Mario Savio was best known as the leader of ''free speech'' demonstrations protesting campus rules at Berkeley in 1964. He was prominent in what became the Free Speech Movement, which is credited with giving birth to the campus ''sit-in'' and with being a model for the larger movement to protest the Vietnam War.
He was one of the hundreds of protesters who staged a sit-in on Dec. 2, 1964, at Berkeley in which the police arrested 800 people. The sit-in was the climax of three months of student protests in reaction to the university's curbing activities of civil rights and political groups on the campus. Students contended that the restrictions abridged their constitutional rights, and 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 the university.
Mr. Savio and other protesters were adversaries of Clark Kerr, Berkeley's president, who dismissed the Free Speech Movement as ''a ritual of hackneyed complaints'' and said the rabble-rousers were dominated by Communists. Savio appealed to his fellow students to halt the university machinery with their bodies. But just about the only physical violence came when he bit a police officer on the foot. The Berkeley faculty eventually overturned Kerr's position, and he gave in to the protesters.
Savio had a history of heart problems and was admitted to the hospital on November 2, 1996. He slipped into a coma on November 5 and died the following day, shortly after being removed from life support.
In 1999, it was revealed that Savio had been trailed by the FBI and was followed for more than a decade ‘because he had emerged as the nation’s most prominent student leader.’ There was no evidence that he was a threat or that he had any connection with the Communist Party, but the FBI decided he merited their attention because they thought he could inspire students to rebel.
According to hundreds of pages of FBI files, the bureau:
· Collected, without court order, personal information about Savio from schools, telephone companies, utility firms and banks and compiled information about his marriage and divorce.
· Monitored his day-to-day activities by using informants planted in political groups, covertly contacting his neighbors, landlords and employers, and having agents pose as professors, journalists and activists to interview him and his wife.
· Obtained his tax returns from the Internal Revenue Service in violation of federal rules, mischaracterized him as a threat to the president and arranged for the CIA and foreign intelligence agencies to investigate him when he and his family traveled in Europe.
· Put him on an unauthorized list of people to be detained without judicial warrant in event of a national emergency, and designated him as a "Key Activist" whose political activities should be "disrupted" and "neutralized" under the bureau's illegal counterintelligence program known as COINTELPRO.
The investigation finally ended at the beginning of 1975 and at that point an investigation in to the FBI’s abuse of power began. Savio’s ex-wife, Suzanne Goldberg, said that the "FBI’s investigation of her and Savio [was] a waste of money and an invasion of privacy."
No comments:
Post a Comment