This article has multiple issues. Please help improve it or discuss these issues on the talk page . (Learn how and when to remove these messages)
|
Jack Weinberg | |
---|---|
Born | Buffalo, New York, U.S. | April 4, 1940
Education | University of California, Berkeley (BA) |
Occupation | Environmental consultant |
Known for | Free Speech Movement, environmental activism |
Spouse | Valerie Denney |
Jack Weinberg (born April 4, 1940) is an American environmental activist and former New Left activist who is best known for his role in the Free Speech Movement at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1964.
Weinberg was born in Buffalo, New York, on April 4, 1940, [1] and grew up there. [2] [3] His father owned a small jewelry business in Buffalo. [4]
He began college at the University of Buffalo. [2] At the age of 21 he transferred to the University of California, Berkeley, majoring in mathematics. [5] He graduated in January 1963 [5] [6] "with great distinction". [7]
In the spring semester 1963, Weinberg continued at Berkeley as a graduate student in the mathematics department. He worked as a teaching assistant there as well. [8] [9]
Weinberg's first participation in a political organization occurred in 1963, when he joined the Berkeley chapter of CORE (Congress of Racial Equality). [10]
Weinberg spent the summer of 1963 traveling in the South and visiting civil rights groups. [2] [5] He returned to Berkeley and began his second semester of grad school in the fall of 1963 but then withdrew mid-semester to devote himself full-time to civil rights activities. [2] [5] He became the head of Campus CORE. [11]
Weinberg remained in the Bay Area throughout the summer of 1964. [12] [lower-alpha 1]
In the fall semester of 1964, Weinberg was engaged in student activism at the University of California, Berkeley. On October 1, 1964, Weinberg was sitting at the CORE table in Sproul Plaza. He refused to show his identification to the campus police and was arrested at noon [12] for violating the university's new rules regarding student political activism. There was a spontaneous movement of students to surround the police car in which he was to be transported. They sat on the ground around the police car, preventing it from moving. [13]
Throughout the night and into the next day, students, including Mario Savio, gave speeches from atop the car calling for free speech on campus. [14] Weinberg, too, addressed the crowd from the top of the police car. [15] At one point, there may have been 3,000 students around the car. On the evening of October 2, 1964, approximately 24 hours later, representatives of political groups on campus signed an agreement with the administration regarding student free speech, which was dubbed the Pact of October 2. [16] After being confined in the police car for 32 hours, [17] [18] Weinberg was then booked and freed as the agreement stipulated that the university would not press charges against him. [14] [19] But less than a week later, the Alameda County District Attorney did press charges against Weinberg. [14] Because no one would sign a complaint, however, the case was dropped in mid-October. [20]
The first meeting of FSM (Free Speech Movement) took place on October 3, in Art Goldberg's apartment. The first order of business was to choose a name for the organization (the name "Free Speech Movement" did not yet exist). Several names were proposed—Students for Free Speech, United Free Speech Movement, University Rights Movement, Students for Civil Liberties. Weinberg suggested "Free Speech Movement" and that's the name that was adopted, by a margin of one vote. [21] [22]
FSM leader Mario Savio later stated that Jack Weinberg was the FSM's key tactician. [23] Historian W. J. Rorabaugh calls Weinberg "one of the most effective civil rights organizers" and "the strategist behind FSM". [24] An Oakland Tribune photo from early January 1965 shows Weinberg speaking, alongside Savio, to a large campus crowd. [25]
Weinberg is credited with the phrase, "Don't trust anyone over 30". [26] [27] The saying exists in several variants, such as "Never trust anybody over 30". Often misattributed to Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin, the Beatles, and others, Weinberg coined the phrase during a November 1964 interview about the Free Speech Movement with a reporter for the San Francisco Chronicle . [28] Weinberg later describe the incident as follows:
I was being interviewed by a newspaper reporter, and he was making me very angry. It seemed to me his questions were implying that we were being directed behind the scenes by Communists or some other sinister group. I told him we had a saying in the movement that we don't trust anybody over 30. It was a way of telling the guy to back off, that nobody was pulling our strings. [29]
On November 15, 1964, the Chronicle printed the story, quoting Weinberg as saying "We have a saying in the movement that you can't trust anybody over 30." [10]
A Chronicle columnist, Ralph J. Gleason, highlighted the saying in his column on November 18. [30] The saying then went viral, becoming a favorite for reporters and columnists wishing to ridicule the young, the New Left, or the hippie/Yippie movement. That annoyed Weinberg, who has said:
