Tag: SLATE
Berkeley SLATE-d for Back to School: Student Community in the Sixties
By Natalie Naylor
Natalie Naylor is a fourth-year undergraduate studying English and Creative Writing. She’s lived in the on-campus dorms, specifically Unit 2, and two Berkeley Student Cooperative properties during her time at UC Berkeley.
Well, it was magnificent! First of all, it was beautiful. I mean, Berkeley in the sixties was just a great place to be. It was very exciting; there were all kinds of new ideas. I loved my classes; I quickly made very good friends.
– Julianne Morris, SLATE Project
Berkeley in the 1960s is a time our campus and its surrounding community look back on with pride. During these years, UC Berkeley students, faculty, and community members participated in civil rights protests, antiwar activism, and, of course, the Free Speech Movement; these efforts are no doubt some of the most significant moments in Berkeley’s history. From the Mario Savio Free Speech Movement Café to the Martin Luther King Jr. Building and Free Speech Monument in Upper Sproul Plaza, the built environment referencing social activism in the sixties incorporates physical tributes to this time throughout UC Berkeley’s contemporary campus.
Sixty years later, as the Fall 2024 semester begins, it’s easy to feel as though that time in our history is completely removed from the present. However, students in the 1960s were concerned with issues familiar to UC Berkeley’s current student body: housing, humanitarianism, belonging, freedom of speech, and community building. This includes many of the members involved in the campus political group SLATE in the late 1950s and early 1960s. The Oral History Center’s SLATE Oral History Project documents the experiences and budding political consciousnesses of some of the students involved in on-campus activism at UC Berkeley sixty years ago.
SLATE was a political party on UC Berkeley’s campus from 1958 to 1966 and, therefore, predated the Free Speech Movement. Its main goal: to present candidates for the Associated Students of the University of California (ASUC) office who supported racial equality and free speech on campus.
Jackie Goldberg, an undergraduate social science major in the mid-sixties, was one of the most well-known student activists involved in SLATE at UC Berkeley. She initially joined SLATE because of her passion for civil rights, as well as the strong community and support from other student activists on campus at the time. Her oral history is a part of the Oral History Center’s Free Speech Movement Oral History Project but chronicles the work she did with SLATE in detail.
When she arrived on campus, Goldberg underwent a year of dorm living—still a staple of the UC Berkeley freshman experience. After that first year in the dorms, she encountered a lack of housing on and around campus, which is a lasting issue at Cal. To secure housing for her second year, she participated in the sorority rush process and became a member of Delta Phi Epsilon. Goldberg claims that due to her Jewish background, most other houses declined to offer her membership. Experiencing this prejudice firsthand likely later influenced her activism in fighting discrimination in Greek life. In her oral history, she describes her housing journey as such:
I had applied to the co-op. I had applied to the dorms, and I didn’t get any of them. I was on the wait list for both. So my game plan was I would go in for a semester, try to grow up so I could get an apartment, find someone to get an apartment with…but it turned out that I was in this free-wheeling place, with a lot of nice people, some of whom are still my friends…and it was so easy. I didn’t have to cook, I didn’t have to clean, I didn’t have to shop, and it was cheap because I was doing the house bills.
Despite originally joining the sorority for housing reasons, Goldberg grew an affinity for the culture of her house and its lifestyle. In her oral history, she recalls: “I stayed all three years. I had no desire to leave.”
Goldberg thrived in community with other members of Delta Phi Epsilon and SLATE during her time at UC Berkeley. Her activist work and living situation occasionally overlapped, like while advocating for the racial integration of sororities at Cal. At the time, Greek life had a vast political presence on campus; Goldberg both embraced and challenged this precedent to incite political change at UC Berkeley. She succeeded in encouraging other sororities to desegregate, despite the decision sometimes diverging from their national organizations and sister-chapters.
