Nonviolence, Resisting Arrest, and the Student Movements of the Sixties and Today
A recurring theme in criticism of the students pepper-sprayed at UC Davis last week is that in forming a ring around police and their fellow activists they were violating the principles of nonviolent resistance. “A fundamental tenet of civil disobedience is to accept arrest when protesting injustice,” Berkeley Daily Cal columnist Casey Given wrote yesterday, and so the UC activists of today have no right to “compare … their struggle to … the Free Speech and Civil Rights Movements of the 1960s.”
Casey Given is right that civil rights activists mostly submitted to arrest willingly (though one of the movement’s greatest unsung heroes did not). But to invoke the Berkeley Free Speech Movement as an example of this supposed rule of nonviolence is a deeply strange choice.
The Free Speech Movement at Berkeley was christened on September 30, 1964, at a sit-in following the citation of eight students for violating the university’s leafleting policies. The very next day, on the morning of October 1,
