Mario Savio, Protest Leader Who Set a Style, Dies at 53
by ERIC PACE (New York Times)
(November 8, 1996) Mario Savio, an incendiary student leader of
the Free Speech Movement at the University of California at Berkeley
in the 1960s, a movement credited with giving birth to the campus
"sit-in" and with being a model for the protests
against the Vietnam War, died on Wednesday in Palm Drive Hospital
in Sebastopol, Calif. He was 53 and lived in Sonoma County, Calif.
Susan Kashack, public information officer for Sonoma State University,
where Savio taught, said he had gone into a deep coma after suffering
heart fibrillation -- rapid, uncoordinated contractions of heart
muscle -- while moving furniture. He had a history of heart trouble.
His family permitted doctors to disconnect life support, a hospital
official was quoted in The Los Angeles Times.
Savio was teaching mathematics and philosophy at Sonoma State,
where he joined the faculty in the 1990s after teaching elsewhere
in California.
In the 1960s, Savio, a fiery, inspiring orator whose father was
a machine punch operator, was an adversary of Clark Kerr, the
University of California president, who referred to the university
as a factory and dismissed the Free Speech Movement as "a
ritual of hackneyed complaints."
Savio is remembered for the words he spoke on Dec. 2, 1964, from
Sproul Plaza in front of Berkeley's main administration building,
to a large crowd of protesters, many of whom took part in a sit-in
inside the building and a campus strike.
"There is a time," he said, "when the operation
of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart,
that you can't take part; and you've got to put your bodies upon
the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus
and you've got to make it stop. And you've got to indicate to
the people who run it, to the people who own it, that unless you're
free, the machine will be prevented from working at all."
The police arrested 800 of the protesters in what was the largest
mass arrest in California history.
The sit-in was the climax of three months of student disorders
in reaction to the university's decision to limit the activities
of civil rights and political groups on the campus. Students contended
that the restrictions abridged their constitutional rights. Savio
became a member of the executive committee of the Free Speech
Movement, an organization representing a score of civil rights
and political groups at Berkeley.
At a news conference after the Dec. 2 action, Savio said it had
been the most successful student strike in American history, with
only 17 percent or 18 percent of the students attending classes.
After a demonstration two months earlier, Savio was accused of
biting a police officer's left thigh, "breaking the skin
and causing bruises." A fellow demonstrator, now known
as Laura X, who heads the Women's History Library in Berkeley,
said Savio loved to tell people that he had apologized afterward
to the officer because, as he put it, they were "both
working-class kids."
Explaining why he had risked expulsion for agitating on campus
in 1964, Savio cited the time he spent working for civil rights
causes in the South earlier that year: "I spent the summer
in Mississippi. I witnessed tyranny. I saw groups of men in the
minority working their wills over the majority. Then I came back
here and found the university preventing us from collecting money
for use there and even stopping us from getting people to go to
Mississippi to help."
Through a change in rules, the university tried to limit the use
of the campus for political activities and the recruiting of students
for off-campus demonstrations.
When students protested, Kerr and other Berkeley administrators
suggested that they were rabble-rousers who were dominated by
Communists. But the protesters ranged from a variety of socialists
to Goldwater Republicans.
The Free Speech movement that Savio gave voice to became a model
for protests. The events of 1964 in Berkeley ushered in a decade
of student agitation across the country, culminating in the wide
protests against the war in Vietnam.
Savio, when asked late in 1964 what the turmoil had signified,
quoted a sentence from "Moby Dick": 'Woe to him
who would try to pour oil on the waters when God has brewed them
into a gale."
A native New Yorker, Savio graduated at the head of his class
of 1,200 from Martin Van Buren High School in Queens and attended
Manhattan College, on scholarship, and Queens College before going
to Berkeley, where he enrolled in 1963 as a philosophy major.
His confrontational activities did not go unpunished. He was suspended
for a time, and was also sentenced to four months in prison for
his part in one protest action.
In later years, after leaving Berkeley, he was mostly out of the
limelight, working as a bookstore clerk, tending bar and teaching
mathematics, as a tutor and also in public and private schools,
at the junior high and high school level. He received a bachelor's
degree summa cum laude in 1984 and then a master's degree, both
in physics from San Francisco State University. He taught there
and at Modesto Junior College before going to Sonoma State.
At a 1994 reunion of 1964 protesters at Berkeley, Savio showed
some his old fire, calling Speaker Newt Gingrich and Sen. Jesse
Helms "crypto-fascists." He also reported that one of
his sons, age 13, had told him that he would not furnish the required
proof of his citizenship when he entered high school the next
year.
"They say the fruit never falls far from the tree,"
Savio added. "Thank God."
His first marriage, to Suzanne Goldberg, ended in divorce.
His survivors include his wife, Lynne Hollander, and three sons,
Daniel, Nadaf and Stefan.
New York Times on November 8th, 1996.
This text is part of the Internet Modern History Sourcebook.
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(c)Paul Halsall Aug 1997