Julianne Morris, another member of SLATE, had a less positive experience in an all-women’s housing arrangement around the University of California, Berkeley’s campus. While studying at UCLA, Morris founded the organization PLATFORM, inspired by conversations she’d had with members of SLATE. After craving more involvement in student politics, she transferred to UC Berkeley in the early 1960s and selected housing based on connections she’d previously made through SLATE. Morris recalls:
My first semester I was in a co-op, Stebbins Hall, and so I met a lot of women friends there. And of course, you know, it was very different then. There was a curfew, where you had to be in—and God forbid that there were any men there at night.
Even in the sixties, the University maintained in loco parentis authority over its female students from which it exempted male students. These unequal restrictions were especially apparent when it came to women’s housing accommodations. Because of this, although she found community both in SLATE and at Stebbins, Morris eventually sought more autonomy by moving to her own apartment after one semester in the co-op system. She explains:
Oh, I liked the idea of being freer. And you know, I hated having to come in at a certain time and no men in the house and the whole way things were at that time. And so I was very happy not to be in a dorm or a co-op anymore and be on my own.
Despite graduating sixty years ago, many of the buildings around UC Berkeley’s campus are part of a continuous built environment that would be physically recognizable to Morris and her peers.
In 2024, there are still two Berkeley co-ops designated for female-identifying students only, but no all-male-identifying cooperatives remain. One historically men-only house was Barrington Hall, which closed in 1989.
David Armor, a founding member of SLATE, lived in Barrington Hall while attending UC Berkeley, and participating in student government and campus activism. In 1959, he became the first and only member of SLATE to be elected as ASUC President. Armor describes his experience living at the student cooperative Barrington Hall during his freshman year as such:
Again, as a very poor student, I chose the cheapest housing, which was…a cooperative, Barrington Hall, terrible building, really not in good shape…there was a two-person bedroom, two two-person bedrooms, and then a one-person bedroom, so five people sharing a bathroom. And co-op means that you did the work…You work. You did the food, the serving, the cleaning, and everything, that’s how you paid, why the fees were so low. So you basically worked to provide all the services.
However, after a semester, Armor also decided to transition to an apartment. While making this change, he and his roommates integrated some of the cooperative practices they adopted from Barrington into their new living dynamic. Armor reports this influence as having a positive impact on his development as a young adult:
So we got an apartment in the second semester of my freshman year, and five roommates, and we divided up the chores, cooking and whatever, and that was a great experience, because we [were] becoming independent, and living on our own.
Armor’s desire for strong community and cooperation mirrors the effective practices of SLATE’s grassroots political advocacy approach. Housing was one of the main issues of SLATE’s political platform, and the group supported the Berkeley Fair Housing Ordinance in 1959. SLATE also opposed the University’s compulsory ROTC program for male freshmen and sophomores. Members defined SLATE by its beliefs in student organizations, advocacy, and the right for personal academic freedom on UC Berkeley’s campus and its surrounding areas. Communal living, even on an apartment scale, is still a method of community building for students at UC Berkeley. In addition, cooperative living situations are often regarded as financially accessible for a wide range of students looking for housing in Berkeley. Armor and other SLATE participants likely resonated with communal styles of living because of their political and personal beliefs, as well as their material needs.
Over the past sixty years, both Barrington Hall and the UC Berkeley chapter of the Delta Phi Epsilon sorority have closed; the physical structures where they were once housed are the largest reminders and evidence of their impact on campus. Stebbins Hall, Morris’s first housing experience at Cal, is still operational as a student cooperative, and has been co-ed since 1971. In short, the built environment since the time of the Free Speech Movement on Berkeley’s campus has both endured and been changed in ways that would feel substantial to former students and members of SLATE.
The activists highlighted here craved more autonomy and less censorship in both their campus and housing climates. They were able to socially campaign for their beliefs as a result of cross-community building practices. Goldberg, Morris, and Armor all lived in houses with a built-in social element; this was likely a great opportunity for idea-sharing and recruitment for SLATE’s cause, as well as a way to foster meaningful connections with their housemates. Their interviews reveal the importance and impact of these connections, as well as the places in which they were formed. What these narrators recall best from their time at UC Berkeley—outside of their work with SLATE—is not classes or grades, but instead the places they lived and the communities of people they built in those places. Indeed, Goldberg, Morris, and Armor’s individual memories of student-led activism and the communities that emerged from, and around, that work have remained strong sixty years on.
