Arthur Gatti Papers

Arthur Gatti attended Queens College from the early to mid-1960s, where he was extensively involved in the political and social activism that engulfed the campus. During the summers of 1963 and 1964, Gatti travelled to Mexico as a member of the Queens College Mexico Volunteers, a student group dedicated to improving sanitary conditions and quality of life in impoverished villages and towns. Gatti was initially stationed in the city of Taxco, in the state of Guerrero, in 1963, but left to work in Mexico City to repair a hospital and (in 1964) he returned to Taxco to help build a school that is still in use today. Art and Kevin Donnellan (whose memoir about Andy Goodman has been recently added to this archive) were the solitary pair shoring up the walls in Hospital de la Mujer, in Mexico City, in 1963. Not an easy task, since the building was over four centuries old. In 1964 Kevin and Art also helped build the aforementioned school, Escuela del Emperador Cuauhtemoc, in Pedro Martin, Taxco, Guerrero

Mario Savio (or “Bob” Savio, as he was known then), another Queens College student, was also in Taxco during the summer of 1963. Gatti and Savio were already close friends, but they barely touched base with each other in Taxco that summer, since Savio left prematurely to rejoin his family who had relocated to California. In the fall of 1963, Savio enrolled at San Francisco State and later at the University of California at Berkeley, where he later rose to national prominence as a central figure in the Free Speech Movement (FSM). The FSM was a major catalyst for the emergence of the anti-Vietnam War movement, and ushered in an age of campus uprisings. Gatti and Savio remained friends until Savio’s death at age 53 in 1996. Before leaving Taxco in 1963, Savio made a commitment to an old Zapatista to round up funds and students to come to Mexico the next summer, to work as peons, and to shame the local government into helping complete the mountain slum school. Since Savio was moved to abandon his school-building role in favor of attending Freedom Summer, the final task fell to Gatti and his crew. The job got done, the school built—and in the ‘70s was adopted by the Apple computer company in its early push to bring literacy and technology to the impoverished of the Third World.

During the winter intersession (January) and Easter break (April) of 1965, Gatti joined a group of fellow Queens College students on a volunteer mission under the supervision of Queens College Education Department Professor Sidney Simon. The students helped rebuild African American Baptist churches in Mississippi burned by white supremacists during the Freedom Summer of 1964. The church rebuilding project was conducted under the auspices of the Queens College Mississippi Freedom Project and in coordination with the Committee of Concern, an interracial and interfaith group of Mississippi clergymen, Quakers, and Mennonites. During the first trip to Mississippi, Gatti’s group was stationed in Tougaloo, twelve miles north of Jackson; for the second trip they were stationed in Meridian, where Queens College student Andrew Goodman and fellow activists James Chaney and Michael Schwerner were stationed before being murdered by white supremacists the previous summer. Due to commitments, Art Gatti did not accompany the students to Meridian for the Easter break project, but did co-organize it.

Gatti was an active member of the Queens College branches of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) and Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), nationally prominent organizations organizing for social, racial and economic justice. After graduating from Queens College in 1965, Gatti volunteered for five years at the Newark Community Union Project (NCUP); a project chartered two years earlier by SDS and headed by Tom Hayden. He worked as a community organizer until the fall of 1969 helping tenants secure better living conditions. Finally, Gatti wrote several articles documenting his activist experiences, which were featured in the Queens College newspaper, The Phoenix, as well as The Long Island Press. More recently, his Savio memories appeared in Radical History Review, and were broadly cited in the books, Freedom’s Orator (R. Cohen) and Subversives! (S. Rosenfeld). Art’s current poetic output frequently references these experiences.