Following the
Free Speech Movement at
Berkeley, there was a series of far less successful
riots and
protests on campus that became known as the Filthy Speech Movement. A follow up movement to the first, the Filthy Speech Movement occurred in
1965 when
nine people engaged in separate
public displays of obscenity, in protest of Campus policies against
obscene speech. It all started when John Thomson, a radical who had been attracted to Berkeley because of all the publicity surrounding the
Free Speech Movement, sat down on the steps of the
Student Union and held a sign across his chest that read ‘
Fuck.’ He was
arrested for obscenity.
A
graduate student witnessed the
arrest, and was disgusted by the actions of the
police in arresting the freshman for obscenity. The graduate student’s name was
Michael Klein, and he went inside a public
hall on campus and brought out his copy of
Lady Chatterly’s Lover. He
read aloud from the work a paragraph concerning
copulation, and was subsequently arrested.
In response to the arrests, there were a series of
rallies on campus. The major speaker at the Filthy Speech Movement rallies was
Art Goldberg, who despite his rather
colorful deliveries made some interesting points with his
presentations. He accused society of
hypocrisy in not allowing
public use of a word common in
private conversation. Also, he believed that just because the word was
classified as obscene did not necessarily make its use automatically
offensive.
However, these points appealed to a
mindset that many did not hold. His main
influence came from how he drew a connection between the attempt to
regulate the content of speech through
obscenity laws and the
Free Speech Movement’s protest against
restrictions on political speech. He carried this point further to say that in the future the administration or the police could regulate any speech that they wanted by declaring it to be obscene.
Yet the Filthy Speech Movement did not spark the
Berkeley campus as had the
Free Speech Movement. It seemed that most of the students
opposed the public use of filthy speech regardless, and were thus supportive of the
administration’s policies. The movement was also greatly hindered when
Mario Savio, the
charismatic leader of the
Free Speech Movement, decided not to support this new effort and indeed voiced his opinion that the issue detracted from the
dignity of free speech.
Works Consulted
“Campus Disorders.” New Republic. 160: 5-7. March 29 1969.
“Campus Violence.” National Review. 21: 477-8. May 20 1969.
Crawford, Kenneth. “Campus Revolution.” Il Newsweek. 73: 39. June 2 1969.
Rorabaugh, W.J. Berkeley at War. New York, USA: Oxford University Press. 1989.