About the Oral History Center
The Oral History Center of The Bancroft Library preserves voices of people from all walks of life, with varying political perspectives, national origins, and ethnic backgrounds. We are committed to open access and our oral histories and interpretive materials are available online at no cost to scholars and the public. You can find our oral histories from the search feature on our home page. Search by name, keyword, and several other criteria. Sign up for our monthly newsletter featuring think pieces, new releases, podcasts, Q&As, and everything oral history. Access the most recent articles from our home page or go straight to our blog home.
JoAnn Fowler: Building the Foundations of SLATE
The Oral History Center has been conducting a series of interviews about SLATE, a student political party at UC Berkeley from 1958 to 1966 – which means SLATE pre-dates even the Free Speech Movement. The newest addition to this project is an oral history with JoAnn Fowler, who was a founding member of the organization in the late 1950s.
JoAnn Fowler is a retired Spanish language educator and was a founding member of the University of California, Berkeley student political organization SLATE in the late 1950s. Fowler grew up in Los Angeles, California. She attended UC Berkeley from 1955 to 1959, where she became active in SLATE and served in student government through Associated Students of the University of California (ASUC). After completing a master’s degree at Columbia University, she worked as a teacher, mostly in Davis, California. Find this interview and all our oral histories from the search feature on our home page. You can search by name, key word, and several other criteria.
I have previously written about the contributions of women members of SLATE and their sometimes complicated feelings about gender roles in this student political group. Fowler, however, did not feel that being a woman was not an obstacle for her in SLATE, and her interview includes memories of her own role in shaping the organization.
Fowler recalls being an outspoken SLATE member from the start. At her first meeting with the group in the fall of 1957, she recalled being overwhelmed by the advanced political theory many of the group discussed, and by one faction that she perceived “wanted to sit around and talk these things to death and not try to take any kind of action.” She felt that in order to be politically effective, the group had to take another approach:
I’m very verbal, I’m not shy at all, I speak right up, I don’t care, I have nothing to lose here. I say that, “You have to do something within the campus, you have to work within the campus. If you want to get all these things done, you have to get elected and do things on campus.”…So that’s the position I take, and that’s the position that Pat Hallinan takes, and so we win over the majority of these people…
Perhaps Fowler’s greatest contribution to the group was that in the spring of 1958 she ran for and won a position with ASUC on the SLATE ticket. This made Fowler and Mike Gucovsky the first SLATE members to have a voice in student government at UC Berkeley, and being able to affect progressive political change from positions of campus leadership was a key goal of the group. In speaking of her campaign platform, Fowler remembered:
If you were to name anything, we ran on all of it, but not all of that could be addressed during the campaign. Basically, it was: freedom of speech was addressed through [being] against the [House] Un-American Activities Committee and also by the relationship between professors and the students that should be confidential and the anti-Loyalty Oath. Then there was civil liberties in the South; in Berkeley with that housing ordinance that came up for vote; and on the campus that no fraternity or sorority should discriminate.
She continued discussion of that ASUC campaign, saying:
This was encouraged by Mike Miller. I didn’t mind running—that was going to be great—but I did mind speaking to big groups. I hadn’t had a lot of experience doing that, so he encouraged me to do that. I went around only two nights that I remember, and it was only to men—I never spoke to women—and only at the co-ops. That was my background; I’d come out of co-ops. I’d go in at dinnertime and I would speak for two minutes, maybe somebody introduced me and maybe somebody didn’t. I’d speak for two minutes to those very immediate concerns that I thought would be very appealing, and I would have this overwhelming applause. But I felt that anybody, any woman could have stood up there and gotten this overwhelming applause, because that’s the kind of applause I felt it was. I don’t know, maybe that’s just me. I don’t know who else spoke there. I don’t know if men spoke there, if other independents have reached out, I have no idea.
