The Browns of California Read online

  Savio, a junior and a philosophy major, led dozens of students into Sproul Hall, where they blocked egress and trapped the deans inside. A group of faculty members attempted to mediate between students and administration, periodically updating the crowd. By late afternoon, demonstrators voted by acclamation to withdraw from Sproul Hall but continue to surround the police car until charges against the original eight students were dropped.

  The governor’s reaction was not sympathetic. “This is not a matter of freedom of speech26 on the campuses,” Pat said that afternoon after a speech in San Francisco. “This will not be tolerated. We must have—and will continue to have—law and order on our campuses.”

  By evening, the crowd in Sproul Plaza had swelled to more than twenty-five hundred, alternately shouting, singing, and swearing. The roof of the police car sagged as speaker after speaker used it as a platform to address the crowd. Savio urged calm as fraternity brothers threw eggs and burning cigarettes at the demonstrators. The sun rose on a plaza strewn with sleeping bags, books, blankets, and debris, the lone police car still stranded in the middle. Thousands more joined the crowd as negotiations continued and police began to mass around the perimeter of the campus.

  Around seven thirty P.M., Savio mounted the police car one more time to read the agreement that had been reached: Students would refrain from illegal activity; a committee of students, faculty, and administrators would make recommendations on political activity on campus; the university would not press charges against Weinberg; and the proposed suspension of the other students would be submitted to a committee of the Academic Senate for review. The next day, the new student organization was formally announced as the Free Speech Movement.

  For a month, an uneasy truce prevailed, punctuated by occasional sit-ins and rallies. Students set up tables and violated regulations with only sporadic, minimal enforcement. The Regents modified rules to permit fundraising and recruitment, but they refused to clear the records of those sanctioned in recent months. Unexpectedly, over the Thanksgiving break, the chancellor informed four students, including Savio, that they would be disciplined for their actions back in October.

  On December 2, hundreds of students gathered in the plaza and Savio addressed them from the steps of Sproul Hall: “There is a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can’t take part, you can’t even tacitly take part, and you’ve got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you’ve got to make it stop. And you’ve got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it, that unless you’re free, the machine will be prevented from working at all.”

  As Joan Baez sang “We Shall Overcome” and a song recently written by Bob Dylan, “The Times They Are a-Changin’,” almost eight hundred students rushed into Sproul Hall. With blankets, books, and food, they settled in for a well-organized, orderly occupation of the administration building. The fourth floor was designated for quiet study, the second floor for classes and showing movies.

  Kerr, a Quaker and a labor mediator, favored police intervention only as a last resort. While he did not condone the students’ actions, he understood why they felt betrayed. He spoke twice with the governor, who was in Los Angeles at a gala hospital fundraiser headlined by Frank Sinatra and Bob Hope. Pat agreed to wait until the morning and then accompany Kerr into Sproul Hall to try to negotiate a peaceful end. Hours later, an inspector from the California Highway Patrol and Assistant Alameda County District Attorney Ed Meese reached out and told Pat the situation was out of control. They urged him to send in state police. Pat agreed, without consulting Kerr. He was, as he said often, a former law enforcement official who believed laws must be obeyed.

  Police stormed Sproul Hall around three in the morning and over the next twelve hours carried out more than six hundred students, dragging their limp bodies one by one down flights of stairs as cameras rolled and the crowd sang “We Shall Not Be Moved” and “Ain’t Gonna Let Governor Brown Turn Me ’Round.” Of the 735 people arrested, all but 47 were students, 80 percent of them undergraduates.

  “It isn’t often that a great university suddenly goes smash,27 yet this is what happened to the Berkeley campus during the first week of December, 1964,” Sheldon Wolin, one of the faculty leaders who supported the students, wrote a few weeks later. “Campus authority vanished, academic routines were reduced to a shambles, and the prophecy of Mario Savio was fulfilled: the ‘machine’ came to a ‘grinding halt.’ ”

  Wolin, who helped craft the resolutions that brought the machine back to life, argued that the Free Speech Movement “rediscovered” the democratic political process. The students were idealistic and nonviolent. In pictures of the October sit-in, the policeman was smiling. The Faculty Senate’s support of the students was instrumental in persuading the administration to back down. An angry, divided Board of Regents finally accepted Kerr’s recommendation to endorse the faculty resolutions, which included amnesty and broadening free speech to include political activity. After a week of strikes and strife, some semblance of normality resumed.

  Pat Brown was hurt, outraged, bewildered. He could not comprehend why students who should be grateful had flouted the law. He lacked advisers who might have helped him understand the students’ alienation and rage, which would soon intensify and turn against the war in Vietnam and the university’s role in scientific research for military purposes. “What had been peaceful demonstrations, which I have always protected, had turned into violations of state law28 and the actual threat of anarchy,” Pat wrote to the many constituents who questioned his actions. “I took a strong stand to preserve law and order; but I have been working just as hard to guarantee that the students on campus are not denied their civil liberties.”

