Biography
Mario Savio, the son of Sicilian immigrants, became the leading orator of the 1964 Berkeley Free Speech Movement after participating in SNCC's Mississippi Freedom Summer. On December 2, 1964, atop the steps of Sproul Hall, he delivered his iconic 'Bodies Upon the Gears' speech and led approximately 1,000 students into a sit-in protesting university restrictions on political activity. Police arrested 773 students that night in the largest mass arrest in California history to that date. Savio was convicted of trespass and resisting arrest and in 1967 served 120 days at Santa Rita Jail in Alameda County. He spent decades teaching mathematics and physics, returning to activism in his later years to oppose California's Proposition 209 before suffering a fatal heart attack in 1996.
