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Freedom's Orator: Mario Savio and the Radical Legacy of the 1960s
Here is the first biography of Mario Savio, the brilliant leader of Berkeley's Free Speech Movement, the largest and most disruptive student rebellion in American history. Savio risked his life to register black voters in Mississippi in the Freedom Summer of 1964 and did more than anyone to bring daring forms of non-violent protest from the civil rights movement to the struggle for free speech and academic freedom on American campuses. Drawing upon previously unavailable Savio papers, as well as oral histories from friends and fellow movement leaders, Freedom's Orator illuminates Mario's egalitarian leadership style, his remarkable eloquence, and the many ways he embodied the youthful idealism of the 1960s. The book also narrates, for the first time, his second phase of activism against "Reaganite Imperialism" in Central America and the corporatization of higher education. Including a generous selection of Savio's speeches, Freedom's Orator speaks with special relevance to a new
generation of activists and to all who cherish the '60s and democratic ideals for which Savio fought so selflessly.
generation of activists and to all who cherish the '60s and democratic ideals for which Savio fought so selflessly.
544 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2009
6 people are currently reading
178 people want to read
About the author
Robert Cohen
10 books4 followersLibrarian note:
There is more than one author in the GoodReads database with this name
Robert Cohen is a professor of history and social studies in NYU’s Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development. He is an affiliated member of NYU’s History Department. His historical scholarship focuses on politics, higher education, and social protest in twentieth century America. His social studies work links middle and high school teachers with the recent advances in historical scholarship and develops curriculum aimed at teaching their students to explore history as a critical discipline – and one that is characterized by intense and exciting debate.
Source:NYU.
There is more than one author in the GoodReads database with this name
Robert Cohen is a professor of history and social studies in NYU’s Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development. He is an affiliated member of NYU’s History Department. His historical scholarship focuses on politics, higher education, and social protest in twentieth century America. His social studies work links middle and high school teachers with the recent advances in historical scholarship and develops curriculum aimed at teaching their students to explore history as a critical discipline – and one that is characterized by intense and exciting debate.
Source:NYU.
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
July 30, 2014
I had never before heard of Mario Savio, let alone the impact of the Free Speech Movement, until very recently. This book was given to me as part of the freshman "On the Same Page" program at UC Berkeley, which merited the giving of a book to each student at orientation.
It is important to note that this book is composed of four parts: early life, free speech movement, the afterward, and a compilation of speeches/writings by the man himself (Savio).
The book is very informative and detailed regarding Savio's life, presenting a deep analysis into the formation of the free speech movement. This takes into account former politics, WWII, the Cold War, the racism of the 1950's, the Civil Rights movement of the early 1960s, as well as the personal history of Savio. Savio, though promoted to a celebrity status during the course of the movement, was a part of a militant yet democratic group of students who wanted to protect their first-amendment rights on campus. Savio's skill as a public speaker, surprising due to his childhood stutter, thrust him into the limelight as a leader of the movement. The book details Savio's personal struggles during and after the movement, the reluctance to be heralded as a leader or celebrity, and the moral convictions (and the reasons for them) that led Savio to be such a part of this movement.
Especially in part two, analysis of both his speeches, and pieces of his speeches, are prominent. Though these long passages of analysis may seem initially boring, the reading of the full texts of speeches (found in part 4) allows them to be incredibly useful, and helpful, in the understanding of Savio's motivation (both his own, and how it motivated others).
Though mostly heralded for his role in the FSM, I found part 3 of the book, which discusses his change/decline in political presence, and roles of later activism just as inspiring. Specifically, I appreciated Savio's 1990's activism. Explained in Part 3, with the corresponding texts in part 4, were very convincing and moral arguments regarding affirmative action, immigration, and public spending issues, which are just as relevant today as they were in 1995.
I am very glad that I read this book, and I highly recommend it to those interested in political activism, the 1960's, morality in the face of politics, or college-age students.
It is important to note that this book is composed of four parts: early life, free speech movement, the afterward, and a compilation of speeches/writings by the man himself (Savio).
The book is very informative and detailed regarding Savio's life, presenting a deep analysis into the formation of the free speech movement. This takes into account former politics, WWII, the Cold War, the racism of the 1950's, the Civil Rights movement of the early 1960s, as well as the personal history of Savio. Savio, though promoted to a celebrity status during the course of the movement, was a part of a militant yet democratic group of students who wanted to protect their first-amendment rights on campus. Savio's skill as a public speaker, surprising due to his childhood stutter, thrust him into the limelight as a leader of the movement. The book details Savio's personal struggles during and after the movement, the reluctance to be heralded as a leader or celebrity, and the moral convictions (and the reasons for them) that led Savio to be such a part of this movement.
