At the height of the Vietnam War, Mark Rudd acquired fame as a militant anti-war activist. Today the TVI math teacher says peaceful nonviolence is the most effective political means.
As national secretary of Students for a Democratic Society, the largest student-based anti-Vietnam War movement in the United States, Rudd helped lead the 1968 student seizure of Columbia University. One year later, Rudd and hundreds of comrades aiming to induce a social revolution rioted in the streets of a Chicago shopping district, smashing windows and assaulting police in what became known as the Days of Rage protests. Rudd and a radical faction of SDS, rejecting nonviolent political tactics as feeble, worked to dissolve SDS and replace it with a more radical group they named the Weathermen.
It is a decision he deeply regrets.
"We (SDS leaders) decided that SDS was an impediment to the development of a revolutionary movement - it wasn't revolutionary enough," Rudd said. "We thought SDS was merely a legal reform organization on college campuses, and was not building a revolutionary movement and, therefore, we decided to abolish it. We were actually doing the work of the FBI."
Changing its name to the Weather Underground in 1969, the clandestine group disappeared and turned to sabotage, bombing several buildings, including the U.S. Capitol Building and the Pentagon. Group members were careful not to inflict casualties during the bombings, which were in response to a government policy or event the group opposed. In 1970, Rudd left the Weather Underground, moving frequently with his wife and daughter to evade the FBI.
For seven years, Rudd successfully avoided capture while working low-wage jobs across the United States. In late 1977, he emerged to plead guilty in Manhattan to a misdemeanor relating to the Columbia University uprising. The following year he pleaded guilty in Chicago to charges related to the Days of Rage riots. He was sentenced to two years of probation and paid a $2,000 fine.
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Rudd moved back to New Mexico in 1978. He said he needed a college degree and knew he wanted to teach at a community college.
"I talked my way into UNM," he said. "I had to promise to be a good boy."
Rudd got his bachelor's from the UNM College of Education in 1980, and after teaching a semester of college composition at UNM, began teaching at TVI.
Rudd said his perspective on the use of violence reversed after he surveyed the damage the Weather Underground caused mainstream social activism like SDS.
"Our idealism was such that we thought it was a revolutionary time," he said. "What we should have done is to unite as many people as possible around the demand 'US withdraw from Vietnam,' and in so doing we could put forward an anti-imperialist analysis. It should have been a united anti-war movement around a more limited goal than revolution."
Rudd said his experience in the Weather Underground led him to uniformly oppose political violence on practical grounds.
This principle, he said, extends to groups that destroy property.
"It doesn't work," he said. "Symbolic violence is never understood by the oppressors, or the population of the oppressor country, as self-defense. The goal in all movements in this country is to build a majority movement."
