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Bodies Upon the Gears

Witness the birth of the free speech movement. Watch the new documentary presented by FIRE and directed by Academy Award-winning filmmaker Paul Wagner.

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Free Speech Movement

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Screenshots from the FIRE mini-documentary "Bodies Upon the Gears"

WATCH: "Bodies Upon the Gears", a new free speech documentary, which is a FIRE presentation of an American Focus production.

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Back in 1964, in light of growing political unrest, the University of California, Berkeley, banned all political speech on campus. In response, a group of college students— Students for Goldwater, conservatives, liberals, and communists— joined forces to create the Free Speech Movement. Their objective? Defend their First Amendment rights at Berkeley. But what started as a small campus protest quickly spread across the country, changing the course of American history forever.

Watch the new free speech documentary "Bodies Upon the Gears," presented by FIRE.

Mario Savio speaks to the press at Berkeley's Greek Theater on Dec. 7, 1964.

There's a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious—makes you so sick at heart—that you can't take part. You can't even passively take part. And you've got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you've got to make it stop.

Free speech activist Mario Savio speaks with reporters outside the Greek Theatre at Berkeley University on December 7, 1964.

Savio, a young college student from Queens, New York, spent the summer of 1964 volunteering for the Mississippi Freedom Summer, going door-to-door to register Black voters in the South. He suffered a beating by the Ku Klux Klan. Mario returned to school at the University of California, Berkeley, that fall to continue his advocacy. At this time, the Berkeley administration was pressured to shut down student activism. So the University decreed that students could no longer set up tables to promote political causes. It was this spark that led Mario and his classmates to create the Free Speech Movement.

“Bodies Upon the Gear” is a Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression presentation of an American Focus production. The documentary is directed, written, and edited by Academy Award and Emmy-winning Paul Wagner (Best Documentary Short Film for The Stone Carvers) and produced by Wagner and his producing partner, Ellen Wagner. 

FIRE Senior Fellow and former national president of the ACLU Nadine Strossen narrates.

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