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{{Short description|American far-left militant organization, 1969–77}}
{{POV-check|date=April 2008}}
{{About|the United States militant organization|the weather forecasting service|Weather Underground (weather service)|other uses}}
{{Use American English|date = October 2019}}
{{Use mdy dates|date=March 2014}}
{{Infobox war faction
| war = the ], ], and ] movements
| image = Weather Underground logo.svg
| name = Weather Underground
| caption = Logo of the Weather Underground
| active = 1969–1977
| ideology = {{Plainlist|
* ]
* ]
* ]
* ]
* ]
* ]}}
]
| leaders = {{Plainlist|
* ]
* ]{{sfn|Grathwohl|Frank|1977|p=110}}}}
| position = ]
| clans = {{Plainlist|
* ]
* ]}}
| headquarters =
| area = United States
| size =
| partof = ]
| predecessor =
| successor = ]
| allies = ]
| split =
| opponents = United States
| battles = {{blist|
Political violence in the United States during the Cold War
* ]
* ]}}
}}


The '''Weather Underground''' was a ] Marxist militant organization first active in 1969, founded on the ] campus of the ].{{sfn|Burrough|2015}}{{page needed|date=November 2024}} Originally known as the '''Weathermen''', the group was organized as a faction of ] (SDS) national leadership.<ref name=djwnyt82403>{{cite news |last1=Wakin |first1=Daniel J. |title=Quieter Lives for 60's Militants, but Intensity of Beliefs Hasn't Faded |url=https://www.nytimes.com/2003/08/24/nyregion/quieter-lives-for-60-s-militants-but-intensity-of-beliefs-hasn-t-faded.html |work=The New York Times |date=August 24, 2003 |access-date=June 7, 2008}}</ref> Officially known as the '''Weather Underground Organization''' ('''WUO''') beginning in 1970, the group's express political goal was to create a revolutionary party to overthrow the United States government, which WUO believed to be ].
{{dablink|For other uses, see ].}}
] (center) and ] (with sunglasses) at the '']'', Chicago, October 1969.]]


The ] described the WUO as a ] group,<ref>{{cite web |title=Weather Underground Bombings |url=https://www.fbi.gov/history/famous-cases/weather-underground-bombings |publisher=Federal Bureau Of Investigation |access-date=30 November 2018}}</ref> with revolutionary positions characterized by ] and opposition to the ].<ref name=djwnyt82403/> The WUO took part in domestic attacks such as the jailbreak of ] in 1970.<ref name="PBS-Lens-2010"/><ref name="EB-2017">{{cite encyclopedia |encyclopedia=Encyclopedia Britannica |title=Weather Underground American Militant Group |last1=Lambert |first1=Laura |url=https://www.britannica.com/topic/Weathermen |date=August 31, 2017 |access-date=4 December 2018 }}</ref> The "]" was the WUO's first riot in October 1969 in Chicago, timed to coincide with the trial of the ]. In 1970, the group issued a "Declaration of a State of War" against the United States government under the name "Weather Underground Organization."<ref name="The Weather Underground">'']'', produced by Carrie Lozano, directed by Bill Siegel and Sam Green, New Video Group, 2003, DVD.</ref>
'''Weatherman''', known ] as '''the Weathermen''' and later the '''Weather Underground Organization''', was an ] ] organization founded in 1969 by leaders and members who split from the ] (SDS). The group organized a riot in ] in 1969 and bombed buildings in the 1970s.


In the 1970s, the WUO conducted a bombing campaign targeting government buildings and several banks. Some attacks were preceded by evacuation warnings, along with threats identifying the particular matter that the attack was intended to protest. Three members of the group were killed in an accidental ], but none were killed in any of the bombings. The WUO communiqué issued in connection with the bombing of the ] on March 1, 1971, indicated that it was "in protest of the ]". The WUO asserted that its May 19, 1972 bombing of ] was "in retaliation for the ]". On September 28, 1973, an ] building in New York City was bombed for the involvement of this company in the ].<ref>{{cite news | url=https://select.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=FB0815FA3554137A93CBAB1782D85F478785F9 | work=The New York Times | title=I.T.T. Office Here Damaged by Bomb; Caller Linked Explosion at Latin-American Section to 'Crimes in Chile' I.T.T. Latin-American Office on Madison Ave. Damaged by Bomb Fire in Rome Office Bombing on the Coast Rally the Opponents | date=September 29, 1973 | access-date=May 5, 2010 | first=Paul L. | last=Montgomery | url-status=live | archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20110512100123/http://select.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=FB0815FA3554137A93CBAB1782D85F478785F9 | archive-date=May 12, 2011 }}</ref><ref>{{Cite book |last1=Ayers |first1=Bill |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=X2OJhrWo6PcC&dq=itt+bomb+1973&pg=PT257 |title=Sing a Battle Song: The Revolutionary Poetry, Statements, and Communiques of the Weather Underground 1970-1974 |last2=Dohrn |first2=Bernardine |last3=Jones |first3=Jeff |date=2011 |publisher=Seven Stories Press |isbn=978-1-58322-965-1 |page=257 |language=en}}</ref> The WUO announced that its January 29, 1975 bombing of the ] building was "in response to the escalation in Vietnam".<ref name="The Weather Underground"/><ref>{{cite book |title = The Weather Underground. |year= 1975|publisher= US Government Printing Office |location= Washington DC |pages= –2, 11–13 |url= https://archive.org/details/statedepartmentb00unit |access-date=December 20, 2009}}</ref>
They took their name from the lyric "''You don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows,''" from the ] song '']''. They also used this lyric as the title of a ] they distributed at an SDS convention in Chicago on ], ], as part of a special edition of ''New Left Notes''. The Weathermen were initially part of the ] (RYM) within the SDS, splitting from the RYM's ]s by claiming there was no time to build a ] and that revolutionary war against the United States government and the ] should begin immediately. Their founding document called for the establishment of a "white fighting force" to be allied with the "Black Liberation Movement" and other "]" movements<ref name="Berger">{{cite book|title=Outlaws of America: The Weather Underground and the Politics of Solidarity|author=Berger, Dan|page=95|publisher=]|year=2006}}</ref> to achieve "the destruction of ] and achieve a ] world: world ]."<ref name="Weatherman">See document 5, {{cite web|url=http://martinrealm.org/documents/radical/sixties1.html|title="You Don't Need a Weatherman to Know Which Way the Wind Blows."|accessdate=2008-04-119|author=Revolutionary Youth Movement|date=1969}}</ref>


The WUO began to disintegrate after the United States reached a peace accord in Vietnam in 1973,{{sfn|Jacobs|1997}}{{Page needed|date=November 2024}} and it was defunct by 1977. Some members of the WUO joined the ] and continued their activities until that group disbanded in 1985.
The group's first public demonstration was the "]," an ], ] riot in ] that was coordinated with the trial of the ].<ref>{{cite web|url=http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/groupProfile.asp?grpid=6808|title="Weatherman"|publisher=Discoverthenetworks.org|accessdate=2008-04-19}}</ref> In 1970 the group issued a "Declaration of a State of War" against the United States government, under the name "Weather Underground Organization" (WUO), and members adopted fake identities and pursued ] activities. They carried out a campaign consisting of ]ings, ]s, and ]s. Their attacks were mostly bombings of government buildings, along with several banks, police department headquarters and precincts, state and federal courthouses, and state prison administrative offices.<ref>Kushner, Harvey W. ''Encyclopedia of Terrorism.'' Thousand Oaks, Calif.: SAGE Publications, 2002. ISBN 0761924086</ref><ref>], ].]</ref>


The group took its name from ]'s lyric "You don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows", from the song "]" (1965).<ref>{{cite news|url=https://www.nytimes.com/1975/01/30/archives/weather-men-got-name-from-song-groups-latest-designation-is-weather.html|title=Weathermen Got Name from Song|date=January 30, 1975 |work=The New York Times }}</ref> That Dylan line was also the title of a position paper distributed at an SDS convention in Chicago on June 18, 1969. This founding document called for a "White fighting force" to be allied with the "Black Liberation Movement" and other radical movements{{sfn|Berger|2006|p=95}} to achieve "the destruction of U.S. imperialism and form a ] communist world".<ref name="Weatherman">See document 5, {{cite web |url=http://martinrealm.org/documents/radical/sixties1.html|title=You Don't Need a Weatherman to Know Which Way the Wind Blows |author=Revolutionary Youth Movement|year=1969 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20060328145901/http://martinrealm.org/documents/radical/sixties1.html |archive-date=2006-03-28 |access-date=March 3, 2014}}</ref>
Apart from an apparently accidental premature detonation of a bomb in the ] which claimed the lives of three of its own members, no one was ever harmed in the extensive bombing campaign, as WUO issued warnings in advance to ensure a safe evacuation of the area prior to detonation.<ref name="The Weather Underground">'']'', produced by Carrie Lozano, directed by Bill Siegel and Sam Green, New Video Group, 2003, DVD.</ref><ref name=autogenerated2> ]</ref> However, according to Mark Rudd, one of the founders of the Weathermen, the group that constructed the bomb that exploded prematurely in Greenich Village had planned to set it off at a dance in an Army NCO club, which presumably would have had lethal consequences. Their activities have often been characterized as domestic terror,<ref></ref> including a later description by the ].<ref>, Federal Bureau of Investigation website, retrieved ], ]</ref>


==Background and formation==
The evacuation warning issued in their communiqués included statements indicating the particular event to which they were responding. For the bombing of the ] on ], ], they issued a statement saying it was "in protest of the US invasion of ]." For the bombing of ] on ], ], they stated it was "in retaliation for the US bombing raid in ]." For the ], ] bombing of the ] housing the ], they stated it was "in response to escalation in ]."<ref name="The Weather Underground"/> The Weathermen largely disintegrated shortly after the US reached a peace accord in Vietnam in 1973 , which saw the general decline of the ].
The Weathermen emerged from the campus-based ] as well as from the ] of the 1960s. One of the factors that contributed to the radicalization of SDS members was the Economic Research and Action Project that the SDS undertook in Northern urban neighborhoods from 1963 to 1968. This project was aimed at creating an interracial movement of the poor that would mobilize for full and fair employment or guaranteed annual income and political rights for poverty class Americans. Their goal was to create a more democratic society "which guarantees political freedom, economic and physical security, abundant education, and incentives for wide cultural variety". While the initial phase of the SDS involved campus organizing, phase two involved community organizing. These experiences led some SDS members to conclude that deep social change would not happen through community organizing and electoral politics, and that more radical and disruptive tactics were needed.<ref>Frost, Jennifer (2001). ''An Interracial Movement of the Poor: Community Organizing and the New Left in the 1960s''. New York: New York University Press; p. 28 {{ISBN?}}</ref>


In the late 1960s, ] action in ] escalated, especially in Vietnam. In the U.S., the anti-war sentiment was particularly pronounced during the ].
== Background and formation ==
The group emerged from the campus-based ], as well as the ]s of the late 1960s. During this time, ] action in ], especially in ], escalated. In the U.S., the anti-war sentiment was particularly pronounced during the ].


The origins of the Weathermen can be traced to the collapse and fragmentation of the ]. The split between the mainstream leadership of SDS, or "National Office," and the ] pushed SDS as a whole further to the left. National Office leaders such as ] and ] began announcing their emerging perspectives, and Klonksy published a document entitled "Toward a ]" (RYM). RYM promoted the philosophy that young workers possessed the potential to be a revolutionary force to overthrow capitalism, if not by themselves then by transmitting radical ideas to the working class. Klonsky's document reflected the growing leftist philosophy of the National Office and was eventually adopted as official SDS doctrine. During the Summer of 1969, the National Office began to split. A group led by Klonsky became known as RYM II, and the other side, RYM I, was led by Dohrn and endorsed more aggressive tactics, as some members felt that years of ] had done little or nothing to stop the Vietnam War.<ref name="The Weather Underground"/> The origins of the Weathermen can be traced to the collapse and fragmentation of the ] following a split between office holders of the SDS, or the "National Office", and their supporters and the ] (PLP). During the factional struggle, National Office leaders such as ] and ] began announcing their emerging perspectives, and Klonsky published a document titled "Toward a ]" (RYM).<ref name="The Weather Underground"/><ref name="toward a rym">{{cite book|last=Investigations|first=United States. Congress. Senate. Committee on Government Operations. Permanent Subcommittee on|title=Riots, Civil and Criminal Disorders: Hearings ... United States Senate, Ninetieth &#91;-Ninety-first&#93; Congress, First &#91;-second&#93; Session|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=E1BKAQAAIAAJ|year=1969|publisher=U.S. Government Printing Office|pages=}}</ref>


RYM promoted the philosophy that young workers possessed the potential to be a revolutionary force which could overthrow capitalism, if not by themselves then by transmitting radical ideas to the working class. Klonsky's document reflected the philosophy of the National Office and it was eventually adopted as the SDS's official doctrine. During the summer of 1969, the National Office began to split. A group led by Klonsky became known as RYM II, and the other side, RYM I, was led by Dohrn and endorsed more aggressive tactics such as ], as some members felt that years of ] had done little or nothing to stop the Vietnam War.<ref name="The Weather Underground"/> The Weathermen strongly sympathized with the radical ]. The police killing of Panther ] prompted the Weatherman to issue a declaration of war upon the United States government.
{{Quote|We ]ed, we ], we ]. I was willing to get hit over the head, I did; I was willing to go to prison, I did. To me, it was a question of what had to be done to stop the much greater violence that was going on.|]<ref name="The Weather Underground"/>}}


{{blockquote|We petitioned, we demonstrated, we ]. I was willing to get hit over the head, I did; I was willing to go to prison, I did. To me, it was a question of what had to be done to stop the much greater violence that was going on.|]<ref name="The Weather Underground"/>}}
===SDS Convention, 1969===
At an SDS convention in Chicago on ], ], the National Office attempted to convince unaffiliated delegates not to endorse Progressive Labor ideals. At the beginning of the convention, two position papers were passed out by the National Office leadership, one a revised statement of Klonksy's RYM manifesto, the other called "You Don't Need a Weatherman to Know Which Way the Wind Blows."
The latter document outlined the position of the group that would become the Weathermen. It had been signed by 11 people, including ], ], ], ], Jim Mellen, ], ], ], Gerry Long, and Steve Tappis.


