McCarthyism, then and now: Trump's campus rules echo past

The president seeks to bend the arc away from justice. Newsom is right to oppose it.

- ANITA CHABRIA COLUMNIST

BULLHORN in hand, Bettina Aptheker leads a march in Berkeley during the Vietnam War. Aptheker, now 81, went on to become a professor at UC Santa Cruz.

Bettina Aptheker was a 20-year-old sophomore at UC Berkeley when she climbed on top of a police car, barefoot so she wouldn't damage it, and helped start the Free Speech Movement.

"Power concedes nothing without a demand," she told a crowd gathered in Sproul Plaza on that October Thursday in 1964, quoting abolitionist Frederick Douglass.

She was blinded by the lights of the television cameras, but the students roared back approval, and "their energy just sort of went through my whole body," she told me.

Berkeley, as Aptheker describes it, was still caught in the tail end of the McCarthyism of the 1950s, when the 1st Amendment was almost felled by fear of government reprisals. Days earlier, administrators had passed rules that cracked down on political speech on campus.

Aptheker and other students had planned a peaceful protest, only to have police roll up and arrest a graduate student named Jack Weinberg, a lanky guy with floppy hair and a mustache who had spent the summer working for the civil rights movement.

Well-versed in those nonviolent methods that were finally winning a bit of equality for Black Americans, hundreds of students sat down around the cruiser, remaining there more than 30 hours - while hecklers threw eggs and cigarette butts and police massed at the periphery before the protesters successfully negotiated with the university to restore free speech on campus.

History was made, and the Free Speech Movement born through the most American of traitscourage, passion and the invincibility of youth.