The land that would become People's Park was an unremarkable rectangle of mud and rubble. The University of California had acquired the site, demolished the houses on it, and then left it sitting vacant. In April 1969, community members began transforming the empty lot into a park, planting trees, laying sod, and building benches. It was part garden, part political statement, a physical claim on public space at a moment when the counterculture and the university administration were locked in escalating conflict. Governor Ronald Reagan had won office in 1966 partly on a promise to crack down on Berkeley's campus protests. The park gave him his opportunity. When Berkeley chancellor Roger Heyns announced on May 13 that the university would fence the site for a planned soccer field, he lit a fuse that had been burning since the Free Speech Movement five years earlier.

The confrontation escalated with terrifying speed. As thousands of protesters surged toward the fenced-off park, the 159 police officers guarding the site fired tear gas. Protesters threw bottles, rocks, and bricks. A fire hydrant was opened. At least one car burned. Then came the shotguns. Alameda County Sheriff Frank Madigan authorized deputies to load lethal buckshot, later explaining that the choice was between firearms and abandoning Berkeley "to the mob." He also acknowledged that some of his deputies, many of them Vietnam veterans, had been overly aggressive, pursuing protesters "as though they were Viet Cong." James Rector, a visitor watching from the roof of Granma Books, was hit by police shotgun fire. He died four days later. Artist Alan Blanchard was permanently blinded. Contemporaneous reports counted at least 50 wounded, including bystanders who had nothing to do with the protest.

Governor Reagan's response was unequivocal. The National Guard rolled into Berkeley, enforcing a citywide curfew and banning public gatherings. On May 20, Guard helicopters flew low over the campus and dispensed tear gas from the air, one of the largest aerial deployments of chemical agents during the entire Vietnam protest era. Wind carried the gas over a wide area, affecting a nearby hospital and people with no connection to the demonstrations. Reagan would later concede this might have been "a tactical mistake." By May 22, nearly 800 people had been arrested. Troops broke up any gathering of more than four people on Berkeley's streets, day or night. In one sweep, soldiers surrounded several thousand people in downtown Berkeley, emptying businesses and restaurants and arresting everyone inside. The Washington Post called the indiscriminate gassing of a thousand people not in violation of any law "more than a little excessive."

The turning point came on May 30. Thirty thousand Berkeley residents obtained a city permit and marched peacefully past the barricaded park, protesting Reagan's occupation, Rector's death, and the injuries inflicted by police. Young women slid flowers down the muzzles of bayoneted National Guard rifles, creating one of the era's defining images of nonviolent resistance. The faculty had already broken ranks: 177 professors declared themselves unwilling to teach until police and troops withdrew. The faculty senate voted 642 to 95 to support transforming the park into an experiment in community-generated design. In a student referendum, UC Berkeley students voted 12,719 to 2,175 in favor of keeping the park, a turnout representing half the student body.

Reagan never wavered. "If it takes a bloodbath, let's get it over with," he told the California Council of Growers the following April. The remark became a rallying cry for both sides. People's Park itself survived, though it has never stopped being contested ground. The university and the community fought over it for decades, each attempt to develop the site reigniting the old confrontation in miniature. What happened on that patch of Berkeley earth in May 1969 was not simply a dispute over land use. It was a collision between a generation that believed public space belonged to the people who used it and an authority structure willing to use lethal force to prove otherwise. The scars from that collision, on the city and on the people who lived through it, never fully healed.