===SDS Convention, June 1969===
After the summer of 1969 fragmentation of Students for a Democratic Society, Weatherman's adherents explicitly claimed themselves the ''real leaders'' of SDS and retained control of the SDS National Office. Thereafter, any leaflet, label, or logo bearing the name "Students for a Democratic Society" or "SDS" was in fact the views and politics of Weatherman, and not of SDS as a whole. Weatherman contained the vast majority of former SDS National Committee members, including ], ] and ]. For this reason, the group, while small, was able to easily commandeer the mantle of SDS and all of its membership lists. For a brief time, affiliations with regional SDS ] were maintained from the National Office, but with Weatherman in charge the relationships did not last long, and local chapters soon disbanded. By February 1970, the group had decided to close the SDS National Office, concluding the major campus-based organization of the 1960s.
At an SDS convention in Chicago on June 18, 1969, the National Office attempted to persuade unaffiliated delegates not to endorse a takeover of SDS by Progressive Labor who had packed the convention with their supporters.It was at the 1966 convention of SDS that members of ] began to make their presence known for the first time. The PLP was a ] group that had turned to SDS as fertile ground for recruiting new members after meeting with little success in organizing industrial workers, their preferred base. SDS members of that time were nearly all anti-communist, but they also refused to be drawn into actions that appeared like ], which they viewed as mostly irrelevant and out of date. The PLP soon began to organize a ]. By 1968 and 1969 they would profoundly affect SDS, particularly at national gatherings of the membership, forming a well-groomed, disciplined faction which followed the Progressive Labor Party line.{{sfn|Sale|1974|p=495}} At the beginning of the convention, two position papers were passed out by the National Office leadership, one a revised statement of Klonsky's RYM manifesto,<ref name="toward a rym"/> the other called "You Don't Need a Weatherman to Know Which Way the Wind Blows".<ref>{{cite web|url=https://www.sds-1960s.org/sds_wuo/weather/weatherman_document.txt|title=You Don't Need a Weatherman to Know Which Way the Wind Blows|date=June 18, 1969|publisher=SDS convention (1969)|website=www.sds-1960s.org|access-date=June 11, 2020|archive-date=August 29, 2020|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20200829033956/https://www.sds-1960s.org/sds_wuo/weather/weatherman_document.txt|url-status=dead}}</ref>


The latter document outlined the position of the group that would become the Weathermen. It had been signed by Karen Ashley, ], ], ], ], Gerry Long, ], ], ], ], and Steve Tappis. The document called for creating a clandestine revolutionary party.
===Ideology===
The name Weatherman was derived from the ] song “]”, which featured the lyrics “You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows.” The lyrics had been quoted at the bottom of an influential essay in the SDS newspaper, ''New Left Notes''. Using this title the Weathermen meant, partially, to appeal to the segment of American ] inspired to action for ] by Dylan’s songs. It appears also that the “Weatherman” ] used by the group may have been meant as a rebuke against the ], whose ] SDS faction had succeeded in recruiting many former SDSers to its ranks, and had allegedly co-opted the 1969 convention.


<blockquote>The most important task for us toward making the revolution, and the work our collectives should engage in, is the creation of a mass revolutionary movement, without which a clandestine revolutionary party will be impossible. A revolutionary mass movement is different from the traditional revisionist mass base of "sympathizers". Rather it is akin to the ] in China, based on the full participation and involvement of masses of people in the practice of making revolution; a movement with a full willingness to participate in the violent and illegal struggle.<ref>{{cite book |title=You Don't Need a Weatherman to Know Which Way the Wind Blows |year=1969 |author1=Karin Asbley |author2=Bill Ayers |author3=Bernardine Dohrn |author4=John Jacobs |author5=Jeff Jones |author6=Gerry Long |author7=Home Machtinger |author8=Jim Mellen |author9=Terry Robbins |author10=Mark Rudd |author11=Steve Tappis |publisher=Weatherman |page=28 |url=https://archive.org/details/YouDontNeedAWeathermanToKnowWhichWayTheWindBlows_925 |access-date=November 19, 2018 }}</ref></blockquote>
The Weatherman group had long held that ] was becoming more important than ] forms of ] action, and that university-campus-based demonstrations needed to be punctuated with more dramatic actions, which had the potential to interfere with the U.S. military and ]. The belief was that these types of ] actions would act as a ] for the coming revolution. Many international events indeed seemed to support the Weathermen’s overall assertion that ] was imminent, such as the tumultuous ] in China; the 1968 student revolts in ], ] and elsewhere; the ]; the emergence of the ] organization in ]; the emergence of the ] and similar ]-led independence movements throughout ]; and within the United States, the prominence of the ] together with a series of “] ]s” throughout poor ] neighborhoods across the country.<ref>Lader, Lawrence. Power on the Left. (New York City: W W Norton, 1979.) 192</ref>


At this convention the Weatherman's faction of the Students for a Democratic Society, planned for October 8–11, as a "National Action" built around ] slogan, "bring the war home".{{sfn|Sale|1974}}{{Page needed|date=November 2024}} The National Action grew out of a resolution drafted by Jacobs and introduced at the October 1968 SDS National Council meeting in ]. The resolution, titled "The Elections Don't Mean Shit—Vote Where the Power Is—Our Power Is In The Street" and adopted by the council, was prompted by the success of the ] in August 1968 and reflected Jacobs' strong advocacy of ].<ref name="Wilkerson">{{Cite book| last=Wilkerson | first=C. | year=2007 | title=Flying Close to the Sun: My Life and Times As a Weatherman | publisher=Seven Stories Press | isbn=978-1-58322-771-8}}</ref>
{{Quote|We felt that doing nothing in a period of repressive violence is itself a form of violence. That's really the part that I think is the hardest for people to understand. If you sit in your house, live your white life and go to your white job, and allow the country that you live in to murder people and to commit ], and you sit there and you don't do anything about it, that's violence.|]<ref name="The Weather Underground"/>}}


As part of the "National Action Staff", Jacobs was an integral part of the planning for what quickly came to be called "Four Days of Rage".{{sfn|Sale|1974}}{{Page needed|date=November 2024}} For Jacobs, the goal of the "]" was clear:
The Weathermen were outspoken advocates of the critical concepts that later came to be known as “]” and ].{{Fact|date=September 2007}} As the ] in poor black neighborhoods intensified in the early 1970s, ] said, “White youth must choose sides ''now.'' They must either fight on the side of the oppressed, or be on the side of the oppressor.”<ref name="The Weather Underground"/>


<blockquote>Weatherman would shove the war down their dumb, fascist throats and show them, while we were at it, how much better we were than them, both tactically and strategically, as a people. In an all-out civil war over Vietnam and other fascist U.S. imperialism, we were going to bring the war home. 'Turn the imperialists' war into a civil war', in Lenin's words. And we were going to kick ass.<ref name="Gillies">{{cite magazine|url=http://www.columbia.edu/cu/computinghistory/1968/radical.html|title=The Last Radical|date=November 1998|magazine=]|via=Columbia University Computing History: A Chronology of Computing at Columbia University}}</ref></blockquote>
==Activities==
==="Days of Rage"===
{{main |Days of Rage}}
]
One of the first things the Weathermen did upon splitting from SDS was to announce that they would hold the "]" that fall. The event was advertised with the slogan ''"Bring the war home!"'' Hoping to cause chaos on a level able to "wake" the American public out of what the group saw as the public's complacency toward the ] that claimed the lives of between 3 and 5 million Vietnamese, the Weathermen wanted the event to be the largest-scale protest the decade had seen. The Weathermen had been told by their regional cadre to expect thousands in attendance, but when they arrived, they found a crowd of only a few hundred people. According to Bill Ayers, "The Days of Rage was an attempt to break from the norms of kind of acceptable theatre of 'here are the anti-war people: containable, marginal, predictable, and here's the little path they're going to march down, and here's where they can make their little statement.' We wanted to say, "No, what we're going to do is whatever we had to do to stop the violence in Vietnam.'"<ref name="The Weather Underground"/>


In July 1969, 30 members of Weatherman leadership traveled to ] and met with North Vietnamese representatives to gain from their revolutionary experience. The ]ese requested armed political action in order to stop the U.S. government's war in Vietnam. Subsequently, they accepted funding, training, recommendations on tactics and slogans from Cuba, and perhaps explosives as well.<ref>{{Cite book| last= Senate Judiciary Committee | year = 1975 | title= Report of the Subcommittee to Investigate the Administration of the Security Act and Other Internal Security Laws of the Committee of the Judiciary | publisher= Government Printing Office | pages = 5, 8–9, 13, 18, 137–147}}</ref>
Shortly before the demonstrations, they blew up a statue dedicated to police casualties in the 1886 ] (right), placing a bomb between its legs.<ref name="Jacobs"/> The blast broke nearly 100 windows and scattered pieces of the statue onto the Kennedy Expressway below.<ref name=Avrich431>{{cite book |last=Avrich |title=The Haymarket Tragedy |pages=p. 431 }}</ref> The statue was rebuilt and unveiled on ], ], and then blown up again by Weatherman on ], ].<ref>Adelman. Haymarket Revisited, p. 40. </ref><ref name=Avrich431/> The statue was again rebuilt and Mayor ] posted a 24-hour police guard at the statue.<ref name=Avrich431/>


===SDS Convention, December 1969===
Although the ], ] rally in ] had failed to draw as many participants as they had anticipated (originally expecting 10,000), the estimated two to three hundred who did attend shocked police by leading a ] through the affluent ], smashing windows of a bank and then those of many cars. The mass of the crowd ran about four blocks before encountering police barricades. The mob charged the police but splintered into small groups, and more than 1,000 police counter-attacked. Although many protesters were wearing motorcycle or football helmets, the police were better trained and armed and nightsticks were aimed at necks, legs and groins. Large amounts of ] were used, and at least twice police ran squad cars full speed into crowds. The riot lasted approximately half an hour, with 28 policemen injured (none seriously), six Weathermen shot by police, an unknown number injured, and 68 protesters arrested.<ref name="Berger"/><ref name="Jacobs">Jacobs, ''The Way the Wind Blew: A History of the Weather Underground,'' 1997.</ref><ref name="Jones">Jones, A Radical Line: From the Labor Movement to the Weather Underground, One Family's Century of Conscience, 2004.</ref><ref name="Sale">Sale, SDS, 1973.</ref>
After the Days of Rage riots the Weatherman held the last of its National Council meetings from December 26 to December 31, 1969, in ]. The meeting, dubbed the ] by the 300 people who attended, adopted Jacobs' call for violent revolution.{{sfn|Berger|2006}}{{Page needed|date=November 2024}} Dohrn opened the conference by telling the delegates they needed to stop being afraid and begin the "armed struggle." Over the next five days, the participants met in informal groups to discuss what "going underground" meant, how best to organize collectives, and justifications for violence. In the evening, the groups reconvened for a mass "wargasm"—practicing ], engaging in physical exercise,<ref>{{Cite book|title=English-Turkmen political dictionary|author=Хатамова, Р. К. (Розыхал Кабуловна)|oclc=290644615}}</ref> singing songs, and listening to speeches.{{sfn|Berger|2006}}{{Page needed|date=November 2024}}{{sfn|Varon|2004}}{{Page needed|date=November 2024}}{{sfn|Jacobs|1997}}{{Page needed|date=November 2024}}<ref name="ThaiJones">Jones, ''A Radical Line: From the Labor Movement to the Weather Underground, One Family's Century of Conscience,'' 2004.</ref><ref name="Elbaum">Elbaum, ''Revolution in the Air: Sixties Radicals Turn to Lenin, Mao and Che,'' 2002.</ref>


