On October 1 and 2, 1964, several hundred students at the University of California's Berkeley campus held a police car captive for thirty-two hours, until administrative leaders of the university agreed to negotiate a series of grievances. The prolonged conflict that emerged from the encounter of the newly formed "Free Speech Movement" convulsed the campus for almost a year. This report uses the Berkeley events as raw material for studying the genesis of collective action in a conflict setting and presents a sociological history of the Free Speech controversy.