CALIFORNIA DURING THE ‘60s
The Student Movement at Berkeley • Free Speech • Black Radicalism
People's Park • Chicano Radicalism • M o r a t o r i u m a t L a g u n a Pa r k The
Occupation of Alcatraz by Native Americans
THE CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT IN CALIFORNIA
I. 1950s: The Supreme Court decision of Brown vs. The Board of Education, Topeka,
Kansas, sparks the Civil Rights Movement into action on the national level.
A. Separate but equal is unconstitutional. Separate can never be equal, because it
limits opportunities.
1. In order to implement the court decision, the cases have to be tested through
the courts.
2. 1955: The first test case is in Montgomery, Alabama, when Rosa Parks
refuses to give up her bus seat. She is the Secretary of the local National
Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP).
3. This sparks a massive bus boycott in Montgomery, Alabama, that lasts
more than a year, and the Civil Rights Movement begins.
4. Students from all over the country go to the South to support the cause. Many
of these students are from California.
5. They return to California with a different social consciousness that enables
them to get involved in different civil right causes.
II.
1960: College students protest exclusion from a hearing on the House Un-American
Activities Committee in San Francisco by staging a sit-in.
III.
1963: California Legislature passes The Rumford Act for "fair housing" and "open
occupancy" which declares racial discrimination in housing to be against public
policy. An active campaign by the California Real Estate Association begins against
this Act, which leads to the drafting and passage of Proposition 14 by California
voters. (The passage of Prop 14 is one force that led to the 1965 riots in Watts.)
IV. 1964, September: The University of California at Berkeley announces that
the south entrance to the campus cannot be used for political gathering or
organizing.
A. Students call a strike of the entire campus.
B. Sit-ins and mass demonstrations occur.
C. Students are disciplined for not leaving the area.
D. There is a large sit-in at Sproul Hall.
E. Governor Edmund G. "Pat" Brown, Sr., calls the state and local police to
intervene/interfere.
F. There is a mass arrest of 700 students.
The University of California charter is interpreted by the regents and other
university officials as saying that free speech and any political advocacy on the
campus is not allowed. Wrong ... the charter said that it forbade "any political
or sectarian influence in the appointment of the university regents and the
administration in its affairs...." Almost every governor has violated this section of the
charter.
V. 1965, August 11: A young black man is arrested for drunk driving. A rumor spreads
that two black women have been victims of police brutality. A riot with looting and burning
results. When all becomes quiet again, 34 are dead, 31 of them African-Americans. We are
still dealing with the causes of the Watts Riot, not only in the Watts area of Los Angeles, but in
other cities as well.
VI.
1966: The State Supreme Court struck down Prop 14 as unconstitutional denial of
the equal protection of the law--a little too late.
VII. 1967,October: A major draft riot breaks out at the Oakland Induction Center.
A. Protestors are mace, and some are jailed.
B. This sparks other protests against the draft in other major U.S. cities.
VIII. 1968, August: Protestors demonstrate against the Vietnam War at the Democratic
Convention.
IX. 1968: San Francisco State College students demand the administration include
Black Studies in the college curriculum.
A. Students from the Third Liberation Front: Latin Americans, Asians, and AfroAmericans begin to organize.
B. There is a strike on campus.
X. 1968: University of California at Berkeley students demand a Third World College.
A. They want classes in cultural identity for Chicanos, Afro-Americans, and
Asians.
B. They want ethic professors.
C. They want minority recruitment.
D. They support the grape boycott.
XI. 1969: People's Park, Berkeley: The radical, young "street people" try to
appropriate a block of university land near Telegraph Avenue as a park for their own
use. The university fences off the park, and a mob gathers.
A. Riots break out and a young bystander is killed.
B. There is a massive movement to take the park.
C. The National Guard is sent in.
XII. Hippie Movement: The movement appeals to the young and rebellious, many of
them from affluent homes. A subculture, or counterculture, is created.
A. Experimentation with drugs
B. Communal living
C. Haight Ashbury, San Francisco
NATIVE AMERICAN RADICALISM IN CALIFORNIA DURING THE 1960s
By the 1960s, Native Americans were gathering energy for resistance. No fundamental
change had taken place since The New Deal. Indians on the reservations were
impoverished. By 1960, there were 800,000 Indians (Half on reservations, half in towns
all over the country). They approach the U.S. Government on an "embarrassing topic"--Treaties.
I. 1961: Tribal and urban Native American leaders meet in Chicago, resulting in the
formation of the national Indian Youth Council. Mel Thom, a Paiute Indian, is elected
president.
II. 1961-1969: Resistance takes place in Washington State over fishing rights and tribal
land ownership.