The War Council ended with a major speech by John Jacobs. Jacobs condemned the "pacifism" of white middle-class American youth, a belief which he claimed they held because they were insulated from the violence which afflicted blacks and the poor. He predicted a successful revolution, and declared that youth were moving away from passivity and apathy and toward a new high-energy culture of "depersonalization" brought about by drugs, sex, and armed revolution.{{sfn|Berger|2006}}{{Page needed|date=November 2024}}{{sfn|Varon|2004}}{{Page needed|date=November 2024}}{{sfn|Jacobs|1997}}{{Page needed|date=November 2024}}<ref name="ThaiJones"/><ref name="Elbaum"/> "We're against everything that's 'good and decent' in honky America," Jacobs said in his most commonly quoted statement. "We will burn and loot and destroy. We are the incubation of your mother's nightmare."{{sfn|Varon|2004|p=160}}
For the next two days, Weatherman held no rallies or protests. Supporters of the RYM II movement, led by Klonsky and Noel Ignatin, held peaceful rallies of several hundred people in front of the federal courthouse, an International Harvester factory, and Cook County Hospital. The largest event of the Days of Rage occurred on Friday, ], when RYM II led an interracial march of 2,000 people through a Spanish-speaking part of Chicago.<ref name="Berger"/><ref name="Jones"/>
Two major decisions came out of the War Council. The first was to go underground and to begin a violent, armed struggle against the state without attempting to organize or mobilize a broad swath of the public. The Weather Underground hoped to create underground collectives in major cities throughout the country.{{sfn|Sale|1974}}{{Page needed|date=November 2024}} In fact, the Weathermen eventually created only three significant, active collectives; one in California, one in the Midwest, and one in New York City. The New York City collective was led by Jacobs and Terry Robbins, and included ], ], ] (Robbins' girlfriend), and ].<ref name="Wilkerson"/> Jacobs was one of Robbins' biggest supporters, and pushed the Weathermen to let Robbins be as violent as he wanted to be. The Weatherman national leadership agreed, as did the New York City collective.<ref>Good, "Brian Flanagan Speaks," ''Next Left Notes,'' 2005.</ref> The collective's first target was Judge John Murtagh, who was overseeing the trial of the "Panther 21".<ref name="Bingham2016">{{cite book|author=Clara Bingham|title=Witness to the Revolution: Radicals, Resisters, Vets, Hippies, and the Year America Lost Its Mind and Found Its Soul|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=3ZhVCgAAQBAJ&pg=PR17|date=2016|publisher=Random House Publishing Group|isbn=978-0-679-64474-3|pages=17–}}</ref>


The second major decision was the dissolution of SDS. After the summer of 1969 fragmentation of SDS, Weatherman's adherents explicitly claimed themselves the ''real leaders'' of SDS and retained control of the SDS National Office. Thereafter, any leaflet, label, or logo bearing the name "Students for a Democratic Society" (SDS) was in fact the views and politics of Weatherman, not of the slate elected by Progressive Labor. Weatherman contained the vast majority of former SDS National Committee members, including ], ] and Bernardine Dohrn. The group, while small, was able to commandeer the mantle of SDS and all of its membership lists, but with Weatherman in charge there was little or no support from local branches or members of the organization,<ref>Pages 184 and 190, Rudd, Mark, ''My Life with SDS and the Weathermen Underground'', William Morrow (2009), hardcover, 326 pages, {{ISBN|978-0-06-147275-6}}</ref><ref>Pages 127 and 136 in the essay "1969" by Carl Oglesby in ''Weatherman'', edited by Harold Jacobs, Ramparts Press (1970), trade paperback, 520 pages, {{ISBN|0-671-20725-3}} {{ISBN|978-0-671-20725-0}} Hardcover: {{ISBN|0-87867-001-7}} {{ISBN|978-0-87867-001-7}}</ref> and local chapters soon disbanded. At the War Council, the Weathermen had decided to close the SDS National Office, ending the major campus-based organization of the 1960s which at its peak was a mass organization with 100,000 members.{{sfn|Varon|2004|pp=158–171}}
On Saturday, ], Weatherman attempted to regroup and resume their demonstrations. Approximately 300 protesters marched swiftly through ], Chicago's main business district, watched over by a double-line of heavily armed police. The protesters suddenly broke through the police lines and rampaged through the Loop, smashing windows of cars and stores. But the police were prepared, and quickly sealed off the protesters. Within 15 minutes, more than half the crowd had been arrested.<ref name="Berger"/><ref name="Jones"/>
===Ideology===
The thesis of Weatherman theory, as expounded in its founding document, ''You Don't Need a Weatherman to Know Which Way the Wind Blows'', was that "the main struggle going on in the world today is between U.S. imperialism and the national liberation struggles against it",<ref>Page 40 This unabridged copy of ''You Don't Need a Weatherman to Know Which Way the Wind Blows'' is part of an extensive ] production made by the ] (FBI).</ref> based on ], first expounded in 1916 in '']''. In Weatherman theory "oppressed peoples" are the creators of the wealth of empire, "and it is to them that it belongs." "The goal of revolutionary struggle must be the control and use of this wealth in the interest of the oppressed peoples of the world." "The goal is the destruction of U.S. imperialism and the achievement of a classless world: world communism"<ref>Page 41 </ref>


The Vietnamese and other third world countries, as well as third world people within the United States play a vanguard role. They "set the terms for class struggle in America&nbsp;..."<ref>Pages 42 and 43 </ref> The role of the "Revolutionary Youth Movement" is to build a centralized organization of revolutionaries, a "Marxist–Leninist Party" supported by a mass revolutionary movement to support international liberation movements and "open another battlefield of the revolution."<ref>, p. 46</ref><ref> {{webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20091104100749/http://martinrealm.org/documents/radical/sixties1.html|date=November 4, 2009}}</ref>
The Days of Rage cost Chicago and the state of Illinois approximately $183,000 ($100,000 for National Guard payroll, $35,000 in damages, and $20,000 for one injured citizen's medical expenses). Most of the Weathermen and SDS leaders were jailed, and the Weatherman bank account was emptied of more than $243,000 in order to pay for bail.<ref name="Sale"/>


The theoretical basis of the Revolutionary Youth Movement was an insight that most of the American population, including both students and the supposed "middle class," comprised, due to their relationship to the instruments of production, the ],<ref>''Flying Close to the Sun'', Cathy Wilkerson, Seven Stories Press (2007), hardcover, 422 pages, {{ISBN|978-1-58322-771-8}}, pp. 113, 114</ref> thus the organizational basis of the SDS, which had begun in the elite colleges and had been extended to public institutions as the organization grew could be extended to youth as a whole including students, those serving in the military, and the unemployed. Students could be viewed as workers gaining skills prior to employment. This contrasted to the Progressive Labor view which viewed students and workers as being in separate categories which could ally, but should not jointly organize.<ref>"More on the Youth Movement" by Jim Mellen in ''Weatherman'', edited by Harold Jacobs, Ramparts Press (1970), trade paperback, 520 pages, pp. 39–49, {{ISBN|0-671-20725-3}} {{ISBN|978-0-671-20725-0}} Hardcover: {{ISBN|0-87867-001-7}} {{ISBN|978-0-87867-001-7}}</ref>
===Declaration of a State of War===
]
In ], the Chicago Police Department, in conjunction with the FBI, conducted a raid on the home of ] ], in which he and ] were killed, with four of the seven other people in the apartment wounded. The survivors of the raid were all charged with assault and attempted murder. The police claimed they shot in self-defense, although a controversy arose when the Panthers and other activists presented what was alleged to be evidence suggesting that the sleeping Panthers were not ]. The charges were later dropped, and the families of the dead won a $1.8 million settlement from the government. It was discovered in 1971 that Hampton had been targeted by the FBI's ].<ref></ref><ref></ref>


FBI analysis of the travel history of the founders and initial followers of the organization emphasized contacts with foreign governments, particularly the Cuban and North Vietnamese and their influence on the ideology of the organization. Participation in the ], a program which involved U.S. students volunteering to work in the sugar harvest in Cuba, is highlighted as a common factor in the background of the founders of the Weather Underground, with China a secondary influence.<ref>, pp. 13–33.</ref> This experience was cited by both Kathy Boudin and Bernardine Dohrn as a major influence on their political development.<ref>Statements in ''Underground'', a film by Emile de Antonio, Turin Film (1976) DVD Image Entertainment</ref>
{{Quote|We felt that the murder of Fred required us to be more grave, more serious, more determined to raise the stakes and not just be the white people who wrung their hands when black people were being murdered.|]<ref name="The Weather Underground"/>}}


Terry Robbins took the organization's name from the lyrics of the ] song "],"<ref>{{cite book|title=The Sixties Chronicle|author=Peter Braunstein |publisher=Legacy Publishing|page=435|year=2004|isbn=1-4127-1009-X}}</ref> which featured the lyrics "You don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows." The lyrics had been quoted at the bottom of an influential essay in the SDS newspaper, ''New Left Notes''. By using this title the Weathermen meant, partially, to appeal to the segment of U.S. youth inspired to action for ] by Dylan's songs.<ref>{{cite magazine|last1=Isserman|first1=Maurice|title=Weather Reports|url=http://www.thenation.com/article/weather-reports|website=TheNation|date=January 24, 2008|access-date=February 23, 2015|archive-date=February 23, 2015|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20150223212010/http://www.thenation.com/article/weather-reports}}</ref>
In 1970 the group issued a "Declaration of a State of War" against the United States government, using for the first time its new name, the "Weather Underground Organization" (WUO), adopting fake identities, and pursuing ] activities only. These initially included preparations for a bombing of a U.S. military non-commissioned officers' dance at ], New Jersey in what ] said had been intended to be "the most horrific hit the United States government had ever suffered on its territory".<ref></ref>


The Weatherman group had long held that ] was becoming more important than ] forms of ] action, and that university campus-based demonstrations needed to be punctuated with more dramatic actions, which had the potential to interfere with the U.S. military and ]. The belief was that these types of ] actions would act as a catalyst for the coming revolution. Many international events indeed seemed to support the Weathermen's overall assertion that ] was imminent, such as the tumultuous ] in China; the ], ] and elsewhere; the ]; the ]; the emergence of the ] organization in ]; the emergence of the ] and similar ]-led independence movements throughout Africa; and within the United States, the prominence of the Black Panther Party, together with a series of "ghetto rebellions" throughout poor ] neighborhoods across the country.<ref>Lader, Lawrence. Power on the Left. (New York City: W W Norton, 1979.) p. 192</ref>
=== Anti-personnel bomb set on window-ledge in San Francisco ===
]


{{blockquote|We felt that doing nothing in a period of repressive violence is itself a form of violence. That's really the part that I think is the hardest for people to understand. If you sit in your house, live your white life and go to your white job, and allow the country that you live in to murder people and to commit ], and you sit there and you don't do anything about it, that's violence.|]<ref name="The Weather Underground"/>}}
In a bombing that took place on February 16, 1970, and that was credited to the Weathermen at the time,<ref>http://www.lapismagazine.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=110&Itemid=59</ref><ref>Former Weatherman Larry Grathwohl's October 18, 1974 testimony to the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee</ref> a pipe bomb filled with heavy metal staples and lead bullet projectiles was set off on the ledge of a window at the Park Station of the San Francisco Police Department. In the blast, Brian V. McDonnell, a police sergeant, was fatally wounded while Robert Fogarty, another police officer, received severe wounds to his face and legs and was partially blinded.<ref>http://www.sfpoa.org/journal/journals/20070201.pdf</ref>


