Savio, Mario (1942–1996)

In the fall of 1964, Mario Savio emerged as spokesman for the Berkeley free speech movement (FSM). Dismissed as a radical and a troublemaker by local officials, including Alameda County deputy district attorney Edwin Meese, Savio was revered by University of California students. With the end of the Vietnam War, though, the FSM members dispersed, and Savio led a mostly quiet, private life until his death in 1996.

Savio was born in Queens, New York, in 1942. His father was a machinist who could only afford to send Mario to Queens College. Savio then transferred to Manhattan College, where he excelled at physics. He applied to the University of California at Berkeley and entered as a junior philosophy major in the fall of 1963. During the spring of 1964, Savio participated in a successful student protest of the San Francisco Hotel Association, which had refused to hire African Americans for any jobs other than maintenance and housekeeping. Devoting himself to the civil rights movement, Savio joined the small army of college-aged volunteers who traveled to Mississippi during the Freedom Summer of 1964, where he witnessed the violence of white supremacy at close quarter.

Inspired by the civil rights activists, Savio returned to Berkeley eager to raise money and recruits for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. His plans quickly ran afoul of the university's policies prohibiting students from engaging in political organizing. When police arrested one student, Jack Weinberg, for violating the prohibition, Berkeley students staged a sit-in, surrounding the police car holding Weinberg for more than 30 hours. It was the first of many such rallies and nonviolent protests that rocked the university campus for the next several months. Appointed as one of the students' delegates to negotiate with the administration, Mario Savio was a prominent spokesman for what the students called the free speech movement. Savio crystallized the students' grievances with his angry denunciation of the university as a heartless, overly bureaucratic machine. He urged students to throw their bodies into the machine's gears in order to stop it. At first, this involved occupying buildings, striking, and getting arrested. But as the free speech movement merged with the anti-war movement, some Berkeley students marched on military draft induction centers and clashed in the streets with policemen wearing riot gear. By bombing student rallies with helicopter-dropped teargas canisters, the forceful police crack-down seemed to undermine the unity of the FSM.

Perhaps disappointed by the movement's shortcomings and possibly battling depression, Savio spent the 1970s in relative obscurity, working as a bartender, bookstore clerk, and math teacher. He finally finished college in 1984, earning bachelor's and master's degrees in physics from San Francisco State [Page 1270]University. He then embarked on a career in higher education, teaching at Modesto Junior College and finally Sonoma State University. After years of heart problems, Mario Savio died of heart failure in 1996, a few weeks after debating the president of the University of California over Proposition 209, which outlawed affirmative action in UC admissions. In 1998, the university honored Savio by creating a library endowment, establishing a Bancroft Library archive of the FSM, and opening the Free Speech Movement Café.

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