(Below is a talk I gave on Monday, Oct. 29th on the UC Berkeley campus. Old veterans of Berkeley's 1964 Free Speech Movement sponsored a get-out-the vote rally. By agreement, speakers were not to single out particular candidates or parties.):
I’m Leon Wofsy, Emeritus Professor of Immunology in the Department of Molecular and Cell Biology. I joined the Berkeley faculty in 1964 just a few months before the Free Speech Movement erupted. I agreed with and supported the student protesters and soon came to know and admire Mario Savio and many others for their courage and integrity. I also formed close friendships with other faculty defenders of free speech, especially with two bright and principled young History professors who were closest to the students in age and spirit, Reggie Zelnik and Larry Levine, both of whom, like Mario Savio, died much too young. Howard Schachman, Professor of Biochemistry, and I came together at these steps on the morning the students who occupied Sproul Hall were hauled off under arrest. We arranged a faculty meeting for that evening which formed the Committee of 200 that supported the students and eventually helped fashion the terms of the historic victory for Free Speech on this campus. I’ll leave it to Professor Charlie Sellers, who was a major co-author of that Free Speech testament, to say more about those days of protest and activism that are so relevant to today’s urgent effort to get out a massive vote.
In my very long life, 97 years so far, I’ve seen many assaults on democracy and free speech. A childhood experience was the arrest and brutal beating inside the Stamford Connecticut police station of my father and twelve others who rallied for unemployment insurance during the Great Depression. There were the lynchings of returning African-American vets and their brides in Augusta, Georgia after World War II; later on the murder of Emmet Till, and, to this day, wanton police killings of unarmed youths. There was the shameful period of McCarthyism and a recurring history of bigoted attacks on immigrants, gays and ethnic minorities. But whenever democracy was challenged and in danger, people rose to the challenge, especially as new generations of young people led the way.
The American Civil Liberties Union has a get out the vote slogan: “Vote as if your rights depend on it!” They might well say “as if lives depend on it!” After the events of this last week, the mail bombings and the mass murder of Jews in a synagogue, sanity requires a serious take on where we are, what’s at stake and why a massive voter turnout is a historic necessity. Democracy is clearly in crisis, here and elsewhere around the world. For us, the danger to democracy may be greater than at anytime since the Civil War. For your generation it is certainly a matter of rights and lives, your lives and the life of the planet, The challenge is nothing less than to reverse the descent into authoritarianism and violence. It is to help bring about a time when the first priorities of government, ours and many others, are to cope decisively with climate change, poverty, and the threat of nuclear catastrophe. It may take more than one generation, but it starts with the millions of young people, women and men, Black, Latino, and all others who are going extra miles to get out the vote across the country. Rights and lives do depend on it!