The Weathermen were outspoken critics of the concepts that later came to be known as "]" (described as white-skin privilege) and ].<ref>Page 249, Bernardine Dorn, Bill Ayers, and Jeff Jones, editors, ''Sing a Battle Song: The Revolutionary Poetry, Statements, and Communiqués of the Weather Underground'', Seven Stories Press (2006), trade paperback, 390 pages, {{ISBN|978-1-58322-726-8}} Reprinted from ''Prairie Fire: The Politics of Revolutionary Anti-Imperialism: Political Statement of the Weather Underground''</ref><ref> "More on the Youth Movement" by Jim Mellen in ''Weatherman'', edited by Harold Jacobs, Ramparts Press (1970), trade paperback, 520 pages, p. 42, {{ISBN|978-0-671-20725-0}} Hardcover: {{ISBN|978-0-87867-001-7}}.</ref> As the ] in poor black neighborhoods intensified in the early 1970s, Bernardine Dohrn said, "White youth must choose sides ''now.'' They must either fight on the side of the oppressed or be on the side of the oppressor."<ref name="The Weather Underground"/>
Weatherman leader ] has been suspected of involvement in the February 16, 1970, bombing of the Park Police Station in ]. At the time, Dohrn was said to be living with a Weatherman cell in a houseboat in ], unnamed law enforcement sources later told ].<ref name=kron>KRON 4, , November 10, 2003</ref> An investigation into the case was reopened in 1999,<ref name=jzsfc>Zamora, Jim Herron, , '']'', February 17, 2007</ref> and a San Francisco grand jury looked into the incident, but no indictments followed,<ref name=kron/> and no one was ever arrested for the bombing.<ref name=jzsfc/> An FBI informant, Larry Grathwohl, who successfully penetrated the organization from the late summer of 1969 until April 1970, later testified to a U.S. Senate subcommittee that ], then a high-ranking member of the organization and a member of its Central Committee (but not then Dohrn's husband), had said Dohrn constructed and planted the bomb. Grathwohl testified that Ayers had told him specifically where the bomb was placed (on a window ledge) and what kind of shrapnel was put in it. Grathwohl said Ayers was emphatic, leading Grathwohl to believe Ayers either was present at some point during the operation or had heard about it from someone who was there.<ref name=dftcabo>Freddoso, David, '']'', Regnery Publishing, Inc., Washington, D.C., 2008, p 124; Chapter 7 Footnote 7: ''Hearings before the Subcommittee to Investigate the Administration of the Internal Security Act and Other Internal Security Laws of the Committee on the Judiciary, United States Senate'', "Terroristic Activity Inside the Weatherman Movement, Part 2", October 18, 1974</ref> In a book about his experiences published in 1976, Grathwohl wrote that Ayers, who had recently attended a meeting of the group's Central Committee, said Dohrn had planned the operation, made the bomb and placed it herself.<ref>Grathwohl, Larry, "as told to Frank Reagan", ''Bringing Down America: An FBI Informer with the Weathermen'', Arlington House Publishers, New Rochelle, New York, 1976 pp 168, 169, ISBN 0870003350</ref> In 2008, author David Freddoso commented that "Ayers and Dohrn escaped prosecution only because of government misconduct in collecting evidence against them".<ref name=dftcabo/><ref>http://article.nationalreview.com/print/?q=ODVlZTZlM2M5NTMxMzllMjJkODVkNzQ3YTFjMTY0NzE=</ref>


The Weathermen called for the overthrow of the United States government.<ref>{{Cite book|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=JDZ7DwAAQBAJ&q=weather+underground+overthrow+government&pg=PT173|title=Pursuing Justice: Traditional and Contemporary Issues in Our Communities and the World|first1=Ralph A.|last1=Weisheit|first2=Frank|last2=Morn|date=2018|publisher=Routledge|via=Google Books|isbn=978-0-429-75339-8}}</ref><ref>{{Cite book|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=N5r4CgAAQBAJ&q=weather+underground+overthrow+government&pg=PA177|title=The Psychology of Radicalization and Terrorism|first1=Willem|last1=Koomen|first2=Joop Van Der|last2=Pligt|date=2015|publisher=Routledge|via=Google Books|isbn=978-1-317-67703-1}}</ref>
=== Initial New York City Bombings ===


===Anti-imperialism, anti-racism, and white privilege===
Early on the morning of February 21, 1970 as his family slept, three gasoline-filled firebombs exploded at at home of New York State Supreme Court Justice Murtagh's at the northern tip of Manhattan. The same night, bombs were thrown at a police car in Manhattan and two military recruiting stations in Brooklyn.
Weather maintained that their stance differed from the rest of the movements at the time in the sense that they predicated their critiques on the notion that they were engaged in "an anti-imperialist, anti-racist struggle".{{sfn|Jacobs|1997|p=135}} Weather put the ''international'' ] at the center of their political theory. Weather warned that other political theories, including those addressing class interests or youth interests, were "bound to lead in a racist and chauvinist direction".{{sfn|Jacobs|1997|p=135}} Weather denounced other political theories of the time as "objectively racist" if they did not side with the international proletariat; such political theories, they argued, needed to be "smashed".<ref>{{cite book|last=Harolds|first=Jacob|title=Weatherman|year=1970|publisher=Ramparts Press|isbn=0-671-20725-3|page=|url=https://archive.org/details/weatherman00jaco/page/113}}</ref><ref>, p. 7.</ref>


Members of Weather further contended that efforts at "organizing whites against their own perceived oppression" were "attempts by whites to carve out even more privilege than they already derive from the imperialist nexus".{{sfn|Jacobs|1997|p=135}} Weather's political theory sought to make every struggle an anti-imperialist, anti-racist struggle; out of this premise came their interrogation of critical concepts that would later be known as "white privilege". As historian Dan Berger writes, Weather raised the question "what does it mean to be a white person opposing racism and imperialism?"{{sfn|Berger|2006|p=272}}
Judge Murtagh was presiding over the trial of the so-called “Panther 21,” members of the Black Panther Party indicted in a plot to bomb New York landmarks and department stores. The side-walk in front of his home had three sentences of blood-red graffiti: "FREE THE PANTHER 21; THE VIET CONG HAVE WON; KILL THE PIGS."


At one point, the Weathermen adopted the belief that all white babies were "tainted with the original sin of "skin privilege", declaring "all white babies are pigs" with one Weatherwoman telling feminist poet ] "You have no right to that pig male baby" after she saw Morgan breastfeeding her son and told Morgan to put the baby in the garbage. ] was an obsession within the group and ] claimed he truly understood the iniquity of white America, with the Manson family being praised for the ]; Dohrn's cell subsequently made its salute a four-fingered gesture that represented the "fork" used to stab Tate.<ref>Christensen, Mark. "Acid Christ: Ken Kesey, LSD and the Politics of Ecstasy". IPG, 2010, p. 264</ref><ref>Stine, Peter, ed. "The Sixties". Wayne State University Press, 1995, p. 222</ref>
Only a few weeks after the attack, the New York contingent of the Weathermen blew themselves up making more bombs in a Greenwich Village townhouse (see below). The same cell had bombed Judge Murtagh's house, according to Ron Jacobs in The Way the Wind Blew: A History of the Weather Underground. In late November of 1970, a letter to the Associated Press signed by ], now ]'s wife, promised more bombings.<ref></ref>


===Practice===
=== Greenwich Village explosion ===
Shortly after its formation as an independent group, Weatherman created a central committee, the Weather Bureau, which assigned its ] to a series of collectives in major cities. These cities included New York, Boston, ], Philadelphia, Cincinnati, Buffalo, and ], the home of the SDS's head office. The collectives set up under the Weather Bureau drew their design from ]'s '']'' theory, which focused on the building of small, semi-autonomous cells guided by a central leadership.{{sfn|Varon|2004|p=57}}
{{main |Greenwich Village townhouse explosion}}
On ], ], during preparations for the bombing of an officers' dance at the ] U.S. Army base and for Butler Library at Columbia University,<ref name=djwnyt82403>Wakin, Daniel J., , article ], ], ], retrieved ], ]</ref> there was an explosion in a ] ] when the bomb being constructed prematurely detonated due to a wiring malfunction. WUO members ], ], and ] died in the explosion. ] and ] escaped unharmed, Wilkerson running naked from the apartment. It was an accident of history that the site of the Village explosion was the former residence of ] brokerage firm founder ] and his son, the poet ]. The younger Merrill subsequently recorded the event in his poem ''18 West 11th Street'', the title being the address of the house. An FBI report later stated that the group had possessed sufficient amounts of explosive to "level ... both sides of the street".<ref></ref>


To try to turn their members into hardened revolutionaries and to promote solidarity and cohesion, members of collectives engaged in intensive criticism sessions which attempted to reconcile their prior and current activities to Weathermen doctrine. These "]" sessions (also called "CSC" or "Weatherfries") were the most distressing part of life in the collective. Derived from Maoist techniques, it was intended to root out racist, individualist and chauvinist tendencies within group members. At its most intense, members would be berated for a dozen or more hours non-stop about their flaws. It was intended to make group members believe that they were, deep down, white supremacists by subjecting them to constant criticism to break them down. The sessions were used to ridicule and bully those who didn't agree with the party line and force them into acceptance. However, the sessions were also almost entirely successful at purging potential informants from the Weathermen's ranks, making them crucial to the Weathermen's survival as an underground organization.{{sfn|Eckstein|2016|pp=76–77}} The Weathermen were also determined to destroy "bourgeois individualism" amongst members that would potentially interfere with their commitment to both the Weathermen and the goal of revolution. Personal property was either renounced or given to the collective, with income being used to purchase the needs of the group and members enduring Spartan living conditions. Conventional comforts were forbidden, and the leadership was exalted, giving them immense power over their subordinates (in some collectives the leadership could even dictate personal decisions such as where one went). Martial arts were practiced and occasional ]s were engaged in. Critical of monogamy, they launched a "smash monogamy" campaign, in which couples (whose affection was deemed unacceptably possessive, counterrevolutionary or even selfish) were to be split apart; collectives underwent forced rotation of sex partners (including allegations that some male leaders rotated women between collectives in order to sleep with them) and in some cases engaged in sexual orgies.<ref> ], ''Flying Close to the Sun: My Life and Times as a Weatherman'', Seven Stories Press (2007), hardcover, 422 pages, {{ISBN|978-1-58322-771-8}}, pp. 266–282.</ref><ref>Staughton Lynd, ''From Here to There: The Staughton Lynd Reader'', PM Press (2010), paperback, 305 pages, p. 110.</ref>{{sfn|Varon|2004|pp=57–60}}{{sfn|Eckstein|2016|pp=76–77}} This formation continued during 1969 and 1970 until the group went underground and a more relaxed lifestyle was adopted as the group blended into the ].<ref>], ''Flying Close to the Sun: My Life and Times as a Weatherman'', pp. 352–353, Seven Stories Press (2007), hardcover, 422 pages, {{ISBN|978-1-58322-771-8}}</ref>
The bomb preparations have been pointed out by critics of the claim that the Weatherman group did not try to take lives with its bombings. Harvey Klehr, the Andrew W. Mellon professor of politics and history at ] in Atlanta, said in 2003, "The only reason they were not guilty of mass murder is mere incompetence. I don't know what sort of defense that is."<ref name=djwnyt82403/>


Life in the collectives could be particularly hard for women, who made up about half the members. Their political awakening had included a growing awareness of sexism, yet they often found that men took the lead in political activities and discussion, with women often engaging in domestic work, as well as finding themselves confined to second-tier leadership roles. Certain feminist political beliefs had to be disavowed or muted and the women had to prove, regardless of prior activist credentials, that they were as capable as men in engaging in political action as part of "women's cadres", which were felt to be driven by coerced machismo and failed to promote genuine solidarity amongst the women. While the Weathermen's sexual politics did allow women to assert desire and explore relationships with each other, it also made them vulnerable to sexual exploitation.{{sfn|Varon|2004|pp=59–60}}
===Underground===
After the ] incident, the group was now well underground, and began to refer to themselves as the Weather Underground Organization. At this juncture, WUO shrank considerably, becoming even fewer than they had been when first formed. The group was devastated by the loss of their friends, and in late April, 1970, members of the Weathermen met in California to discuss what had happened in New York and the future of the organization. The group decided to reevaluate their strategy, particularly in regard to their initial belief in the acceptability of human casualties, rejecting such tactics as kidnapping and assassinations.