I've done some things in my life I think are very important, and my one sentence in history turns out to be something I said off the top of my head which became completely distorted and misunderstood. But I've become more accepting of fate as I get older. [29]
Weinberg was active in leadership of the Vietnam Day Committee (VDC), a coalition that organized rallies and marches opposing the Vietnam War. [31] [32] [33]
On Friday night, October 15, 1965, the VDC held an anti-war march that began at the UC Berkeley campus and was intended to end at the Oakland Army Terminal. [34] The march left the UC campus at 7:52 p.m. after an all-day rally there. Marchers carried anti-U.S. foreign policy signs and chanted anti-war slogans. [35] There were 10,000–14,000 people in the march. [36] At the head of the march was a banner carried by a line of marchers, then a sound truck containing VDC leaders including Jack Weinberg, Bettina Aptheker, Jerry Rubin, Stephen Smale, Steve Weissman, Frank Bardacke, and Robert Scheer. Also in the truck was the poet Allen Ginsberg chanting the Heart Sutra . However, the City of Oakland had refused to grant the march a permit, and so Oakland police blocked Telegraph Avenue at the Oakland border with a phalanx of some 375 [37] policemen. When the march neared the border, it came to a halt while the leaders considered what to do. Weinberg and Bardacke got out of the truck, crossed the police line, and met with Oakland Police Chief Edward M. Toothman. Weinberg and Bardacke could not persuade Toothman to let the march proceed into Oakland. So they returned to the sound truck and told the other VDC leaders. A fierce debate ensued about what to do; they voted 5–4 to turn back into Berkeley. [38]
Weinberg joined the Independent Socialist Club in 1966 and helped organize it into a national movement—the International Socialists—of which he was a national council member. [4]
Weinberg has said that the Stop the Draft Week protests of October 16–21, 1967, were
the first clear demonstration that the radical part of the Anti-Vietnam war movement was coming up against its own limitations. It didn't really have the weight in society to stop the war. I think that it was after that, that the Berkeley radical scene became more and more cut off from reality. And the question of moving American society, changing people really was getting lost. [39]
Weinberg moved to Los Angeles to work as labor correspondent for a radical weekly underground newspaper, the Los Angeles Free Press . Becoming involved in the formation of the Peace and Freedom Party of California, he organized the registration drive that collected enough signatures to get the party on the California ballot in the 1968 elections. [40] Weinberg served as the California state chairperson of the Peace and Freedom Party from August 1968 until November 1968. [41]
In November 1968, Weinberg was the Peace and Freedom Party candidate for congress in California's 26th congressional district election (Los Angeles area); [42] he received 3% of the vote. [43]
In following years, Weinberg was a union activist. In 1973, he was a participant in wildcat strikes at Chrysler plants in Detroit, Michigan, as a member of UAW (United Automobile Workers) Local 212. He wrote a book about those strikes. [44]
In 1975, Weinberg was the editor of Network, Voice of UAW Militants [45] which was a new bimonthly magazine for members of the UAW labor union. [46]
He then moved to Gary, Indiana, where he became a steelworker and was involved in the United Steelworkers union. [47]
In 1982, Weinberg led a coalition of environmentalists, unionists, and community members in defeating a proposal to construct a nuclear power plant in Indiana on Lake Michigan.
He worked for Greenpeace [48] [49] from 1990 to 2000. He then began working for the Environmental Health Fund.
Weinberg is a consultant to groups seeking to clean up environmental pollution. [50]
He is married to Valerie Denney. [1] Weinberg is a grandfather of three and has an adjunct faculty position in public health at the University of Illinois at Chicago. [47]
Freedom Summer, also known as Mississippi Freedom Summer, was a campaign launched by American civil rights activists in June 1964 to register as many African-American voters as possible in the state of Mississippi. Blacks in the state had been largely prevented from voting since the turn of the 20th century due to barriers to voter registration and other Jim Crow laws that had been enacted throughout the American South. The project also set up dozens of Freedom Schools, Freedom Houses, and community centers such as libraries, in small towns throughout Mississippi to aid the local Black population.
Clark Kerr was an American economist and academic administrator. He was the first chancellor of the University of California, Berkeley, and twelfth president of the University of California.
Mario Savio was an American activist and a key member of the Berkeley Free Speech Movement. He is most famous for his passionate speeches, especially the "Bodies Upon the Gears" address given at Sproul Hall, University of California, Berkeley on December 2, 1964.
Sproul Plaza is one center of student activity at the University of California, Berkeley. It is divided into two sections: Upper Sproul and Lower Sproul. They are vertically separated by twelve feet (3.7 m) and linked by a set of stairs.
