'60S Berkeley Student Activist Mario Savio Dies

SAN FRANCISCO - Mario Savio, the Berkeley radical who became a symbol of the 1960s free-speech movement from atop a police car, has died at age 53.

Mr. Savio had a history of heart problems and collapsed Saturday night. He died yesterday at Palm Drive Hospital in Sebastopal, 60 miles north of San Francisco, where he had been hospitalized in a coma.

Friends described him as a brilliant orator and compelling voice for student protest.

"In the '60s he was a powerful symbol of how an ordinary person could stand up and make history," said Democratic state Sen. Tom Hayden, a one-time fellow radical. "He symbolized the possibilities in all of us, to resist becoming cogs in somebody's machine."

Mr. Savio rose to fame as the voice of the free-speech movement at the University of California at Berkeley in 1964, when he stood on a campus patrol car after the arrest of a student for political activity.

After many years out of the limelight, Mr. Savio had recently re-entered public life, leading a drive against higher fees at Sonoma State University and opposing Proposition 209, the California ballot measure to end state affirmative-action programs.

One fellow activist compared him to 19th century black abolitionist leader Frederick Douglass.

Like many students of his era, Mr. Savio went to Mississippi in the early '60s to help register black voters and organize for civil-rights causes.

When he returned to Berkeley, he found the school had banned political activity on campus, sparking a protest that became a model for a decade of agitation over the Vietnam War and other causes.