Jack Weinberg
Jack Weinberg is an environmental activist and former New Left activist who is best known for his role in the Free Speech Movement at the University of California, Berkeley in 1964.
Youth
Weinberg was born in Buffalo, New York on April 4, 1940, and grew up there. His father owned a small jewelry business in Buffalo.He began college at the University of Buffalo. At the age of 21 he transferred to the University of California, Berkeley, majoring in mathematics. He graduated in January 1963 "with great distinction".
In the spring semester 1963, Weinberg continued at Berkeley as a graduate student in the mathematics department. He worked as a Teaching Assistant, teaching undergraduates who were taking large-lecture math courses.
Weinberg's first participation in a political organization occurred in 1963, by joining the Berkeley chapter of CORE.
Weinberg spent the summer of 1963 traveling in the South visiting civil rights groups. He returned to Berkeley and began his second semester of grad school in the fall of 1963 but then withdrew mid-semester to devote himself full-time to civil rights activities. He became the head of Campus CORE.
Weinberg remained in the Bay Area throughout the summer of 1964.
Free Speech Movement
In the fall semester of 1964, Weinberg was engaged in student activism at the University of California, Berkeley. On Thursday October 1, 1964, Weinberg was sitting at the CORE table in Sproul Plaza. He refused to show his identification to the campus police and was arrested at noon for violating the University's new rules regarding student political activism. There was a spontaneous movement of students to surround the police car in which he was to be transported. They sat on the ground around the police car, preventing it from moving.Throughout the night and into the next day, students, including Mario Savio, gave speeches from atop the car calling for free speech on campus. Weinberg, too, addressed the crowd from the top of the police car. At one point, there may have been 3,000 students around the car. On the evening of October 2, 1964, approximately twenty-four hours later, representatives of political groups on campus signed an agreement with the administration regarding student free speech, which was dubbed the Pact of October 2. After being confined in the police car for 32 hours, Weinberg was then booked and freed as the agreement stipulated that the University would not press charges against him. But less than a week later, the Alameda County District Attorney did press charges against Weinberg.
The first meeting of FSM took place on Saturday October 3, in Art Goldberg's apartment. The first order of business was to choose a name for the organization. Several names were proposed—Students for Free Speech, United Free Speech Movement, University Rights Movement, Students for Civil Liberties. Weinberg suggested "Free Speech Movement" and that's the name that was adopted, by a margin of one vote.
FSM leader Mario Savio later stated that Jack Weinberg was the FSM's key tactician. Historian W. J. Rorabaugh calls Weinberg "one of the most effective civil rights organizers" and "the strategist behind FSM".
"Don't trust anyone over 30"
Weinberg is the person who coined the saying "Don't trust anyone over 30". The saying exists in several variants, such as "Never trust anybody over 30". Origination of the saying has been wrongly attributed to Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin, the Beatles, and others. In November 1964, Weinberg was interviewed by a reporter for the San Francisco Chronicle working on a story about the Free Speech Movement. Weinberg tells the story like this:I was being interviewed by a newspaper reporter, and he was making me very angry. It seemed to me his questions were implying that we were being directed behind the scenes by Communists or some other sinister group. I told him we had a saying in the movement that we don't trust anybody over 30. It was a way of telling the guy to back off, that nobody was pulling our strings.
On November 15, 1964, the Chronicle printed the story, quoting Weinberg as saying "We have a saying in the movement that you can't trust anybody over 30."
A Chronicle columnist, Ralph J. Gleason, highlighted the saying in his column on November 18. The saying then went viral, becoming a favorite for reporters and columnists wishing to ridicule the young, the New Left, or the hippie/Yippie movement. That annoyed Weinberg, who has said
I've done some things in my life I think are very important, and my one sentence in history turns out to be something I said off the top of my head which became completely distorted and misunderstood. But I've become more accepting of fate as I get older.
After FSM
Weinberg was active in leadership of the Vietnam Day Committee, a coalition that organized rallies and marches opposing the Vietnam War.On Friday night, October 15, 1965, the VDC held an anti-war march that began at the UC Berkeley campus and was intended to end at the Oakland Army Terminal. The march left the UC campus at 7:52 p.m. after an all-day rally there. Marchers carried anti-U.S. foreign policy signs and chanted anti-war slogans. There were 10,000-14,000 people in the march. At the head of the march was a banner carried by a line of marchers, then a sound truck containing VDC leaders including Jack Weinberg, Bettina Aptheker, Jerry Rubin, Stephen Smale, Steve Weissman, Frank Bardacke, and Robert Scheer. Also in the truck was the poet Allen Ginsberg chanting the Heart Sutra. However, the City of Oakland had refused to grant the march a permit, and so Oakland police blocked Telegraph Avenue at the Oakland border with a phalanx of some 375 policemen. When the march neared the border, it came to a halt while the leaders considered what to do. Weinberg and Bardacke got out of the truck, crossed the police line, and met with Oakland Police Chief Edward M. Toothman. Weinberg and Bardacke could not persuade Toothman to let the march proceed into Oakland. So they returned to the sound truck and told the other VDC leaders. A fierce debate ensued about what to do; they voted 5-4 to turn back into Berkeley.
Weinberg joined the Independent Socialist Club in 1966 and helped organize it into a national movement—the International Socialists—of which he was a national council member.
Weinberg has said that the Stop the Draft Week protests of October 16–21, 1967, were
the first clear demonstration that the radical part of the Anti-Vietnam war movement was coming up against its own limitations. It didn't really have the weight in society to stop the war. I think that it was after that, that the Berkeley radical scene became more and more cut off from reality. And the question of moving American society, changing people really was getting lost.
Weinberg moved to Los Angeles to work as labor correspondent for a radical weekly underground newspaper, the Los Angeles Free Press. Becoming involved in the formation of the Peace and Freedom Party of California, he organized the registration drive that collected enough signatures to get the party on the California ballot in the 1968 elections. Weinberg served as the California state chairperson of the Peace and Freedom Party from August 1968 until November 1968.
In November 1968, Weinberg was the Peace and Freedom Party candidate for congress in California's 26th congressional district election ; he received 3% of the vote.
Work in labor movement
In following years, Weinberg was a union activist. In 1973, he was a participant in wildcat strikes at Chrysler plants in Detroit, Michigan, as a member of UAW Local 212. He wrote a book about those strikes.In 1975, Weinberg was the editor of Network, Voice of UAW Militants which was a new bimonthly magazine for members of the UAW labor union.
He then moved to Gary, Indiana, where he became a steelworker and was involved in the United Steelworkers union.
Work in environmental movement
In 1982, Weinberg led a coalition of environmentalists, unionists, and community members in defeating a proposal to construct a nuclear power plant in Indiana on Lake Michigan.He worked for Greenpeace from 1990 to 2000. He then began working for the Environmental Health Fund.
Weinberg is a consultant to groups seeking to clean up environmental pollution.