III.1969, November 9: Eighty-eight Indians take over and occupy Alcatraz Island in San
Francisco Bay. Their leaders are Richard Oakes, a Mohawk directing Indian Studies
at San Francisco State College, and Grace Thorpe, a Sac and Fox Indian. They
declare themselves Indians of All Tribes. The occupation lasts a year, and then
federal forces invade the island and physically remove the Indians living there.
IV. 1970: The Pit River Indians of Northern California occupy land they say belongs to
them. They are charged with assaulting state and federal officers and cutting trees.
The, Native American resistance movement continues, and, in the years that follow,
Native Americans continue to work toward change by forming the Indian Historian Press
and evaluating the stereotypes depicted in elementary and secondary school texts.
V. 1973, February 23: Oglala Sioux occupy Wounded Knee to demand that the U.S.
government take them seriously. This is one of the most powerful affirmations of
Native American resistance during this time.
BLACK RADICALISM IN CALIFORNIA - OUT OF THE CIVIL RIGHTS
MOVEMENT COMES:
I. The student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC): For students from
Greensboro, North Carolina, hold a sit-in at the Woolworth lunch counter. They are
arrested and refuse bail in order to force desegregation... a historical moment in
history.
Students from all over begin to take action. The Student Movement begins to gain
support and also goes through some painful changes. In 1966, Stokley Carmichael,
leader of SNCC, announces that whites can no longer be participants. Why?
Research. Thus, Black Power is declared.
II. Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale, students at Merritt College, form The Black
Panther Party in Oakland.
A. They form their own brigade (police). Why?
B. There is police brutality and housing discrimination.
III. Eldridge Cleaver gets involved. He is in prison for rape, which he considers an act
of insurrection. He writes Soul on Ice and joins the Black Panther Party.
IV. Events and actions of the Black Panther Party:
A. 1967, October 28: Gunfire is exchanged between police and a car that Newton is
driving. An officer is shot.
B. 1969, April 6: There is shooting between police and Panthers; Cleaver is
wounded and arrested.
C. Newton is convicted of manslaughter; later there is a hung jury.
D. Cleaver runs for President on the Peace and Freedom ticket.
E. Los Angeles undercover FBI agent joins a meeting of the Panthers, and a young
leader of the party is killed. A turn of events...
The party splits:
A. Newton believes that the party should take a different, more moderate approach
and deal with social problems such as:
1. Breakfast. for poor children
2. Medical clinics setup
3. Free transportation for families of prisoners
B. Cleaver, on the other hand, leaves and goes to Algeria; from there he advocates:
1. Revolutionary guerrilla warfare
2. No giving in to "the system"
CHICANO RADICALISM IN CALIFORNIA DURING THE `60s
The Farm Workers' Movement and the Vietnam War are the driving forces that spark
the Chicano Student Movement. University students are aware of the hardships that farm
workers experience, because many of them come from working class families
themselves. Berkeley Chicano students organize around the Grape Strike. Many of the
students' brothers, uncles, cousins and other kin are fighting and dying in large
proportions in Vietnam. The students organize in large numbers.
I. 1969: The Brown Berets form the National Chicano Moratorium Committee. They
organize a large demonstration on December 20 to protest against the numbers of
Chicano soldiers dying in Vietnam. It is a peaceful demonstration on the part of the
demonstrators.
II. 1970, July 4: Another demonstration is organized. This one is to protest police
brutality against Mexican-American in the L.A. jail substation-six deaths in five
months...
III. 1970, August 29: 20,000--30,000 people gather at Laguna Park in L.A. to protest the
war. The people march with signs that read "Raza Si, Guerra No!" "Aztlan: Love it or
leave it!"
A. At a nearby liquor store, some teenagers pilfer some soft drinks.
B. The police overreact to a minor incident following the theft by refusing to
communicate with the rally monitors. Police enter the park and fire tear gas
canisters. (A bad move by the L.A.P.D.)
C. Thus following the most controversial event of this time period: the killing of
Ruben Salazar, a journalist working for KMEX-TV in L.A. He had exposed the
L.A. Police Department's inconsistencies in the reporting of the fatal shootings of
two Mexican nationals in a downtown L.A. hotel. He is uncovering the Police
Department's repressions of Chicanos.
The events that led to Salazar's death are:
1. Ruben Salazar stops at the Silver Dollar Bar to have a beer after the Laguna Park
incident.
2. Police surround the bar, looking for a man with a rifle. The man has already
been apprehended elsewhere, but police ignore that fact and shoot tear gas
into the bar with a 10" projectile which strikes Salazar.
3. Salazar had been getting threats from Police Chief Ed Davis.
4. Officers are indicted and later acquitted.
5. Riots bread out in East L.A.
From 1970-1971, a number of demonstrations occur in and around L.A., many of them
rallied around the death of Ruben Salazar.