The Afterlife of Activist Mario Savio, Free Speech Movement's Best-Known Leader

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http://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/afterlife-mario-savio-free-speech-movements-best-known-leader



Veterans of the 1964 Free Speech Movement in Berkeley, Calif., an event that electrified young men and women the world over, will return to campus for the 50th anniversary reunion this October. FSM’s most famous leader, Mario Savio, won’t be there because he died in 1996.

I’m intensely interested in the personal lives of famous people once they fade from the limelight. You have this thrilling moment that defines you in popular culture ... a speech, an 80-yard kickoff return, an Olympic gold medal ... and then? For Savio the moment came when he jumped barefoot on the police car where his fellow student Jack Weinberg was imprisoned and used the roof as a platform for an immortal speech:

We're human beings! There's a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can't take part! You can't even passively take part! And you've got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels ... upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you've got to make it stop! And you've got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it, that unless you're free, the machine will be prevented from working at all!

Savio’s speech became an antiwar rallying cry during the Vietnam War era. Before Jane Fonda, Joan Baez and Bob Dylan he was the face of protest. And then? It’s said that the ancient Spartan mothers told their sons just before a battle, "Either with your shield or on it.” Or as the Australian swimming gold-medalist Shane Gould reflected on her life after the Olympics: “It was like being taken up to the highest mountain peak to see the view, and then being brought down, never to be there again." Sandy Koufax would know all about that.

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1. I was there!

Well, not when the speech from the top of the cop car took place, but a month or so later I happened to walk through Sproul Plaza the day the big crowd gathered and Savio gave his speech from the steps of Sproul Hall.

I stopped and listened for awhile but I wasn't too impressed. I was an engineering student and we weren't into things like free speech at the time. Besides, I was attending Cal on the GI bill and I had a wife and child to support. The next day the cops came and arrested like 500 people who had refused to disperse.

It was just a few years later, when it dawned on me how much my head was in the sand and what a fucking waste of money and lives Vietnam was, that I realized the importance of what these people were doing.