The Importance Of The Free Speech Movement

The Selma Marches led to many advances in the civil rights movement and got the black civil movement really fired up. The DCVL and organizers from the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee started working for voting registration for blacks in 1963. The white resistance to black voter registration was very extreme in the south. Racist southerners would threaten blacks that would try to register even though it was completely within the black’s rights. Eventually the DCVL asked the Southern Christian Leadership Conference; which was led by Martin Luther King Jr. for help.

Martin Luther King stood up for African-American rights. He was the leader and spokesperson for the African-Americans in Montgomery, Alabama, during the year-long bus boycott to protest segregation from December 5, 1955-December 20, 1956. King believed that both races should be treated equally. He traveled around the country and the world, talking about non-violent protests and equal rights. King traveled to India in 1959 and met Gandhi, who had inspired him.

As a result of the war, universities nationwide in the sixties were in uproar as students attempted to express their opinions through both violent and nonviolent means. Anti-Vietnam protests were first displayed through teach-ins that took place during the fall and spring semesters (“Campus Unrest” 1). These events were large discussions held on college campuses where students, faculty and administration met to openly learn about and discuss issues relating to the war. Teach-ins were efforts for Americans in relation to universities to voice their opinions and get the attention of government officials with the prayer that United States involvement in the war would not continue to increase at such a rapid rate. They stressed the importance of peace, not violence.

King founded the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) to promote others to fight against segregation a year after the bus boycott. Then, in April 1960, he found the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). These newly formed coalitions led to "dramatic success for the movement, but also ushered in a period of heightened tension and social turmoil in the 1960s. By 1968, he was winning the hearts and minds of more and more Americans on both sides of the color line. His efforts successfully merged the a... ... middle of paper ... ...

The students fought the censorship, saying that for something to be legally obscene, it must be "patently offensive, appeal to prurient interest, and, taken as a whole, lack serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific values," (Martinson 3). The students took the principal to court, claiming that he violated their First Amendment rights. Evidently, the students lost the long-fought battle in court, whose decision forever hindered student journalists' voices in the media. The ongoing fight for student freedom of expression was not just evident in the Hazelwood case, but was evident in many cases before it. Only three years before, in the case of Bethel v. Fraser, the United States Supreme Court said: Schools must teach by example the shared values of a civilized social order and to this end the constitutional rights of students in public schools are not automatically coextensive with the rights of adults and other settings (Foerstel 219).

This created an extremely controlled environment and severely impinged on the students rights to free speech. In reaction to such limitations, college students across the country decided to do something about it. The Student Protest Movement (SPM) began at the University of California at Berkeley in the Fall of 1964. In September of that year Berkley campus authorities declared the area directly outside of the main entrance to the school off limits for advocates of civil rights and other causes. For years the strip had been accepted as a place where students could hand out pamphlets, solicit names for petitions, and sign people up.

This speech touched many young blacks searching for freedom. This social change that Martin Luther King was involved in was so touching and made a huge impact on society that he received the Noble Peace Prize on December 10, 1964. King's tone helped change the lives of many blacks, because he promised them hope and freedom. King also gave up his identity as a minister to focus on the Civil Rights Act, in which they walked the freedom walk with 125,000 people on June 23, 1963. King put his life on the line with each and every black that suffered the harsh incidents.

Martin Luther organized sit-ins, marches and boycotts. This was otherwise known as civil disobedience. King believed that it was now time to end segregation and discrimination in the South and throughout the entire country (Civil Rights 84). King helped bring together many blacks that were looking for peaceful solutions to racial oppression in the United States. King became the youngest man ever to win the Nobel peace prize in 1964.

Concerts like the Monterey Pop Festival and Woodstock brought potential voters and youth together to unite their views and to voice freedom. Such performers as Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young and Country Joe and the Fish used their songs to present their political views. . According to Bill Belmont's research of the band, Country Joe and the Fish started as a political band for entertainment. In 1965, members of the Free Speech Movement of the University of California - Berkeley organized a number of demonstrations against the war in Vietnam.

(Martin 3) January 1957 some of the leaders behind the Montgomery bus boycott had assembled in Atlanta, Georgia, and had later founded the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, or SCLC. The SCLS had brought churches and some clergy from across the South, and which was created to coordinate protest inspired by the success of the bus boycott in Alabama. As its president the SCLC elected King, for he had played a major role in its creation, and had, from the beginning, and he had the outlook and intellectual spirit of the group. (Martin explains that his role as president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference demands that he assist local organizations that call upon him) (Martin 2). He did much of the SCLC’s fundraisings by preaching and speaking in the North as well as South... ... middle of paper ... ...e believed essential to its success) (Peake 3).