A recurring theme in criticism of the students pepper-sprayed at UC Davis last week is that in forming a ring around police and their fellow activists they were violating the principles of nonviolent resistance. “A fundamental tenet of civil disobedience is to accept arrest when protesting injustice,” Berkeley Daily Cal columnist Casey Given wrote yesterday, and so the UC activists of today have no right to “compare … their struggle to … the Free Speech and Civil Rights Movements of the 1960s.”
Casey Given is right that civil rights activists mostly submitted to arrest willingly (though one of the movement’s greatest unsung heroes did not). But to invoke the Berkeley Free Speech Movement as an example of this supposed rule of nonviolence is a deeply strange choice.
The Free Speech Movement at Berkeley was christened on September 30, 1964, at a sit-in following the citation of eight students for violating the university’s leafleting policies. The very next day, on the morning of October 1, the university administration escalated the conflict by arresting former student Jack Weinberg for tabling in support of the civil rights movement in Sproul Plaza.
When police told Weinberg he was under arrest, he refused to move, and the officers were forced to call for backup. As they waited, the crowd grew. Eventually a squad car arrived. As police carried Weinberg into the car, the students standing nearby spontaneously sat down, blocking it from leaving Sproul. Police ordered them to move. They refused. Soon Mario Savio climbed onto the roof of the car and declared a noon rally at that location.
Savio was granted a meeting with university administrators not long after, at which he declared that the students surrounding the police car would disperse if and only if the administration released Weinberg, dropped charges against him and the eight students cited the previous day, and opened serious negotiations on campus regulations. Several hundred students spent that night surrounding the car, many of them in sleeping bags. (The demonstrators continued to use the car’s roof as a podium, denting it severely. They also deflated its tires.)
It was not until the following evening, after the administrators had accepted most of their demands, that the students allowed the police car to exit the plaza.
This is the history of nonviolent student protest at Berkeley. It is the history of peaceful student organizing, yes, but it’s also a history of students disrupting police business, refusing to submit to arrest, damaging police property, even holding police hostage.
That is the history of the students of the University of California. That is the inheritance of the student activists of today.
studentactivism.net 
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November 22, 2011 at 1:33 pm
flowersandlemons
I am wondering.. If there are rules about what the police is allowed to do. How come I see more and more police violence against peaceful demonstrations? Does the police have a lot of room to decide what they do, even if it is against their rules? What happened? Is it a lack of sympathy from the people that make and keep the laws towards the protesters? How can this happen?
November 22, 2011 at 3:06 pm
John Slade
We had 8 years of ‘cowboy police state’ ‘undisclosed location’ crap from the Bushies, and it’s sandwiched by two Democrats who were and are way too law-and-order too. Not to mention all the TV cop shows, all the ‘breaking the rules’ stuff. The paramilitary in the US are way too powerful and think they can get away with too much. It’s a problem.
November 22, 2011 at 3:10 pm
mefoley
Forming a ring and sitting down is now violence? Talk about Doublespeak.
People who take that view are merely redefining nonviolence to be violence. It’s ridiculous. And as an attempt to justify their reaction, it’s pitiful, and it’s not fooling anyone.
November 22, 2011 at 3:45 pm
Bartleby the Scrivener
Resisting arrest and obstruction of justice are crimes. When you block the egress of a police officer who is attempting to affect a lawful arrest, you are guilty of resisting arrest in the state in which this took place. I’ve not researched obstruction of justice for that jurisdiction, but on a prima facie level it appears to have been reached as well.
An officer needn’t exhaust all opportunities to leave before you are guilty of the crime. If for example, there is an exit that requires that one go down two flights of stairs, through a basement, up two more flights of stairs, out of the existing building, across a courtyard, into a new building, through the new building, and then out of the new building, only for them to have to then go around back to their police car, you are still guilty of resisting arrest if you obstructed their egress through the first exit and it was a lawful arrest.
November 22, 2011 at 5:14 pm
Lance Miller
If that is the case, everyone should have been arrested, not pepper sprayed. The use of pepper spray by campus police is clear. They violated this rule by the use of pepper spray.
Protestors should have come to terms with the fact that at some point they may be arrested already. Even if resisting arrest by non-violent means, the use of pepper spray is only for when bodily harm is eminent. Nonviolent protest does not denote following the law. Presumably the civil disobedience by it’s very definition is to break the law deemed unjust in a civil manner.
Police officers, especially those involved, are aware of the rules. They know when they can use pepper spray and violence. They must know these rules, how else can they enforce ANY law? Not only do they know the rules, they decided to break a rule that directly caused the physical harm of non-violent citizens.
Justify the police’s action all you like, but the rules for all involved are quit clear. The one major difference, the protestors did not hurt anyone. Even harsh language was discouraged, which by the way I had been there, I do not believe I could not ‘cuss someone out’.
For a long while, as an African American Gay Male, I had started to fear that by enduring some very easy years socially our youth would not know struggle and would take our freedoms for granted. I am more than proud to say I stand corrected. The people will indeed effect change, even after being lulled by some rather easy social years. I say this from the point of view of someone who has known adversity and craved a revolution of the status quo for his entire life, be it only 34 years. I stand with those student’s, faculty and protestors in solidarity. Of course there is a caveat, I await the moment in which the message of the protest is made clear, concise and focused.
November 22, 2011 at 7:27 pm
js
Bartleby the Scrivener: Thank you for that detailed and dispassionately presented info — something seen all too rarely in blog comments. However, I’m not sure what relevance you intended those facts to have here, because the core issue *isn’t* whether the students were acting legally; it’s whether the police response to their actions was proportionate.
Yes, the students broke the law. I have no doubt about that.
But if you consider that Gandhi also (openly and unapologetically!) broke the law when he walked to the sea to get salt, you’ll understand why legality alone *isn’t* the measure of the moral high ground here.
Or to put this another way: yes, civil disobedience involves disobeying. That’s the point.
November 25, 2011 at 2:29 pm
Gabi Kirk
Also, the Daily Cal and many other news outlets err in assuming that we want to be compared to the movements of the ’60s (our parents’ generation). The occupations of the past 2 years are part of the anti-globalization movement which started in the past 10 years, and tactics and demands (against global austerity and fascism) are more in line with that movement than of 45 years ago.