Lenni Brenner, formerly known as Leonard Glaser or Lenny Glaser, is an American Trotskyist writer. In the 1960s, Brenner was a prominent civil rights movement activist and vocal opponent of the Vietnam War. Since the 1980s, his activism has focused on anti-Zionism. He has published widely on the history of Zionism, in particular asserting that the movement collaborated with the Nazis.
A teach-in is similar to a general educational forum on any complicated issue, usually an issue involving current political affairs. The main difference between a teach-in and a seminar is the refusal to limit the discussion to a specific time frame or a strict academic scope. Teach-ins are meant to be practical, participatory, and oriented toward action. While they include experts lecturing on their area of expertise, discussion and questions from the audience are welcome, even mid-lecture. "Teach-ins" were popularized during the U.S. government's involvement in Vietnam. The first teach-in, which was held overnight at the University of Michigan in March 1965, began with a discussion of the Vietnam War draft and ended in the early morning with a speech by philosopher Arnold Kaufman.
Jo Freeman aka Joreen, is an American feminist, political scientist, writer and attorney. As a student at the University of California, Berkeley in the 1960s, she became active in organizations working for civil liberties and the civil rights movement. She went on to do voter registration and community organization in Alabama and Mississippi and was an early organizer of the women's liberation movement. She authored several classic feminist articles as well as important papers on social movements and political parties. She has also written extensively about women, particularly on law and public policy toward women and women in mainstream politics.
The James K. Moffitt Undergraduate Library, simply known as Moffitt Library, is a library situated at the crossroads of the University of California, Berkeley, designed by American activist John Carl Warnecke in the late 1960s as a cutting-edge library for undergraduates. Named after James K. Moffitt, a former Regent of the University of California, the library has been a popular destination for students for over four decades. Campus and curriculum changes in the time since Moffitt Library opened have been a catalyst for considering new purposes for this highly trafficked space. Accommodating increased undergraduate enrollments, greater focus on problem-based and research-based learning, and demand for access to technology-rich spaces have all been taken into account as part of the re-imagination of this library.
Stoney Burke is an American street performer and actor based in California. He is the author of the book Weapon: Mouth–Adventures in the Free Speech Zone (2014).
The Vietnam Day Committee (VDC) was a coalition of left-wing political groups, student groups, labour organizations, and pacifist religions in the United States of America that opposed the Vietnam War during the counterculture era. It was formed in Berkeley, California in the spring of 1965 by activist Jerry Rubin, and was active through the majority of the Vietnam war, organizing several rallies and marches in California as well as coordinating and sponsoring nationwide protests.
SLATE, a pioneer organization of the New Left and precursor of the Free Speech Movement and formative counterculture era, was a campus political party at the University of California, Berkeley from 1958 to 1966.
The history of the University of California, Berkeley, begins on October 13, 1849, with the adoption of the Constitution of California, which provided for the creation of a public university. On Charter Day, March 23, 1868, the signing of the Organic Act established the University of California, with the new institution inheriting the land and facilities of the private College of California and the federal funding eligibility of a public agricultural, mining, and mechanical arts college.
The 1960s Berkeley protests were a series of events at the University of California, Berkeley, and Berkeley, California. Many of these protests were a small part of the larger Free Speech Movement, which had national implications and constituted the onset of the counterculture of the 1960s. These protests were headed under the informal leadership of students Mario Savio, Jack Weinberg, Brian Turner, Bettina Aptheker, Steve Weissman, Art Goldberg, Jackie Goldberg, and others.
Max Scherr was an American underground newspaper editor and publisher known for his iconoclastic 1960s weekly, the Berkeley Barb.
Occupy Cal included a series of demonstrations that began on November 9, 2011, on the University of California, Berkeley campus in Berkeley, California. It was allied with the Occupy Wall Street movement in New York City, San Francisco Bay Area Occupy groups such as Occupy Oakland, Occupy Berkeley, and Occupy San Francisco, and other public California universities. "Cal" in the name "Occupy Cal" is the nickname of the Berkeley campus and generally refers specifically to UC Berkeley.
The Free Speech Movement (FSM) was a massive, long-lasting student protest which took place during the 1964–65 academic year on the campus of the University of California, Berkeley. The Movement was informally under the central leadership of Berkeley graduate student Mario Savio. Other student leaders include Jack Weinberg, Tom Miller, Michael Rossman, George Barton, Brian Turner, Bettina Aptheker, Steve Weissman, Michael Teal, Art Goldberg, Jackie Goldberg and others.
Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) was a national student activist organization in the United States during the 1960s and was one of the principal representations of the New Left. Disdaining permanent leaders, hierarchical relationships and parliamentary procedure, the founders conceived of the organization as a broad exercise in "participatory democracy". From its launch in 1960 it grew rapidly in the course of the tumultuous decade with over 300 campus chapters and 30,000 supporters recorded nationwide by its last national convention in 1969. The organization splintered at that convention amidst rivalry between factions seeking to impose national leadership and direction, and disputing "revolutionary" positions on, among other issues, the Vietnam War and Black Power.
The New Left was a broad political movement that emerged from the counterculture of the 1960s and continued through the 1970s. It consisted of activists in the Western world who, in reaction to the era's liberal establishment, campaigned for freer lifestyles on a broad range of social issues such as feminism, gay rights, drug policy reforms, and gender relations. The New Left differs from the traditional left in that it tended to acknowledge the struggle for various forms of social justice, whereas previous movements prioritized explicitly economic goals. However, many have used the term "New Left" to describe an evolution, continuation, and revitalization of traditional leftist goals.
Eric Mann is a civil rights, anti-war, labor, and environmental organizer whose career spans more than 50 years. He has worked with the Congress of Racial Equality, Newark Community Union Project, Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), the Black Panther Party, the United Automobile Workers and the New Directions Movement. He was also active as a leader of SDS faction the Weathermen, which later became the militant left-wing organization Weather Underground. He was arrested in September 1969 for participation in a direct action against the Harvard Center for International Affairs and sentenced to two years in prison on charges of conspiracy to commit murder after two bullets were fired through a window of the Cambridge police headquarters on November 8, 1969. He was instrumental in the movement that helped to keep a General Motors assembly plant in Van Nuys, California open for ten years. Mann has been credited for helping to shape the environmental justice movement in the U.S. He founded the Labor/Community Strategy Center in Los Angeles, California and has been its director for 25 years. In addition, Mann is founder and co-chair of the Bus Riders Union, which sued the Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority for what it called “transit racism”, resulting in a precedent-setting civil rights lawsuit, Labor Community Strategy Center et al. v. MTA.
Alliance of Libertarian Activists (ALA) was a libertarian student organization primarily located in the San Francisco Bay area, mostly active at University of California, Berkeley, established in 1965–1966, and considered the first campus group to adopt the term “libertarian.” ALA gained members from both the purged Young Americans for Freedom (YAF) Moïse Tshombe chapter and the Cal Conservatives for Political Action (CCPA) at UC Berkeley, which was a continuation of the 1964 Cal Students for Goldwater, both founded and first chaired by Dan Rosenthal.
This section contains too many or overly lengthy quotations .(September 2022) |
In the summer of 1963 he participated in civil rights actions in South Carolina and Arkansas. When he returned to Berkeley that fall, he says, "civil rights was my whole identity." He dropped out of school again, began helping organize major civil rights demonstrations, and became chairman of the new campus CORE chapter.
He'd grown up in Buffalo, New York, and majored in mathematics at the University of Buffalo but dropped out before getting his degree.
He joined the Independent Socialist Club in 1966 and helped organize it into a national movement -- the International Socialists -- of which he is a national council member.
Rather than return to the South in the summer of 1964, Weinberg remained in the Bay Area, maintaining a high civil rights profile.
On the morning of October 1, a Berkeley mathematics graduate named Jack Weinberg was driven to campus by two friends, a big door balanced on top of their car.
Inside the police car sat Jack Weinberg, a math major recently graduated 'with great distinction,' who had committed the 'crime' of handing out civil rights literature on campus.
The police were called in, and they arrested Jack Weinberg, a former teaching assistant in mathematics, for operating a CORE table in violation of the new university rules.
Former teaching assistant in mathematics at the University of California, currently chairman of Campus CORE and a member of the FSM Steering CommitteeReprinted from the January 1965 issue of Campus CORElator.
'I decided I'd rather work for civil rights than study math,' he said. He has no long-range plan for his future. 'We have a saying in the movement that you can't trust anybody over 30,' he remarked. 'So of course I'm 24 and I can't go on doing this indefinitely. But by then I'll have developed into somebody else.'
Jack Weinberg remained in the Bay Area throughout the summer of 1964.
Fifty years ago Wednesday, Jack Weinberg sat in the back of a police car on the University of California campus here for 32 hours while thousands of students blocked the vehicle's exit, protesting Mr. Weinberg's arrest on charges of manning an information table about the civil rights movement.
