David Gilbert (activist) - Activism and Influences

Activism and Influences

David Gilbert grew up in a Jewish family in Brookline, Massachusetts, a suburb of Boston. Inspired in his teens by the Greensboro sit-ins and other events of the Civil Rights Movement, he joined the Congress of Racial Equality at age seventeen. He entered Columbia University in 1962. In March 1965 Gilbert founded the Independent Committee on Vietnam (ICV) at Columbia University. Later, in the same year, he co-founded the Columbia University Chapter of Students for a Democratic Society which merged with ICV in the Fall of 1966 even though there was already a chapter set in place that was formed in the early sixties. The SDS chapter founded by Gilbert became renowned. Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). He traveled regularly to Harlem while working as a tutor, and saw Malcolm X speak at Barnard College in February 1965, experiences he describes as formative. Gilbert was one of the known attendees, by the FBI, at the Flint War Council. Gilbert, Kathy Boudin and Judith Alice Clark formed the May 19 Communist Organization.

After graduating from Columbia University in June 1966, Gilbert spent most of his days and evenings during the fall of 1967 downtown attending grad school at the New School, building an SDS chapter there or attending meetings at the New York SDS Regional Office. In addition, Gilbert spent his spare-time studying Marx's Das Kapital book and writing New Left theoretical papers on imperialism and U.S. domestic consumption, consumerism and "the new working-class." As Columbia SDS grew during the Spring 1967 term, Gilbert returned to the Columbia campus to offer a "radical education counter-course" for Columbia SDS freshmen and sophomores in a lounge in Ferris Booth Hall. Known by the late 1960s primarily as a young theorist, publishing articles in New Left Notes and other movement publications, he went on to play an organizing role in the April–May 1968 Columbia student strike.On April 4, 1968 Gilbert had his first arrest after walking into a police riot where 6 officers were beating a kid. He could not just stand there and allow it to continue so police turned on him. His charge was assaulting a police officer(apparently the cop scraped his hand when he tried to hit Gilbert in the head with his baton). His lawyer advised him to take a plea bargain because going to trial would mean the word of six officers against his.He plea bargained for being guilty of disorderly conduct and was fined $50. During the Columbia strike, which began on April 23, 1968, as part of the strike team and since he was in good relations with some of the faculty, Gilbert was called in to be a negotiator. At the time of the strike he was a graduate student at the New School for Social Research. In October 1969, he headed up a Weather collective in Denver and was arrested twice. The first arrest was for when he was passing out leaflets at a mall and his comrades were inside setting off a smoke bomb. The second arrest was when he was charged with "assault with a deadly weapon" after arresting officers found a rock in his pocket.