Mario Savio

Mario Savio spent the summer of 1964 working with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee to bring national attention to racial injustices and white terrorism in Mississippi in what came to be known as Freedom Summer. This project's main goal was to fight Jim Crow institutionalized racism by registering Black Mississippians to vote. It was dangerous work: civil rights workers faced police brutality and outright murder. This experience galvanized Savio, and he came back to UC Berkeley with a heightened sense of social responsibility. His famous "Bodies Upon the Gears" speech delivered in December 1964 urged listeners to "you've got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus — and you've got to make it stop! And...indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it — that unless you're free the machine will be prevented from working at all!"