People's Park: The Vacant Lot That Became a Battleground

In April of nineteen sixty-nine, Berkeley students and community members turned a vacant lot owned by the University of California into a park. They brought sod, trees, a swing set. For several weeks the lot was a park. Then the university decided it wasn't.

On May fifteenth, Governor Ronald Reagan ordered the National Guard to retake the lot. At four in the morning, workers erected a chain-link fence. By midday, a protest march of roughly four thousand people was moving through Berkeley. Sheriff's deputies and National Guard troops responded with birdshot and buckshot. These weapons were fired into the crowd.

James Rector was standing on a rooftop watching the march below him when he was struck by buckshot. He died from his injuries several days later. According to the California History journal and KQED San Francisco's documentation of the event, over one hundred people were treated for birdshot wounds that day. The numbers reported from official records at the time; independent confirmation of the precise casualty count is noted as a gap in the source record.

Reagan's response did not end with May fifteenth. He sent about two thousand seven hundred National Guard troops to occupy Berkeley for about two weeks. During that occupation, military helicopters sprayed tear gas over the University of California campus during final examinations. That detail was not a rumor; it was documented in contemporaneous newspaper accounts and the California History journal's scholarly record of the period.

The park was contested for over fifty years. After further legal battles, the university began construction on student housing at the site in twenty twenty-four, ending the standoff. The housing is there now. The park is gone. The argument it represented, about who has the right to determine what vacant land in a city becomes, is not a question anyone has answered.