Especially in part two, analysis of both his speeches, and pieces of his speeches, are prominent. Though these long passages of analysis may seem initially boring, the reading of the full texts of speeches (found in part 4) allows them to be incredibly useful, and helpful, in the understanding of Savio's motivation (both his own, and how it motivated others).
Though mostly heralded for his role in the FSM, I found part 3 of the book, which discusses his change/decline in political presence, and roles of later activism just as inspiring. Specifically, I appreciated Savio's 1990's activism. Explained in Part 3, with the corresponding texts in part 4, were very convincing and moral arguments regarding affirmative action, immigration, and public spending issues, which are just as relevant today as they were in 1995.
I am very glad that I read this book, and I highly recommend it to those interested in political activism, the 1960's, morality in the face of politics, or college-age students.
July 4, 2020
Where do we learn to obey and that some people are worse than others? You learn it in the family; [not] out of a book. You learn in the family that it's not what you do but who you are. If you have the wrong kind of genitalia then you are in one class. And if you have the right kind, you're in another kind. Later on, you can transfer that kind of learning to other things, but it is very important lesson learnt in the home and very early; that it's okay for whole classes of people to be above the other on the basis of what they are and not what they do.
January 1, 2022
In the fall of 1964, onSproul Plaza of the UC Berkeley campus in Oakland, a young physics student climbed on top of a parked police car and made a speech. The car was surrounded by several thousand students, all sitting on the pavement, making a coordinated effort to prevent the police from approaching it and driving it away. This was the beginning of the Free Speech Movement and the student on the police car was Mario Savio, its main spokesperson. The Free Speech Movement began when the administrators banned political speech at Berkeley, primarily to prevent student activists from educating others about the Civil Rights Movement which was approaching its peak at the time. Robert Cohen’s biography Freedom’s Orator: Mario Savio and the Radical Legacy of the 1960s does a quality job of bringing the days of the FSM to life for readers in our current times.
As any biographer would, Cohen starts off with the family upbringing of the young subject, showing how Mario Savio’s childhood prepared him for his role in later life. His parents were working class immigrants from Sicily who raised Savio in Brooklyn. The youth was an academic high achiever who suffered from a severe stutter that was caused by anxiety and got worse when in the presence of authority figures. Cohen returns to this fact repeatedly throughout the book to illustrate how overcoming this problem propelled Savio to be an advocate of free speech and an effective speech-maker throughout the rest of his life. Other contributing factors in Savio’s development into a political activist were his grandfather’s membership in the fascist party of Mussolini and the trauma of childhood sexual abuse which made him feel a deep solidarity with all the downtrodden people of the world.
Mario Savio went on to be involved with activism as soon as he left high school. He went to Mexico to help indigenous people build modern housing for themselves and spent time in Mississippi working with SNCC to register African-American voters while the KKK were trying to terrorize and kill them. When he returned to Berkeley he participated in non-violent demonstrations in favor of equal representation for Black people in the labor market. When SNCC, CORE, and other leftist political organizations began setting up tables on UC Berkeley’s Sproul Plaza to educate students about Civil Rights, the pro-establishment administration called the police to have them arrested and removed. That led to the spontaneous demonstration where Mario Savio made his groundbreaking speech.
From there, Cohen details what happened with the Free Speech Movement and their two committees that worked on solving the conflict they had with the authorities. The FSM not only had conflicts with Berkeley’s management team, they also had internal conflicts that had to be overcome. Mario Savio was also a man who had his own deep, internal conflicts. The biography examines these issues both sympathetically and critically, never shying away from pointing out where the FSM’s weaknesses were even though he wholeheartedly admires what they did.
Other topics covered are Mario Savio’s relationship to the New Left movement and the hippie counter-culture, neither of which was he enthusiastic about in his support, his battle with mental illness, his career as a college physics professor, and his lifelong commitment to advocacy for minority and low-income students in their struggle to pursue higher education. The final part of the book is a collection of Savio’s speeches and essays. This was the least memorable part of Cohen’s biography, mostly because all the key ideas there were already addressed in the first three sections. The final essay, an effective explanation and defense of affirmative action, hits all the right notes and is well worth your time even if it is a bit dry.