Even after she graduated from UC Berkeley in 1959, the lessons she learned from SLATE stayed with her. While living in Davis, she worked at a Hunt’s tomato factory, where she attempted to organize the office workers. Later, she headed the Davis Teachers Association, supporting a raise in teachers’ salaries. These organizing efforts didn’t always succeed, but Fowler saw them as part of a larger political project she’d been passionate about since her time in college. She explained, “But I did my bit, and so without SLATE, I wouldn’t have…tried, no, I wouldn’t have tried.”
Reflecting on how her involvement with SLATE impacted her life, Fowler observed:
I think it was one of the greatest experiences of my life. I never would have been as politically aware. I didn’t have that background, I didn’t take political science, I didn’t take sociology; I took economics, I took psychology. I never would have been as aware or as active as I was, I wouldn’t have had a group. When I lived in an apartment, I didn’t have a social group or I didn’t have—you were going to come on campus and leave campus because you certainly didn’t meet too many people coming out of that lecture hall of 500 people. I’m glad I have that experience, very much so. It was a good time in my life.
To learn more about JoAnn Fowler’s life and political work, check out her oral history! Find this interview and all our oral histories from the search feature on our home page. You can search by name, key word, and several other criteria.
“They Got Woken Up”: SLATE and Women’s Activism at UC Berkeley
For students across the country, college is a time of political awakening. And perhaps no other university has earned its reputation for radical student politics quite like UC Berkeley. Indeed, mid-century political activism around civil rights, the Vietnam War, and the Free Speech Movement has shaped how students, faculty, and administrators experience life at Berkeley today.
However, one important part of Berkeley’s political history that often gets left out of the conversation is the New Left student political party SLATE. SLATE — so named because the group backed a slate of candidates who ran on a common platform for ASUC (Associated Students of the University of California) elections — operated between 1958 and 1966, and ignited a passion for politics in the face of looming McCarthyism and what many perceived as the University of California’s encroachment on student rights to free speech. These students translated political theory they learned in the classroom to action, even when it went against University policies. Perhaps SLATE’s most important ideological contribution to Berkeley’s campus and to other social movements is the “lowest significant common denominator.” This concept allowed the group to form a big tent coalition between Marxists, liberal Democrats, and others by only choosing political positions and actions that the whole group could agree on. As a result, the group became involved with civil rights, labor organizing, and anti-war protests on campus and across California. Most notably, in May of 1960, SLATE and other student activists protested the HUAC (House Un-American Activities Committee) hearings at the San Francisco City Hall. In response to the peaceful sit-in, police blasted students with fire hoses and dragged them down stairs before placing them under arrest. This event was emblematic of SLATE’s commitment to activism, even when it came at personal risk.
In recent years, the Oral History Center of the Bancroft Library has conducted a series of interviews with members of SLATE to keep alive memories of the group’s influence on ideology and political infrastructure at UC Berkeley.
An essential part of SLATE’s story is the contributions of its women members. SLATE operated at a time before the women’s movement, but its work became an important introduction to political organizing for a generation of women students at Berkeley. These women were dedicated members of the group, but often felt sidelined in SLATE leadership. And yet, their work helped to change political culture and campus life at Berkeley. Three of these groundbreaking Berkeley women are Cindy Lembcke Kamler, Susan Griffin, and Julianne Morris.
Cindy Lembcke Kamler was just a freshman when she connected with SLATE in the spring of 1958, drawn in by the political ideals of the group dominated by male upperclassmen and graduate students. Susan Griffin and Julianne Morris were among the second generation of SLATE activists and joined the group around the same time in 1960 — after the famous HUAC protest.
All of these women came from politically left families who feared encroaching McCarthyism. Griffin and Morris also had connections to Judaism. These backgrounds helped ignite a political consciousness in these women that led them to SLATE.
