[1] He says he developed an early interest in history from reading Hendrik Willem van Loon's The Story of Mankind at age seven, which his brother had received as a bar mitzvah present.
[b] Brenner has recounted that his involvement with the Civil Rights Movement began when he met James Farmer of the Congress of Racial Equality, later the organizer of the Freedom Rides of the early 1960s.
Du Bois youth wing of the Communist Party of the United States (CPUSA) within the Ad Hoc Committee to End Discrimination (AHCED).
A bid to enroll in the orthodox Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party was rejected though he was permitted to join its youth branch, from which he was expelled for ignoring an order that he desist from talking about drug reform at street rallies.
[e] The UC, under Chancellor Clark Kerr, who believed Communist influence lay behind the Free Speech Movement (FSM),[9] had recently banned political activities on campus, and speakers were obliged to address passers-by outside, on city-owned property, though card-tables with leaflets were permitted a few steps inside.
[4] On October 1, 1964, Jack Weinberg a student of mathematics who had graduated with great distinction,[11] challenged the ruling by setting up one such card table in Sproul Plaza.
He was collecting funds for Congress of Racial Equality(CORE):[7] a number of campus activists at the time,[12] including philosophy student Mario Savio, were spending their summers aiding the civil rights movement to get Afro-Americans to register for a vote in the face of Ku Klux Klan violence.
[18] The hood of the car was turned into a platform where Savio, and one source claims Brenner himself,[19][i] made speeches and Joan Baez sang before a growing student crowd of thousands.
Some days after the incident, the University police contacted Brenner's probation officer expressing concern that his exceptional rhetorical talents might induce "mob action or violence" on the campus.
[4] UC faculty scholar William Petersen wrote an extensive report on the incident which, on 17 May 1965, was read into a Senate inquiry into putative Communist influence on American universities into internal security laws.
[2][1] He recalls that his time in prison enabled him to read widely in the library, enjoy free medical care, and engage with some of the "most impressive & intelligent people" he encountered in the 60s decade.
[23] In a memoir of the period, one of the FSM leaders, Michael Rossman[24] argued that the movement, in failing to stand by Brenner when he was targeted by the authorities, had effectively betrayed him and his distinctive campus voice.
[30] Davis found the thrust of the latter study, despite its impeccable documentation, somewhat weakened by passages of "pseudo-Freudian causal explanations" that Brenner wrote to supplement his political analysis.
[34] Brenner has authored, co-authored and edited a number of books: The wind blows a piece of paper into the law courts and it takes a yoke of oxen to get it out.