VOICES

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Mario Savio --
The Death of a Radical

By Jonah Raskin

Date: 11-11-96

Mario Savio, unlike other radical activists of the 1960s, was a shy man, wary of the media and fully aware of the dangers of celebrity. The adulation he received as a leader of the Free Speech Movement took its toll, but he put his life back together and returned to public life to promote the causes that mattered to him. PNS commentator Jonah Raskin chairs the Communication Studies Department at Sonoma State University and is the author of "For the Hell of It: The Life and Times of Abbie Hoffman."

SONOMA, CALIF. -- The death of Mario Savio on November 6 shocked his colleagues and students here at Sonoma State College, where he taught mathematics and philosophy.

Friends knew Mario had a bad heart, and that he had been in and out of Palm Drive Hospital in Sebastopol, his new home (which he called "Berkeley North"). But it is hard to believe that the tall, thin white-haired professor will no longer hold forth; that his loud, clear voice has been stilled forever at the age of 53.

Savio, a leader of the Free Speech Movement (FSM) at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1964, wasn't the only radical from that era teaching at the college, but no one was more publicly identified with the 1960s, and no one carried on the tradition of protest into the 1990s with more vigor.

Though he was something of a legend, and always outspoken, Savio was a shy man, wary of the media and fully aware of the dangers of celebrity. In recent years, he tried to stay on the sidelines, but he was so disturbed by the assault on affirmative action represented by California Proposition 209, and by a plan to increase student fees here by $300 a year, that he could not restrain himself. Knowing his heart could give out at any time, he went on to debate the University's president on the fee increase and to defend the principle of free education for students in the state university system.

Although I read about Mario Savio and the FSM when I was a student and protestor at Columbia in New York City in the mid 1960s, I did not meet him until he joined the faculty at Sonoma State. We became not only colleagues but friends, seeing each other almost daily and frequently talking about issues of the day as well as personal matters -- his Catholic childhood and education, his recent interest in Buddhism, his vacation in Italy.

At one point we did a formal sit-down interview about his experiences in the civil rights movement in Mississippi in the "Freedom Summer" of 1964, the decisive experience of his life. "Freedom Summer was the most important project in America since the Civil War," he said, "it was the moment of awakening."

It certainly awakened Mario Savio. A few months later, at Berkeley, he stepped out of the crowd and emerged as a phenomenal leader. But the adulation and media attention took its toll, as it did on so many: Mario dropped out of school, withdrew from public view, experienced bouts of depression, went through a divorce. But he put his life back together: by the time he joined the faculty at Sonoma State, the wounds of the past seemed to have healed, and -- with some trepidation -- he returned to public life. He was happily remarried, loved teaching, was devoted to his students, and proud of his three sons.

Listening to Mario speak over the last few years -- at a meeting of the American Civil Liberties Union in Sebastopol, where he broke into song and then turned to fluid Italian, or at Sproul Plaza in Berkeley on the thirtieth anniversary of the FSM -- I was amazed at his power, at his extraordinary ability to sway large numbers of people.

In Berkeley, in 1964, Mario told his fellow students, "There is a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can't 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."

Over the last few years, it seemed like he was putting his own fragile body on the line -- to preserve affirmative action, to protect undocumented workers, to stop the fee increase at Sonoma State. In this sense, Mario Savio gave up his own life for causes he believed in with all his generous heart.