22 Facts About Ted Gold

Theodore "Ted" Gold was a member of Weather Underground who died in the 1970 Greenwich Village townhouse explosion.

Ted Gold's mother was a statistician who taught at Columbia.

Ted Gold's parents lived in an upper-middle-class high-rise apartment on Manhattan's Upper West Side.

In 1958, before he reached the age of 11, Ted Gold had attended his first civil-rights demonstration in Washington, DC As a boy, he had gone to summer camp with other red-diaper babies at Camp Kinderland in upstate New York.

From 1959 to 1961 Ted Gold attended Joan of Arc Junior High School on 93rd Street between Amsterdam Avenue and Columbus Avenue.

Ted 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.

Ted Gold organized fund-raising activities for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee Selma Project with Friends of SNCC at Columbia University, founded by Neal H Hurwitz, College Class of '66.

Ted Gold identified more with SNCC activists than with the activists of any other Civil Rights Movement groups.

In November 1966, Ted Gold became active in helping to build a mass-based chapter of the Students for a Democratic Society at Columbia.

Ted Gold 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.

Ted Gold then played a major role in collectively writing the following letter from Columbia SDS to Columbia University faculty members, which indicates how Columbia SDS's leadership thought politically at that time.

Ted Gold organized with other Columbia SDS activists on the Upper West Side a "Vietnam Summer" anti-war off-campus summer organizing project.

In July 1967 Ted Gold seemed only lukewarm about having Columbia SDS adopt some variant of Halliwell's "Debrayist" New Working-class organizing strategy.

In late July 1967, Ted Gold was still thinking of going to graduate school in London, following his scheduled June 1968 graduation from Columbia College, in order to please his mother.

Ted Gold thought that he would be able to get a good recommendation from Columbia Professor of Sociology Silver, who was still Gold's favorite professor at Columbia, on a personal level, at this time.

In July 1967, Ted Gold had become romantically involved with a recent Barnard College graduate named Trude Bennett, who was working during the summer as a "Double Discovery" project counselor.

On WKCR, the Columbia student radio station, Gold was invited to do a 15-minute political commentary show each week during the summer of 1967, in which he explained why he felt the black urban rebellions were justified.

In September 1967, Gold moved most of his books and record albums from his parents' apartment to the West 94th Street apartment he now rented with Gilbert and Feldman.

In 1969, Ted Gold joined the Weatherman faction of Columbia SDS.

Ted Gold had become more militant after a visit to Cuba, during which he and some other US anti-war activists met with representatives of the Vietnamese people who were opposed to continued US military intervention in Indochina.

Five months after the Weatherman faction's October 1969 "Days of Rage" protests in Chicago, Ted Gold died on March 6,1970, in the Greenwich Village townhouse explosion at 18 West 11th Street in Greenwich Village, New York City.

Ted Gold was crushed to death by the building's facade, which killed him as he returned back to the townhouse.