From Simon Reynolds's interview with Greil Marcus in the Los Angeles Review of Books: SR: I wanted to ask you about an experience that seems to have been utterly formative and enduringly inspirational: the Free Speech Movement at Berkeley in 1964. That is a real touchstone moment for you, right? GM: That was a cauldron. It was a tremendously complex experience, struggle, event. A series of events. In a lot of ways, it's been misconstrued: there are many versions of it. Each person had their own version of it. The affair began when there'd been a lot of protests in the Bay Area in the spring of 1964 against racist hiring practices. At the Bank of America, at car dealerships, at the Oakland Tribune —black people were not hired at all for any visible job. So there were no black sales people, no black tellers or clerks. A lot of the organizing for these protests, which involved mass arrests and huge picket lines and publicity, was done on the Berkeley campus. Different political groups would set up a table and distribute leaflets and collect donations and announce picket lines and sit-ins. The business community put a lot of pressure on...

http://www.roughtype.com/archives/2012/06/1964.php