Marion Delgado was a five-year-old American boy whose image and story made the inside pages of ''Life'' magazine on June 2, 1947. The caption below the photograph read: "With a defiant smile, 5-year-old Marion Delgado shows how he placed a 25-pound concrete slab on the tracks and wrecked a passenger train." The event was reported as an accident. On May 20, 1947, the curious five-year-old tried to crack the slab by bouncing it on the rails. When that did not work, he decided to let the Feather River Express passenger train do the heavy work of cracking the concrete chunk and he laid it across a rail near his

Decoto, California Decoto is a neighborhood of Union City, California originally established as a separate community. It is located north-northwest of downtown Newark, along California State Route 238. History In 1867, Ezra Decoto, a local landowner sold land to ...

home. "At 11:10 a.m. the Feather River Express boomed into Decoto at 50 mph. There was a crash. The engine jumped the rails, tore up 300 feet of track, hit a switch and turned over. The engineer and four other people were injured." When asked by the police, according to the ''Life'' article: "Marion shrugged, 'I couldn't break that big rock by myself', he said, 'so I decided to let the train do it.'"

In popular culture

Just over two decades after the photo and caption ran in ''Life'', the

Students for a Democratic Society Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) was a national student activist organization in the United States during the 1960s, and was one of the principal representations of the New Left. Disdaining permanent leaders, hierarchical relationships ...

(SDS) (then under the control of the Weathermen) published the Delgado photograph and caption on the cover of their newspaper, '' New Left Notes'' without attribution and without the accompanying article. Delgado's name was later elevated to that of "editor" after the other major groups in SDS condemned the cover. Various Weathermen continued to invoke the name "Marion Delgado" for decades afterward. In Billy Ayers' book ''

Fugitive Days ''Fugitive Days'' is a memoir by Bill Ayers. Ayers chronicles his childhood, his radicalization, his days as a leader of the Weather Underground, and his days on the run from the US government. The book was originally published by Beacon Press in ...

'', Delgado was mentioned as an Italian boy who derailed a train in Italy, with no injuries, and that

Terry Robbins Terry Robbins (October 4, 1947 – March 6, 1970) was an American far left activist, a key member of the Ohio Students for a Democratic Society (The S.D.S.), and one of the three Weathermen who died in the Greenwich Village townhouse explosi ...

had gotten the photo "hot off the AP wire" in 1969. As of April 2015, the AP News Archive has no record of a Marion Delgado story in 1969. Jeff Jones is quoted as calling out the name "Marion Delgado" to signal an attack by the Weathermen on the Drake Hotel during the

Days of Rage The Days of Rage were a series of protests during three days in October 1969 in Chicago, organized by the emerging Weatherman faction of Students for a Democratic Society. The group planned the October 8–11 event as a "National Action" ...

protests in 1969. Additionally, Bernardine Dohrn used the name during a Weatherwomen rally. The novel ''The Company You Keep'' mentions "Marion Delgado Brigades" (MDB) in several passages.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Delgado, Marion Counterculture of the 1960s New Left People from Alameda County, California