Dec. 3, 1964 - The law broke the student siege of Sproul Hall at the University of California at Berkeley today with a bloodless mass arrest of 801 defiant sit-in demonstrators.
Nearly 500 state, county, city, and campus officers carried out the arrests for 12 hours on orders from Governor Edmund Brown.
But strife on the campus persisted, and a campus-wide strike was called for tomorrow. Stephen Weissman, chairman of a committee representing teaching assistants and graduate students, announced tonight that the committee had voted to lead a strike of all students and paralyze the vast institution starting tomorrow and lasting until noon Tuesday.
The lawmen hauled deliberately limp demonstrators from debris-strewn Sproul Hall in a steady stream and sped them off in buses and vans to three locations for booking and imprisonment: the Alameda County prison farm at Santa Rita, the Oakland City Prison, and the National Guard Armory at San Lorenzo.
When Mario Savio, a protest leader, was taken away by the police, he shouted, “This is wonderful — wonderful! We’ll bring the university to our terms.”
Another leader, Arthur Goldberg, said as he was led away, “Good. The kids have learned more about democracy here than they could in 40 years of classes. This is a perfect example of how the State of California plays the game.”
Mr. Savio is a New Yorker who is the president of the Berkeley chapter of SNCC, the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee. He was involved last spring in recruiting demonstrators who slept in at the Sheraton Palace Hotel. He was arrested at that time on a charge of disturbing the peace. He also worked in the SNCC program in Mississippi last summer.
Another leader of the Free Speech Movement is Bettina Aptheker. She is a member of the W.E.B. DeBois Club, which has been described by Department of Justice sources as a front among college students for the Communist party.
The dispute that led to the arrests began last September, when the university administration announced it would no longer permit the use of a strip of campus property for soliciting political funds and recruiting protest demonstrators.
The students objected, and a series of demonstrations resulted. Eight students were suspended, and the demonstrations were stepped up.
The mass arrests created a situation unlike any ever experienced by a major university in this country. Confused faculty and student groups called “emergency” meetings but did not get together on any concrete proposals.
But Governor Brown, taking full responsibility for the arrest order, made it clear that the law will be enforced on the strife-ridden Berkeley campus.
“Things could have been worse,” said Brown. “We could have used tear gas.”
The Governor said he felt he did the right thing because “the overriding matter became one between the people of the State of California versus the demonstrators.”
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