Farrakhan's UC Berkeley Speech Prompts Standing Ovation, Outrage

Despite a protest led by Jewish student groups, Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan spoke at UC Berkeley last weekend and received a standing ovation from the hundreds of students who attended.

Farrakhan, 78, has long been a lightening rod for controversy, and news of the event . The prevailing sentiment of the readers is that the city that gave birth to the free speech movement should let the man speak.

Apparently, UC President Mark Yudof agreed with Patch readers and issued a statement that’s got some 50 sites buzzing today, from Fox News to the BET.

In a note posted on his Facebook page, Yudof called Farrakhan a “provocative and divisive figure with a long history of racist, anti-Semitic and homophobic speech."

"We cannot, as a society or as a university community, be provoked by hurtful speech to retreat from the cherished value of free speech," Yudof said.

Farrakhan spoke at the Afrikan Black Coalition Conference put on by UC Berkeley’s Black Student Union, despite the petition that more than 350 students signed to prevent him from speaking.

The San Francisco Chronicle reports that Farrakhan seemed to “relish the controversy.”

When Farrakhan spoke of Chinese people he “adopted a faux Asian accent and used gibberish,” the Chronicle reported. This drew “a gasp from some of the crowd.”

Farrakhan and Malcolm X were contemporaries at the Nation of Islam. Here’s a video of Malcolm X speaking at UC Berkeley in 1963.

But Malcolm X mellowed after his pilgrimage to Mecca and left the Nation of Islam, while Farrakhan rose in its ranks, maintaining his fiery rhetorical style (Malcolm X once compared the Nation of Islam to the Ku Klux Klan, as you can see in this video).

But for UC Davis student Sadalia King, Farrakhan, like Malcolm X, is a figure she’s studied in school. And according to the San Francisco Chronicle, she wanted to come see the ailing 78-year-old. The paper quotes her as saying that people like Farrakhan are "just like your grandparents. You know they might say something a little crazy, but you're still going to love and respect them."