Mario Savio

Mario Savio on Sproul Hall steps, 1966

Mario Savio (December 8, 1942 – November 6, 1996) was an American political activist and a key member in the Berkeley Free Speech Movement. He is most famous for his passionate speeches, especially his "put your bodies upon the gears" address given at Sproul Hall, University of California, Berkeley on December 2, 1964.

Biography

Early life

Mario Savio was born in New York to a Sicilian steel worker father. Both his parents were devout Catholics and, as an altar boy, Savio was planning to become a priest. He graduated from Martin Van Buren High School in Queens at the top of his class in 1960 and then went to Manhattan College on a full scholarship as well as Queens College. When he finished in 1963, he spent the summer working with a Catholic relief organization in Taxco, Mexico helping to improve the sanitary problems by building facilities in the slums.

His parents had moved to Los Angeles and that autumn he enrolled at University of California, Berkeley. In March the following year he was arrested while demonstrating against the San Francisco Hotel Association for excluding blacks from non-menial jobs. He was charged with trespassing, along with 167 other protesters. While in jail, a cellmate asked if he was heading for Mississippi that summer to help with the Civil Rights project.

Activism

During the summer of 1964 he joined the Freedom Summer projects in Mississippi and was involved in helping African Americans register to vote. He also taught at a freedom school for black children in McComb, Mississippi. In July, Savio, another white civil rights activist and a black acquaintance were walking down a road in Jackson and were attacked by two men. They attempted to press charges but the case went nowhere until President Lyndon Johnson, who had only recently passed the Civil Rights Act, urged the FBI look into it as a civil rights violation. Eventually one of the attackers was found, and was fined $50 and charged with misdemeanor assault.

When Savio returned to Berkeley after his time in Mississippi, he was intent on raising money for SNCC, but found that the university had banned all political activity and all fund-raising. He told Karlyn Barker in 1964 that it was a question as to whose side you are on. ‘Are we on the side of the civil rights movement? Or have we gotten back to the comfort and security of Berkeley, California, and can we forget the sharecroppers whom we worked with just a few weeks back? Well we couldn’t forget.’

Savio’s part in the protest on the Berkeley campus started when on October 1, 1964, former student Jack Weinberg was manning a table for CORE. The University police had just put him in the police car when someone from the surrounding crowd yelled ‘sit down.’ Savio, along with others during the 32-hour sit-in, took off his shoes and climbed on top of the car and spoke with words that roused the crowd into frenzy.

The last time he climbed on the police car was to tell the crowd of a short-term understanding that had been met with UC President Clark Kerr. Savio said to the crowd, "I ask you to rise quietly and with dignity, and go home", and the crowd did exactly what he said. After this Savio became the prominent leader of the newly formed Free Speech Movement. Negotiations failed to change the situation; therefore direct action began in Sproul Hall on December 2. There, Savio gave his most famous speech, on the "operation of the machine", in front of 4,000 people. He and 800 others were arrested that day. In 1967 he was sentenced to 120 days at Santa Rita Jail. He told reporters that ‘[he] would do it again.’

In April 1965, he quit the FSM because ‘he was disappointed with the growing gap between the leadership of the FSM … and the students themselves.’

"Bodies upon the gears" speech

"There's a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious—makes you so sick at heart—that you can't take part. You can't even passively 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." Sproul Hall Steps, December 2, 1964

Later life

Between 1965 and his death, Savio held a variety of jobs, including being a sales clerk in Berkeley. In 1965, he married Suzanne Goldberg, whom he had met at the Free Speech Movement. Two months after their wedding, they moved to England because Savio had won a scholarship to the University of Oxford. While there, they had their first child, Stefan. He did not complete his degree at Oxford due to emotional problems, and they moved back to California in February 1966. In 1968, he ran for state senator from Alameda County on the Peace and Freedom Party ticket, but lost to Nick Petris, a liberal Democrat.

