The SDS, Students for a Democratic Society, served as one of the leading organizations in the Columbia University protests of the late 1960s. The protests and so-called liberation or occupation of Columbia began as a series of anti-Vietnam war protests, but quickly ballooned into a general protest against the building of a new University gym in Harlem (an action which the students believed showcased racial inequality), a protest against the University's affiliation with organizations that aided the war effort, a protest against American imperialism. For more radical students, like Mark Rudd, the protests and occupation of Columbia were a sign that the "revolution" was beginning.
A mild activist at first, Mark Rudd, quickly progressed, after Columbia, from non-violent protest to violent action. In this autobiographical account, Rudd traces his involvement and leadership within the SDS from his first days attending Columbia University, to the creation within SDS of a faction known as "the weathermen," and eventually their split from SDS as they radicalized, and turned to terrorist tactics. As the title of the book suggests, Rudd, on the run from police, was forced to go underground for years.
Rudd describes his fear and then acceptance of violence within the movement, but also describes his exit from "the weathermen," and the difficulty he had in coming to terms with life after the Vietnam war when he understood that there would be no revolution in America.
One of the images that sticks with me from this book is, days into the Columbia occupation, when the police moved in with clubs to clear the buildings at the request of the University, Rudd relates how a number of non-violence advocates, wearing green armbands, stood outside the buildings as a sort of human wall to slow to progress of the police. Apparently they took much of the initial brunt of the attack. No one, I should think, could ever accuse those pacifists of being cowards.
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