By Julia Stein for Counter Punch - After graduating UC Berkeley in 1968, I returned to Berkeley to visit friends May 1969 when People’s Park was being built. I had gotten arrested for Free Speech in 1964, and had seen for months how the “mainstream” press had attacked our non-violent Free Speech Movement (FSM). For months my boss told me that she believed the Oakland Tribune newspapers that the leaders of the FSM were Communists. For months I said the leaders of FSM were civil rights activists except for one Communist—Bettina Aptheker who was a moderating influence. My months of denials never affected my boss at all. After I got out of jail, I called my parents the next night, telling them I had been arrested in the sit-in. FSM had run orderly sit-in, giving us instructions to stay out of administration’s offices, which we scrupulously followed. My mother asked, “The LA Times said the people in the sit-in went in and broke into somebody’s office.” “No, we didn’t,” I said. Later we heard that a high administration bureaucrat at Berkeley had told that fallacious bit of news to the press who reprinted it until a second high official said, “No, my office was not broken into. I just keep a messy office.”
