g the city's name in the list of elements.
1950s and 1960s
The postwar years saw moderate growth of the City, as events on the U.C. campus began to build up to the recognizable activism of the sixties. In 1950, the Census Bureau reported Berkeley's population as 11.7% black and 84.6% white. In the 1950s, McCarthyism induced the University to demand a loyalty oath from its professors, many of whom refused to sign the oath on the principle of freedom of thought. In 1960, a U.S. House committee (HUAC) came to San Francisco to investigate the influence of communists in the Bay Area. Their presence was met by protesters, including many from the University. Meanwhile, a number of U.C. students became active in support of the Civil Rights Movement. Finally, the University in 1964 provoked a massive student protest by banning distribution of political literature on campus. This protest became the Free Speech Movement. As the Vietnam War rapidly escalated in the ensuing years, so did student activism at the University, particularly that organized by the Vietnam Day Committee.
Berkeley is strongly identified with the rapid social changes, civic unrest, and political upheaval that characterized the late 1960s. In that period, Berkeley�especially Telegraph Avenue�became a focal point for the hippie movement, which spilled over the Bay from San Francisco. Many hippies were apolitical drop-outs, rather than students, but in the heady atmosphere of Berkeley in 1967�1969 there was considerable overlap of the hippie movement and the radical left. An iconic event in the Berkeley Sixties scene was a conflict over a parcel of University property south of the contiguous campus site that came to be called "People's Park."
The battle over disposition of People's Park resulted in a month-long occupation of Berkeley by the National Guard on orders of then-Governor Ronald Reagan. In the end, the park remained undeveloped, and remains so today. A spin-off,
