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Forty-seven years ago, the US National Guard and armed police violently targeted students and anti-war demonstrators in an unfair fight over a small community park in Berkeley, California.
Later termed the Battle For People's Park, one person was killed and scores injured as police fired shotguns indiscriminately in a bid to disperse demonstrators on the Berkeley campus on 15 May, 1969.
With the blessing of then-California governor Ronald Reagan, armed police and soldiers carrying bayonets tackled protesters, many of them students, in a small park set up on unused University of California property.
Earmarked for a
million dollar development, the area was left vacant by the university and transformed by students into a community park.
On April 18 1969, an article entitled
'Hear Ye, Hear Ye' in the Berkeley Barb informed readers about the guerilla pop-up park. "A park will be built this Sunday between Dwight and Haste," it read. "The land is owned by the university which tore down a lot of beautiful houses in order to build a swamp."
"In a year the university will build a cement type expensive parking lot which will fiercely compete with the other lots for the allegiance of Berkeley's Buicks.
"On Sunday we will stop this shit. Bring shovels, hoses, chains, grass, paints, flowers, trees, bull dozers, top soil, colorful smiles, laughter and lots of sweat ... we want the park to be a cultural, political freak out and rap center for the Western world."
'Lay down some rules'Three years previously, Hollywood actor turned conservative Republican politician Ronald Reagan's gubernatorial campaign vowed to clean up the "mess" at Berkeley, describing the university's hippy elements and atmosphere as "contrary to our standards of human behavior".
In 1967, Governor Reagan expressed his contempt for liberal activism on university campuses in a letter to
San Francisco State College, suggesting it was time to take on the "neurotics" running California's colleges and "lay down some rules of conduct for the students".
"How far do we go in tolerating these people & this trash under the excuse of academic freedom & freedom of expression?"
Bloody ThursdayThe events of Bloody Thursday followed days of tension as rumours spread that the university would attempt to reclaim the People's Park area.
In the week leading up to the riots, Youth International Party member and anti-war activist Stew Albert wrote in the
Berkeley Barbnewspaper that "park commissioners" were not prepared to "let the university piss its fascist thing on our flowers of freedom".
Despite this, University of California executive vice chancellor Earl Cheit said he "expected no conflict" over the park.
He could not have been more wrong as Reagan allowed law enforcement to use "
whatever force is necessary" in their eviction of park inhabitants on May 15.
Thousands of protesters had gathered in the park when police opened fire with shotguns and buckshot. Student
James Rector, 25, died from police gunshot wounds, while another man was blinded in the chaos that unfolded near Telegraph Avenue.
A 1969
police report, held by the Online Archive of California, reveals that more than 400 protesters were picked up in arrests on Bloody Thursday. According to University of California Police Department,
111 police officers were also injured in a riot sparked by the police raid.
At the time, the
Desert Sun newspaper described how Reagan "mobilized a 'substantial number' of Guardsmen and clamped a strict nighttime curfew on the city and campus."
"At least 128 persons were injured in the conflict, including 32 hit by blasts of bird shot from police shotguns," the paper reported.
In the days following Bloody Thursday, riot police and helicopter tear gas were used as crowd control. "Lines of soldiers with fixed bayonets and California Highway Patrolmen prevented the demonstrators from moving off the campus toward city hall," a
Desert Sun report stated.
"Two hours after the aerial gas attack, Highway Patrolmen, Alameda County Sheriff's deputies and police from nearby Oakland swept through the streets near the campus."
Reagan later defended the actions of law enforcement in a press conference televised by
KQED San Francisco.
People's Park Much like camps set up by the more recent Occupy Movement, People's Park became a symbol of opposition towards the political establishment.
The Berkeley community park was set up at a time when the university was a hotbed for counterculture movements and anti-war Vietnam protest.
Today the space still operates as a public park comprising children's play areas, community gardens and a basketball court.
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The Expert Witness Radio Show
Seth Rosenfeld's book on the FBI and UC Berkeley, a culmination of 30 years of work, has already created consternation. It's not just the news that FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover sent agents to spy on Berkeley professors and students starting in the 1940s and worked behind the scenes with Ronald Reagan to get UC President Clark Kerr fired. It's not just Rosenfeld's massive evidence that Hoover twisted the inner workings of the FBI to justify intensive spying on the Free Speech Movement and its leaders, including Mario Savio and Bettina Aptheker. And it's not just the news that top UC Berkeley officials, upset about unrest on campus, worked closely with federal agents to harm the reputations of students and professors they considered subversive.
What has people fired up is Rosenfeld's revelation that Richard Aoki, a revered radical leader best known for providing the first guns to the Black Panthers, was an FBI informant.
In Subversives: The FBI's War on Student Radicals and Reagan's Rise to Power, Rosenfeld notes that Aoki started to work for the FBI shortly after he graduated from Berkeley High in 1956, at a time he was politically conservative. Over the next decade, Aoki become more radical and joined the Young Socialists' Alliance, took a leadership position in the Black Panthers, worked for the Vietnam Day Committee, and became a leader in the Third World Strike at Cal, a protest that led to the formation of the university's Ethnic Studies Program. All that time he was reporting to the FBI, writes Rosenfeld.
Rosenfeld first learned about Aoki when he talked to retired FBI agent Burney Threadgill, Jr., who mentioned he had recruited Aoki to join radical organizations and report on their inner workings. That led Rosenfeld on a search to unearth more about the political activist, including a telephone interview in which Aoki denied he had been an informant, but acknowledged the complexity of the times. Based on this information, as well as a 1967 FBI document that identified Aoki as an "informant" with the code number "T-2," Rosenfeld concluded he worked for the FBI.
Rosenfeld stands by his reporting and says it is difficult for people to believe that Aoki, who has risen to iconic status since his suicide in 2009, was a collaborator.
In some ways, it is unfortunate that the revelation about Aoki has captured the majority of the media attention for Subversives. The book, which is the culmination of a 30-year investigation and five lawsuits against the FBI, is a masterpiece of reporting and writing with much deeper significance than the one fact that Aoki was an informant.
Subversives details the prolonged and systematic attempt of Hoover to undermine Berkeley's student protest movements, all because he was convinced Communist manipulators were clandestinely controlling the students. The book also reveals for the first time just how closely the actor Ronald Reagan worked with the FBI in the 1950s to pass on information about actors and other Hollywood professionals rumored to be communists. (The FBI, Rosenfeld noted, considered Reagan "one of its best contacts ever"). Reagan, Rosenfeld reveals, was not paid by the FBI but he benefited from his close relationship with Hoover, as the agency FBI helped at least two of Reagan's children, Maureen and Michael, get out of trouble. The book also details how Reagan used concern about the student protest movements' alleged connection to Communism (false allegations trumped up by Hoover) as political fodder than allowed him to defeat Gov. Edmund "Pat" Brown in 1966.
See also: Richard Aoki. The Man Who Armed The Panthers....[Link]