===Recruitment===
They wanted to convince the American public that the United States was truly responsible for the calamity in ].<ref name="The Weather Underground"/> The group began striking at night, bombing empty offices, with warnings always issued in advance to ensure a safe evacuation. According to ], " goal was to not hurt any people, and a lot of work went into that. But we wanted to pick targets that showed to the public who was responsible for what was really going on."<ref name="The Weather Underground"/> After the Greenwich Village explosion, no one was killed by WUO bombs.<ref name=autogenerated2 />
Weather used various means by which to recruit new members and set into motion a nationwide revolt against the government. Weather members aimed to mobilize people into action against the established leaders of the nation and the patterns of injustice which existed in America and abroad due to America's presence overseas. They also aimed to convince people to resist reliance upon their given privilege and to rebel and take arms if necessary. According to Weatherman, if people tolerated the unjust actions of the state, they became complicit in those actions. In the manifesto compiled by ], ], ], and Celia Sojourn, entitled "Prairie Fire: The Politics of Revolutionary Anti-Imperialism," Weatherman explained that their intention was to encourage the people and provoke leaps in confidence and consciousness in an attempt to stir the imagination, organize the masses, and join in the people's day-to-day struggles in every way possible.<ref name=Ayers>Bernardine Dohrn, Bill Ayers. and Jeff Jones, editors (2006). Sing a Battle Song: The Revolutionary Poetry, Statements, and Communiqués of the Weather Underground, 1970–1974. New York: Seven Stories Press. {{ISBN|1-58322-726-1}}. p. 239.</ref>


In the year 1960, over a third of America's population was under 18 years of age. The number of young citizens set the stage for a widespread revolt against perceived structures of racism, sexism, and classism, the violence of the Vietnam War and America's interventions abroad. At college campuses throughout the country, anger against "the Establishment's" practices prompted both peaceful and violent protest.<ref name=PBS>{{cite web|url=https://www.pbs.org/independentlens/weatherunderground|title=The Weather Underground |publisher=Independent Lens<!-- (c) 2017 Independent Television Service (ITVS) --> |website=Pbs.org |access-date=December 15, 2018}}</ref>
{{Quote|We were very careful from the moment of the townhouse on to be sure we weren't going to hurt anybody, and we never did hurt anybody. Whenever we put a bomb in a public space, we had figured out all kinds of ways to put checks and balances on the thing and also to get people away from it, and we were remarkably successful.|]<ref name="The Weather Underground"/>}}
The members of Weatherman targeted high school and college students, assuming they would be willing to rebel against the authoritative figures who had oppressed them, including cops, principals, and bosses.{{sfn|Berger|2006|p=99}} Weather aimed to develop roots within the class struggle, targeting white working-class youths. The younger members of the working class became the focus of the organizing effort because they felt the oppression strongly in regard to the military draft, low-wage jobs, and schooling.{{sfn|Jacobs|1997|p=19}}


Schools became a common place of recruitment for the movement. In direct actions, dubbed ], Weather members invaded educational institutions as a means by which to recruit high school and college students. The motivation of these jailbreaks was the organization's belief that school was where the youth were oppressed by the system and where they learned to tolerate society's faults instead of rise against them. According to "Prairie Fire", young people are channeled, coerced, misled, miseducated, misused in the school setting. It is in schools that the youth of the nation become alienated from the authentic processes of learning about the world.<ref name=Dohrn>Dohrn, Bernardine. ''Sing a Battle Song: The Revolutionary Poetry, Statements, and Communiques of the Weather Underground 1970–1974''. Seven Stories Press. 2006. p. 370.</ref>
]]]
On ] ], a communiqué from the Weather Underground was issued promising to attack a "symbol or institution of American injustice" within two weeks.<ref>Kirkpatrick Sale, SDS, (New York: Random House, 1973), 611.</ref> The communiqué included taunts towards the FBI, daring them to try and find the group, whose members were spread throughout the United States.<ref>Harold Jacobs ed., Weatherman, (Ramparts Press, 1970), 508-511.</ref> Many leftist organizations showed curiosity in the communiqué, and waited to see if the act would in fact occur. However, two weeks would pass without any occurrence.<ref>Harold Jacobs ed., Weatherman, (Ramparts Press, 1970), 374.</ref> Then on ] ], their first publicly acknowledged bombing occurred at a ] police station,<ref>Kirkpatrick Sale, SDS, (New York: Random House, 1973), 648.</ref> saying it was "in outraged response to the assassination of the ] ],"<ref name="The Weather Underground"/> who had recently been killed by prison guards in an escape attempt. The FBI placed the Weather Underground organization on the ten most-wanted list by the end of 1970.<ref name="Jacobs"/> On ] ], ]’s birthday, The Weather Underground placed a bomb in the women’s bathroom in the Air Force wing of ]. The damage caused flooding that devastated vital classified information on computer tapes. Leftist groups worldwide applauded the bombing, illustrated by German youth protesting against American military systems in ].<ref name="Jacobs"/>


Factions of the Weatherman organization began recruiting members by applying their own strategies. Women's groups such as The Motor City Nine and ] took the lead in various recruitment efforts. ], a member of the radical women's liberation group Cell 16 spoke about her personal recruitment agenda saying that she wanted their group to go out in every corner of the country and tell women the truth, recruit the local people, poor and working-class people, in order to build a new society.<ref>Ortiz, Roxanne Dunbar. ''Outlaw woman: a memoir of the war years, 1960–1975''. San Francisco, CA. City Lights: 2001. p. 154</ref>
===Change in direction, ''Prairie Fire''===
The Weather Underground’s ideology changed direction in the early 1970’s. With help from former Progressive Labor member, ], The Weather Underground sought a more ] approach. The leading members of the Weather Underground collaborated ideas and published their manifesto: ''"Prairie Fire: The Politics of Revolutionary Anti-Imperialism.''"<ref name="Jacobs"/> By the summer of 1974, five thousand copies had surfaced in coffee houses and bookstores across America. Leftist newspapers praised the manifesto.<ref name=autogenerated3>Jeremy Varon, Bringing The War Home: The Weather Underground, The Red Army Faction And Revolutionary Violence In The Sixties And Seventies, (Berkley: University of California Press, 2004), 292</ref> ] publicly praised ''Prairie Fire'' and believed every American should be given a copy.<ref>Marty Jezer, Abbie Hoffman: American Rebel, (New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 1992), 258-259.</ref> The manifesto’s influence initiated the formation of the ']' in several American cities. Hundreds of above-ground activists helped further the new political vision of the Weather Underground.<ref name=autogenerated3 /> In the late 1970s, the Weatherman group further split into two factions &mdash; the "May 19 Coalition" and the "Prairie Fire Collective" &mdash; with ] and ] in the latter. The Prairie Fire Collective favored coming out of hiding, with members facing the criminal charges against them, while the May 19 Coalition continued in hiding. A decisive factor in Dohrn's coming out of hiding were her concerns about her children.<ref name=lfnyt112281/>. The Prairie Fire Collective started to surrender to the authorities from the late 1970s to the earyl 1980s. The remaining Weatherman Underground members continued to violently attack US institutions.


Berger explains the controversy surrounding recruitment strategies saying, "As an organizing strategy it was less than successful: white working class youths were more alienated than organized by Weather's spectacles, and even some of those interested in the group were turned off by its early hi-jinks."{{sfn|Berger|2006|p=113}}
=== Timothy Leary prison break ===
In September 1970, the group took a $25,000 payment from a ] distribution organization called ] to break ] advocate ] out of prison{{Fact|date=July 2008}}, transporting him and his wife to ]. Leary joined ] in ]; his initial press release contains revolutionary rhetoric sympathetic to the Weather Underground's cause. When Leary was eventually captured by the ], it is alleged he offered to serve as an informant to capture the Weather Underground members to reduce his prison sentence. Others, such as ], claim he was just feeding false information to the authorities in an attempt to reduce his sentence. Ultimately no one was charged, and Leary served a few more years in prison.{{Fact|date=March 2007}}


=== Brinks Armed Robbery of 1981=== ====Armed propaganda====
In 2006, Dan Berger (writer, activist, and longtime anti-racism organizer){{sfn|Berger|2006}}{{Page needed|date=November 2024}} states that following their initial set of bombings, which resulted in the ], the organization adopted a new paradigm of direct action set forth in the communiqué '']'', which abjured attacks on people.{{sfn|Berger|2006}}{{Page needed|date=November 2024}} The shift in the organization's outlook was in good part due to the 1970 death of Weatherman ], ] and ], all graduate students, in the Greenwich Village townhouse explosion.{{sfn|Varon|2004|p=174}}


According to Dan Berger a relatively sophisticated program of ] was adopted. This consisted of a series of bombings of government and corporate targets in retaliation for specific imperialist and oppressive acts. Small, well-constructed ]s were used, generally in vents in restrooms, which exploded at times the spaces were empty. Timely warnings were made, and communiqués issued explaining the reason for the actions.{{sfn|Berger|2006|pp=148–154}}
{{main |Brinks robbery (1981)}}
On October 20, 1981 the Weather Underground combined forces with the Black Liberation Army to rob a Brink's armored truck. Two policemen and a Brink's guard were killed. The Black Liberation Army members Jeral Wayne Williams (aka Mutulu Shakur), Donald Weems (aka Kuwasi Balagoon), Samuel Smith and Nathaniel Burns (aka Sekou Odinga), Cecilio "Chui" Ferguson, Samuel Brown (aka Solomon Bouines) with five members of the Weather Underground (David Gilbert, Samuel Brown, Judith Alice Clark, ], and Marilyn Buck) stole $1.6 million from a Brink's armored car at the Nanuet Mall, in Nanuet, New York. All the perpertrators were eventually captured and tried. ]'s child with David Gilbert, Chesa, was raised to adulthood by ] and ], while she was in prison.


=={{Anchor|Major activities and suspected activities}} Major activities==
==Dissolution and aftermath==
{{Main|List of Weatherman actions}}
===COINTELPRO===
{{main|COINTELPRO}}


===Haymarket Police Memorial bombing===
In April 1971, The "]" broke into an ] office in ].<ref>David Cunningham, There’s Something Happening Here: The New Left, The Klan, And FBI Counterintellegence, (Berkley: University of California Press, 2004), 33.</ref> The group stole files with several hundred pages, ninety-eight percent of the files targeted left wing individuals and groups. By the end of April, the FBI offices were to terminate all files dealing with leftist groups.<ref>David Cunningham, There’s Something Happening Here: The New Left, The Klan, And FBI Counterintellegence, (Berkley: University of California Press, 2004), 35.</ref> The files were a part of an FBI program called ].<ref>Paul Wolf, COINTELPRO, www.icdc.com/~paulwolf/cointelpro/cointel.htm </ref> However, after COINTELPRO was dissolved in 1971 by J. Edgar Hoover,<ref>Nelson Blackstock, Cointelpro: The FBI’s Secret War on Political Freedom, (New York: Anchor Foundation, 1990), 185.</ref> the FBI continued their counterintelligence on groups like the Weather Underground. In 1973, the FBI established the ']' program, where agents were sent undercover to penetrate the Weather Underground. Due to the illegal tactics of FBI agents involved with the program, government attorneys requested all weapons and bomb related charges be dropped against the Weather Underground. The Weather Underground was no longer a fugitive organization and could turn themselves in with minimal charges against them.<ref name="autogenerated1">Jeremy Varon, Bringing The War Home: The Weather Underground, The Red Army Faction And Revolutionary Violence In The Sixties And Seventies, (Berkley: University of California Press, 2004), 297.</ref>
] police memorial, seen in 1889]]
Shortly before the ] demonstrations on October 6, 1969,<ref>{{cite web |url=http://www.chicagohistory.org/dramas/epilogue/toServeAndProtect/monumentOnTheMove.htm |title=To Serve and Protect |publisher=Chicagohistory.org |access-date=2015-01-30 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20150501192936/http://www.chicagohistory.org/dramas/epilogue/toServeAndProtect/monumentOnTheMove.htm |archive-date=May 1, 2015 |df=mdy-all }}</ref> the Weatherman planted a bomb which blew up ] during the 1886 ].{{sfn|Jacobs|1997}}{{Page needed|date=November 2024}} The blast broke nearly 100 windows and scattered pieces of the statue onto the Kennedy Expressway below.<ref name=Avrich431>{{cite book |last=Avrich |title=The Haymarket Tragedy |page=431 }}</ref> The city rebuilt the statue and unveiled it on May 4, 1970, but the Weathermen blew it up as well on October 6, 1970.<ref name=Avrich431/><ref>Adelman. Haymarket Revisited, p. 40.</ref> The city rebuilt the statue once again, and Mayor ] posted a 24-hour police guard to protect it,<ref name=Avrich431/> but the Weathermen destroyed the third one, as well. The city compromised and rebuilt the monument once more, but this time they located it at Chicago Police Headquarters.<ref>{{cite book|last=Green|first=James|title=Death in the Haymarket|url=https://archive.org/details/deathinhaymarket00gree|url-access=registration|page=|publisher=Pantheon Books|year=2006|isbn=0-375-42237-4}}</ref>


==="Days of Rage"===
FBI agent ], along with ], authorized FBI agents to break into homes secretly in 1972 and 1973, without a ], on nine separate occasions. These kinds of FBI burglaries were known as "]". The break-ins occurred at five addresses in New York and New Jersey, at the homes of relatives and acquaintances of Weather Underground members, and did not lead to the capture of any fugitives. The use of "black bag jobs" by the FBI was declared unconstitutional by the ] in the '']'' case, 407 U.S. 297 (1972).
{{Main|Days of Rage}}
One of the first acts of the Weathermen after splitting from SDS was to announce they would hold the "Days of Rage" that autumn. This was advertised to "Bring the war home!" Hoping to cause sufficient chaos to "wake" the American public out of what they saw as complacency toward the ], the Weathermen meant it to be the largest protest of the decade. They had been told by their regional cadre to expect thousands to attend; however, when they arrived, they found only a few hundred people.<ref name="The Weather Underground"/>


According to ] in 2003, "The Days of Rage was an attempt to break from the norms of kind of acceptable theatre of 'here are the anti-war people: containable, marginal, predictable, and here's the little path they're going to march down, and here's where they can make their little statement.' We wanted to say, "No, what we're going to do is whatever we had to do to stop the violence in Vietnam.'"<ref name="The Weather Underground"/> The protests did not meet Ayers' stated expectations.
After revelation by the ] of the FBI's illegal activities, many agents were investigated. Felt in 1976 publicly stated he had ordered break-ins and that individual agents were merely obeying orders and should not be punished for it. Felt also stated Gray also authorized the break-ins, but Gray denied this. Felt said on the CBS television program ''Face the Nation'' he would probably be a "scapegoat" for the Bureau's work.<ref>John Crewdson (], ]), "Ex-F.B.I. Aide Sees 'Scapegoat' Role", ''The New York Times'', p. 21.</ref> "I think this is justified and I'd do it again tomorrow", he said on the program. While admitting the break-ins were "extralegal", he justified it as protecting the "greater good". Felt said:
<blockquote>To not take action against these people and know of a bombing in advance would simply be to stick your fingers in your ears and protect your eardrums when the explosion went off and then start the investigation.
</blockquote>
The Attorney General in the new Carter administration, ], investigated, and on ], ], a federal grand jury charged Felt, Miller and Gray with conspiracy to violate the constitutional rights of American citizens by searching their homes without warrants, though Gray's case did not go to trial and was dropped by the government for lack of evidence on ], ].