We tried on several -- Students for Free Speech, United Free Speech Movement, University Rights Movement, Students for Civil Liberties -- but none seemed really to fit. ... The name 'FSM' was proposed by Jack Weinberg. ... I favored Jack's suggestion because it was something that could be written on the walls, like in Paris or Algiers. The name was adopted by a margin of one vote.
Someone else suggested University Rights Movement, but Savio thought the acromym -- URM -- lacked the appropriate dignity. Jack Weinberg, the man in the car, suggested Free Speech Movement. After much debate they approved it by one vote.
Weinberg was, as Savio explained, the movement's key tactician; he had 'a consummate talent for determining what the tactical possibilities in a given situation are -- or enumerating them, analyzing them.'
... and Jack Weinberg, one of the most effective civil rights organizers, the strategist behind FSM, and author of the statement, 'You can't trust anybody over thirty.' (This remark was both generational and a sneer at the aging communists.)
JACK WEINBERG, twenty-four year old leader of the Free Speech Movement at the University of California, Berkeley, California, interview with San Francisco Chronicle reporter, c. 1965.
In what may have been an unintended consequence of the FBI's covert operations, Montgomery questioned Weinberg about who was 'behind' the Free Speech Movement, and Weinberg rebuffed the reporter's implication that students were being directed by Communist Party officials, or anyone else, with a remark that became a credo for his generation: 'We have a saying in the movement,' he said. '"Don't trust anyone over thirty."'
I told him we had a saying in the movement that we don't trust anybody over 30. It was a way of telling the guy to back off, that nobody was pulling our strings.A text version of this article is also online.
Maybe those in the civil rights movement who say, as Jack Weinberg was quoted Sunday in the Free Speech Movement story, that 'you can't trust anyone over thirty' may be right. You can't trust them to see things the way they really are very often, that's for sure.
Weinberg was subsequently active in leadership in the VDC.
But the V.D.C. leaders looked scared. 'Advance scouts' radioed that a few blocks ahead a wall of helmeted policemen stood on the Oakland-Berkeley line with clubs and gas masks. In front of them, between the police and the marchers, stood a thousand hostile demonstrators. Weinberg and Frank Bardacke, two members of a hastily formed emergency executive committee, ran forward to negotiate with the police.A text version of this article is also online.
I yelled, 'Turn the march!' Immediately the car swung a right turn. The call was taken up by Jack Weinberg on a bullhorn. The marchers turned west, away from the border.
Police insisted repeatedly that they were concerned about the 'hostility' of the spectators. But Jack Weinberg, a Vietnam Day Committee member and spokesman said the march had turned only because a number of persons 'not concerned with our movement' stood between the marchers and the police and made a 'confrontation' impossible.
The actual count, according to officials who are expert in making such estimates, was between ten and fourteen thousand.(For other formats of this document, see https://archive.org/details/appendixtojournax1967cali)
After an hour the march approached the Oakland City limits. Some 375 Oakland police, carrying billy clubs and gas masks and wearing helmets, stood shoulder-to-shoulder, blocking the way.
Jack Weinberg dismounted the platform on the VDC's red truck and walked toward the police line. ... Now he crossed the barricade and met with [Oakland Police] Chief [Edward] Toothman inside a police truck. Although the Berkeley Police Department had let the parade proceed without a permit, Oakland authorities refused. Weinberg could not convince Toothman otherwise and soon walked back through the police line, across the asphalt to the red truck. The VDC leaders fiercely debated whether to confront the cops, ultimately voting 5-4 to turn back, a decision Weinberg announced from atop the truck.
[the Stop the Draft Week protests were] the first clear demonstration that the radical part of the Anti-Vietnam war movement was coming up against its own limitations. It didn't really have the weight in society to stop the war. I think that it was after that, that the Berkeley radical scene became more and more cut off from reality. And the question of moving American society, changing people really was getting lost.Transcript of 1990 documentary film directed by Mark Kitchell. This quote occurs at 69 minutes 56 seconds into the film.
He helped set up the Peace and Freedom party, organizing the registration drive that gained it enough signatures to get on the California ballot in the 1968 elections.
Jack Weinberg was the first state chairperson recognized by the Secretary of State. Weinberg served from August 1968 until he resigned in November 1968.
{{cite magazine}}
: Missing or empty |title=
(help)There's a new magazine out and if you're in the UAW it's for you. If you're not, there's still a lot for any worker to learn from Network, Voice of UAW Militants, an independent bimonthly publication.
'Fifty years have passed, and it's pretty safe to be a supporter of the Free Speech Movement now,' said Weinberg, 74, who is a consultant to groups seeking to clean up environmental pollution.