  Student grievances broadened into an attack on what they dubbed the “knowledge factory,” a research-oriented institution where undergraduates could easily spend four years without speaking directly to a professor. “These students broke the rules and the law in an agonizing effort to compel an Administration which, by its unwillingness to listen to their just claims and to treat them as participating members of a community of the intellect, inevitably brought about its own moral downfall29 and forfeited its claim to willing obedience,” Wolin wrote.

  One of Wolin’s former students, Jerry Brown, had a ringside seat to the unfolding student protests. Through a mutual friend, he had arranged a phone call between his father and Savio early in the confrontation. The conversation resolved little. Though Jerry empathized with the portrayal of Berkeley as a mechanistic knowledge factory, he, like his father, had little tolerance for unlawful protests. Jerry had graduated from Yale and started work in the fall of 1964 as a clerk to Mathew Tobriner, whom Pat had elevated to the California Supreme Court. An esteemed judge who had his pick of clerks in a highly competitive process, Tobriner accepted Jerry at once when his friend’s son requested one of the coveted positions.

  “He has a thoughtful mind30 and an original point of view; he has a fine and contagious enthusiasm and a sensitive feeling of obligation to his community. He is a liberal in the best sense,” Tobriner wrote to Pat. “I will consider it a privilege to have him with me, and I think we will have lots of fun together.”

  For part of his clerkship, Jerry shared the ground floor of a Victorian house in Berkeley with his law school friend Tony Kline, also a Supreme Court clerk. Most of their Yale classmates were from the East Coast, and historically the path from Yale law had led to a New York firm or a clerkship. National firms did not yet have offices in California, but Los Angeles firms like O’Melveny & Myers began to show up on the East Coast radar. Jerry’s class of 1964 broke tradition when a significant number of graduates took jobs in California, in part because of interest in the largest state at the forefront of the 1960s revolutions, and in part because the California Supreme Court had established a reputation as arguably the best in the country.

  Tobriner
, key to that reputation, found his new clerk more like Bernice than Pat, a quick-witted loner. His work showed a willingness to improvise and a reluctance to be bound by precedent. He earned another distinction, as the only one of Tobriner’s clerks to fail the bar exam. Jerry had not bothered to study much. His father arranged for tutoring and settled his son in a third-floor bedroom of the Governor’s Mansion. He took the exam again in March, and passed.

  On June 14, 1965, Pat and Bernice sat in the front row of Veterans Memorial Auditorium in San Francisco to watch their son sworn in to the California bar. “It’s a big day31 in his life,” Pat said, “and it is a big day in mine.” Asked about his future plans, Jerry said: “I have some political ambitions, when the time is right.”

  He did not explain until many decades later the moment in the Mansion that had triggered those ambitions. While studying for the bar, a task he found tedious, Jerry would wander out onto the stair landing to eavesdrop on conversations downstairs. One day, he overheard his father engaged in a heated dispute with Assembly Speaker Jesse Unruh, a Democrat who had become an adversary rather than an ally. Unruh argued that it was his turn to run for governor in 1966. Pat denied he had ever agreed to step down after two terms. The conversation was about power. Jerry found it riveting.32

  Pat, determined to run for a third term in part to block Unruh, knew he would face a difficult campaign. In August 1965, he and Bernice set off on a month-long European summer vacation that would be his last long respite. So it happened that when another California city became a symbol of protest and mayhem, the governor was in Greece.

  Among the many things that had increased along with the explosive growth in Southern California were income inequality and de facto segregation. By 1965, the poor were concentrated in a heavily black swath of south Los Angeles, while the white middle class moved farther and farther from the center, to self-contained suburban enclaves. In four communities in the center of the city,33 seventy-five thousand whites moved out between 1950 and 1960, and more than a hundred thousand blacks moved in.

  Between 1940 and 1965, the population of Los Angeles County tripled, while the black population increased almost tenfold. Many came from the South seeking the promise of the Golden State and found instead restrictive housing covenants, racist police, and jobs that were claimed by returning veterans. By 1965, the map of heavily black neighborhoods and the map of poverty had largely the same contours. Two thirds of the approximately 650,000 blacks in Los Angeles lived in and around the community of Watts, which had become almost 90 percent black. As families crammed into dilapidated housing projects, density increased, unemployment among men climbed to 35 percent, and the median income declined. Two thirds of the students did not graduate from high school. The population was young, poor, and disillusioned.34 The passage of Prop 14 had reinforced whites’ commitment to segregation, one more effort to roll back the gains that had been made during the war.

  The sprawling, carcentric geography and culture of Los Angeles added problems not found in other urban ghettos. Los Angeles had the worst public transportation system of any major city, leaving the carless with extremely limited options for shopping, entertainment, or basic services. Neighborhood stores sold outdated food at inflated prices. A pediatrician in Watts saw patients in groups to accommodate his caseload of ten thousand. Because most people in Los Angeles drove, and there was little reason for nonresidents to drive through Watts, poor people in the center of the city became largely invisible. Their physical and social isolation made their rising anger and desperation easy to ignore.