Aside from the clear and precise details, a strength of this biography is how well Cohen explains the methods of the Free Speech Movement which provides a good contrast to the political activism of our current times. Mario Savio saw the educational institutions of America as being run like machines so they believed in shutting down their operation through demonstrations and forcing the authorities into a position where they would have to negotiate in order to get the machine running again. When the Berkeley students seized the police car, they held it for ransom and the price was a place at the negotiating table, not some outlandish over-the-top abstract claim like ending the patriarchy now or stopping capitalism. The FSM risked their safety to put themselves into a position where they could make demands. Their activism was done with the intention of reaching short terms achievements that could lead to more short term achievements which collectively would result in a larger transformation of society at a later time. Political activism today is mostly done by ineffective street demonstrations and picking fights with strangers on the internet, neither of which have proven to be effective. The end result of political correctness was Donald Trump. Occupy Wall Street is a great example of the colossal failure of the 21st century American left; it was a massive demonstration where nobody made any clear demands and so nothing got accomplished. Today’s activists should learn a few lessons from the Free Speech Movement and the Civil Rights Movement to see how things actually get done. Demonstrations are not magic spells that correct the world’s problems. Arguments on the internet have never, ever, succeeded in convincing anybody to change their mind about anything significant. Without direct action that leads to realistic demands and negotiation, activism amounts to nothing more than vanity, publicity stunts, and whining.
Mario Savio is here portrayed without any embellishments. His style was plain and down-to-Earth. There was nothing flamboyant in his character which again stands in stark contrast to the celebrity boutique activism we have now and the McLeftist-tainment costume shows we get from activist at the street level. Savio acted out of conviction more than egotism. For him, change was more important than fame and that is why he was able to lead the Free Speech Movement to victory armed with nothing but the minds and bodies of the people who supported the cause. Mario Savio comes off as any ordinary man on the street, albeit an ordinary man on the street who made a significant difference in the conduct of our nation.
While the cause of free speech in the 21st century has become the domain of loony conspiracy theorists, white supremacists, and other bizarro right wing ideologues, leftists have come full circle and are now demanding censorship for offensive speech. UC Berkeley has become a big part of the reactionary left’s blunders since they have banned Bill Maher, Ann Coutler, and Milo Yiannaoulis from speaking on their campus; the latter two individuals deserve all the humiliation the receive at the hands of the public and then some, but they still should have the right to make asses of themselves on any college campus they choose. Colleges are supposed to be places for the free exploration of ideas, not factories, as Mario Savio would say, for producing pre-fabricated workers for big business and government bureaucracies. Universities are also not meant to be indoctrination centers which is what they become if speech is censored in the name of not offending people. It is a sad irony that UC Berkeley, after having put a commemorative plaque to Mario Savio on Sproul Plaza, is now a hotbed of censorship and cancel culture being propagated by the people who have benefited the most from the Free Speech Movement. Without Mario Savio, some of the advances made in the name of minority rights, women’s rights, and LBGTQ rights would not have been possible. Activists of today’s left owe it to themselves to read a book like Freedom’s Orator so they can raise their awareness of how freedom of speech benefits everybody and censorship only benefits the people of privilege they claim to be fighting against.
https://grimhistory.blogspot.com/
As any biographer would, Cohen starts off with the family upbringing of the young subject, showing how Mario Savio’s childhood prepared him for his role in later life. His parents were working class immigrants from Sicily who raised Savio in Brooklyn. The youth was an academic high achiever who suffered from a severe stutter that was caused by anxiety and got worse when in the presence of authority figures. Cohen returns to this fact repeatedly throughout the book to illustrate how overcoming this problem propelled Savio to be an advocate of free speech and an effective speech-maker throughout the rest of his life. Other contributing factors in Savio’s development into a political activist were his grandfather’s membership in the fascist party of Mussolini and the trauma of childhood sexual abuse which made him feel a deep solidarity with all the downtrodden people of the world.
Mario Savio went on to be involved with activism as soon as he left high school. He went to Mexico to help indigenous people build modern housing for themselves and spent time in Mississippi working with SNCC to register African-American voters while the KKK were trying to terrorize and kill them. When he returned to Berkeley he participated in non-violent demonstrations in favor of equal representation for Black people in the labor market. When SNCC, CORE, and other leftist political organizations began setting up tables on UC Berkeley’s Sproul Plaza to educate students about Civil Rights, the pro-establishment administration called the police to have them arrested and removed. That led to the spontaneous demonstration where Mario Savio made his groundbreaking speech.
From there, Cohen details what happened with the Free Speech Movement and their two committees that worked on solving the conflict they had with the authorities. The FSM not only had conflicts with Berkeley’s management team, they also had internal conflicts that had to be overcome. Mario Savio was also a man who had his own deep, internal conflicts. The biography examines these issues both sympathetically and critically, never shying away from pointing out where the FSM’s weaknesses were even though he wholeheartedly admires what they did.
