Lenni Brenner

Lenni Brenner (born 1937), formerly known as Leonard Glaser or Lenny Glaser, is an American Trotskyist writer.

Brenner was born into an Orthodox Jewish family in 1937.

He says he developed an early interest in history from reading Hendrik Willem van Loon's The Story of Mankind at age seven, which his brother had received as a bar mitzvah present.

In the 1960s, Brenner was a prominent civil rights movement activist and vocal opponent of the Vietnam War.

Brenner has recounted that his involvement with the Civil Rights Movement began when he met James Farmer of the Congress of Racial Equality, later the organizer of the Freedom Rides of the early 1960s.

Brenner, then known as Glaser, came to Berkeley in 1962.

A bid to enroll in the orthodox Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party was rejected though he was permitted to join its youth branch, from which he was expelled for ignoring an order that he desist from talking about drug reform at street rallies.

On the missile crisis he once delivered a non-stop speech from noon to midnight at Bancroft and Telegraph Avenue in 1962.

That venue was not thought to be on University property.

The UC, under Chancellor Clark Kerr, who believed Communist influence lay behind the Free Speech Movement (FSM), had recently banned political activities on campus, and speakers were obliged to address passers-by outside, on city-owned property, though card-tables with leaflets were permitted a few steps inside.

He also worked with Bayard Rustin, later the organizer of Martin Luther King Jr.'s 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom.

Brenner was arrested three times during civil rights sit-ins in the San Francisco Bay Area, In an article in the San Francisco Examiner Brenner, together with Mike Myerson, was identified as a member of the W.E.B. Du Bois youth wing of the Communist Party of the United States (CPUSA) within the Ad Hoc Committee to End Discrimination (AHCED).

In February 1964, he was arrested on a drug charge and put on probation for marijuana possession.

Though a non-student, Brenner at UC had become by this time a long-time campus orator, a familiar if solitary figure on the Berkeley campus (UC), where he delivered passionate tirades to passing students while protesting issues like Kennedy's handling of the Cuban Missile Crisis and the papal opposition to birth control, while also advocating for the legalization of marijuana.

On September 14, 1964, the University administration extended its ban, in effect from the 21st., to these card tables on the 26 foot brick walkway, technically also University property, just outside the campus entrance.

The tightening of this regulation triggered a wave of defiance, with students challenging the order by moving the card-tables inside the campus grounds.

On October 1, 1964, Jack Weinberg a student of mathematics who had graduated with great distinction, challenged the ruling by setting up one such card table in Sproul Plaza.

He was collecting funds for Congress of Racial Equality(CORE): a number of campus activists at the time, including philosophy student Mario Savio, were spending their summers aiding the civil rights movement to get Afro-Americans to register for a vote in the face of Ku Klux Klan violence.

After Weinberg refused to identify himself to emissaries of the dean, a lieutenant from the campus police was called in and informed him of the infraction.

Outnumbered, the policeman then left and came back with three more officers who arrested Weinberg for trespass and for violating the regulation against political activity.

Weinberg, using a passive disobedience technique, went limp and had to be hauled to a police car, which was almost immediately encircled by hundreds of students.

Brenner, In what has been described as an "historic event," is generally reported to have been the first in the crowd to try and physically block the exit of the police vehicle detaining Weinberg by Weinberg by rolling under it.

Several hundred joined him and the car remained "entrapped" for 32 hours.

In response, 643 police were assembled on the campus by 2 October.

The hood of the car was turned into a platform where Savio, and one source claims Brenner himself, made speeches and Joan Baez sang before a growing student crowd of thousands.

Brenner, though present, later stated he was opposed to the ensuing demonstration, and that he had approached the car and asked Weinberg if he wanted to get out.

Weinberg replied negatively saying that his presence there was of symbolic value.

The University authorities regarded Brenner as a trouble-maker.

Some days after the incident, the University police contacted Brenner's probation officer expressing concern that his exceptional rhetorical talents might induce "mob action or violence" on the campus.

According to David Goines, Brenner was then arrested when a policemen observed him accepting a beer from a passer-by and charged him with drinking in public.

This charge signified legally that he had violated the terms of his three year probation.

Lewis Feuer frequently referred to Brenner (Glaser) as the nihilistic Nechayev of the FSM, the evil genius behind the movement.

The UC sent a representative to testify against Brenner's probation while Brenner was denied the right to call witnesses on his own behalf.

The court ruling revoked his probation on the grounds that he had obstructed police in the execution of their duties.

He was sentenced to 1 to 10 years' imprisonment.

Brenner's appeal against his conviction was turned down by Judge Richard Sims who however, according to Brenner, wrote that he was troubled by Judge Dieden's ruling.

For Sims, Brenner was not a felon.

He had no interest in Jewish issues until around 1973, since, Brenner has remarked, he hailed from a milieu that frequented the synagogue only until the bar mitzvah rite was completed.

Since the 1980s, his activism has focused on anti-Zionism.

He has published widely on the history of Zionism, in particular asserting that the movement collaborated with the Nazis.