The 1960s: the Baby Boomers born to the WW II-era families reached teenage years, began college, and started movements to overturn the society of their parents. Still three years before Woodstock, before the major antiwar protests took place on the same campus and elsewhere around the country, The University of California Berkeley campus was already well known as the spawning ground for progressive movements. School administrators attempted to impose limits, banning holding political rallies or fundraisers with university property, which only caused the students to dig in their heels and agitate for free speech on campus.

On this day, November 3, in 1964, a sit-in by 1,000 Berkeley students and faculty was broken up by the police by order of the state governor. Some 800 of the students were arrested, some forcibly dragged down the stairs to the waiting police cars.

The protest came from the arrest of former grad student Jack Weinberg, and the expulsion of eight others, for violating the ban on fundraising on school grounds. A mob of students blocked the path of the car holding him, and Weinberg was released, but the school threatened to prosecute several of the mob members. The resulting sit-in supporting the “Free Speech Movement” was organized by Mario Savio, who delivered the keynote address from the steps of the occupied Sproul Hall: “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’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.”