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Bettina Aptheker, as a student activist at UC Berkeley in the 1960s, fought for free speech after administrators tried to suppress political speech on campus.

She sees parallels between the red-baiting unleashed by Joe McCarthy in the 1950s and President Trump’s efforts to control speech at universities today.

Bettina Aptheker was a 20-year-old sophomore at UC Berkeley when she climbed on top of a police car, barefoot so she wouldn’t damage it, and helped start the Free Speech Movement.

“Power concedes nothing without a demand,” she told a crowd gathered in Sproul Plaza on that October Thursday in 1964, quoting abolitionist Frederick Douglass.

She was blinded by the lights of th

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