Mario Savio

• Mario Savio
• Born: December 8, 1942
• Died: November 6, 1996

Was an activist, founder of the Free Speech Movement at the University of California, Berkeley, and a professor.

Mario Savio was born in Queens, New York. He was a bright student and was the valedictorian of Martin Van Buren High School. After graduating high school, he attended Manhattan College on a scholarship as well as Queens College. He later enrolled at the University of California, Berkeley. Savio was a politically active college student. In 1964, he organized with the Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) during the Freedom Summer efforts to register black voters in Mississippi. During that summer, activists were beaten, jailed, and three were murdered in the small town of Philadelphia, Mississippi.

Upon returning to Berkeley, Savio and other students who had worked with SNCC installed an information table on campus to teach students about the civil rights efforts in the South. The administration did not approve of the openly political activities on the campus and tried to shut down the students’ efforts. Students were shocked when math graduate student Jack Weinberg was arrested for passing out pamphlets on the Civil Rights Movement. As the police tried to escort Weinberg away in their car, students sat down to block the path and yelled for police to release him. Over the ensuing weeks, the sit-in grew to over eight hundred students. The Free Speech Movement at University of California, Berkeley, was born and Mario Savio became a leader.

The students at Berkeley were protesting both campus and national issues. For many, the two were merged. They saw political repression in the South and witnessed the machinations of power in the form of bureaucracies. At the same time, they felt that the campus administration was treating them like children. During the 1960s, college campuses had curfews and dress codes. Men and women were not allowed in each other’s dorm rooms, except during specific visiting hours on certain days. Even then, many had to be chaperoned. Students were rarely involved in campus decisions regarding quality of life issues or their own curriculum. College administrators made all of these decisions, often condescendingly. The students at University of California, Berkeley were fed up.

On December 2, 1964, the administration ordered the eight hundred students arrested. On that day, Savio took off his shoes, climbed atop a police car, and delivered one of the most important speeches of the New Left. His impassioned and impromptu speech explained the frustrations of the students: “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.” During the protests, the faculty supported the students and the administration ultimately capitulated. Students were allowed to have information tables and political groups on campus.

Political conservatives, however, used the protests to win electoral victories. During the sit-ins, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover and Ronald Reagan collaborated to bring down the student protesters. Reagan was running for governor of California at the time and he used the disorder at Berkeley to suggest that conservatives like him would reinstate order. He believed that the Berkeley protestors were just children throwing a fit and were in need of parental discipline. Conservative Republicans across the nation also considered the issue to be an example of the social disorder brought about by liberal Democratic policies.

For his part in the protests, Savio was suspended from Berkeley and was not reinstated. He did not receive his bachelor’s degree until 1984 when he graduated summa cum laude from San Francisco State University. He received his master’s degree from the same university in 1989. After acquiring his degrees, Savio became a college professor in math and philosophy. He taught at San Francisco State University and Modesto Junior College before becoming a full-time professor at Sonoma State University in 1990. Savio died in 1996 at the age of fifty-three.

During the heyday of the New Left, Savio was persecuted and written out the University of California, Berkeley’s history. The university never apologized to him, nor did it attempt to reinstate him. After Savio’s death, however, the university has marketed him as their own saint of free speech. They named the steps to Sproul Hall where he gave his passionate speech the Mario Savio Steps. In 2014, Berkeley hosted half a dozen events celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of the Free Speech Movement.

The Free Speech Movement had a lasting impact on college campuses. After protests sparked by the Free Speech Movement spread across the country, most campus administrations did away with their paternalistic curfews, dress codes, and rules. Students were treated as adults and given voice in the management and decisions of their schools. Savio and the Free Speech Movement helped remake the college campus into a site for youth protest and political engagement.

For further readings see The Essential Mario Savio: Speeches and Writings that Changed America, edited by Robert Cohen, (2014), Robert Cohen, Freedom’s Orator: Mario Savio and the Radical Legacy of the 1960s (2009), Seth Rosenfeld, Subversives: The FBI’s War on Student Radicals and Reagan’s Rise to Power (2012), and Maurice Isserman and Michael Kazin, America Divided: The Civil War of the 1960s (2000).