Features

The Free Speech Movement’s (FSM) 40th anniversary commemoration ends Sunday with gatherings for the veterans of the movement in Strawberry Canyon and a similar get-together for SLATE activists in Stiles Hall. 

But before the curtain drops, there’s plenty left to see and do, starting today (Friday) with a noon rally around a police car in Sproul Plaza—where another rally around a cop car 40 years ago helped define the movement. 

Recent news from another campus shows that the battle waged in Berkeley is far from over. Just a week ago a federal judge in Texas struck down an attempt to limit free speech on the Texas Tech campus to a single tiny gazebo for a university with a student body of 28,000 and quashed a campus speech code that banned insults and ridicule. 

Friday’s rally in Sproul plaza targets one of the latest and most far-reaching challenges to the rights FSM members fought for so ardently four decades ago, the PATRIOT Act.  

FSM veteran Bettina Aptheker and ASUC President Misha Leybovich will serve as emcees, and participants include former Presidential candidate Howard Dean, singer Terry Garthwaite, state Assemblymember Jackie Goldberg, Sanjeev Bery of the Northern California ACLU, noted defense attorney Tony Serra, UC Berkeley Chancellor Robert Birgeneau, street poet Julia Vinograd and Rosha Jones and Hiraa Khan of the Berkeley ACLU chapter. 

From 6:15 to 9:15 p.m. in the Redwood Gardens Community Room, 2951 Derby St., satirists Paul Krassner, Scoop Nisker, Kris Welch and Ishmael Reed will provide their ongoing commentary during the broadcast of the third Bush/Kerry debate, followed by a rock dance-concert featuring Clan Dyken. 

In a parallel event, investigative journalist Seymour Hersh of the New York Times will appear in the Pauley Ballroom in the Student Union at 7:45 p.m. The talk is jointly sponsored by the Graduate School of Journalism 

Meanwhile, from 7 to 11 p.m. in 142 Dwinelle, the public is invited to the Sixties Film Festival, featuring Berkeley in the Sixties and Freedom on My Mind . 

Saturday’s events include 10 panel discussions on contemporary civil liberties issues from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. in the Martin Luther King Jr. Student Union. 

One of the day’s most entertaining events is scheduled from 2 to 5:30 p.m. in Alumni House, featuring satire performances and a panel discussion featuring Bruce Barthol, Stoney Burke, Karen Ripley, Bernard Gilbert, Aundre the WonderWoman and Paul Krassner, who was the youngest artist to perform at Carnegie Hall and the creator and editor of The Realist, perhaps the most outrageous publication of the Sixties. 

The Sixties Film Festival continues from 1-5 p.m. in 142 Dwinelle, featuring Eyes on the Prize V, WeatherUnderground, Yippie and Free@30. 

An informal socializing session for FSM veterans and students is scheduled for 5 to 7:30 p.m. in the Martin Luther King Jr. Student Union, followed by a folk music hootenanny until 11 p.m. in the student union’s Pauley Ballroom featuring Rachel Garlin, Barbara Dane, Ronnie Gilbert and others. Offering will include FSM carols.  

Sunday, the final day of the celebration, is reserved for the veterans. 

Members of SLATE, a student alliance that tilled the soil from which the FSM movement would sprout, will hold a 9 a.m. to 2 p.m. reunion in Stiles Hall, and for 12 hours beginning at 10 a.m., FSM stalwarts will gather in the Strawberry Canyon Recreational Facility. 

For a complete listing of events, see the FSM website at www.straw.com/fsm-a.›