  That indifference was shattered by a sequence of events that began with a police stop in Watts on Thursday, August 12, 1965. A fight broke out after a black motorist was arrested for drunk driving. A crowd gathered, accusations of police brutality spread, and violence escalated. Residents, who had long complained about police harassment, pelted officers with rocks and concrete chunks. Skirmishes continued through the night. A meeting the next morning failed to calm the crowds. Los Angeles police chief William Parker asked for a thousand National Guard troops. Hale Champion, Pat’s finance director, reached the governor in Athens and told him to come home as quickly as possible.

  For several days, Watts was torched and looted, mobs roamed the streets, and shots rang out as National Guard troops struggled to gain control. Fires were visible miles away. Scenes that resembled foreign war zones filled television screens. Traditional sources of leadership in the black community, such as churches and the NAACP, were based outside Watts in more affluent areas and largely rejected by the community. Martin Luther King Jr. came to Watts during the riots, and he was booed.

  Pat reached Los Angeles late Saturday night after a twenty-four-hour journey, during which he used layovers in Rome, New York, and Omaha to talk with state and federal officials. He toured Watts on Sunday and held a news conference. “Most of us, whatever our race, now stand hesitantly between fear and hope,”35 he noted, “not only in Los Angeles, but in New York, in Philadelphia, in Chicago, in Detroit—all across the land … it is here in Los Angeles, however, that fear seems closest and hope the most distant at this hour—here that the greatest toll of riot, arson and bloodshed in our nation’s recent history haunts our minds and hearts, clouds our vision and briefly blights our faith in ourselves and in our neighbors.” He added a heartfelt caution: “While poverty is no excuse for violence, let us remember, too, that violence is no excuse for indifference to poverty.”

  By Monday,36 there were thirteen thousand National Guard troops in the curfew area, and the worst of the rioting was over. On Tuesday, the National Guard began to withdraw. By the end of the week, there had been four thousand arrests. Five hundred buildings were burned and looted, with damages estimated at $40 million. More than a thousand people were wounded. Thirty-four died.

  William Warne, the director of the California Department of Water Resources, saw images on television that reminded him of scenes he had witnessed when he worked in Iran and Korea, mobs that had “slipped all restraints37 … young men and women smashing windows and setting fires; children laughing as they and their mothers carried home loot.” Warne felt so strongly about the need for a government project to address the underlying causes of the disturbance that he proposed taking on that task and handing off the water project. “People said plainly, if inarticulately, that they saw the privileges around them but had no contact with the people who enjoyed them, and they resented that of which they were not a part,” Warne wrote to the governor. “Why is it that the American genius is able to diagnose the ills of others and to prescribe and apply remedies, but has not recognized, let alone treated, the illness at home?”

  Pat did not take him up on the offer. He appointed a high-level commission and dispatched his top aide for human rights, Bill Becker, to the riot area. Becker had grown up in New Jersey and taken a job organizing farmworkers in the San Joaquin Valley in 1948 when his child’s health required a hot, dry climate. He went on to work for the Jewish Labor Committee in San Francisco and formed a coalition that lobbied for civil rights legislation, including the Rumford Act. After its passage, Pat hired Becker. In Watts, Becker spent weeks in conversations and meetings before filing a report. “Although they express many different grievances and have a variety of attitudes toward the riot, these people reflected an almost universal bitterness38 toward the ‘establishment,’ both white and Negro,” Becker wrote to the governor. “They do not feel beaten or humbled, but rather more self-confident and even more united.”

  Becker concluded that their anger focused on the police in part because that was the only government agency most people encountered. They complained about Los Angeles mayor Sam Yorty and Police Chief Parker, about being overcharged by discourteous shopkeepers for inferior produce, about slum landlords and streets that were cleaned only before elections. The teenagers talked about rats eating popcorn around their feet and running across the screen during movies. They described libraries with so few books they were use
less for school assignments. Becker summed up their feelings: “We want the kind of life the white man has.”

  The commission chaired by former CIA director John McCone held hearings, took testimony, and issued a report that pleased no one. The report was criticized as too lenient by conservatives who favored harsher law enforcement and denounced by liberals who argued it glossed over underlying causes of the riot and downplayed racism. The U.S. Commission on Civil Rights said the recommendations were for “aspirin where surgery is required.”

  Pat understood the political consequences as he headed into an election year. “The white backlash39 is understandably very severe and a governor must in every utterance he makes maintain the rule of law,” Pat wrote to the columnist Drew Pearson. “On the other hand, I have a deep and, I hope, understanding sympathy for the Negro and would rather not be reelected Governor than to let them think some of the white people do not appreciate the terrible problems of poverty and prejudice.”