The 1969 People's Park protest, also known as Bloody Thursday, took place at People's Park on May 15, 1969. The Berkeley Police Department and other officers clashed with protestors over the site of the park, using deadly force. Ronald Reagan, then-governor of California, eventually sent in the state National Guard to quell the protests.
Background
The 1969 confrontation in People's Park grew out of the counterculture of the 1960s. Berkeley had been the site of the first large-scale antiwar demonstration in the country on September 30, 1964. The late 1960s saw student protests across the United States, such as the 1968 Columbia Univeresity and Democratic National Convention protests. On April 3, 1969, students at Stanford University protested war-related research by occupying Encina Hall.
California governor Ronald Reagan had been publicly critical of university administrators for tolerating student demonstrations at the University of California, Berkeley. He had received popular support for his 1966 gubernatorial campaign promise to crack down on what the public perceived as a generally lax attitude at California's public universities. He called the Berkeley campus "a haven for protesters and sex deviants".
In the U.S. House of Representatives, the Higher Education Protection and Freedom of Expression Act of 1969 was introduced in response to mass protests and demonstrations at universities and colleges across the nation. The bill would have required colleges and universities to file plans of action for dealing with campus unrest with the U.S. commissioner of education, and would have given the institutions the power to suspend federal aid to students convicted, in court or by the university, of violating campus rules in connection with student riots. The bill also proposed that any school that did not file such plans would lose federal funding. Reagan supported the federal legislation; in a March 19 statement, he urged the U.S. Congress to "be equally concerned about those who commit violence who are not receiving aid". On May 20, U.S. attorney general John N. Mitchell advised the committee that existing law was "adequate".
On April 13, 1969, local merchants and residents decided to develop a vacant, unused lot owned by the Berkeley campus into a public park, a "Power to the People Park". Construction started on April 20 and continued for weeks. However, on April 28, Berkeley vice chancellor Earl Cheit announced that the university planned to build a soccer field on the site, though he promised he would notify park supporters before construction. On May 13, Berkeley chancellor Roger Heyns announced that the university would soon erect a fence around the park to begin construction.
Protest
In the early morning of May 15, 1969, local police cleared the park, arresting three people who refused to leave. University work crews arrived later, destroyed many of the improvements that had been made to the park, and erected an -tall perimeter chain-link wire fence around the site. The action came at the request of Berkeley mayor Wallace J. S. Johnson. It became the impetus for the "most violent confrontation in the university's history".