environmentalists Against the War. 

“It’s important to get today’s students involved,” said Peter Franck, a veteran of SLATE, a campus movement of the 1950s that paved the way for the FSM. 

“In these days of the PATRIOT Act and Cat Stevens getting thrown out of the country, it’s important to know you can change things through activism,” he said. 

“They can dragnet, dragoon and detain any American citizen,” Smith said. “They don’t have to worry about the election, because any time they want, they can declare John Kerry an enemy combatant and ship him off to Guantanamo.” 

SLATE veterans will be having their own gathering in parallel with the FSM commemoration. 

Calling their 40th anniversary fete “Free Speech in a Dangerous Time,” the organizers have assembled an impressive gallery of participants for the Oct. 5-10 event. 

The program opens Tuesday, Oct. 5, with a three-hour FSM and Civil Liberties poetry reading in the Bears’ Lair.  

Other highlights include: 

• A 6-7p.m. Wednesday concert in Sproul Plaza featuring Utah Phillips and other artists, followed by a 7-10 p.m. session in Zellerbach Hall featuring columnist Molly Ivins giving the Mario Savio Memorial Lecture and the presentation of the Young Activist Award. 

• Thursday afternoon panels on “How It Worked: Nuts and Bolts of the FSM” and “Berkeley and the Black Freedom Struggle: Then and Now” and an evening symposium on the beginning, meaning and consequences of the movement. 

• Friday, a series of panels, a noon rally around a police car in Sproul Plaza—a vivid reminder of the movement’s most memorable day—featuring speeches by movement veterans Bettina Aptheker and others, and a whole range of events in the evening, including a speech (sponsored by the Graduate School of Journalism) by Pulitzer-winning New York Times journalist Seymour Hersh, a dissection of that evening’s presidential debate by satirists Paul Krassner, Scoop Nisker and Kris Welsh, a rock dance featuring, among others, the Country Joe Band with Country Joe McDonald, and a film festival. 

• Saturday, 10 panels on modern civil liberties challenges, a panel of FSM veterans discussing “How the Spirit Moved Us,” satirical performances, a film festival and an archetypal event of the early ‘60s, a hootenanny, a communal sing-along. 

A detailed schedule is available on-line at www.straw.com/fsm-a/. Revisions will be posted as new participants are added, said Rossman. 

This year’s event is much more structured than the first decade anniversary, when many FSM veterans were engaged in organizing around the Vietnam War, then in the final stages. 

“This year’s event will be the broadest themed civil liberties event that we know of,” said Rossman. “It’s the best possible way to commemorate the signal victory of the Free Speech Movement.” 

Veterans will unite past and present when they recite the PATRIOT Act from the top of a squad car in Sproul Plaza, an event that will be accompanied by a surprise Rossman promises will be truly memorable. All he’d offer beyond that was the hint that puppets would be involved. 

“Personally, it’s been like too few people have started too late with too ambitious a program, but it gives me something to do besides sitting in the corner, chewing my knuckles as I piss and moan about what’s going on in the world today,” he said. 

Overworked or not, the volunteers have been attacking their challenge with something of the same vigor they used four decades earlier to challenge the administration and bring free speech to the UC campus. 

Marilyn Noble is recapitulating some of the same roles she played back 40 years earlier when she assumed the task of caring for the movement’s executive committee, gathering up food, cooking up a bottomless pot of soup and keeping clothes clean and suits pressed. 

“I’ve picked up three tasks this year,” she said. “Finding housing, feeding ourselves on Sunday morning when we have our own schmoozing day, and speaking on the ‘And the Spirit Moved Us’ panel on Saturday.” 

The ties forged in the heat of activities in the ‘60s remain strong today. 

“We’ve formed a loose friendship network,” said Rossman. “We have a mailing list of 1,300, and half of them were involved in the Free Speech Movement.” 

The list includes a third of the activists arrested in the Sproul Hall sit-in, he said. 

After the death of key FSM activist Mario Savio in 1996, the survivors incorporated the group as the Free Speech Movement Archives, and have been busily assembling documentation of the era, some of which is posted on their web site. 

Time has taken its toll as the “Sixties Generation” evolved into the “Sexagenarian Generation.” 

One of the harshest blows came earlier this year with the accidental death of UC Berkeley Reginald Zelnick, who had championed the students cause and announced the Faculty Senate vote that gave full backing to the movement on Dec. 8, 1964, and forced the administration to back down. 

Another casualty of the years has been the mimeograph, the machine that did what laser printers do today. 

“The Free Speech Movement produced over three million sheets of paper in over 286 documents,” he said. 

The archives turned up a 2.5-inch stack of mimeo stencils, and organizers are looking for a working machine so that today’s students attending the memorial can crank the handle and turn out their own copies of the seminal documents of the day. 

Organizers can be reach through the link on their website.›