Chesa Boudin was named a Rhodes Scholar over the weekend, but couldn't phone his parents with the news.

His mother and father, both 1960s radicals, have been in prison since 1981 for murder and robbery in an armored car heist. Boudin was raised by two other former members of the radical Weather Underground, Bernardine Dohrn and Bill Ayers of Chicago. Dohrn was once on the FBI's 10 Most Wanted List.

Boudin's parents also missed out when he graduated from high school with a 4.0 grade point average, and will miss his graduation next May from Yale University, where's he's a Phi Beta Kappa.

"I've gotten used to it, in a tragic way," Boudin said. "It's deeply saddening."

Rhodes scholarships are the most prestigious scholarships in the English-speaking world. Boudin is one of 32 Americans, of 981 who applied, to win scholarships for two or three years of study at University of Oxford in England.

Boudin's mother, Kathy Boudin, and father, David Gilbert, named him Chesa after the Swahili word for dancing feet.

"I was born feet first and my dad was watching," Boudin said. "He said I came dancing into the world."

But a few months after his first birthday, Boudin's parents were arrested for their roles in the $1.6 million holdup of a Brink's armored truck in Rockland County, N.Y. A security guard and two police officers were killed.

Boudin's father drove the getaway truck and was sentenced to 75 years to life. His mother, a passenger in the truck, was sentenced to 20 years to life. Last year, after serving 20 years, Kathy Boudin was denied parole. Although she has been a model prisoner, the parole board said paroling her "would serve to deprecate the seriousness of the criminal behavior."

While growing up, Boudin visited his parents in prison and they called him collect and wrote frequently. But it was his legal guardians, Dohrn and Ayers, who raised him. Dohrn is director of the Children and Family Justice Center at Northwestern University, and Ayers is an education professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

Boudin had a difficult early childhood, Dohrn recalled Sunday. He threw tantrums, cursed out his teachers and didn't learn how to read until the third grade. But around the sixth grade, his behavior improved, "and when he got on top of it, nothing could stop him," Dohrn said. "He gives all of us hope for the future."

Boudin, 22, said he had advantages most other children of prisoners lack: a stable, loving home, money for tutors, counseling and the private University of Chicago Laboratory Schools, plus "the fact that I had white skin."

In high school, Boudin received the coach's award for leadership on the cross-country team and an award for his participation in the Model United Nations.

At Yale, he's a volunteer interpreter for Spanish-speaking hospital patients and a leader of the Yale Coalition for Peace, which opposes war with Iraq. Boudin spent his junior year in Chile, where he worked at a community health center and was a translator for Greenpeace.

Boudin also has spoken and written about the problems of children of prisoners.

"I see prisons all around me," he wrote on Salon.com. "Tasting the cool water of a river, stretching out on a double bed, racing to school--in some measure my freedom must compensate for [my parents'] imprisonment. Every day I combine two lives: one immersed in the stability of privilege and the other meeting the challenges of degradation."

A second Rhodes scholar with local ties is Sean Campbell of Brooklyn, N.Y, who recently graduated from the University of Chicago, where he won the prize for best essay in American history.

Campbell interned for Mayor Daley and worked on the Street Wise newspaper sold by the homeless.

Copyright 2002, Digital Chicago Inc.

###