Events

Police carried 773 students out of Sproul Hall one by one in the largest mass arrest in California history. The sit-in at the University of California, Berkeley, on December 2-3, 1964, was the climax of the Free Speech Movement, a student revolt that challenged university administrators' authority to regulate political activity on campus. The arrests did not crush the movement. They transformed it into a national cause. The crisis began in September 1964 when Berkeley's administration banned tables and leafleting at the Bancroft Way entrance to campus, a traditional zone for student political organizing. Civil rights activists who had spent the summer registering voters in Mississippi were particularly outraged. When administrators attempted to arrest a former student for staffing a Congress of Racial Equality table on October 1, thousands of students surrounded the police car for 32 hours, using its roof as a speaking platform. Mario Savio, a 21-year-old philosophy student and Mississippi Freedom Summer veteran, emerged as the movement's most compelling voice. His speech on the steps of Sproul Hall on December 2 electrified the crowd: "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." He urged students to put their bodies upon the gears. Over a thousand filed into the building for an all-night occupation. Governor Pat Brown ordered the arrests, which took police 12 hours to complete. But a campus-wide faculty vote on December 8 sided overwhelmingly with the students, and the administration capitulated on nearly every demand. The Free Speech Movement established the template for campus activism that defined the late 1960s, from anti-Vietnam War protests to the ethnic studies movement. Berkeley became synonymous with student radicalism, a reputation that persists six decades later.

Christiaan Barnard cut open a dying man's chest and replaced his heart with one from a woman killed in a car accident. The surgery at Groote Schuur Hospital in Cape Town on December 3, 1967, lasted nine hours and required a team of thirty. Louis Washkansky, a 54-year-old grocer ravaged by diabetes and heart disease, woke up with the heart of Denise Darvall, a 25-year-old bank clerk, beating inside him. Barnard was not the most obvious candidate to make surgical history. American surgeons Norman Shumway and Richard Lower at Stanford had performed the crucial animal research and developed the techniques Barnard used. But Shumway faced institutional review hurdles and legal uncertainty about when a donor could be declared dead. South Africa had no such constraints. Barnard, who had trained briefly at the University of Minnesota, moved faster. Darvall and her mother were struck by a drunk driver on the evening of December 2. Her mother died instantly. Denise was declared brain dead at Groote Schuur, and her father gave consent for organ donation. Barnard's team cooled her heart, stopped it with potassium, and transplanted it into Washkansky's chest. When they removed the clamps and warmed the heart, it began beating on its own. Barnard later said the sound was "like music." Washkansky survived 18 days before dying of pneumonia, his immune system weakened by the anti-rejection drugs. The brevity of his survival disappointed some, but the surgery proved the concept. Barnard performed a second transplant in January 1968, and the patient lived 19 months. Shumway continued refining the procedure and immunosuppression protocols that made heart transplants routine. Today, roughly 6,000 heart transplants are performed worldwide each year, all of them descendants of one audacious night in Cape Town.