Other topics covered are Mario Savio’s relationship to the New Left movement and the hippie counter-culture, neither of which was he enthusiastic about in his support, his battle with mental illness, his career as a college physics professor, and his lifelong commitment to advocacy for minority and low-income students in their struggle to pursue higher education. The final part of the book is a collection of Savio’s speeches and essays. This was the least memorable part of Cohen’s biography, mostly because all the key ideas there were already addressed in the first three sections. The final essay, an effective explanation and defense of affirmative action, hits all the right notes and is well worth your time even if it is a bit dry.
Aside from the clear and precise details, a strength of this biography is how well Cohen explains the methods of the Free Speech Movement which provides a good contrast to the political activism of our current times. Mario Savio saw the educational institutions of America as being run like machines so they believed in shutting down their operation through demonstrations and forcing the authorities into a position where they would have to negotiate in order to get the machine running again. When the Berkeley students seized the police car, they held it for ransom and the price was a place at the negotiating table, not some outlandish over-the-top abstract claim like ending the patriarchy now or stopping capitalism. The FSM risked their safety to put themselves into a position where they could make demands. Their activism was done with the intention of reaching short terms achievements that could lead to more short term achievements which collectively would result in a larger transformation of society at a later time. Political activism today is mostly done by ineffective street demonstrations and picking fights with strangers on the internet, neither of which have proven to be effective. The end result of political correctness was Donald Trump. Occupy Wall Street is a great example of the colossal failure of the 21st century American left; it was a massive demonstration where nobody made any clear demands and so nothing got accomplished. Today’s activists should learn a few lessons from the Free Speech Movement and the Civil Rights Movement to see how things actually get done. Demonstrations are not magic spells that correct the world’s problems. Arguments on the internet have never, ever, succeeded in convincing anybody to change their mind about anything significant. Without direct action that leads to realistic demands and negotiation, activism amounts to nothing more than vanity, publicity stunts, and whining.
Mario Savio is here portrayed without any embellishments. His style was plain and down-to-Earth. There was nothing flamboyant in his character which again stands in stark contrast to the celebrity boutique activism we have now and the McLeftist-tainment costume shows we get from activist at the street level. Savio acted out of conviction more than egotism. For him, change was more important than fame and that is why he was able to lead the Free Speech Movement to victory armed with nothing but the minds and bodies of the people who supported the cause. Mario Savio comes off as any ordinary man on the street, albeit an ordinary man on the street who made a significant difference in the conduct of our nation.
While the cause of free speech in the 21st century has become the domain of loony conspiracy theorists, white supremacists, and other bizarro right wing ideologues, leftists have come full circle and are now demanding censorship for offensive speech. UC Berkeley has become a big part of the reactionary left’s blunders since they have banned Bill Maher, Ann Coutler, and Milo Yiannaoulis from speaking on their campus; the latter two individuals deserve all the humiliation the receive at the hands of the public and then some, but they still should have the right to make asses of themselves on any college campus they choose. Colleges are supposed to be places for the free exploration of ideas, not factories, as Mario Savio would say, for producing pre-fabricated workers for big business and government bureaucracies. Universities are also not meant to be indoctrination centers which is what they become if speech is censored in the name of not offending people. It is a sad irony that UC Berkeley, after having put a commemorative plaque to Mario Savio on Sproul Plaza, is now a hotbed of censorship and cancel culture being propagated by the people who have benefited the most from the Free Speech Movement. Without Mario Savio, some of the advances made in the name of minority rights, women’s rights, and LBGTQ rights would not have been possible. Activists of today’s left owe it to themselves to read a book like Freedom’s Orator so they can raise their awareness of how freedom of speech benefits everybody and censorship only benefits the people of privilege they claim to be fighting against.
https://grimhistory.blogspot.com/
January 31, 2024
I found this book at a campus book swap, always felt I should know more about the Free Speech Movement, working on the UC Berkeley campus and frequenting the FSM cafe on breaks. Come to find out the copy I had swapped for was a Cal special one off for a summer reading program last decade, so I am now up to date with the class of 2021's book list (smirk).
Book is a straight ahead history, its not super engaging to read, but the content and research was well done, Savio and his speeches could clearly be rated a five-star on merit alone. It was interesting to see the through line of the civil rights movement non-violent protest tactics playing such a large part in FSM's success, and later deployment in the student movement across the nation's campuses.
This book was a smart thing to assign all the campus community, I am invested in making this campus better all the more now.
Book is a straight ahead history, its not super engaging to read, but the content and research was well done, Savio and his speeches could clearly be rated a five-star on merit alone. It was interesting to see the through line of the civil rights movement non-violent protest tactics playing such a large part in FSM's success, and later deployment in the student movement across the nation's campuses.
This book was a smart thing to assign all the campus community, I am invested in making this campus better all the more now.
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