Certainly Kamler, Griffin, and Morris’s oral histories contribute to the larger archive of SLATE history, but they also speak specifically to their experiences as women in this group. For instance, Griffin and Morris recalled instances of feeling marginalized and of being left to do what Morris called the “scut work,” like mimeographing fliers and cooking for hungry activists. This work, while essential to maintaining operations, felt to them like gendered tasks. For her part, Kamler doesn’t remember gender discrimination in SLATE. She insisted, “Oh, no, I never made coffee or any of that stuff.” And yet, Griffin recalled that several years later at a meeting of SLATE women in the 1970s,
“We were recounting how there was this prejudice against us and we were never allowed to have leadership positions. And husbands and boyfriends and guys from SLATE showed up at this meeting and started making fun of us and broke the meeting up. They thought that was the end of the story. Little did they know, [laughs] that was just the beginning of the story.”
These tensions came to a head at a 1984 SLATE reunion in which women newly empowered by feminism expressed displeasure with the way they had been treated while working for the campus political group. Many of the men denied there had been discrimination, but others took it to heart and sincerely apologized. Morris explained, “There were a lot of women who were really angry about how it had been. I don’t know that I was angry, in the sense that I really felt it was a different time and one can’t judge one time by another. But there was no question that that’s the way it was, and that’s what kind of was accepted.” Watching these events unfold, Kamler recalled, “I was just sitting there stunned. I didn’t do any of that stuff. I ran for office, I got elected, I was chairperson.”
Indeed, while there may have been invisible barriers for many of the women involved in SLATE, there were still opportunities to grow as individuals and leaders. Kamler ran for second vice president in the spring of 1958 and lost, but ran again for representative-at-large in spring of 1959 and won. She also served as the chair of SLATE for some time, helping to shape the group’s platform and activist agenda. Even Griffin and Morris were encouraged to run for ASUC office in the early 1960s, and had to learn how to campaign and feel confident in public speaking. Morris especially found running for office to be a formative experience. She remembered,
“And that was, for me, a big experience, because as I said, I was shy in terms of speaking out and I didn’t think that I could do it. And Mike Miller kept urging me to do it and saying, ‘You can do this. I’ll help you if you want, but you can do this! You’re going to be able to go to all of these fraternities and talk to them about ROTC. I just know you can do it.’ So I did it, and I really was very frightened about doing it, and I actually did fine. So that was, for me, kind of a breakthrough, that I was able to do something like that, because it wasn’t easy for me at the time.”
But as their lives became less centered around the UC Berkeley campus, these women drifted away from SLATE. Kamler married and left the group after the spring of 1960. Griffin and Morris had decreased their participation in SLATE or left campus entirely by 1964. And yet, as their oral histories reveal, the experiences these women had as Berkeley undergraduates in this student political party shaped their perspectives about politics and activism for years to come. For both Griffin and Morris, this activism took shape as involvement in the women’s movement. Griffin explained, “The guys may not have known it, but they were training feminist activists in all that period.”
Thinking about the longer arc of SLATE’s impact on the lives of its dedicated members, Morris recalled of a reunion in the 1990s:
“One of the things that we did was that we went around as a group and talked about what our lives were like now. And no one in that whole group went into business. Everybody was an organizer, a teacher, a social worker, a psychologist. It was so interesting that this group of people kind of, in some ways, stayed true to what we all went through in college. It really formed our lives.”
But most importantly, what these women learned from their time with SLATE was the importance of building and sustaining community in activist groups. For Morris, joining SLATE helped her find a place where she belonged. Griffin pointed to organizations of politically like-minded individuals as ways to create belonging and “joy” through an almost spiritual experience of protest.