In 1980, he married a second time, to Lynne Hollander, an old acquaintance from the Free Speech Movement. He returned to education at San Francisco State University during their marriage. In 1984, he received a summa cum laude bachelor’s degree in physics and earned a master’s degree in 1989. In 1990, Savio and Hollander moved with their 10-year-old son Daniel to Sonoma County, California, where he taught mathematics, philosophy and logic at Sonoma State University.

FBI controversy

In 1999, it was revealed that Savio had been trailed by the Federal Bureau of Investigation from the moment that he had climbed on to the police car that harbored Jack Weinberg. He 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.

Even when he had quit the FSM, the FBI called him to their Berkeley office. They told Savio that they had received letters of a threatening nature towards him, but they would not speak with Savio’s attorney present. However, he would not agree, and instead criticised the FBI ‘for failure to make arrests and take action in the South where human rights are being violated every day.’ At this point the meeting ended.

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."

Death

Savio had a history of heart problems and was admitted to Columbia-Palm Drive Hospital in Sebastopol, California on November 2, 1996. He slipped into a coma on November 5 and died the following day, shortly after being removed from life support.

Legacy

A Memorial Lecture Fund was set up to honor Mario Savio upon his death. The MSMLF hosts an annual fall lecture on the University of California, Berkeley campus. Past lecturers include Howard Zinn, Winona LaDuke, Lani Guinier, Barbara Ehrenreich, Arlie Russell Hochschild, Cornel West, Christopher Hitchens, Adam Hochschild, Amy Goodman, Molly Ivins, Jeff Chang, Tom Hayden, Angela Davis, Seymour Hersh, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., and Naomi Klein.

The Memorial Fund also set up the Mario Savio Young Activist Award to honor an outstanding activist under 30 with a deep commitment to human rights and social justice and the qualities of leadership ability, creativity, and integrity. Recipients of the award since it was first bestowed in 1998 include Michael Leon Guerrero, Niki Fortunato Bas, Jia Ching Chen, Jim Keady, Harmony Goldberg, Genevieve Gonzales, Rocio Nieves, Jason West, Erin Durban, Noemi Ramos, Christopher Goodman, Patrisse Marie Cullors, Julissa Bisono, Chelsea Chee, and Timothy Den-Herder.

In 1997, the steps of Sproul Plaza, from which he had given his most famous speech, were officially renamed the “Mario Savio Steps".

Mario's famous speech is sampled in many songs including An Ounce Of Prevention from the album On Little Known Frequencies by the band From Monument to Masses, Timelessness by the band Fear Factory, The Movie's Over by the Australian band Cog, Article IV by the Santa Cruz band Good Riddance, Here Come The Pigs by Deadsoul Tribe and Wretches and Kings from the album A Thousand Suns by Linkin Park. It is also paraphrased in an episode of Battlestar Galactica (Lay Down Your Burdens, Part II) , given by a character playing the head of a union.

Biography

• Robert Cohen, Freedom's Orator: Mario Savio and the Radical Legacy of the 1960s (Oxford University Press, 2009). ISBN 978-0-19-518293-4
• Robert Cohen and Reginald E. Zelnik, eds., The Free Speech Movement: Reflections on Berkeley in the 1960s (University of California Press, 2002). ISBN 0-520-23354-9

External links

• http://americahurrah.com/NBC/MarioSavio.htm
• Text, Audio, Video of Sproul Hall Sit-in Address delivered 2 December 1964
• The Free Speech Movement Online Sound Recording Collection (via UC Berkeley Media Resources Center)
• The Free Speech Movement Archives (includes information about the event surrounding the speech; the Mario Savio Memorial Lecture; and Mario Savio's 1996 Memorial)
• The UC Berkeley Bancroft Library Free Speech Movement Digital Archives (includes a RealAudio videoclip of the Savio 1964 Dec. 2 speech, available at a sub-page)
• The Mario Savio Memorial Lecture Fund