People are considering the First Battle of Berkeley in terms of police brutality, civil liberties, Berkeley civic politics, or even the emergence of a revolutionary political vanguard, god help us. There is much confusion about what the Battle meant, in what if any sense it was a victory, and where and how to move next. And though this groping community conversation seems our own, most of it is not: in talking both tactics and theory, we define ourselves by and in reaction to the Outside's terms, its threats and promises. We have few terms of our own, natively new; little positive sense of who we are and of what moves through us.

There is a deeper context to this Battle than one hears in the immediate political conversation, on the streets or in our forums. To begin with, it is an episode in a struggle for ghetto self-rule. For the Berkeley community, of which Telegraph Avenue is the commercial and cultural center, is a first class ghetto: no matter that its inhabitants are young instead of black, no matter that its membership is voluntary rather than compelled. (Even this last may not be entirely true. We shouldn't dismiss too lightly the feeling of a growing many in their twenties: that urban life detached from our peculiar supportive communities is impossible.)

Berkeley and the Haight are America's prototype VOLUNTARY YOUTH GHETTOS, and with the East Village form the three largest ones. Such ghettos are unique and new to history, and the change they portend and begin may have properties that aren't described by any classical model of revolution (YSA beware). For the change goes deep; the Battle of Berkeley is more than a ghetto self-rule struggle and more than an expression of a future-oriented nationalism. A new culture, in the full strength of that term, is being born among the young of technological. America. We all are coming to know this, and it's time to confess it publicly, and move with the knowledge.

Berkeley is one of that culture's three present main foci, and the Battle Is an episode in its blind searching-out of forms and expressions for its growth. More than revolutionary politics or human rights of expression are involved: an emerging culture's survival is being tested out. (For who can doubt, that if enough of our heads get senseless bashed into the ground, a deep weariness will descend to fragment us beyond hope and our song into impotence, and the dawning of the new be again delayed?)

At Berkeley, the new culture first burst out in campus-based political expression, from 1958 to 1964, shaking up the surrounding society. Lately it has flowered also in urban community, in high arts and home arts and beauty and some thought; and a glad flag has been raised in our home-seeking hearts, its emblem still seen dimly. And the culture has been moving to claim the heartland of its birth, its home turf: the campus Plaza has been shakily secured for four years, since FSM, and now it moves on Telegraph.

Consider the chain of episodes which testify to our intense and growing territoriality. During the years when our only public expression was political, it struggled, harassed but successful, for a physical toehold on the edge of the campus.

OCTOBER 1964. The administration decides to take away our space, banishes the political tables, Cops drive onto campus and arrest a kid at an "illegal" Civil Rights table. 1000 students entrap the cop car for two days, wait for 600 cops to descend upon them (no blood this time). Free exercise of political rights on the Plaza is decreed, enforced by popular support: the Plaza Is ours, and we'll talk there as we please, by the laws we recognize: our bodies on the line to defend our public place.

APRIL 1966. A night-time VDC rally in support of striking Saigon students is held on Telegraph, choking the Avenue. There is no permit. Police club the microphones silent, confiscate them. The demonstration moves down to City Hall, fruitlessly and nonviolently. (Later the courts say we shouldn't have been denied the permit )

NOVEMBER 1966. Police come onto campus to remove an anti-war table set up opposite a Marine recruiting table in our Student Union, which we have paid for and supposedly run, but do not control. They arrest first one student, and then four non-students from the sit-in which forms in protest. By midnight, 3,000 students vote the school out on its second protest strike, which comes off fairly well but wins us no space.

APRIL 1967. The Better Berkeley Committee spent a year of fruitless dicking-around with the city government, committees, reports and petitions, trying for experimental closure of Telegraph as a mall and for festivals. Finally someone prints up 500 buttons saying, “Telegraph /April 9th." And on that day of good music and public dope 3,000 friendly people close their street and play, unmolested. (The Haight beat us to the street-closing act a week earlier, but theirs got a bit smashed up by the heat.) We are temporarily bought off from regular trespass by the offer of Sunday rock concerts in Provo Park -- a territory the Berkeley High kids had already somewhat liberated, where we tasted our first bit of teargas in 1967.

