Mark Rudd

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 was the leader of the Columbia University chapter (branch) 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.

Rudd became involved with the Weather Underground, 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 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 Adminstration building Low 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 Weather Underground waged war against the United States government. The Weather Underground's violent actions subsided in March of 1970 after a tragic 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.

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.

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 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.

External Links

• Mark Rudd's personal web site [1]

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