Though the October 8, 1969, rally in Chicago had failed to draw as many as the Weathermen had anticipated, the two or three hundred who did attend shocked police by rioting through the affluent ]. They smashed the windows of a bank and those of many cars. The crowd ran four blocks before encountering police barricades. They charged the police but broke into small groups; more than 1,000 police counter attacked. Many protesters were wearing motorcycle or football helmets, but the police were well trained and armed. Large amounts of ] were used, and at least twice police ran squad cars into the mob. The rioting lasted about half an hour, during which 28 policemen were injured. Six Weathermen were shot by the police and an unknown number injured; 68 rioters were arrested.{{sfn|Berger|2006}}{{Page needed|date=November 2024}}{{sfn|Jacobs|1997}}{{Page needed|date=November 2024}}{{sfn|Sale|1974}}{{Page needed|date=November 2024}}<ref name="Jones">Jones, ''A Radical Line: From the Labor Movement to the Weather Underground, One Family's Century of Conscience'', 2004. {{ISBN?}} {{page?|date=December 2024}}</ref>
The indictment charged violations of Title 18, Section 241 of the ]. The indictment charged Felt and the others
<blockquote>did unlawfully, willfully, and knowingly combine, conspire, confederate, and agree together and with each other to injure and oppress citizens of the United States who were relatives and acquaintances of the Weatherman fugitives, in the free exercise and enjoyments of certain rights and privileges secured to them by the Constitution and the laws of the United States of America.<ref>Felt, FBI Pyramid, p. 333.</ref></blockquote>


For the next two days, the Weathermen held no rallies or protests. Supporters of the RYM II movement, led by Klonsky and Noel Ignatin, held peaceful rallies in front of the federal courthouse, an International Harvester factory, and Cook County Hospital. The largest event of the Days of Rage took place on Friday, October 9, when RYM II led an interracial march of 2,000 people through a Spanish-speaking part of Chicago.{{sfn|Berger|2006}}{{Page needed|date=November 2024}}<ref name="Jones"/>
Felt and Miller attempted to plea bargain with the government, willing to agree to a misdemeanor guilty plea to conducting searches without warrants&mdash;a violation of 18 U.S.C. sec. 2236&mdash;but the government rejected the offer in 1979. After eight postponements, the case against Felt and Miller went to trial in the ] on ], ].<ref>Robert Pear: "Conspiracy Trial for 2 Ex-F.B.I. Officials Accused in Break-ins", The New York Times, ], ]; & "Long Delayed Trial Over F.B.I. Break-ins to Start in Capital Tomorrow", The New York Times, ], ], p. 30.</ref> On ], former President ] appeared as a rebuttal witness for the defense, and testified that presidents since ] had authorized the bureau to engage in break-ins while conducting foreign intelligence and counterespionage investigations.<ref>Robert Pear, "Testimony by Nixon Heard in F.B.I. Trial", The New York Times, ], ].</ref> It was Nixon's first courtroom appearance since his resignation in 1974. Nixon also contributed money to Felt's legal defense fund, Felt's expenses running over $600,000. Also testifying were former Attorneys General ], ], ], ], and ], all of whom said warrantless searches in national security matters were commonplace and not understood to be illegal, but Mitchell and Kleindienst denied they had authorized any of the break-ins at issue in the trial.


On October 10, the Weatherman attempted to regroup and resume their demonstrations. About 300 protesters marched through ], Chicago's main business district, watched by a double line of heavily armed police. The protesters suddenly broke through the police lines and rampaged through the Loop, smashing the windows of cars and stores. The police were prepared, and quickly isolated the rioters. Within 15 minutes, more than half the crowd had been arrested.{{sfn|Berger|2006}}{{Page needed|date=November 2024}}<ref name="Jones"/>
The jury returned guilty verdicts on ], ]. Although the charge carried a maximum sentence of 10 years in prison, Felt was fined $5,000. (Miller was fined $3,500).<ref>Kessler, F.B.I.: Inside the Agency, p. 194.</ref> Writing in '']'' a week after the conviction, ] claimed that Felt and Miller were being used as scapegoats by the ] and that it was an unfair prosecution. Cohn wrote it was the "final dirty trick" and that there had been no "personal motive" to their actions.<ref>Roy Cohn, "Stabbing the F.B.I.", The New York Times, ], ], p. 20.</ref> ''The Times'' saluted the convictions saying it showed "the case has established that zeal is no excuse for violating the Constitution".<ref>"The Right Punishment for F.B.I. Crimes." (Editorial), ''The New York Times'', ], ].</ref> Felt and Miller appealed the verdict, and they were later pardoned by ].<ref>http://www.reagan.utexas.edu/archives/speeches/1981/41581d.htm</ref>


The Days of Rage cost Chicago and the state of Illinois about $183,000 ($100,000 for National Guard expenses, $35,000 in damages, and $20,000 for one injured citizen's medical expenses). Most of the Weathermen and SDS leaders were now in jail, and the Weathermen would have to pay over $243,000 for their ].{{sfn|Sale|1974}}{{Page needed|date=November 2024}}
===Dissolution===


===Flint War Council===
Despite the change in their status the Weather Underground remained underground for a few more years. However, by 1976 the organization was disintegrating. The Weather Underground held a conference in ] called Hard Times. The idea was to create an umbrella organization for all radical groups. However, the event turned sour when Hispanic and Black groups accused the Weather Underground and the Prairie Fire Committee of limiting their roles in racial issues.<ref name="autogenerated1" /> The conference enhanced a division within the Weather Underground. The Weather Underground faced accusations of abandonment of the revolution by reversing their original ideology.
{{Main|Flint War Council}}
The Flint War Council was a series of meetings of the Weather Underground Organization and associates in Flint, Michigan, that took place 27–31 December 1969.<ref>Federal Bureau of Investigation. (1976) Weather underground organization. Retrieved , pp. 382–383</ref> During these meetings, the decisions were made for the Weather Underground Organization to go underground{{sfn|Varon|2004|pp=158–171}} and to "engage in guerilla warfare against the U.S. government."<ref name="foia.fbi.gov">Federal Bureau of Investigation. (1976). Weather underground organization. Retrieved from {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20080312225151/http://foia.fbi.gov/foiaindex/weather.htm |date=March 12, 2008 }}, pp. 382–383</ref> This decision was made in response to increased pressure from law enforcement,{{sfn|Jacobs|1997|p=41-43}} and a belief that underground guerilla warfare was the best way to combat the U.S. government.<ref name="foia.fbi.gov"/>


During a closed-door meeting of the Weather Underground's leadership, the decision was also taken to abolish Students for a Democratic Society.<ref name="Rudd, M. 2009">Rudd, M. (2009). Underground: my life with sds and the weatherman. New York, NY: HarperCollins. pp. 185–193.</ref> This decision reflected the splintering of SDS into hostile rival factions.<ref name="Rudd, M. 2009"/>
East coast members favored a commitment to violence and challenged commitments of old leaders, Bernadine Dohrn, Bill Ayers and Jeff Jones. By the end of 1976, the Weather Underground would collapse.<ref>Jeremy Varon, Bringing The War Home: The Weather Underground, The Red Army Faction And Revolutionary Violence In The Sixties And Seventies, (Berkley: University of California Press, 2004), 297-298.</ref> Within two years, many members turned themselves in after taking advantage of President ]’s amnesty for draft dodgers.<ref name="Jacobs"/>


===New York City arson attacks===
Mark Rudd turned himself in to authorities on ], ]. Rudd was fined $4,000 and received two years probation.<ref name="Jacobs"/> ] and ] turned themselves in on ], ], in New York, with substantial media coverage. Charges were dropped for Ayers. Dohrn received three years probation and a $15,000 fine.<ref name="Jacobs"/>
On February 21, 1970, at around 4:30&nbsp;a.m., three gasoline-filled ]s exploded in front of the home of ] Justice John M. Murtagh, who was presiding over the pretrial hearings of the so-called "Panther 21" members of the ] over a plot to bomb New York landmarks and department stores.<ref name="Murtagh">{{cite news|last1=Cotter|first1=Joseph P.|last2=Dembart|first2=Lee|date=February 21, 1970|title=Four bombs at Murtagh home; Panther hearing judge|newspaper=New York Post|page=1|url=http://jfk.hood.edu/Collection/Weisberg%20Subject%20Index%20Files/B%20Disk/Blacks%20Miscellaneous/056.pdf|access-date=January 6, 2014}}<br/>{{cite news|last=Perlmutter|first=Emanuel|date=February 22, 1970|title=Justice Murtagh's home target of 3 fire bombs|newspaper=The New York Times|page=1|url=https://www.nytimes.com/1970/02/22/archives/justice-murtaghs-home-target-of-3-fire-bombs-judges-home-target-of.html|access-date=October 12, 2008}}<br/>{{cite news|date=February 24, 1970|title=Police investigate Law firebombing|newspaper=Columbia Daily Spectator|page=1|url=http://spectatorarchive.library.columbia.edu/cgi-bin/columbia?a=d&d=cs19700224-01.2.3&srpos=&dliv=none&e=-------en-20--1--txt-IN-----|access-date=January 6, 2014}}</ref> Justice Murtagh and his family were unharmed, but two panes of a front window were shattered, an overhanging wooden eave was scorched, and the paint on a car in the garage was charred.<ref name="Murtagh"/> "Free the Panther 21" and "] have won" were written in large red letters on the sidewalk in front of the judge's house at 529 W. 217th Street in the ] neighborhood of Manhattan.<ref name="Murtagh"/> The judge's house had been under hourly police surveillance and an unidentified woman called the police a few minutes before the explosions to report several prowlers there, which resulted in a police car being sent immediately to the scene.<ref name="Murtagh"/>


In the preceding hours, Molotov cocktails had been thrown at the second floor of ]'s International Law Library at 434 W. 116th Street and at a police car parked across the street from the Charles Street police station in the ] in Manhattan, and at Army and Navy recruiting booths on Nostrand Avenue on the eastern fringe of the ] campus in Brooklyn, causing no or minimal damage in incidents of unknown relation to that at Judge Murtagh's home.<ref name="Murtagh"/>
Certain members remained underground and joined other radical groups. Years after the dissolution of the WUO, former members ], ], and ] formed the ], which eventually joined with the ]. On ], ], in ] New York, the group attempted to ] containing more than $1 million. The robbery turned violent, resulting in the murder of two police officers and a security guard.<ref name="Jacobs"/> Boudin, Clark, and Gilbert were found guilty and sentenced to lengthy terms in prison, considered the “last gasps” of the Weather Underground.<ref>Richard G. Braungart and Margret M. Braungart, “From Protest to Terrorism: The Case of the SDS and The Weathermen.”, International Movement And Research: Social Movements and Violence: Participation in Underground Organizations, Volume 4, (Greenwich: Jai Press, 1992.), 67.</ref>


According to the December 6, 1970, "New Morning—Changing Weather" Weather Underground communiqué signed by ], and ]'s 2007 memoir, the fire-bombing of Judge Murtagh's home, in solidarity with the Panther 21, was carried out by four members of the New York cell that was devastated two weeks later by the March 6, 1970 townhouse explosion.<ref name="New Morning">{{cite book|last1=Weather Underground|last2=Dohrn|first2=Bernardine|year=1970|chapter=New Morning—Changing Weather|editor1-last=Ayers|editor1-first=Bill|editor2-last=Dohrn|editor2-first=Bernardine|editor3-last=Jones|editor3-first=Jeff|publication-date=2006|title=Sing a Battle Song: The Revolutionary Poetry, Statements, and Communiqués of the Weather Underground, 1970–1974|location=New York|publisher=Seven Stories Press|isbn=978-1-58322-726-8|page=}}</ref><ref name="Diana">{{cite book|last=Powers|first=Thomas|year=1971|title=Diana: The Making of a Terrorist|location=Boston|publisher=Houghton Mifflin|isbn=0-395-12375-5|page=217}}</ref><ref name="Seedman">{{cite book|last1=Seedman|first1=Albert|last2=Hellman|first2=Peter|year=1974|title=Chief!|location=New York|publisher=Arthur Fields Books|isbn=0-525-63004-X|page=285}}</ref>{{sfn|Jacobs|1997|p=125}}{{sfn|Berger|2006|p=340}}<ref name ="Barber">{{cite book|last=Barber|first=David|chapter=Leading the Vanguard: White New Leftists School the Panthers on Black Revolution|year=2006|editor1-last=Lazerow|editor1-first=Jama|editor2-last=Williams|editor2-first=Yohuru|title=In Search of the Black Panther Party: New Perspectives on a Revolutionary Movement|location=Durham, N.C.|publisher=Duke University Press|isbn=978-0-8223-3837-6|pages=, |url=https://archive.org/details/isbn_9780822338901/page/243}}</ref><ref name="Wilkerson"/>{{rp|324–325}}
===Today===


===Greenwich Village townhouse explosion===
Widely-known members of the Weather Underground include ], ], ], ], ], ], ], ], ], ], ], ], ], ] and the still-married couple ] and ]. Most former Weathermen have successfully re-integrated into mainstream society, without necessarily repudiating their original intent.
{{Main|Greenwich Village townhouse explosion}}


Weather Underground members ], ], ], ], and ] were making bombs in a ] townhouse on March 6, 1970, when one of the bombs detonated. Oughton, Gold, and Robbins were killed; Wilkerson and Boudin escaped unharmed.
Bill Ayers, now a professor of education at the ], was quoted in an interview to say "I don't regret setting bombs"<ref></ref> but has since claimed he was misquoted.<ref></ref> ] has expressed regret for his actions during the Weatherman years, and compared the group's activities to terrorism. Flanagan said: "When you feel that you have right on your side, you can do some pretty horrific things."<ref></ref> Mark Rudd, now a teacher of ] at ], has said he has "mixed feelings" and feelings of "guilt and shame".


