Is It Time for the Anti-Trump Resistance to Non-Violently Place Our ‘Bodies Upon the Gears and Wheels of the Machine’?

In the fall of 1964, over 60 years ago, the young students on the campus of the University of California, Berkeley found themselves in an untenable situation. Campus activists had set up information tables in Sproul Plaza on campus and had solicited donations for causes connected to the Civil Rights Movement. Some of them had traveled with the Freedom Riders and had worked to register African American voters in Mississippi that previous summer.  At the time, however, existing rules for fundraising for political parties was limited exclusively to the Democratic and Republican school clubs.

In mid-September, a school dean announced that existing University regulations prohibiting advocacy of political causes or candidates, outside political speakers, recruitment and fundraising by student organizations would be “strictly enforced.” Two weeks later, a graduate student sitting at one of the civil rights tables refused to show his identification to campus police and was immediately arrested and placed inside a campus police car on Sproul.

Suddenly and spontaneously hundreds of students who witnessed the arrest, surrounded the police car, sat down and refused to budge. While the graduate student sat in the backseat, student activist leaders mounted the car and began to give speeches on free speech and against political restrictions. Students remained around the car for 32 hours and at one point, there were an estimated 3,000 students blocking its movement. People used the car as a speaker’s podium and held a continuous public discussion on rights, free speech and student liberties. This continued until charges against the graduate student were dropped.

It was the first mass act of civil disobedience on an American college campus in the 1960s and was the birth of the Free Speech Movement. Students insisted that the university administration lift the ban of on-campus political activities and acknowledge the students’ right to free speech and academic freedom. But, negotiations with the administration broke down, so in early December, between 1,500 and 4,000 students went into Sproul Hall as a last resort in order to re-open negotiations with the administration and sat-in. Other grievances included the fact that four of their leaders were being singled out for punishment.

The sit-in was orderly; students opened their books and studied; they watched movies and sang folk songs. Joan Baez appeared to give moral support and lead in the singing. “Freedom classes” were held by teaching assistants and a special Channukah service took place in the main lobby. On the steps of Sproul Hall, one of the activist leaders Mario Savio gave a famous speech.

He began by saying:

“… [W]e’re a bunch of raw materials that don’t mean to be — have any process upon us. Don’t mean to be made into any product! Don’t mean — Don’t mean to end up being bought by some clients of the University, be they the government, be they industry, be they organized labor, be they anyone! We’re human beings!”

Then Savio launched into words that have become immortalized:

“There’s 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 passively 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.”

Police arrived around 2 a.m., cordoned off Sproul Hall and began making arrests. Up to 800 students were arrested, transported by bus to a jail miles away and then were released on their own recognizance. A month passed and then the university brought charges against the sit-in organizers, but this resulted in even a larger student protest that all but shut down the entire university. Another month passed and all charges were dropped, new rules for political activity on campus were established and the school designated Sproul Hall steps an open discussion area during certain hours of the day and permitted information tables in the Plaza. This applied to the entire student political spectrum, not just liberal causes.

It was the first time that the civil disobedience tactics of the Civil Rights Movement, tactics used by Rosa Parks that had ignited the Montgomery, Alabama Bus Boycott — that was successfully led by Dr. Martin Luther King — were brought to a college campus in the 1960s. These tactics gave the students exceptional leverage to make demands of university administrators, and built the foundation for future protests, such as those against the Vietnam War.

Over the next ten years, the Vietnam War raged and so did the anti-war movement across the nation. From hundreds of building take-overs, sit-ins, dozens of blockades to streets and schools themselves, the oppositional movement utilized an array of civil disobedient tactics. These type of tactics had been honed by Mahatma Gandhi decades earlier and ultimately helped India rid itself of the British Empire. They also echoed the non-violent sit-ins of factories by American workers during the 1930s. And of the San Diego Free Speech Fight over a century ago by the Industrial Workers of the World which resulted in police using water cannons and massive arrests to disperse non-violent protesters. Non-violent civil disobedience.

The Vietnam War was not the last time American students used civil disobedience, or CD. During the late 1970s and early 1980s, students employed CD to resist the US military draft and then the nuclear war build up between the US and Russia. Hundreds of protesters were arrested as they “invaded” missile sites and other nuclear facilities, placing their bodies on the line to block the launch of weapons. These actions helped defuse the grave situation the world had found itself in between two super-powers that were banging the war drums.

When social movements are faced with the hardened intransigence of governments and corporations, when ordinary tactics like letter-writing, petitions, pickets with signs and even massive demonstrations of rallies and marches no longer “work,” then those movements turn by necessity to a different kind of tactic, a tactic that demands a different kind of commitment, a different type of sacrifice. It’s a commitment and sacrifice that expresses a solid blockade of the gears, wheels and levers of the machine that prevent it from working. It’s a stop to the “business as usual” machinations of a society and government that no longer caters to the wants and needs and rights of the people.

In the end, civil disobedience is a tactic by the people who every now and then have to step in and reassert our power. It’s that time now. We need to reassert that power — political power flows from the people.

And at this moment when Trump is sending National Guards to Blue cities, as he contemplates employing the Insurrection Act and bypassing the Posse Comitas Act, we have to ask ourselves, ‘why is now any different from our past when earlier generations of Americans made the sacrifices and risked arrest and imprisonment to halt government abuse and over-reach’ — including today’s Trump authoritarianism?

Why is today any different then when Rosa Parks refused to budge from her bus seat and go to the back? Why is today any different than those days when young African-Americans sat down in segregated lunch counters, or when people — Black and white — took buses into Jim Crow states, risking their lives and welfare? Why is it any different than those years during the Vietnam war when students sat-in and took over administration buildings or built barricades in the streets? They all risked arrest, expulsion, loss of careers.

Why is this any different than those years when Americans faced off against Richard Nixon for his presidential abuse, Jimmie Carter for calling up the draft, Ronald Reagan for threatening nuclear catastrophe? Are our lives and freedoms so choice and so free during the era of Trump that they’re more worthy than these earlier generations of our fellow Americans?

They’re not. It’s time for civil disobedience — it’s non-violent and makes a lasting impression. It speaks of resistance and expresses the collective ‘we’ve had enough!’

For Americans, our history began in protest, in civil disobedience. What was the famous Boston Tea Party but an act of civil disobedience? The resistance to unfair taxes by colonists were more acts in the face of King George.

Today, we face another king. And it turns out we must be willing to save the country, to save democracy itself by risking ourselves. This is no different than before. Our country, our democracy, our Constitution are all worth it.

Yes, it’s time to place our bodies on the gears, the wheels, the levers of the machine. Because the operation of the machine has become so odious — that it is making all of us so sick at heart that we can no longer take part, not even passively.

It’s time to shout “No Kings!” and mean it — and now we have to be ready to enforce it.