SLATE
SLATE
SLATE, a pioneer organization of the New Left and precursor of the Free Speech Movement and formative counterculture era, was a campus political party at the University of California, Berkeley from 1958 to 1966.
Origins
The University of California, Berkeley, had a substantial tradition of student political activism ranging from peace agitation in the 1930s to resisting McCarthyism during the loyalty oath controversy of the 1950s. The first stirrings of the Civil Rights Movement in the mid-1950s prompted a challenge by Ralph Shaffer, graduate student representative on the ASUC (Associated Students of the University of California) Senate, to discriminatory practices of fraternities and sororities. The group's ultimate goal, however, was to end the legacy of McCarthyism The group hoped to achieve this goal by calling for abolition of the House Un-American Activities Committee, which was viewed as one of the biggest obstacles to student rights.
Origins
In 1957 a campus political party called Toward An Active Student Community (TASC) was organized by Fritjof Thygeson, Rick White and others. It ran candidates in the student government election. Its requirement that candidates be accountable to TASC, based on the British parliamentary system, was fiercely attacked in the Daily Californian (UCB's student newspaper). TASC's candidates ran on a liberal platform, and were substantially defeated. The next semester, Mike Miller, an undergraduate representative on the ASUC Senate, resigned and organized a slate of candidates to run on a platform supporting racial equality, free speech on campus, voluntary ROTC (participation in ROTC was mandatory at the time for freshman and sophomore men), and participation in the National Student Association. They doubled the electorate and received between 35-40% of the vote. Encouraged, the candidates, joined by Thygeson, White, Peter Franck, Marv Sternberg, and Wilson Carey McWilliams, formally established SLATE as a campus political party in February 1958 (the name was not an acronym, but simply stood for a slate of candidates who ran on a common platform. However, when the Daily Californian followed their policy of not printing in all-capitals a name that was not an acronym, SLATE declared its name to be an acronym for "Student League Accused of Trying to Exist".) The university administration approved SLATE as a student organization, but not as a political party.
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