David Gilbert (activist)

David Gilbert (born October 6, 1944) is an American radical leftist who participated in the deadly 1981 robbery of a Brinks armored vehicle.

Gilbert was a founder of the Columbia University chapter of Students for a Democratic Society and became a member of the Weather Underground.

Gilbert, who served as the getaway driver in the robbery, was convicted under New York's felony murder law in the killing by co-defendants of two Nyack, New York police officers and a Brink's security guard.

Gilbert received a grant of clemency from Governor Andrew Cuomo on August 23, 2021, reducing his minimum term from 75 years to 40, thereby making him eligible for conditional release.

He was granted parole on October 26, 2021, and released on November 4, 2021.

Gilbert grew up in a Jewish family in Brookline, Massachusetts, a suburb of Boston.

He was an Explorer Scout, and his father was Post Leader, of a South Brookline Explorer Post.

Inspired in his teens by the Greensboro sit-ins and other events of the Civil Rights Movement, he joined the Congress of Racial Equality at age seventeen.

Known by the late 1960s primarily as a young theorist, publishing articles in New Left Notes and other movement publications, he went on to play an organizing role in the April–May 1968 Columbia student strike.

He entered Columbia College of Columbia University in 1962.

In March 1965, Gilbert founded the Independent Committee on Vietnam (ICV) at Columbia.

He traveled regularly to Harlem while working as a tutor, and saw Malcolm X speak at Barnard College in February 1965, experiences he describes as formative.

Gilbert was one of the attendees at the Flint War Council known to the FBI.

Later, in the same year, he co-founded the Columbia chapter of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) which merged with ICV in the Fall of 1966, even though there was already an SDS chapter established at Columbia, formed in the early 1960s.

The SDS chapter founded by Gilbert became renowned.

After graduating from Columbia University in June 1966, Gilbert spent most of his days and evenings during the fall of 1967 downtown, attending graduate school at the New School for Social Research, building an SDS chapter there, or attending meetings at the New York SDS Regional Office.

In addition, Gilbert spent his spare time studying Karl Marx's Das Kapital and writing New Left theoretical papers on imperialism and U.S. domestic consumption, consumerism and "the new working-class".

At Columbia, the SDS expanded during the Spring 1967 term.

Gilbert returned to the Columbia campus to offer a "radical education counter-course" for Columbia SDS freshmen and sophomores in a lounge in Ferris Booth Hall.

On April 4, 1968, Gilbert was arrested for the first time, after joining a disturbance where 6 officers were engaged in a physical altercation with a protester.

Gilbert's charge was assaulting a police officer.

Gilbert maintained that the officer scraped his hand when he tried to hit Gilbert in the head with his baton.

His lawyer advised him to take a plea bargain, and Gilbert pleaded guilty to disorderly conduct and was fined $50.

During the Columbia strike, which began on April 23, 1968, Gilbert served as part of the strike team.

Having good relations with some of the faculty, he was called on to be a negotiator.

At the time of the strike he was still a graduate student at the New School for Social Research.

In October 1969, he headed a Weather Underground collective in Denver and was arrested twice.

The first arrest occurred while he was passing out leaflets in front of a community college and his comrades were inside setting off a smoke bomb.

The second arrest led to a charge of "assault with a deadly weapon" after arresting officers found a rock in his pocket.

In 1969, SDS split into different ideological factions and the Weathermen emerged, its purpose being to promote armed struggle among young white Americans in support of the Black Panthers and other militant groups, and also to oppose the war in Vietnam by means of activities intended to "Bring the War Home".

Gilbert joined this group in 1969 with his friend Ted Gold, who died in the March 1970 Greenwich Village townhouse explosion, along with fellow Weather members Diana Oughton and Terry Robbins.

The group became clandestine, and the organization was renamed the Weather Underground.

When Weather went underground, members often used money they already had or which they received from their family to fund their efforts.

Gilbert cashed in his Israel bonds and half of that money went to supporting Weather and the other half was put into the Black Panther bail fund.

Gilbert joined the Bay Area collective, living in a San Francisco apartment.

He and another member were working on one of the group's cars in spring of 1971 when they were approached by two men in suits claiming to be real-estate agents.

The men asked a few questions and then left.

Gilbert suspected that these men were actually FBI agents looking for information.

After several group meetings, they decided to reduce their radical activities for a while.

As support for the group began to wane, the pace of their activities slowed, and some members of the Weather Underground resurfaced in late 1976 and early 1977.