Jo Freeman

The University had restricted such activity since the 1930s.

Jo Freeman aka Joreen (born August 26, 1945), is an American feminist, political scientist, writer and attorney.

She was born in Atlanta, Georgia, in 1945.

Her mother Helen was from Hamilton, Alabama, and had served during World War II as a first lieutenant in the Women's Army Corps, stationed in England.

Soon after Jo's birth Helen moved to Los Angeles, California where she taught junior high school until shortly before her death from emphysema.

As a student at the University of California, Berkeley in the 1960s, she became active in organizations working for civil liberties and the civil rights movement.

She went on to do voter registration and community organization in Alabama and Mississippi and was an early organizer of the women's liberation movement.

She authored several classic feminist articles as well as important papers on social movements and political parties.

She has also written extensively about women, particularly on law and public policy toward women and women in mainstream politics.

Freeman attended Birmingham High School, but graduated in the first class of Granada Hills High School in 1961.

It became a major issue when the civil rights movement came to the Bay Area in the fall of 1963 because students wanted to support the movement on campus as well as off.

When the civil rights movement came to the San Francisco Bay Area in 1963, it picketed local employers who didn't hire blacks.

Demonstrations were organized at Lucky supermarket and Mel's Drive-In to get them to sign hiring agreements.

Success here was followed by unsuccessful negotiations with San Francisco's most elegant hotels and several automobile dealers.

In the fall of 1964 the question was dramatized when student organizations set up tables on campus to solicit money and recruit students for off-campus political action in defiance of the ban.

One person was arrested and several students were issued administrative citations.

After a mass arrest was narrowly avoided by last minute negotiations with University president Clark Kerr, the Free Speech Movement (FSM) was formed by the student groups to continue the struggle.

Freeman represented the University Young Democrats on the FSM executive committee.

After two months of fruitless negotiations, Freeman was one of "the 800" students who were arrested for sitting in at the main administration building on December 2–3, 1964.

This was the biggest mass arrest in California history.

The publicity it generated compelled the Regents of the University to change the rules so that students could pursue political issues on campus.

Freeman was one of 167 demonstrators arrested at the Sheraton-Palace Hotel in March 1964, and one of 226 arrested at the Cadillac agency in April.

She was acquitted in her first trial and convicted in her second, resulting in a fifteen-day jail sentence.

Her second trial kept her from attending the 1964 Freedom Summer project in Mississippi.

After it ended she hitchhiked to the 1964 Democratic National Convention in August in Atlantic City, New Jersey, to support the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party's petition to be seated in place of the all-white regular Mississippi delegation.

Following graduation from UC Berkeley, Freeman joined the Southern Christian Leadership Conference's (SCLC) summer project, SCOPE (Southern Community Organization and Political Education).

When the summer was over, she joined the SCLC staff as a field worker.

For the next year she did voter registration in Alabama and Mississippi, spending a few days in jail in both states.

She received her BA with honors in political science from UC Berkeley in 1965.

In August 1966, when she was working in Grenada, Mississippi, the Jackson Daily News published an exposé of her work as a "professional agitator" on its editorial page, implying that she was a communist sympathizer.

The exposé was accompanied by five photographs, including one taken during the FSM.

Thirty years later a federal court order disclosed that these were provided to the newspaper by the Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission.

She began her graduate work in political science at the University of Chicago in 1968 and completed her PhD in 1973.

After four years of teaching at the State University of New York she went to Washington, D.C., as a Brookings Fellow and stayed another year as an American Political Science Association Congressional Fellow.

She entered New York University School of Law in 1979 as a Root-Tilden Scholar and received her JD degree in 1982.

Freeman moved to Park Slope, Brooklyn in 1979 to attend law school and has lived in Kensington, Brooklyn since 1985.

At Berkeley, Freeman was active in the University Young Democrats and the campus political party, SLATE.

SLATE worked to abolish nuclear testing, to eliminate the University's ban on controversial speakers, and to improve undergraduate education at Cal. It developed a guide to classes and professors entitled the SLATE Supplement to the General Catalog, for which Freeman wrote reviews of professors and their courses.

One of SLATE's fundamental principles was that students should have the same rights to take stands on issues on campus that they had as citizens off campus.

She was admitted to the New York State Bar in 1983.