The commanding victory of the California Civil Rights Initiative set off predictable cries of horror from the state’s liberals. A collection of advocacy groups, including the ACLU, immediately challenged its constitutionality in federal court. Twenty-three students were arrested for illegally occupying a bell tower at the University of California at Berkeley in protest. The Los Angeles City Council declared it wouldn’t be enforcing the measure. Mario Savio, the radical activist who began the Free Speech Movement at Berkeley in 1964, died Wednesday — and his friends blamed the anxiety caused by CCRI for his demise.
Then there was the guerrilla war against an editorial in the Berkeley student newspaper, the Daily Californian, that endorsed CCRI. Nearly all 23,000 copies of the paper were stolen (the largest such theft of student newspapers anywhere, according to the Student Press Law Center). Word of the pro-CCRI editorial had leaked out; a delivery driver reported seeing someone follow him at each of his stops, apparently confiscating the papers along the way. Berkeley, which actually has a monument to “free speech,” has once again revealed that it’s free speech for me, but not for thee.
