Italian American History and Heroes

Mario Savio (1942-1996)

Mario Savio was born in Queens, NY to working class parents. During the summer of 1964, he joined the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee to register black voters in Mississippi. Later that year, Savio was involved in a student strike that shut down the campus of University of California at Berkeley. He was a leader in the Free Speech Movement, which served as a model for future campus "sit-ins" and protests against the Vietnam War. Noted as an orator, Savio declared, "There comes a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can't take part; and you've got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus and you've got to make it stop." Read Gil Fagiani's essay in the anthology The Lost World of Italian American Radicalism

 

 

 

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