Bob Avakian

Bob Avakian was born in Washington, DC, and grew up in Berkeley, California. His father, Spurgeon "Sparky" Avakian, the son of Armenian immigrants, was a lawyer and then an Alameda County judge in Oakland, California and a member of the Berkeley School Board. His mother, Ruth, was a teacher. In his memoir, From Ike to Mao and Beyond: My Journey from Mainstream America to Revolutionary Communist , BA talks about how, as a young person, he had passion for music, sports, poetry and literature, and these intersected with his life growing up in the 1950s and ’60s in Berkeley, a university town with a racially diverse population, which would become a center of intellectual, cultural and political ferment that would have a major impact on the whole country. Growing up and going to school with Black friends, singing in doo-wop groups and playing sports, Avakian experienced up close and personal the prevailing segregation and racism in society and the ways it affected his Black friends. As a young person, Avakian came to hate racism and would brook no tolerance for white people who were racist or did not uncompromisingly oppose racism. He was the quarterback of his high school football team at Berkeley High. In his memoir he recounts the experience of a late night bus ride after a game: On the way back after the game I was sitting with some Black friends of mine on the football team, and we got into this whole deep conversation about why is there so much racism in this country, why is there so much prejudice and where does it come from, and can it ever change, and how could it change? This was mainly them talking and me listening. And I remember that very, very deeply—I learned a lot more in that one hour than I learned in hours of classroom time, even from some of the better teachers. His early passion for sports in general, but especially basketball, could have led his life in an entirely different direction. As he explains in his memoir: Getting into philosophy, starting to study history as well as literature, and so on—led me to see from a lot of different directions that religion and the idea of god were human inventions. All these different cultures had different ideas of god that conflicted with and contradicted each other. We studied Greek mythology with Ms. Bentley and you could see that different people in different ages believed in all different kinds of gods, and that some of these had passed out of convention and weren’t widely believed in any more.... As for my friends, today there’s all this nonsense about how Black people are just inherently religious—and that’s a whole thing that gets me pissed off, it’s just bullshit. These are socially conditioned things. A lot of my Black friends and a lot of people who influenced me later in life, like the Panthers, were going through the same thing I’d gone through, and recognized that these religious ideas and institutions are human inventions—and not very good ones. So some of my friends were still religious, but many of them were going through the same general kind of emancipating experience that I was in casting off religion. BA entered the University of California, Berkeley in the fall of 1961, intending to pursue a wide range of academic interests and try out for the freshman football team, but that plan was cut short by a life-threatening illness that required months of hospitalization and years of intensive treatment. Even as he was recovering from his illness and beginning to recover his energy, BA resumed his studies at UC Berkeley. His entrance into campus life coincided with an important point in U.S. history where Berkeley was leading the way in cracking open the conservatism of the 1950s, as students broke out in social protest and intellectual challenges to the status quo—most notably expressed in the early ’60s by the Free Speech Movement. This movement challenged the university’s ban of campus organizing around off-campus issues, in particular students prot