BLAM!!!
Fifty years ago, the rules of engagement changed. On Thursday May 15th 1969, police opened fire with shotguns on mostly peaceful, unarmed student demonstrators who were protesting the seizure of the People’s Park in Berkeley, CA.
The cops were given the green light to do whatever the fuck they wanted or in PR parlance use whatever force was necessary to remove the demonstrators. The word had come down from California’s Governor Ronald Reagan who thought Berkeley was “a haven for communist sympathizers, protesters, and sex deviants.” Some of the cops agreed. These were mostly hyped-up ex-Vietnam vets who thought hippie draft-dodging commie student bastards were the nearest thing to the VC they’d ever get a chance to blast on home turf. The cops were just pawns in a game but their actions were bloody, unnecessary, fatal, and ultimately futile.
BLAM!!!
In the mid-1950s, the University of Berkeley wanted to buy a stretch of land to redevelop as student residences, a parking lot, and some campus offices. Student numbers were growing and there was a lack of good affordable student housing. The university bods eyed up a 2.8 acre plot of land just east of Telegraph Hill and about a block from one of Berkeley’s other student dormitories. As there wasn’t enough cash to buy the land and pay for its redevelopment, the plans were put on hold until 1967 when the university bought the plot by eminent domain (or compulsory purchase) for $1.3m. The land had about 25 various low-rent working class dwellings which were soon bulldozed to make way for the bright shiny brand new future.
But fuck all happened.
After almost two years, the land had become nothing more than a dumping ground for garbage and wrecked automobiles. Word soon went round campus, with an earnestness only the young can afford, that the land grab, the bulldozing of the houses, and the promise of a bright new shiny future had just been a clever ruse to rid Berkeley from the influence of the radical left-wing dropouts who lived in the plot’s low rent dwellings. Word was the cops and some university officials saw these people as the main instigators of Berkeley’s anti-Vietnam and anti-capitalist agitation. Get rid of them, the story went, and the university and the city and the state were getting rid of a goddam irritant.
There was some substance to this theory, which was in no small part aided by Governor Reagan’s vehemence against Berkeley, but it wholly overlooked a bigger issue which was universities like most academic institutions are run by well-meaning ditherers whose business acumen is hamstrung by their good intentions. Left untended, the site was bringing the neighborhood down and damaging local businesses.
In April 1969, concerned residents, business owners, merchants, students and alike got together to decide what they could do to change the site. The best suggestion came from student Wendy Schlesinger and anti-war activist Michael Delacour who offered up a plan to turn the area into a people’s park and free speech area. This suggestion was unanimously agreed upon by those who attended the meeting. Unfortunately, they never presented their idea for possible consideration to the university land owners. But fuck them. They’d never taken an interest in the site, they’d just bulldozed a shitload of houses and let it to go wild.
The People’s Park brought together around a thousand volunteers who helped clear out this abandoned ground for wrecked cars and dumped trash and start to landscape and plant trees and flowers. By mid-May, the People’s Park was open to all. But back on campus, trouble was brewing.
More on the battle of People’s Park, after the jump…
