Mark William Rudd

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"He's 30 years old. You get too old to be a revolutionary."
—Jacob S. Rudd, father of Mark William Rudd, speculating on why Mark turned himself in to police.

Mark William Rudd (born June 2, 1947 in Irvington, New Jersey) is an American educator and anti-war activist. During the late 1960s, he was the leader of the Columbia University chapter of Students for a Democratic Society. Before and after the 1968 Columbia Student Revolt, he became a spokesperson for dissident students who were protesting a variety of issues, most notably the Vietnam War.

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[edit] Birth

Mark was the son of Jacob S. Rudd (1909-1995), a former Army officer who sold real estate in Maplewood, New Jersey. Jacob was born as "Jacov Shmuel Rudnitsky" in Stanislower, Poland, and emigrated to the United States in 1917, when he was nine years old. Mark's mother was Bertha Bass (1912-?), who was born in Elizabeth, New Jersey, the year after her parents immigrated from Lithuania. She was the only child of the family born in the United States. Mark has a brother: David R. Rudd (1939-?), an attorney.

[edit] Weather Underground

Rudd became involved with the Weathermen, a group that splintered off from SDS, believing that the group was not doing enough to oppose the war in Vietnam. The Weathermen were a self proclaimed "organization of communist women and men," and set out to overthrow the government due to their belief of the criminality of the government's actions in Vietnam and in persecuting the Black Panthers.

In 1968, Rudd, then a junior, was expelled from Columbia University after a series of sit-ins and riots which disrupted campus life and attracted nationwide attention. These events culminated in the dramatic occupation of several campus buildings, including the Administration building Low Memorial Library, which ended only after violent clashes between students and the New York Police Department. The Columbia revolt was by no means the first student revolt on an American campus, but it happened at a relatively conservative Ivy League school located just up the street from the headquarters of the nation's news media, so it made a big impression nationwide. The revolt inspired the slogan, "One, Two, Three, Many Columbias!"

Rudd eventually went underground, while the Weathermen waged war against the United States government. The Weathermen's violent actions subsided in March of 1970 after an incident: while working on a bomb in lower Manhattan, the group accidentally set it off, killing three of their members, including Rudd's former classmate Ted Gold.

[edit] Reappearance

For seven years after, Rudd ran from the law. On October 13, 1977, Rudd turned himself in. Ironically, he had recently been living and working peacefully under an assumed name just a few miles from the Columbia campus, in Brooklyn. His first public appearance was on campus, where he spoke to a crowd of hundreds of admiring students. He was not the firebrand the crowd expected, but he did participate in a march around the campus after the speech.

[edit] New Mexico

He is now a professor of mathematics at a community college in New Mexico. He was interviewed in the 2002 documentary, The Weather Underground, and stated that while he believes the group's motivation, to end the Vietnam War, was justified, and that while its Marxist-inspired understanding of the history of United States imperialism was correct, the terrorist actions performed in pursuit of the goal of its overthrow were wrong.

[edit] Reference

  • Time (magazine); September 26, 1977; Radical Comes Home. Has the movement collapsed? He was a single-minded revolutionary, one of the most notorious of the young radicals in the '60s. He led the militant students who occupied five buildings at Columbia University in 1968—prompting a battle with police that injured more than 200 protesters and triggered a student strike that paralyzed the campus for a month. He later took part in the "days of rage" demonstration in Chicago, in which several hundred radicals went on a four-day rampage. Then, rather than answer criminal charges stemming from both episodes, Mark Rudd went underground. For seven years his face peered stonily from WANTED posters across the country. A special squad of FBI agents—up to 35 at one point—shadowed his friends, tapped their phones and examined their mail in a fruitless hunt for Rudd and other fugitive firebrands.

[edit] External links