1968 - Mark Kurlansky [54]
“Am I a Judas?” Savio asked himself, still steeped in the imagery of the Church. “I am going to betray the people that I endangered now that I am back home? Forget all about that. Was that reality? Or is it just a fantasy? A little childish game? I did my little childish game in Mississippi, and now I am back to the serious stuff of becoming whatever I was going to become (I had no idea what that was anyway)?”
Drawing from the lessons of Mississippi, where even knocking on doors was done in pairs, the Berkeley free speech advocates did nothing alone, always en masse. On October 1, 1964, a civil rights worker named Jack Weinberg, who had also gone to Mississippi for Freedom Summer, was arrested on the Berkeley campus. He had defied the prohibition of political advocacy on campus by sitting at a table filled with civil rights literature. He was placed in a police car, which was surrounded by protesters. With no real plan, students trained in the civil rights movement sat down. More and more students came, immobilizing the car for thirty-two hours.
When Mario Savio leaped on top of the police car to make a speech, he first removed his shoes so as not to damage the car. Later, he did not even recall when he had decided to jump on the car. He just did it. He stammered no longer, and his eloquence instantly anointed him the spokesperson of what came to be known as the Berkeley Free Speech Movement.
A graduate philosophy student, Suzanne Goldberg, who later married Savio, said that “his charisma came from sincerity.” She remembered, “I would see him around Berkeley carrying signs, but when I heard him speak I was amazed at the sincerity. Mario had the ability to make things ordinary and understandable without using rhetoric. He believed that if people knew all the facts, they couldn’t help but do the right thing—which most of us know is not true. He had a naïve faith in people. He would talk to people at great length, certain that he could convince them.”
Though Mario Savio did not have the eloquence of Martin Luther King, or the lawyerly precision of Tom Hayden, he loved language and used it to simplify. At Berkeley his stammer appeared only occasionally, the Queens accent remained. His speeches, devoid of rhetorical flourish, always seemed to say “It’s all so clear.” Only in his eyes could a real fire be seen. The sweep of his arms and his persistent hand gestures reflected his Sicilian origins. The tall, lanky, bowed stance revealed his humility, recalling Gandhi’s teaching that a political activist should be so mild that the adversary, once defeated, does not feel humiliated. A favorite Savio phrase was “I ask you to consider.” According to legend, Savio, during one of his stays in prison, approached a large, burly inmate and, apropos of nothing, bet him that if he poured a glass of water on the man’s head, the inmate would do nothing to retaliate against his skinny attacker. The man took the bet, and Savio filled two glasses of water. He simultaneously poured one glass on the other inmate’s head and one on his own. He won the bet.
Two months after the sit-in at the police car, Savio led a takeover of Sproul Hall, a university building, which resulted in the largest mass arrest of students in U.S. history. Before the seizure of the building, Savio made what may be the only student speech of the sixties that is remembered. He said:
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 tacitly 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 are free, the machine