David Gilbert (born October 6, 1944) is an American radical leftist who participated in the deadly 1981 robbery of a Brinks armored vehicle.
[3] 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.
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.
[8] 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.
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".
[citation needed] 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.
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.
[15] 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.
On October 20, 1981, the RATF and related May 19th Communist Organization participated, along with several members of the BLA, in an armed robbery of a Brink's armored car at the Nanuet Mall, near Nyack, New York.
[citation needed] While confined at the maximum security Auburn Correctional Facility in Cayuga County, New York during the early years of his sentence, Gilbert in 1987 co-founded an inmate peer education program on HIV and AIDS, and a similar, more successful project in Great Meadows Prison in Comstock following his transfer to the eastern part of the state.
[19] On August 23, 2021, his last day in office, Governor Andrew Cuomo granted Gilbert clemency in the form of a partial sentence commutation.
The article, co-written with Bob Gottlieb and Gerry Tenney, was part of a longer position paper called the "Port Authority Statement".
[22][23] There is a mini-biography on David Gilbert on page 312 of the book Outlaws of America: The Weather Underground and the Politics of Solidarity, by Dan Berger.
[24] In an article published in the Columbia Daily Spectator on April 2, 1983, Bob Feldman wrote: "Beyond Brinks: David Gilbert Talks About the Robbery, the Underground, the Struggle".
[29][31] Chesa Boudin grew up to be a Rhodes Scholar, Yale Law School graduate, and, from 2019 to 2022, District Attorney of San Francisco.