FREE SPEECH MOVEMENT TURNS 40

Reviled at birth, the Free Speech Movement is returning under a crown of glory to its UC Berkeley home this week.

More than 50 events are being held to mark the movement's 40th anniversary, including an echo of the captive police-car episode. The week's highlight will be a noon rally Friday atop a police car in Sproul Plaza with former Democratic presidential candidate Howard Dean among the speakers.

No one knew at the time that the 1964 campus conflict would be viewed, much less honored, today as the political earthquake that spawned a generation of student protests across the nation.

The 10 weeks that shook the world began Oct. 1 when students sat down in civil disobedience and blocked a police car on Sproul Plaza that was attempting to take away civil rights organizer Jack Weinberg, a former Cal grad student who had been arrested for violating a campus ban on political advocacy.

Weinberg, who coined the phrase "Don't trust anyone over 30," was a campus leader for the Congress on Racial Equality, which played a role in the 1964 Freedom Summer of civil rights activism in the South.

Among those who took off their shoes before climbing on top of the car to address the crowd of protesters that swelled to 3,000 during the ensuing 32- hour standoff was a 21-year-old philosophy student named Mario Savio, whose eloquence quickly propelled him to the role of movement spokesman.

Savio's words from the Sproul steps two months later have been branded into the annals of American student protests:

"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; and you've got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon all the apparatus, and you've got to make it stop."

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