On October 1, 1964, Jack Weinberg calmly waited in the backseat of a campus-police squad car as thousands of Berkeley students sat down around it. For 32 hours they blocked the cops from taking him away and used the roof of the squad car as a speaker’s platform. Earlier in the day Weinberg had been the first person arrested for violating the university’s new rules restricting the distribution of political literature on campus. The Berkeley Free Speech Movement was born, giving the New Left student movement of the 1960s a dramatic push forward.
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At the University of Buffalo he started out as a math student, though he was also interested in philosophy and attracted by the beat-generation writers Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg. He sees his political roots in their romantic vision of the heroic self, which echoed the popularized existentialism of the day. “From Jack Kerouac’s On the Road to Goethe’s Faust I took the same message–that life was not in the achieving but in the striving, that value was not in the goal but in the quest for the goal.”
In Berkeley he became involved in the civil rights movement, especially the Berkeley Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), which he says filled a void in his life. He also went back to school at the University of California. In the summer of 1963 he participated in civil rights actions in South Carolina and Arkansas. When he returned to Berkeley that fall, he says, “civil rights was my whole identity.” He dropped out of school again, began helping organize major civil rights demonstrations, and became chairman of the new campus CORE chapter. He was recruiting for CORE on campus; the university wanted the recruiting stopped. And that led to the epochal confrontation that became the Free Speech Movement.
He was now working at a print shop and becoming increasingly involved in Greenpeace activities and a campaign to stop all discharging of toxic contaminants into the Great Lakes. When Greenpeace advertised for a Great Lakes project coordinator in 1989, he applied. It seemed like his dream job, though partly because he’s frustrated by internal Greenpeace organizational problems he’s decided to leave later this year.
