Mario Savio's Shoes: The Moment a Student Changed a University

On October first, nineteen sixty-four, a University of California Berkeley administrator decided that political literature tables were no longer permitted in Sproul Plaza. A Congress of Racial Equality table-monitor named Jack Weinberg refused to leave. Campus police arrived. A crowd formed around the police car.

At that point a twenty-one-year-old philosophy student named Mario Savio climbed on top of the police car. Before he began speaking, he removed his shoes. He did not want to dent the roof.

Savio had spent the summer of nineteen sixty-four in Mississippi, registering Black voters under conditions that were regularly violent. He came back to Berkeley and found that students were prohibited from distributing political literature on their own campus. The contrast was not lost on him.

The standoff around that police car lasted thirty-two hours. The Free Speech Movement that grew from it changed university governance across the United States, establishing the legal and administrative framework under which students at public universities could organize politically and distribute literature. The California History journal and the UC Berkeley Free Speech Movement Archives, accessible through the Online Archive of California, document the movement's four-month campaign in detail.

In December of nineteen sixty-four, Savio gave a speech on the steps of Sproul Hall. The most-quoted passage: '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.' That speech is still quoted.

The plaza you are looking at, or passing, is the place where those thirty-two hours happened. The man took his shoes off so as not to cause damage. Then he started talking.