American Notes Berkeley

"This is about as bad as anything that I can recall in the 1960s," said a dismayed University of California, Berkeley, Chancellor Ira Heyman. Some 400 demonstrators, many armed with rocks, bottles and chunks of concrete, faced off against club-swinging police. In two days of fighting, more than 150 were arrested and at least 33 injured.

The issue this time was not free speech on campus, as in 1964, or the war in Viet Nam, as in 1965 and afterward, but the state university system's estimated $2.4 billion investment in 33 U.S. companies that are doing business in South Africa. Dissatisfied with the regents' Case-by-case divestiture

stance, protesters erected mock shantytowns. When a fire marshal ordered the shanties demolished as a hazard, the battle was joined. As in the 1960s' protests, many of those arrested were not Berkeley students.