Mario Savio; Led Free Speech Movement

Mario Savio, whose eloquent oratory at UC Berkeley sparked the Free Speech Movement that ushered in a decade of student protest in the 1960s, died Wednesday. He was 53.

Savio, who collapsed last weekend from heart failure and never regained consciousness, died at a Sebastopol, Calif., hospital. His family allowed doctors to disconnect life support, a hospital official said.

“He was a man who could inspire, motivate, educate and inform in brilliant eloquence,” said Councilwoman Jackie Goldberg, who was a student activist with Savio at Berkeley. “It was his passion that made him such a powerful leader and speaker--passion for democracy and justice, passion that everyone should have a place at the table.”

In 1964, he was president of the UC Berkeley Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee chapter and was known as a shy philosophy major with a slight stutter. But he rose to fame when an ex-student was seized by authorities for passing out leaflets and held in a police car while Savio stood on the roof of the car and addressed thousands of students.

Savio soon gained national recognition as the voice of the Free Speech Movement.

“In the ‘60s he was a powerful symbol of how an ordinary person could stand up and make history,” said state Sen. Tom Hayden (D-Los Angeles), a onetime fellow radical. “He symbolized the possibilities in all of us, to resist becoming cogs in somebody’s machine.”

Savio, who was born and raised in New York City, went to Mississippi in the early 1960s to help register black voters and work for civil rights.

When he returned to UC Berkeley, he found that the school had banned political activity on campus, sparking a protest that turned into the Free Speech Movement and became a model for a decade of agitation over the Vietnam War and other causes.

David Harris, a Vietnam-era war protester and draft resister who often spoke at Berkeley, said Savio was unique.

“He was a brilliant speaker and an extraordinary figure for the moment he appeared in,” Harris said. “There hadn’t been anything like the Free Speech Movement before, and he epitomized that movement.”

By the late 1960s, when the Vietnam War became the decisive campus issue, Savio had largely withdrawn from public life.

He taught at an alternative school in Los Angeles in the early 1970s, married and raised his children. He earned a bachelor’s degree in physics from San Francisco State in 1984 and the next year obtained a master’s degree.

Three years ago he began working at Sonoma State, where he taught math, logic and philosophy to remedial students.

Recently, Savio became active again in political issues. During the 1994 election he condemned Proposition 187, which limited benefits for illegal immigrants, as a “know-nothing fascist” law. In recent months he had spoken out against Proposition 209, the landmark ballot measure on affirmative action.

“Up until his death,” Goldberg said, “he was working to defeat 209, still inspiring students, still educating them.”