---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Tue, 14 Jan 2003 22:05:16 -0500
From: Jay Moore <pieinsky@igc.org>
To: Sixties List <sixties@lists.village.virginia.edu>
Subject: Free Speech Denied Again in Berkeley
Posted on Tue, Jan. 14, 2003
Emma Goldman's anti-war stance stirs controversy anew
IAN STEWART
Associated Press
BERKELEY, Calif. - Emma Goldman, America's iconoclastic
turn-of-the-century muckraking anti-war activist, is at it again - 63 years
after her death.
Goldman's provocative writings, which are housed at the University of
California-Berkeley, are at the center of a new controversy.
Candace S. Falk, the director of the Emma Goldman Papers Project, used
three quotations from Goldman's work as part of a fund-raising appeal.
University officials stopped the mailing, claiming she had chosen the quotes
to make an inappropriate political statement against war with Iraq.
Repeated telephone messages left for Falk were unreturned Tuesday. But
Falk told The New York Times that she did select the quotes because of their
relevance to today's events, and felt so strongly about the principles at
stake that she sent out an uncensored letter at her own expense.
"You can't work on the Emma Goldman Papers Project and fold on
something like this," she said. "We just had to find a way to get this out."
Falk chose one quotation from a 1915 Goldman paper that called on
people "not yet overcome by war madness to raise their voice of protest, to
call attention of the people to the crime and outrage which are about to be
perpetrated on them."
Around the time of the 1917 Bolshevik revolution in Russia, Goldman
was one among a passionately vocal anti-war group who also advocated for
socialist reforms, organized labor, sexual freedoms, atheism and anarchy.
For her outspoken political activities, Goldman was deported to Russia
along with several other opponents to military conscription and U.S.
involvement in World War I. In the 1981 film "Reds," Goldman, who died in
1940, was played by Maureen Stapleton.
After a flurry of media interest in the controversy over the
fund-raising appeal, UC Berkeley defended its support of the Goldman Papers
Project and appeared to be backing away from its original stance.
"The work on the Emma Goldman Papers is a valued part of the research
that we do at UC-Berkeley," Chancellor Robert M. Berdahl said in a statement
issued Tuesday. "We have spent more than a $1 million so far supporting the
ongoing project."
Berdahl said he understood how the university's effort to delete the
quotes from the fund-raising letter could be misconstrued as censorship.
"The question that has arisen was originally seen not as a free speech
issue, but as a question by the associate vice chancellor over what was
appropriate in a fund-raising letter. I can understand how others might view
it differently and in retrospect, had we to do it over, we would have done
it differently," Bedahl said.
The chancellor was otherwise unavailable for comment.
In a second quotation used by Falk, Goldman in 1902 warned that free
speech proponents "shall soon be obliged to meet in cellars, or in darkened
rooms with closed doors, and speak in whispers lest our nextdoor neighbors
should hear that free-born citizens dare not speak in the open."
The Berkeley campus is no stranger to debate over free speech and
anti-war views, having been at the center of anti-Vietnam War student
protests in the 1960s and '70s.
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