1/7/2017, San Francisco Chronicle, When Washington's Red-baiting congressional committee came to SF, Gary Kamiya,
"On May 13, 1960, 300 protesters, most of them students from UC Berkeley, gathered at San Francisco City Hall to protest hearings that HUAC had decided to hold here. Many of the protesters gathered outside the hearing room on the second floor were clean-cut youths, and their most confrontational action was singing "The Star-Spangled Banner" and staging a sit-down protest. None of them could have imagined that their peaceful sit-in would end with San Francisco police blasting them with fire hoses and clubbing them - or that their protest would be one of the seminal events of what would come to be called the '60s. ¶....¶ An activist UC student organization called SLATE, formed in 1958, urged students to picket the three-day HUAC hearings, in part because the committee had subpoenaed [UC student Douglas] Wachter. On the morning of May 12, scores of students filed into City Hall and lined up to enter the hearing chamber.¶ ....¶ [HUAC staff director Richard] Arens then called Wachter. The 18-year-old Berkeley High School graduate, wearing a gray suit and red tie, was a member of SLATE who had picketed with the civil rights group Congress of Racial Equality and marched against capital punishment. His parents were longtime members of the Communist Party; he was part of the party's youth group. Wachter refused to answer Arens' questions, citing his First and Fifth amendment rights.¶ After the lunch break, more students arrived from a rally at Union Square, where Assemblyman Phil Burton had told them, 'People should be tried in a legal court of law on the basis of their actions. … No legislative committee has the right to tell a man what he thinks and what he doesn't!'"