David Gilbert and Kathy Boudin - 2022 Anniversary Dinner Speakers

Kathy Boudin and David Gilbert are life-long anti-imperialists whose actions in support of Black liberation resulted in decades in prison. Kathy spent 22 years behind bars, David - who was released in November 2021 –  spent 40. 

David’s lifetime of work against racism and for peace with justice began as a student when he joined the Congress of Racial Equality, CORE, in 1962. 

As an undergraduate at Columbia in 1965, he started the Committee to End the War in Vietnam, one of the first groups to oppose the war in Southeast Asia. He was also a founding member of Columbia University SDS (Students for a Democratic Society) and co-authored their iconic pamphlet naming “imperialism” as the system which the new movements needed to fight against, offering a strategic focus for the growing movement. 

David also was a founder of Men Against Sexism in Denver, CO, and a supporter of the women’s liberation movement as firm, constructive efforts by women comrades showed him “the importance of opposing sexism and of striving to live our humanist values in our personal relationships.” 

In 1970, responding to the murderous government assault on the Black Liberation Movement and the massive bombings of Vietnam, David and Kathy went underground to raise their level of resistance, as part of the Weather Underground Organization (WUO).  By the end of the 1970s, after the WUO dissolved, David and Kathy worked more directly as allies of the Black Liberation struggle and were captured in 1981. 

After his Black Panther co-defendant Kuwasi Balagoon died of AIDS in prison in 1986, David helped pioneer one of the first AIDS peer counseling and education programs within the New York State Department of Corrections. Jerome Wright, a civil rights activist, first met David in the 1980s at Great Meadow Correctional Facility and worked with him to develop peer education classes in prison about the HIV/AIDS epidemic. “I was much younger than him, in my 20s, and he was instrumental in quelling a lot of fear that the younger guys had about the prevalence of HIV infection, how you got it, and the conspiracy theories,” Wright recalls. “He would talk to us about what we could do to protect ourselves and our family. Because of his calm, quiet way of talking and the [commitment] he had in the fight for justice for Black and brown people, we would listen to him. He was one of the mentors who helped me develop as a young man.”

David remained active as a counselor and advocate for fellow prisoners throughout his decades behind bars. He contributed to the struggle through correspondence with younger generation activists and as a vocal political prisoner through his two books - Love and Struggle: My Life in SDS, the Weather Underground, and Beyond (PM Press, 2012) and No Surrender (Abraham Guillen Press, 2004). He was one of the founders of the Certain Days Free Political Prisoners Calendar and continues on the Advisory Committee.

David Gilbert remains a gentle, humble person.

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Even before Kathy Boudin’s long history as an anti-war and Black liberation solidarity activist, she grew up in a family of committed radicals, including her NLG lawyer father Leonard Boudin. She shared legal lessons that she learned at home with thousands, after she joined Students for a Democratic Society and the mass protests against racism and the US war in Vietnam. Kathy co-wrote the classic activist pamphlet, “The Bust Book: What to Do Till the Lawyer Comes” (with Eleanor Raskin, Brian Glick, and the late Gus Reichbach) when many young people were protesting and facing arrest for the first time. She also joined the protests, refusing to accept the role of a complacent, intellectual woman and instead confronting a system she knew to be oppressive to most of humanity.

After years in the Weather Underground and her arrest in 1981, Kathy continued her political work at NY’s maximum-security prison for women in Bedford Hills. She found herself in the midst of the worst damage of the AIDS epidemic—before HIV had been identified as the source of the lethal condition that was ravaging incarcerated communities, or recognized as a disease that women were also contracting—and was a key organizer in building ACE (AIDS Counseling and Education). The work of ACE became a model for HIV/AIDS education in prisons across the country. With others, she authored “Breaking the Walls of Silence: AIDS and Women in a New York State Maximum Security Prison,” about the fight to prevent deaths among incarcerated women and their families. She also joined other incarcerated women in writing and study and, in 1999, won an International PEN prize for her poetry. Her poems were included in books and journals such as the PEN Center Prize Anthology Doing Time, Concrete Garden, and Aliens at the Border. Also while behind bars, Boudin published many articles and essays, including "Participatory Literacy Education Behind Bars: AIDS Opens the Door" (Harvard Educational Review, Summer 1993, 63/2).

After Kathy’s release from prison in 2003, she earned a PhD in social work and founded the Coming Home Program, which provides healthcare for people returning from incarceration. She is the Co-Director and Co-Founder of the Center for Justice at Columbia University which is committed to ending mass incarceration and criminalization. The Center has advocated transforming the approaches to justice from being driven by punishment and retribution to being centered on prevention and healing. Kathy has authored many articles and research papers on the causes and consequences of incarceration, especially those most affecting women and children.

Kathy Boudin is one of three formerly incarcerated elders who, in 2013, founded RAPP: Release Aging People in Prison. RAPP’s work to end mass incarceration and promote racial justice through the release of prison elders and those serving long sentences has been one of the most effective prison “non-reformist reform” efforts (to quote Angela Davis) in recent history. RAPP works to dismantle the racist policies of mass incarceration by expanding the use of parole, compassionate release, clemency, and other forms of release in New York State; to end life imprisonment in the U.S.; and to organize community power to free incarcerated elders and uproot a system of endless punishment that damages Black and other communities of color.

In every area of work, Kathy, like David, is deeply loved and valued. Her life is an example of how hard work, creativity, and perseverance in service of principle can itself be a lesson for future generations.

While we celebrate the freedom of Kathy and David, we note that Dr. Mutulu Shakur, arrested and convicted in the federal conspiracy case connected with their cases, remains in federal prison with advanced bone cancer. For more information and to help support his release, please see https://mutulushakur.com