These bombs were made to target a Non-Commissioned Officer (NCO) dance at ], which would be attended by non-commissioned officers and their companions, as well as ] at Columbia University.<ref name="djwnyt82403" /> An FBI report stated that they had enough explosives to "level… both sides of the street".<ref>{{cite news|url=https://www.nytimes.com/2002/05/10/arts/my-manhattan-this-side-of-heaven-please-in-the-village.html|title=My Manhattan; This Side of Heaven, Please, in the Village|author=Michael Frank|newspaper=The New York Times|date=May 10, 2002 |access-date=July 22, 2018}}</ref> Weather Underground leadership members Bill Ayers, Bernardine Dohrn, and Jeff Jones claimed the planned bombings of the Fort Dix NCO dance and Columbia University building were a rogue operation led by more extreme Greenwich Village townhouse residents, Ayers singling out Terry Robbins.<ref name="ArthurEckstein1" /><ref name="NPR-interview-Burrough" /> However, later researchers concluded Weather Underground leaders planned and approved the bombings of an NCO dance, a Columbia University building, and several bombings in Detroit which were defused by the Detroit Police aided by informant ].<ref name="ArthurEckstein1">{{cite video|url=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oFVORAsspf8&t=1315|time=22:00|author=Arthur Eckstein|publisher=WoodrowWilsonCenter|website=www.youtube.com|date=2013|archive-url=https://archive.today/20230603234320/https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oFVORAsspf8|archive-date=2023-06-03|url-status=live|title=The Way the Wind Actually Blew: Weatherman Underground Terrorism and the Counterculture, 1969–1971}}</ref><ref name="ArthurEckstein2">{{cite video|url=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oFVORAsspf8&t=2181|time=36:00|author=Arthur Eckstein|publisher=WoodrowWilsonCenter|website=www.youtube.com|date=2013|archive-url=https://archive.today/20230603234320/https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oFVORAsspf8|archive-date=2023-06-03|url-status=live|title=The Way the Wind Actually Blew: Weatherman Underground Terrorism and the Counterculture, 1969–1971}}</ref><ref name="NPR-interview-Burrough">{{cite interview | url=https://www.npr.org/2015/04/05/396359930/explosive-protests-u-s-bombings-during-days-of-rage | publisher=NPR | title=Explosive Protests: U.S. Bombings During 'Days Of Rage' | date=April 5, 2015 | interviewer=NPR Staff | subject= Bryan Burrough | archive-url=https://archive.today/20230604213721/https://www.npr.org/2015/04/05/396359930/explosive-protests-u-s-bombings-during-days-of-rage |archive-date=2023-06-04 | url-status=live | quote=Especially when you look at the Weather Underground the myth has arisen, largely propagated by alumni of the Weather Underground, that they never intended to hurt a soul; that they only bombed ... symbols of American power. In fact I think I show persuasively through on-the-record interviews with former Weatherman leaders that the first 90 days up until that explosion, it's very clear now that they had intended to kill – not just anyone, but their intent was to kill policemen.}}</ref>
{{Quote|These are things I am not proud of, and I find it hard to speak publicly about them and to tease out what was right from what was wrong. I think that part of the Weatherman phenomenon that was right was our understanding of what the position of the United States is in the world. It was this knowledge that we just couldn't handle; it was too big. We didn't know what to do. In a way I still don't know what to do with this knowledge. I don't know what needs to be done now, and it's still eating away at me just as it did 30 years ago.|]<ref name="The Weather Underground"/>}}


The site of the Village explosion was the former residence of ], co-founder of the ] brokerage firm, and the childhood home of his son ]. James Merrill memorialized the event in his poem ''18 West 11th Street'', the address of the brownstone townhouse.<ref name="GussowHouse">{{cite news|author=Mel Gussow|url= https://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9C02E4DB1638F936A35750C0A9669C8B63&sec=&spon=&pagewanted=all|title= The House On West 11th Street|newspaper=The New York Times|date=March 5, 2005|access-date=April 24, 2013}}</ref>
A non-violent faction of the Weather Underground continues today as the Prairie Fire Organizing Committee. Their official site reads:


====Underground strategy change====
:We oppose oppression in all its forms including ], ], ], ] and ]. We demand liberation and justice for all peoples. We recognize that we live in a capitalist system that favors a select few and oppresses the majority. This system cannot be reformed or voted out of office because reforms and elections do not challenge the fundamental causes of injustice.<ref></ref>


After the Greenwich Village townhouse explosion, per the December 1969 ] decisions the group was now well underground, and began to refer to themselves as the Weather Underground Organization. At this juncture, WUO shrank considerably, becoming even fewer than they had been when first formed. The group was devastated by the loss of their friends, and in late April 1970, members of the Weathermen met in California to discuss what had happened in New York and the future of the organization.
===Weatherman documentaries===


In 2003, Weather Underground members stated in interviews that they had wanted to convince the American public that the United States was truly responsible for the calamity in ].<ref name="The Weather Underground"/> The group began striking at night, bombing empty offices, with warnings always issued in advance to ensure a safe evacuation. According to ], who took part in the ] that killed two police officers and a Brink's guard, and was jailed for murder, " goal was to not hurt any people, and a lot of work went into that. But we wanted to pick targets that showed to the public who was responsible for what was really going on."<ref name="The Weather Underground"/> After the Greenwich Village explosion, in a review of the documentary film '']'' (2002), a '']'' journalist restated the film's contention that no one was killed by WUO bombs.<ref name=autogenerated2>{{cite web|url=http://film.guardian.co.uk/features/featurepages/0,,990399,00.html|title=All the rage|author=John Patterson|work=The Guardian|date=July 4, 2003|access-date=February 15, 2015}}</ref>
The WU insisted that ] shoot the documentary '']'' in 1976. However, a much more extensive, widespread, and critically-acclaimed documentary emerged in 2002 with the Oscar-nominated '']'' by filmmakers ] and ]. A little seen film called ''Ice'' had several WU members in a somewhat fictionalized revolutionary setting.


{{blockquote|We were very careful from the moment of the townhouse on to be sure we weren't going to hurt anybody, and we never did hurt anybody. Whenever we put a bomb in a public space, we had figured out all kinds of ways to put checks and balances on the thing and also to get people away from it, and we were remarkably successful.|], 2003<ref name="The Weather Underground"/>}}
== Chronology of events ==
{{Refimprovesect|date=May 2008}}
<div class="references-small" style="-moz-column-count:2; column-count:2;">
*18-22 June, 1969 – SDS National Convention held in Chicago, Illinois. Publication of "Weatherman" founding statement. Members seize control of SDS National Office.


===Declaration of war===
*July, 1969 – Members ], ], ], ], ] and ] travel to ] and meet representatives of the North Vietnamese and Cuban governments.
In response to the death of Black Panther members ] and ] in December 1969 during a police raid, and the ] 5 months later, on May 21, 1970 the Weather Underground issued a "Declaration of War" against the United States government, using for the first time its new name, the "Weather Underground Organization" (WUO), adopting fake identities, and pursuing ] activities only.<ref>{{Cite journal |last=Alimi |first=Eitan Y. |date=January 2011 |title=Relational dynamics in factional adoption of terrorist tactics: a comparative perspective |url=https://www.jstor.org/stable/41475683 |journal=] |volume=40 |issue=1 |pages=95–118 |doi=10.1007/s11186-010-9137-x |jstor=41475683 }}</ref> These initially included preparations for a bombing of a U.S. military non-commissioned officers' dance at ], New Jersey, in what ] said had been intended to be "the most horrific hit the United States government had ever suffered on its territory".<ref>{{cite web|url=http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=03/08/21/1441247|title=Ex-Weather Underground Member Kathy Boudin Granted Parole|work=Democracy Now!|access-date=February 15, 2015|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20071114020010/http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=03%2F08%2F21%2F1441247|archive-date=November 14, 2007|df=mdy-all}}</ref>


{{blockquote|We've known that our job is to lead white kids into armed revolution. We never intended to spend the next five to twenty-five years of our lives in jail. Ever since SDS became revolutionary, we've been trying to show how it is possible to overcome frustration and impotence that comes from trying to reform this system. Kids know the lines are drawn: revolution is touching all of our lives. Tens of thousands have learned that protest and marches don't do it. Revolutionary violence is the only way.|]<ref>]</ref>}}
*August 1969 – Weatherman member ] travels to ]. Weatherman activists meet in ], in preparation for "]" protests scheduled for October, 1969 in Chicago.


Bernardine Dohrn subsequently stated that it was ]'s death that prompted the Weather Underground to declare war on the U.S. government.
*] ] – Female members converge on South Hills High School in ], where they run through the school shouting anti-war slogans and distributing literature promoting the “National Action.” The term "Pittsburgh 26" refers to the 26 women arrested in connection with this incident.


{{blockquote|We felt that the murder of Fred required us to be more grave, more serious, more determined to raise the stakes and not just be the white people who wrung their hands when black people were being murdered.|Bernardine Dohrn<ref name="The Weather Underground"/>}}
*] ] – A group of members confront Chicago Police during a demonstration supporting the "National Action," and protesting the commencement of the ] trial stemming from the 1968 ].


In December 1969, the Chicago Police Department, in conjunction with the FBI, conducted a raid on the home of ] Fred Hampton, in which he and ] were killed, with four of the seven other people in the apartment wounded. The survivors of the raid were all charged with assault and attempted murder. The police claimed they shot in self-defense, although a controversy arose when the Panthers, other activists and a Chicago newspaper reporter presented visual evidence, as well as the testimony of an FBI ballistics expert, showing that the sleeping Panthers were not ] and fired only one shot, as opposed to the more than one hundred the police fired into the apartment. The charges were later dropped, and the families of the dead won a $1.8 million settlement from the government. It was discovered in 1971 that Hampton had been targeted by the FBI's ].<ref>{{cite web|url=https://www.pbs.org/hueypnewton/people/people_other.html|title=A Huey P. Newton Story – People – Other Players |publisher=Pbs.org|access-date=February 15, 2015}}</ref><ref>{{cite web|url=https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/eyesontheprize/story/17_panthers.html|title=American Experience|publisher=Pbs.org|access-date=February 15, 2015|archive-date=March 1, 2017|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20170301134853/http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/eyesontheprize/story/17_panthers.html}}</ref> True to Dohrn's words, this single event, in the continuing string of public killings of black leaders of any political stripe, was the trigger that pushed a large number of Weatherman and other students who had just attended the last SDS national convention months earlier to go underground and develop its logistical support network nationally.
*] ] – The ] in Chicago is bombed; The Weathermen later claim credit for the bombing in their book, ''Prairie Fire''.


On May 21, 1970, a communiqué from the Weather Underground was issued promising to attack a "symbol or institution of American injustice" within two weeks.{{sfn|Sale|1974|p=661}} The communiqué included taunts towards the FBI, daring them to try to find the group, whose members were spread throughout the United States.<ref>Harold Jacobs ed., ''Weatherman'', (Ramparts Press, 1970), 508–511.</ref> Many leftist organizations showed curiosity in the communiqué, and waited to see if the act would in fact occur. However, two weeks would pass without any occurrence.<ref>Harold Jacobs ed., ''Weatherman'', (Ramparts Press, 1970), 374.</ref> Then on June 9, 1970, their first publicly acknowledged bombing occurred at a ] police station.{{sfn|Sale|1974|p=648}} The FBI placed the Weather Underground organization on the ten most-wanted list by the end of 1970.{{sfn|Jacobs|1997}}{{Page needed|date=November 2024}}
*]-11, 1969 – The "Days of Rage" riots occur in Chicago, damaging a large amount of property. 287 Weatherman members are arrested, and some become fugitives when they fail to appear for trial in connection with their arrests.


