Ted Gold

Theodore "Ted" Gold (December 13, 1947 – March 6, 1970) was a member of Weather Underground who died in the 1970 Greenwich Village townhouse explosion.

Gold, a red diaper baby, was the son of Hyman Gold, a prominent Jewish physician and of a mathematics instructor at Columbia University who had both been part of the Old Left.

His mother was a statistician who taught at Columbia.

His parents lived in an upper-middle-class high-rise apartment on Manhattan's Upper West Side.

While Gold's father had gone to medical school, Gold's parents had experienced economic hardship.

But Gold considered his parents affluent and upper-middle-class.

In 1958, before he reached the age of 11, Gold had attended his first civil-rights demonstration in Washington, D.C. As a boy, he had gone to summer camp with other red-diaper babies at Camp Kinderland (Yiddish for "Children's Land") in upstate New York.

From 1959 to 1961 Gold attended Joan of Arc Junior High School (JHS 118) on 93rd Street between Amsterdam Avenue and Columbus Avenue.

Gold attended Stuyvesant High School, an elite public high school in Manhattan, where he was a member of the school's cross-country track team, the Stamp Club, and the History and Folklore Society.

Arriving at Columbia University in Fall 1964, Gold immediately became involved in campus Civil Rights Movement activity.

He organized fund-raising activities for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) Selma Project with Friends of SNCC at Columbia University, founded by Neal H. Hurwitz, College Class of '66.

Gold identified more with SNCC activists than with the activists of any other Civil Rights Movement groups.

During his freshman year at Columbia College Gold lived at home with his parents.

At the beginning of his sophomore year, however, he moved into an 8th-floor single dormitory room in Columbia University's Furnald Hall.

Initially Gold had planned to major in mathematics at Columbia, but by his junior year in Fall 1966, Gold had decided that sociology was a more relevant field for him.

By late 1966 Gold had rejected many Old Left cultural and lifestyle values which he had come to regard as too "bourgeois", but he considered himself a Marxist and a communist who sought to establish "decentralized socialism" in the United States.

If some other campus leftist would argue against a political position of his by stating that "Lenin wrote", or "Marx said", or "Mao says", however, Gold would generally reply by reminding the other leftist that "Marxism is a method and a tool, not a dogma".

In November 1966, Gold became active in helping to build a mass-based chapter of the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) at Columbia.

By March 1967, Gold was the vice-chairman of Columbia SDS and, between late March 1967 and March 1968, Columbia SDS Vice-Chairman Gold did most of the basic, menial work that was required to keep Columbia SDS functioning as a multi-issue radical student organizing group on campus.

He became the most politically influential leader of Columbia SDS's New Left "Praxis Axis" faction, which emphasized education, rather than confrontational direct action, as its primary campus organizing strategy.

They distributed materials, held rap sessions in the dorms, protested recruiters, and held referendums.

On April 20, 1967, as Columbia SDS vice-chairman, Gold led 300 anti-war student protesters from a sundial rally into Columbia University's John Jay Hall to demand that the Columbia Administration ban the U.S. Marines from recruiting inside the John Jay Hall lobby.

After a group of pro-war right-wing Columbia student athletes attacked the non-violent anti-war protesters inside the lobby, Gold quickly urged Columbia SDS people to retreat from John Jay Hall and return to the sundial rallying point in order to avoid further violence.

Its April 21, 1967 demonstration of the next day was going to be non-violent, disciplined, and focused more on protesting against the Columbia Administration's policies than on the jocks.

Martin Luther King Jr.'s Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) aide, James Bevel, would be invited to address the campus rally.

Gold then played a major role in collectively writing the following letter from Columbia SDS to Columbia University faculty members, which indicates how Columbia SDS's leadership thought politically at that time.

A photocopy of this letter was found in the de-classified NYC Police Department's Red Squad organizational file on SDS, in 1987:

"Dear Faculty Member: In the past few months, the question of whether military agencies should be allowed to recruit on the Columbia campus has become a major issue, particularly for those students and faculty who are concerned about the war in Vietnam. The University Administration has maintained that it has the obligation to allow any U.S. government agency to use University facilities for military recruitment. Many students and faculty, however, have objected to this involvement of Columbia University in the Government's military operations. Twice already, President Kirk has allowed the Central Intelligence Agency to recruit students on campus, despite the protests of many students and faculty members. Yesterday, President Kirk provided the University's facilities for the U.S. Marine Corps for this purpose, in this case overriding the objections of student officials. The Marines were granted space for recruiting in John Jay Residence Hall, even though the Executive Board of the Undergraduate Dormitory Council had voted against the use of dormitory facilities for this purpose.

The Marines were granted space for recruiting in Butler Library, even though the Columbia University Student Council was denied the use of that very spot for the draft referendum.

Since President Kirk ignored representative student institutions in favor of the Marines, it is clear that the Administration enforces even its own rules only when it sees fit.

Yesterday a group of 500 students, many of them members of Students for a Democratic Society, marched to John Jay Hall with the intention of questioning the recruiters about Marine atrocities in Vietnam and United States military policy throughout the world.

However, a group of self-styled "leathernecks" sought to prevent any such peaceful confrontation.

This violent group again and again attacked the anti-Marine demonstrators, who were trying to question the Marines and to keep an aisle open to their table.

When the rally following the right-wing student attack on Columbia SDS people had ended, the Columbia SDS steering committee and Columbia Professor of Sociology Vernon Dibble, who was Columbia SDS's strongest faculty supporter, retreated to the back of the West End Bar on Broadway and 114th Street to plan what to do next.

"You let them push you out of John Jay Hall today. You have to go back there again tomorrow to keep your credibility as a radical student group," Professor Dibble insisted.

Gold and other Columbia SDS leaders all then got into a debate.

Everyone agreed that Columbia SDS activists had to go back to confront the Marine recruiters the next day.

The major point of debate was whether Columbia SDS would gain more politically and win more mass support by stopping campus Marine recruitment and possibly fighting it out with other students, the right-wing protectors of the U.S. Marines, or by having a more mass-based, non-violent anti-war demonstration directed at protesting the policies of its main political enemy, the Columbia Administration.

"The Administration likes nothing better than to have students fighting other students. Then it can portray itself as "above politics" and as "a neutral". We shouldn't fall into the Administration's trap and alienate all our new mass student support by leading students into a violent confrontation, which is what the Administration now wants us to do," Gold argued.

Gold's views were broadly supported by the rest of the Columbia SDS leadership.