Mark Rudd - Revolutionary Youth Movement and Weather Underground

Revolutionary Youth Movement and Weather Underground

In 1969, as SDS membership grew rapidly, members' views concerning both goals and methods began to diverge widely. Rudd felt that SDS was not doing enough to protest the war in Vietnam. He was a leader of the Revolutionary Youth Movement (RYM), a faction of SDS, which advocated a more militant course of action while other factions within SDS were becoming concerned about Rudd's increasingly vocal calls for violent confrontation and hardline Communist sentiments. The 1969 SDS convention effectively splintered and ended the organization. Rudd and other former RYM members ultimately formed Weatherman, a self-proclaimed "organization of communist women and men." The new organization was intent on overthrowing the government through violent actions. Spreading communism was a priority for the members of Weather, as when Rudd told other members of SDS, “ Don’t be timid about telling people we’re Communist. Don’t deny it, be proud of it.”

Read more about this topic:  Mark Rudd

Famous quotes containing the words youth, movement, weather and/or underground:

    Columbus stood in his age as the pioneer of progress and enlightenment. The system of universal education is in our age the most prominent and salutary feature of the spirit of enlightenment, and it is peculiarly appropriate that the schools be made by the people the center of the day’s demonstration. Let the national flag float over every schoolhouse in the country and the exercises be such as shall impress upon our youth the patriotic duties of American citizenship.
    Benjamin Harrison (1833–1901)

    When delicate and feeling souls are separated, there is not a feature in the sky, not a movement of the elements, not an aspiration of the breeze, but hints some cause for a lover’s apprehension.
    Richard Brinsley Sheridan (1751–1816)

    What
    One believes is what matters. Ecstatic identities
    Between one’s self and the weather and the things
    Of the weather are the belief in one’s element,
    The casual reunions, the long-pondered
    Surrenders, the repeated sayings that
    There is nothing more and that it is enough....
    Wallace Stevens (1879–1955)

    The only free road, the Underground Railroad, is owned and managed by the Vigilant Committee. They have tunneled under the whole breadth of the land.
    Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)