Word: savio
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Mario Savio, the leader of Berkeley's Free Speech Movement whose demonstrations this fall have--as he puts it--brought the University of California "to a grinding halt," seems curiously unprepared for the role in which he has been cast. Today this 22-year-old junior is acclaimed by his followers, and acknowledged by his opponents, as a charismatic orator whose public speaking has amassed powerful popular support at the Berkeley campus. Six months ago he was unknown to the students who now risk jail in support of the FSM, and he stuttered so badly that even his private conversation...
When he returned to Berkeley this fall, after a summer of civil rights work in McComb, Mississippi, Savio began to speak at rallies against University restrictions on campus political activity. As the rallies grew from a few hundred students to a few thousand, Savio became the feature attraction. In October, when 1500 demonstrators sat down around a patrol car and prevented police from removing an arrested student, Savio took off his shoes and climbed atop the car to address his followers. Commenting on the spectacle, the San Francisco Chronicle called Savio "a silver-tongued orator...
...Savio's speeches are not great rhetoric. He neither harangues the crowd with emotional challenges nor convinces it with intellectual precision. When he spoke in Lowell Lecture Hall last Friday, his tone was personal and appealing. As he moved slowly through a rambling account of the riots at Berkeley, castigating Kerr for turning the university into a "knowledge factory," he paused frequently to gather his thoughts. When he made a point and saw that the audience was pleased, he would cock his head back and grin. After reciting some story of unfairness by the administration, he suddenly stopped...
...With Savio's emergence as chief spokesman for the FSM, two schools of thought have developed to account for him. To his friends--and there are many--he is a brave and honest spokesman who seeks simply to extend First Amendment freedoms to the Berkeley campus. To his enemies--and there are many--he is a party-line Marxist revolutionary, bent on destroying the University of California. The first view is inadequate; the second is simply wrong...
...Savio was reluctant to predict that the University Regents would accept the terms of a peace proposal by Berkeley's Academic Senate. The offer has been endorsed...