An End to History Persuasive Speech
Last summer I went to Mississippi to join the struggle there for civil rights. This fall I am engaged in
another phase of the same struggle, this time in Berkeley. The two battlefields may seem quite
different to some observers, but this is not the case. The same rights are at stake in both
places—the right to participate as citizens in a democratic society and the right to due process of
law.
In our free speech fight at the University of California, we have come up against what may emerge
as the greatest problem of our nation—depersonalized, unresponsive bureaucracy.
The same is true of all bureaucracies. They begin as tools, means to certain legitimate goals, and
they end up feeding their own existence. The conception that bureaucrats have is that history has in
fact come to an end. No events can occur now that the Second World War is over which can
change American society substantially.
The most crucial problems facing the United States today are the problem of automation and the
problem of racial injustice. Most people who will be put out of jobs by machines will not accept an
end to events, this historical plateau, as the point beyond which no change occurs. Negroes will not
accept an end to history here. All of us must refuse to accept history’s final judgment that in America
there is no place in society for people whose skins are dark.
On campus students are not about to accept it as fact that the university has ceased evolving and is
in its final state of perfection, that students and faculty are respectively raw material and employees,
or that the university is to be autocratically run by unresponsive bureaucrats.
The things we are asking for in our civil rights protests have a deceptively quaint ring. We are asking
for the due process of law. We are asking for our actions to be judged by committees of our peers.
We are asking that regulations ought to be considered as arrived at legitimately only from the
consensus of the governed.
The university is the place where people begin seriously to question the conditions of their existence
and raise the issue of whether they can be committed to the society they have been born into. After
a long period of apathy during the ’50s, students have begun not only to question but, having arrived
at answers, to act on those answers.
This is part of a growing understanding among many people in America that history has not ended,
that a better society is possible and that it is worth dying for.
Students are permitted to talk all they want so long as their speech has no consequences.
The most exciting things going on in America today are movements to change America. America is
becoming ever more the utopia of sterilized, automated contentment. The “futures” and “careers” for
which American students now prepare are for the most part intellectual and moral wastelands.
