NEWARK WHEN Charlotte L. Kates was in elementary school, she devoured a series of books on foreign countries. One nation, however, captured her imagination. She was in the family car on her way to a children's arts festival in Philadelphia, when, she said, the utopian vision of a communist society in the Soviet Union leapt off the pages and inspired her to be a revolutionary.
She never looked back. As a law student at Rutgers University, and one of the leaders of New Jersey Solidarity, a pro-Palestinian student group, Ms. Kates has reserved space at Rutgers this October for the Third North American Student Conference of the Palestine Solidarity Movement. The gathering will draw hundreds of student activists from the United States and Canada, and they will converge on the New Brunswick campus, she said, to "organize against the Israeli occupation of Palestine."
The forum has attracted the attention of state politicians, including Gov. James E. McGreevey and John O. Bennett, the Republican leader in the State Senate.
Mr. Bennett sent a letter to the governor asking him to "prevent our prestigious and world-renowned university from hosting this abominable conference."
The governor met with the Rutgers president, Richard L. McCormick, yesterday to discuss the conference, among other things. According to the governor's office, Mr. McGreevey left the meeting supporting Dr. McCormick's decision to let the conference take place.
Ms. Kates also stirred up the campus in March when her organization reserved banner space for two weeks at the Douglass College Center. The banner read: "From the River to the Sea, Palestine Will be Free."
"It was a call for all land between the Jordanian River and the Mediterranean to be returned to the Palestinians," she said.
Such a call also meant Israel would be wiped off the map. The Israel Action Committee of Rutgers organized a sit-in at the center demanding that the banner be removed. It was not.
New Jersey Solidarity takes a hard line in its support of the Palestinians. Ms. Kates will not, for instance, condemn suicide bombings, saying "it is not our place in the United States to dictate the tactics Palestinian groups use in the liberation struggle."
Seated in a small coffee shop near the Rutgers Law School on Monday, Ms. Kates, 23, recalled the book she was reading on that car trip to Philadelphia years ago. "The book quoted the 1917 revolutionary slogan: peace, land, bread and freedom," she said. "This idea hit me. I had to find out more about socialism."
SHE began to read Lenin and Marx. She looked up the American Communist Party's local chapter in New Jersey, where she grew up. She rode her bike on Sunday afternoons to local party meetings. By age 13, she said, she had joined the party, paying monthly dues of 50 cents.
"It is a workers party, so dues are paid on a sliding scale," she said. "I kept it from my parents. A year later, a clerk at the supermarket mentioned to my mother that she had seen me handing out copies of the communist newspaper the People's Weekly World at the Collingswood train station. The clerk wanted to know if my mother was also a communist."
Her parents, although not pleased, allowed her to continue. Activism does not run in her family, but she is quick to add that "my parents are working class." Her brother, Benjamin Kates III, 16 years her senior, is a United States marshal in Texas. Her father, Benjamin Kates Jr., now retired, drove heavy equipment. Her mother, Carol, is a service representative in a bank.
Her decision to "side with the oppressed, liberation movements and the working class" is one that has led her to butt heads repeatedly with authority. In the seventh grade, she agitated to loosen the dress code at her school and reduce the lunch fees. "It was called the `lunch costs too much campaign,' " she said.
Later, she used a board, reserved for honors students to note important moments in history, to mark anniversaries like the protest on March 6, 1930, when a million Americans across the country marched for unemployment insurance.
As an undergraduate at Rutgers in 2000, she helped organize a "people's convention" to run a radical slate for City Council in New Brunswick. The slate, which had three candidates, received 28 percent of the vote.
Her small dorm room at Rutgers, which she shares with three other first- year law students, is decorated with the requisite picture of Che Guevara, a hero of the Cuban revolution, along with a poster of Nabil Salameh, a slain radical Palestinian leader.
A poster on the wall reads: "Long Live the Proletarian Feminism of the Heroic Red Women Fighters of Peru." Without a moment's hesitation, she said her favorite book is "The State and Revolution" by Lenin.
She has a weakness for Dr. Pepper. There was a case on her floor. And she makes room on her wall for prints by the artist Gustav Klimt.
The day after being featured in an article in The New York Post this month with the headline "Rutgers gets `F' For Putting Anti-Semitism 101 on the Schedule," she lost her summer job as a customer service representative for an electronics company in Teaneck.
"They told me it was because they were doing financial restructuring," she said, her signature red kaffiyeh draped around her shoulders, "but I have my doubts."
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