May 15: People’s Park

A gathering at the University of California Berkeley campus of 3,000 people to discuss the Israeli-Arab conflict turned into a march down Telegraph Avenue to People’s Park on this date in 1969, when student body President Dan Siegel shouted from the free speech platform, “Let’s take the park!” People’s Park was a 2.8-acre derelict lot that had been turned into a park and garden by local residents and activists, stirred by Yippie founder Stew Albert’s articles in the Berkeley Barb. (To read eulogies for Stew Albert, an influential activist who died in 2006, click here.) The place had been seized and fenced off by nearly 300 cops, sent in earlier that day by California Governor Ronald Reagan to put an end to the popular occupation of the site. The demonstrators, eventually swelling to 6,000, were met with tear gas, clubbings, and buckshot. At least 128 of them were treated at local hospitals for serious injuries, and student James Rector died of his buckshot wounds. Reagan then sent in 2,700 National Guard troops to occupy Berkeley for two weeks. Today, according to Dan Siegel, the park “has now become this somewhat forlorn urban park . . . I think . . . if the university turned off its Wi-Fi, they’d get bigger demonstrations than they would for People’s Park.” To see a video about People’s Park then and now, click here.

“If it takes a bloodbath, let’s get it over with. No more appeasement.”—Ronald Reagan