June 3, 1957: 67 years ago, June 3 1957, San Francisco police arrested City Lights [...]
67 years ago, June 3 1957, San Francisco police arrested City Lights Bookstore manager Shigeyoshi “Shig” Murao for selling Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl” and a Berkeley beat journal called “The Miscellaneous Man,” which the Juvenile Bureau had deemed “unfit for children to read” Police also issued an arrest warrant for City …
May 14, 1960: 64 years ago, May 13 1960, hundreds of students battled cops on the steps [...]
64 years ago, May 13 1960, hundreds of students battled cops on the steps of City Hall during the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) hearings on “communist subversion” in San Francisco. The protest against HUAC marked the beginning of a new student movement in the Bay HUAC had already held …
January 19, 1961: 63 years ago, Jan 18 1961, John Harrison Farmer opened fire with a shotgun [...]
63 years ago, Jan 18 1961, John Harrison Farmer opened fire with a shotgun at the office of UC Berkeley English professor Thomas Parkinson, bearing a note reading: “Death to all communists.” Parkinson was severely wounded, and graduate student Stephen Thomas was killed Parkinson, who was not a communist, was …
April 22, 1961: 63 years ago, April 21 1961, the Fair Play for Cuba Committee organized a [...]
63 years ago, April 21 1961, the Fair Play for Cuba Committee organized a march in San Francisco in response to the failed Bay of Pigs invasion. Hundreds gathered, marching from Market St. to Union Square and the Federal Building, to demand an end to the U.S. invasion of Cuba …
November 4, 1963: 58 years ago, Nov 3 1963, the Ad Hoc Committee to End Discrimination [...]
58 years ago, Nov 3 1963, the Ad Hoc Committee to End Discrimination organized a mass sit-in at Mel’s Drive-in on Geary St. in San Francisco to protest the restaurant’s racially discriminatory hiring practices, becoming the first mass sit-in of the Bay Area’s Civil Right Movement The Ad Hoc Committee …