And yet, the political work of Cindy Lembcke Kamler, Susan Griffin, and Julianne Morris wasn’t just personally fulfilling. For these individuals and generations of other women students, their political activism at UC Berkeley left an indelible mark on the campus. In thinking of this legacy, Morris reflected, “…it was one of the first…of the Left student movements. And I think it influenced a lot of people in that regard…I’m not at all sure that the Free Speech Movement would have happened without SLATE.” She concluded, “I think we were very successful in those years. We got a lot of people elected to the campus political organization, and I think people started thinking, at Cal, a little differently. They got woken up in a way that perhaps they would not have been.”
To learn more about these activist women at Berkeley and the history of this early student political party, check out the Oral History Center’s SLATE Oral History Project.
Women of SLATE: Susan Griffin and Julianne Morris
The Oral History Center has been conducting a series of interviews about SLATE, a student political party at UC Berkeley from 1958 to 1966 – which means SLATE pre-dates even the Free Speech Movement. The newest additions to this project include two women who joined SLATE in the early 1960s at a tumultuous time at UC Berkeley: Susan Griffin and Julianne Morris.
Susan Griffin is an accomplished writer, and was a member of the UC Berkeley student political organization SLATE in the early 1960s. Griffin grew up in Los Angeles, California. She attended UC Berkeley, where she became active in SLATE, attending protests and engaging in political discussions. Griffin left Berkeley in 1963, but continued to work as a writer in the San Francisco Bay Area, producing many works, including Woman and Nature: The Roaring Inside Her. Over the years, Griffin remained active in causes of social justice, including the women’s movement and anti war protests.
Julianne Morris is a former social worker and mediator, and was a member of the UC Berkeley student political organization SLATE in the early 1960s. Morris grew up in Compton, California, and attended UC Los Angeles, where she helped found the student political group PLATFORM based on discussions with SLATE members. She then transferred to UC Berkeley, where she became active in SLATE, attending protests and running for ASUC student representative. Morris stayed at UC Berkeley to earn her master’s in social work. She then moved to New York City in 1964 and was a social worker for many years, where she helped start women’s centers, rape crisis programs, and became a part of the women’s movement. She returned to Berkeley in the early nineties and reconnected with former SLATE friends through reunions and an ongoing political discussion group.
Griffin and Morris were among the second generation of SLATE activists and joined the group around the same time in 1960 – after the famous HUAC protest in May of 1960 and before the Free Speech Movement in 1964. They also have similar upbringings in Jewish (adoptive family, in Griffin’s case) and politically left families who feared encroaching McCarthyism. These backgrounds helped ignite a political consciousness in both women that led them to SLATE.
Griffin and Morris’s oral histories build on an archive of SLATE history, but they also speak specifically to their experiences as women in this group. Both recount instances of feeling marginalized as women, of being left to do the “scut work” like mimeographing and cooking for hungry activists. They even recount tensions at a 1984 SLATE reunion in which those newly empowered by feminism expressed displeasure with the way they had been treated; many of the men denied this discrimination, but others took it to heart and sincerely apologized. And yet, Griffin and Morris both were encouraged to run for ASUC office in the early 1960s, campaigning on the SLATE platform and often pushing their own boundaries of what they thought was possible. Despite the challenges of being a woman in this campus political group, there were still opportunities to grow as individuals and as leaders.
Listen as Susan Griffin and Julianne Morris share their memories of running for ASUC on the SLATE ticket at UC Berkeley:
Even though both Griffin and Morris had decreased participation in SLATE or left campus by 1964, their experiences in the organization clearly shaped their perspectives about politics and activism, particularly as they both became involved with the women’s movement. Griffin explained, “The guys may not have known it, but they were training feminist activists in all that period.”
Most importantly, by recalling their times with SLATE and later political work, both Griffin and Morris emphasized the importance of building and sustaining community in activist groups. For Morris, joining SLATE helped her find a place where she belonged. Griffin pointed to organizations of politically like-minded individuals as ways to create belonging and “joy” through an almost spiritual experience of protest.
Listen as Julianne Morris reflects on SLATE’s impact on the Free Speech Movement:
Come learn more about SLATE, and explore the oral histories of Susan Griffin and Julianne Morris!