Berkeley Photo Journal, 1995
While I was doing research for the article in American Realities on Berkeley in the sixties, I visited the University of California, where I had received my graduate training in history from 1965 to 1970. Although I had missed the free speech movement by about six months, I was in Berkeley during all of the other events recorded in the essay.I visited the campus a number of times during intervening years. I particularly remember the atmosphere during a trip in the 1980s, when the Young Republicans was the biggest student group on campus and a jazz concert was the major event on the horizon. I don't recall seeing any signs of the political activism that had been so prevalent during my years on campus.
But 1995 was different. Before returning to Berkeley, I had immersed myself in accounts of the turbulent sixties, and historical research has a way of bringing one closer to the past. So when I flew into San Francisco one fall day, my head was filled with images of a world that had existed some three decades before. I wondered as I traveled toward the campus whether any of the old Berkeley still existed.
