Ted Gold - Apartment

Apartment

In September 1967, Gold moved most of his books and record albums from his parents' apartment to the West 94th Street apartment he now rented with Gilbert and Feldman. But by early October 1967, Gold was mainly living with Bennett in her West 108th Street apartment and by December 1967 he had completely moved out of the West 94th Street apartment and into Bennett's apartment. At the October 21, 1967 anti-war march on the Pentagon, Gold and Bennett both joined the sit-in at the Pentagon and were arrested, although Gold had previously felt that National SDS's 1967 strategy of emphasizing local organizing, rather than organizing for semi-annual national anti-war marches, made the most strategic sense. In explaining why he decided to participate in the October 21, 1967 non-violent mass sit-in at the Pentagon, Gold observed a few days later: "Sometimes spontaneous events happen that you have to take part in, even if it doesn't fit directly into a local organizing strategy. Being radical means being in the front line when masses of people are in motion."

The following month, Gold and another Columbia SDS activist named Mark Rudd were arrested in midtown Manhattan on November 14, 1967, for chanting through a bullhorn and encouraging anti-war demonstrators to go "block the limousines" in the streets and "block the rush-hour" traffic near the Hilton Hotel to protest the presence of U.S. Secretary of State Dean Rusk at a Foreign Policy Association gathering that was being held at the hotel. Gold and Rudd were taken to the 100 Centre Street jail and charged with "incitement to riot" but, due to the efforts of the National Lawyers Guild, they were soon released and the charges were later dropped.

In his 2010 book, "Mohamed's Ghosts," journalist Stephan Salisbury observed that "The FBI began gathering information on" Gold "in earnest in 1967." Gold's FBI files, according to Salisbury, "stacked on a table, stand at least a foot high;" and they are "full of descriptions of meetings, speeches, names of friends, telephone numbers, organizations--all meticulously detailed by Bureau agents, informers, and memos derived from electronic surveillance."

After Mark Rudd was elected as Columbia SDS Chairman in late March 1968, Gold was placed on disciplinary probation by the Columbia Administration, along with five other anti-war students (including Rudd), for demonstrating inside Low Library to protest Columbia University's institutional sponsorship of the Pentagon's Institute for Defense Analyses weapons research think-tank. To protest the Columbia Administration's repression of "The IDA Six", on April 23, 1968, Gold joined Rudd in being one of the Columbia SDS activists who helped lead the 1968 Columbia Student Revolt, in which five Columbia University buildings were seized by over 700 anti-war Columbia and Barnard students.

Following his suspension for his political activity during his senior year at Columbia in May 1968, Gold enrolled in a summer teachers training course. During the 1968-69 year, he worked as both a teacher in a private school and as a New York Regional SDS organizer of anti-war radical teachers for the newly-formed Teachers for A Democratic Society (TDS) group.