OCTOBER 1967. We are trying to close down the Induction Center. We need a place to gather, a public place to discuss and decide. The Plaza is sanctified by use. Court order forbids this; but the University helps fudge the interpretation so we aren't molested. Why? Because the 6,000 clustered in that shallow bowl of night -- whose use we have not yet forced them to grant us in law -- made it quietly quite clear once again that they would not move: that they would defend their possession and right to that place against clubs, tear gas, and perhaps death .

That is the leading edge of the present feeling about Telegraph Avenue: there is no mistaking the mood that grows in Berkeley, and only much cost will change its direction even temporarily. We are acting out a deep territorial imperative: a new culture must control its birthground, to control its own growth. (Much of our longing for an open space which is fully our own comes from our sense that in it will crystallize that community we so strongly anticipate, and whose fragments, frustratingly incomplete, nourish us now.)

In Berkeley, as in the Haight and her echo-communities, we are liberating territory in which to build and heal and play and learn. Free territory for these life-functions of community and culture comes also in forms other than physical space. With the underground papers, rock stations, and films we have staked out a corner of Medialand, in which our control is still uncertain, And in the hundreds of free universities, we begin to explore the unknown landscape of Our Necessary Education.

Observe the rough progression, Fellow Social Scientists. As people decide to stay on in Berkeley, they build to a critical culture-producing mass. The focus of community, once exclusively on the campus, suddenly doubles: a non-campus Berkeley community develops and displays itself, continuous and compatible with the campus community: twin yolks in the hot pan of our time. Expression broadens from the "merely political," and Telegraph Avenue becomes the best approximation to the physical root of our miraculous mushroom culture.

And thus the turf we decide to claim as our own expands off campus: we move on Telegraph. And the kinds of things we try to do on that turf, the social myths we try to act out, become more diverse and broadly humane. Creative/joyous Community. Revolutionary Community. Are our efforts feeble? We- have few models, and we're coming up from a long blind despair. Are our examples ludicrous? Don't laugh: they're all we got. And if Telegraph Avenue is not ours, what is?

The victory of the Battle of Berkeley -- if we may come back to that -- is not in civic politics, where our quite real rational arguments and allies got a few liberal councilmen to switch votes, and prevent a July 4 massacre. The victory lies in this: The volatile edge of our disorganized community's will claimed Telegraph for July 4, and got it, IN PUBLIC. We have staked claims to our piece of land, and given notice that we will push for it: the threat of our bloodied presence and retaliation is full and credible. And this goes a long way toward shaping our consciousness, our sense of our interests, direction, and center. For some spaces of land do have special meanings and social powers.

Right now we take our turf at their mercy, and they clearly want to club the shit out of us (the broad violence of the old culture's Official Arm gives a clue to how deep our change runs). Moves are under way to try to ratify our claim politically: the PFP/Panther proposal for local community-controlled police is one such. A good political solution seems unlikely, though to get the city to give us the street seems possible. It would probably help to conceive and present the next moves in the struggle for Telegraph in this broader context, as part of a movement for ghetto and cultural self-determination. For the description furnishes a good framework for understanding where and how to move next, both within and beyond political action.

Two footnotes. First, I'm not sure what to say about our violence, except that we're being roasted in the oven of our culture' s violence, and what sad surprise if we heat in the heat, being flesh. But somewhat connected with this is this matter of language: CLAIM A PIECE OF TURF. That is a strong nuance in our territoriality -- we have in some respects a natural gang mentality. This isn't surprising either: the cops, the Kennedys, the Panthers, the Mafia, and the CIA are gangs, and we organize in response to our environment.

Also, a solid case can be made for a ghetto self-rule analysis by sociologists, and perhaps we should press them to do so. For they are long overdue, and the best among them are longing, for a way to translate their knowledge into social consequence. Why should they not finally go down to City Hall -- even a few would do -- and lecture those people that they've got knowledge they'd like to see have effect? And threaten to go off and organize a referendum ordering the City to act in accord with the findings of a study, which would mainly say KEEP OFF OUR BACKS? For the university community and its secular sister control Berkeley, at least when you count all the liberals in. And they just might be induced to vote all together to get the town's government to follow the scholarly dictates of sweet Reason. Especially if the fate or breaking of the University appears to possibly rest on the question of whether the State continues to harass its changeling young.

Source: San Francisco Express Times 7/9/68