Mark William Rudd
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Mark William Rudd (born June 2, 1947 in Irvington, New Jersey) is a revolutionary organizer, American educator, and anti-war activist. From 1963 onwards Rudd was a member and from 1968 onward he was a 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] Youth
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.
Rudd attended Columbia High School in his hometown.[1]
[edit] Campus activism and Weather Underground
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 protest was not 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 became involved with the Weatherman (or Weather Underground), a group which was the product of an internal split within SDS in 1969. Rudd was a leader of the Revolutionary Youth Movement (RYM) faction of SDS which believed that the group was not doing enough to oppose the war in Vietnam and advocated for a more militant course of action. The 1969 SDS convention effectively splintered and ended the organization, with Rudd and other members of the RYM ultimately forming the Weatherman, a self proclaimed "organization of communist women and men" intent on overthrowing the government through violent action. The Weathermen were particularly opposed to what they saw as the criminality of the government's actions in Vietnam and its persecution of the Black Panthers.
Rudd and the rest of the Weatherman organization officially went underground in March of 1970 in the wake of the Greenwich Village townhouse explosion in which a small Weatherman cell making a bomb accidentally set it off killing three members of the group including Rudd's former classmate Ted Gold. After going underground the Weather organization was responsible for a number of bombings and other illegal actions throughout the country.
[edit] Reappearance
For seven years Rudd lived underground, although he was disengaged from the WUO for most of that time. 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 became an instructor of mathematics at Central New Mexico Community College in Albuquerque, 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 violent actions performed in pursuit of the goal of its overthrow were wrong.
Mark Rudd has now retired from teaching, and is traveling around the country engaging and supporting the newly reborn Students for a Democratic Society movement. Rudd along with Brian Kelly of Pace SDS have helped establish ties between the new SDS and the the Tent State University movement.
[edit] Works
- Mark Rudd, Truth and Consequences: The Education of Mark Rudd, Grove Press, 1990, ISBN 978-0802112699
[edit] References
- ^ Durbach, Elaine. "Ex-'60s radical shows kindler, gentler side at his alma mater", New Jersey Jewish News, April 19, 2007. "But while the former member of the Weather Underground showed a kinder and gentler side at an April 9 gathering at Columbia High School in Maplewood, his alma mater..."
