BY JOHN K. WILSON

Screenshot from Berkeley HxA video of event celebrating the sixtieth anniversary of Berkeley’s Free Speech Movement.

Sixty years ago, a revolution in campus free speech began. Unfortunately, it’s an anniversary being celebrated in the midst of extraordinary repression on college campuses against the right to protest. The Free Speech Movement at Berkeley and around the country was a direct outgrowth of the Civil Rights Movement and the tactics of nonviolent civil disobedience. While Martin Luther King Jr. and other leaders of the Civil Rights Movement are revered today as heroes, the tactics they used are being demonized.

In a recent event marking the sixtieth anniversary of the Free Speech Movement at Berkeley, Erwin Chemerinsky–Dean of Berkeley’s law school and one of the leading First Amendment experts–argued: “If students are going to violate the law, they face legal consequences. If they violate campus rules, they face campus consequences. And you may say it’s justified and it’s a good thing for them to do that, but the nature of civil disobedience is that one accepts the consequences.”

Dean Chemerinsky is completely wrong. At Berkeley, the students committing civil disobedience refused to accept the consequences. The Berkeley protests began on October 1, 1964, when students surrounded a police car and physically prevented a student from being arrested for political tabling. It was standing on top of that police car with a megaphone in clear violation of the law that Mario Savio first rose to national prominence. Then 814 students were arrested for occupying a campus building. And then after Berkeley sought to punish only a few of the protest leaders, students refused to let them accept the consequences and shut down the campus with a protest that eventually forced the administration to give in by allowing free speech and also punishing no one.

The entire Free Speech Movement was based upon refusing to accept the consequences of civil disobedience, and refusing to believe that students should be punished for their activism even if it violated campus rules.

If your takeaway lesson from the Civil Rights Movement is that civil disobedience must have consequences and white supremacists were correct to arrest Martin Luther King Jr., you have learned the wrong things from reading his “Letter from a Birmingham Jail.” We can celebrate the courage of peaceful protesters who are willing to be arrested for a cause without celebrating the authorities who arrest them, and without justifying those arrests as a moral good.

Protesters do not have a fundamental right to violate the law. But when the law is wrong, the answer is not to punish those who challenge it. And even when the law is right, violations of campus rules must be judged with care and justice, not retribution and indifference to the rights of protesters. We need to protect the right to dissent and defend the due process rights of protesters even if we might disagree with their goals and their tactics.

John K. Wilson is the author of eight books, including Patriotic Correctness: Academic Freedom and Its Enemies and the forthcoming book The Attack on Academia.