Theodore "Ted" Gold (December 13, 1947 – March 6, 1970) was a member of Weather Underground who died in the 1970 Greenwich Village townhouse explosion.
Early years and education
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.
Student activism at Columbia University
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.
Antiwar rally
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.
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.