*November-December, 1969 – A small number of Weatherman members join the first contingent of the ] (VB) that departs for ] to harvest sugar cane.


===Activity in 1970===
*] ] – Bombing of several Chicago Police cars parked in a precinct parking lot at 3600 North Halsted Street, Chicago. The WUO claims responsibility in '']'', stating it is a protest of the fatal police shooting of Illinois ] leaders ] and ] on ] ].
On June 9, 1970, a bomb made with ten sticks of dynamite exploded in the ] headquarters of the New York City Police Department. The explosion was preceded by a warning about six minutes prior to the detonation and was followed by a WUO claim of responsibility.<ref>{{cite book |title = The Weather Underground |year= 1975|publisher= US Government Printing Office |location= Washington, DC |pages= –32 |url= https://archive.org/details/statedepartmentb00unit |access-date=December 20, 2009}}</ref>


On July 23, 1970, a Detroit federal grand jury indicted 13 Weathermen members in a national bombing conspiracy, along with several unnamed co-conspirators. Ten of the thirteen already had outstanding federal warrants.<ref>{{cite book |title = The Weather Underground. |year= 1975|publisher= US Government Printing Office |location= Washington DC |pages= , 131–132 |url= https://archive.org/details/statedepartmentb00unit |access-date=December 20, 2009}}</ref>
*]-31, 1969 – The Weathermen hold a "War Council" in ], where they finalize their plans to change into an underground organization that will commit strategic acts of sabotage against the government. Thereafter they are called the "Weather Underground Organization" (WUO).


In September 1970, the group accepted a $20,000 payment from the largest international ] distribution organization, called ], to break ] advocate ] out of a California prison in ], north of ],<ref name="The Weather Underground"/> and transport him and his wife to ], where Leary joined ].
*February, 1970 – The WUO closes the SDS National Office in Chicago, concluding the major campus-based organization of the 1960s. The first contingent of the VB returns from Cuba and the second contingent departs. By mid-February the bulk of the leading WUO members go underground.


In October 1970, ] was put on the ].<ref>{{cite book |title = The Weather Underground. |year= 1975|publisher= US Government Printing Office |location= Washington D.C. |page= |url= https://archive.org/details/statedepartmentb00unit |access-date=December 20, 2009}}</ref>
*] ] - Several police vehicles of the ], Police Department are bombed in the police parking lot; ] ]: A bomb is detonated at the ] branch of the ] Police Department, killing one officer and injuring a number of other policemen. No organization claims credit for either bombing.


===United States Capitol bombing===
*March, 1970 – Warrants are issued for several WUO members, who become federal fugitives when they fail to appear for trial in Chicago.
On March 1, 1971, members of the Weather Underground set off a bomb on the Senate side of the United States Capitol. While the bomb smashed windows and caused hundreds of thousands of dollars' worth of damage, there were no casualties.<ref>{{Cite news|url=https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2015/03/02/a-look-at-the-history-of-attacks-in-the-u-s-capitol-44-years-after-the-weather-underground-bombing/|title=A history of attacks on the U.S. Capitol, 44 years after the Weather Underground bombing|newspaper=Washington Post}}</ref>


===Pentagon bombing===
*] ] – 34 sticks of ] are discovered in the 13th Police District of Detroit, Michigan. During February and early March, 1970, members of the WUO, led by ], are reported to be in ], for the purpose of bombing a police facility.{{Fact|date=April 2008}}
]]]
On May 19, 1972, ]'s birthday, the Weather Underground placed a bomb in the women's bathroom in the Air Force wing of ]. The damage caused flooding that destroyed computer tapes holding classified information. Other radical groups worldwide applauded the bombing, illustrated by German youths protesting against American military systems in ].{{sfn|Jacobs|1997}}{{Page needed|date=November 2024}} This was "in retaliation for the U.S. bombing raid in ]."{{sfn|Berger|2006|p=330}}


===Withdrawal of charges===
*] ] – WUO members ], ], and ] are killed in the ], when a nailbomb they were constructing detonates. The bomb was intended to be planted at a non-commissioned officer's dance at ], New Jersey.
In 1973, the government requested dropping charges against most of the WUO members. The requests cited a recent decision by the ] that barred electronic surveillance without a court order. This Supreme Court decision would hamper any prosecution of the WUO cases. In addition, the government did not want to reveal foreign intelligence secrets that a trial would require.<ref>{{cite book |title = The Weather Underground. |year= 1975|publisher= US Government Printing Office |location= Washington DC |pages= 40, 47, 65, 111–112 |url= https://archive.org/details/statedepartmentb00unit |access-date=December 20, 2009}}</ref> Bernardine Dohrn was removed from the FBI's Ten Most Wanted List on 7 December 1973.<ref>{{cite web|last1=Dohrn |first1=Bernardine |title=FBI "Ten Most Wanted Fugitives" Program Frequently Asked Questions |url=https://www.fbi.gov/wanted/topten/ten-most-wanted-fugitives-faq/ |website=Wayback Machine |access-date=21 October 2015 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20151013164420/https://www.fbi.gov/wanted/topten/ten-most-wanted-fugitives-faq/ |archive-date=October 13, 2015 }}</ref> As with the earlier federal grand juries that subpoenaed Leslie Bacon and ] in the U.S. Capitol bombing case, these investigations were known as "fishing expeditions", with the evidence gathered through ] jobs including illegal mail openings that involved the FBI and ], burglaries by FBI field offices, and electronic surveillance by the ] against the support network, friends, and family members of the Weather Underground as part of Nixon's ] apparatus.<ref>{{cite book |title=U.S. Select Committee on Intelligence, Report on Illegal Domestic Intelligence Gathering Activities (1974) }}</ref>


These grand juries caused Sylvia Jane Brown, Robert Gelbhard, and future members of the ] to be subpoenaed in Seattle and Portland for the investigation of one of the first (and last) captured WUO members. Four months afterwards the cases were dismissed.<ref>{{Cite web|title=In the Matter of Sylvia Jane Brown, a Witness Before The United States Grand Jury, Appellant, v. United States of America, Appellee, 465 F.2d 371 (9th Cir. 1972)|url=https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/appellate-courts/F2/465/371/290087/|website=Justia Law}}</ref><ref>Gelbard vs. United States, 408 U.S. 41, 92 S.Ct. 2357 (1972), reversing </ref><ref>"New York Times.com/archives/1972/"Barnard Coed Subpoenaed to Seattle"</ref> The decisions in these cases led directly to the subsequent resignation of FBI Director, ], and the federal indictments of W. ] or "Deep Throat" and Edwin Miller and which, earlier, was the factor leading to the removal of federal "most-wanted" status against members of the Weather Underground leadership in 1973.
*] ] – Chicago Police discover a WUO "bomb factory" on Chicago’s north side. A subsequent discovery of a WUO "weapons cache" in a south side Chicago apartment several days later ends WUO activity in the city.


===''Prairie Fire''===
*April, 1970 – The ] arrests WUO members ] and ] are arrested in ].
With the help of ], the Weather Underground sought a more ] ideological approach to the post-Vietnam reality.{{sfn|Jacobs|1971}}{{Page needed|date=November 2024}} The leading members of the Weather Underground (Bill Ayers, Bernardine Dohrn, Jeff Jones, and Celia Sojourn) collaborated on ideas and published a manifesto: ''Prairie Fire: The Politics of Revolutionary Anti-Imperialism.''{{sfn|Jacobs|1997}}{{Page needed|date=November 2024}}<ref>{{cite web|url=https://archive.org/details/PrairieFireThePoliticsOfRevolutionaryAnti-imperialismThePolitical |title=Prairie fire : the politics of revolutionary anti-imperialism : the political statement of the Weather Underground. : Weather Underground Organization. : Free Download & Streaming: Internet Archive |date=2014-12-31 |access-date=2015-01-30}}</ref> The name came from a quote by ], "a single spark can set a prairie fire." By the summer of 1974, five thousand copies had surfaced in coffee houses, bookstores and public libraries across the U.S. Leftist newspapers praised the manifesto.{{sfn|Varon|2004|pp=292–298}}


] publicly praised ''Prairie Fire'' and believed every American should be given a copy.<ref>Marty Jezer, ''Abbie Hoffman: American Rebel'', (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1992), pp. 258–259.</ref> The manifesto's influence initiated the formation of the ] in several American cities. Hundreds of above-ground activists helped further the new political vision of the Weather Underground.{{sfn|Varon|2004|p=292-298}} Essentially, after the 1969 failure of the Days of Rage to involve thousands of youths in massive street fighting, Weather renounced most of the Left and decided to operate as an isolated underground group. Prairie Fire urged people to never "dissociate mass struggle from revolutionary violence". To do so, asserted Weather, was to do the state's work. Just as in 1969–1970, Weather still refused to renounce revolutionary violence for "to leave people unprepared to fight the state is to seriously mislead them about the inevitable nature of what lies ahead". However, the decision to build only an underground group caused the Weather Underground to lose sight of its commitment to mass struggle and made future alliances with the mass movement difficult and tenuous.{{sfn|Jacobs|1971|pp=76–77}}
*] ] – A federal ] in Chicago returns a number of indictments charging WUO members with violation of federal anti-riot laws. Also, a number of additional federal warrants charging "unlawful flight to avoid prosecution" are returned in Chicago based on the failure of WUO members to appear for trial in local cases. (The Anti-riot Law charges were later dropped in January, 1974.)


By 1974, Weather had recognized this shortcoming and in ''Prairie Fire'' detailed a different strategy for the 1970s which demanded both mass and clandestine organizations. The role of a clandestine organization would be to build the "consciousness of action" and prepare the way for the development of a people's militia. Concurrently, the role of the mass movement (i.e., above-ground Prairie Fire collective) would include support for, and encouragement of, armed action. Such an alliance would, according to Weather, "help create the 'sea' for the guerrillas to swim in".{{sfn|Jacobs|1971|pp=76–77}}
*] ] – The ] building in ] is bombed.{{Fact|date=April 2008}}


According to Bill Ayers, writing in 2001, by the late 1970s, the Weatherman group had further split into two factions—the ] and the Prairie Fire Collective—with Bernardine Dohrn and Bill Ayers in the latter. The Prairie Fire Collective favored coming out of hiding and establishing an above-ground revolutionary mass movement. With most WUO members facing limited criminal charges (most charges had been dropped by the government in 1973) against them creating an above-ground organization was more feasible. The May 19 Communist Organization continued in hiding as the clandestine organization. A decisive factor in Dohrn's coming out of hiding was her concerns about her children.{{sfn|Ayers|2008}}{{page needed|date=November 2024}} The Prairie Fire Collective faction started to surrender to the authorities from the late 1970s to the early 1980s. The remaining Weather Underground members continued to attack U.S. institutions.
*] ] – The WUO releases its "Declaration of a State of War" communique under ]'s name.


==COINTELPRO==
*] ] – In a letter, the WUO claims credit for bombing of the ], although no explosion has occurred. Months later, workmen locate an unexploded bomb.{{Fact|date=April 2008}}
{{Main|COINTELPRO}}


===Event===
*] ] - The New York City Police headquarters is bombed by ] and accomplices. The Weathermen state this is in response to "police repression."{{Fact|date=April 2008}}
In April 1971, the "]" broke into an FBI office in ].<ref>David Cunningham, ''There's Something Happening Here: the New Left, the Klan, and FBI Counterintelligence'', (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), p. 33.</ref> The group stole files with several hundred pages. The files detailed the targeting of civil rights leaders, labor rights organizations, and left-wing groups in general, and included documentation of acts of intimidation and disinformation by the FBI and attempts to erode public support for those popular movements. By the end of April, the FBI offices were to terminate all files dealing with leftist groups.<ref>David Cunningham, ''There's Something Happening Here: the New Left, the Klan, and FBI Counterintelligence'', (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), p. 35.</ref> The files were part of an FBI program called COINTELPRO.<ref> {{webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20130113101622/http://www.icdc.com/~paulwolf/cointelpro/cointel.htm|date=January 13, 2013}}</ref>


After COINTELPRO was dissolved in 1971 by J. Edgar Hoover,<ref>Nelson Blackstock, ''Cointelpro: The FBI's Secret War on Political Freedom'', (New York: Anchor Foundation, 1990), 185.</ref> the FBI continued its counterintelligence on groups like the Weather Underground. In 1973, the FBI established the "Special Target Information Development" program, where agents were sent undercover to penetrate the Weather Underground. Due to the illegal tactics of FBI agents involved with the program, government attorneys requested all weapons- and bomb-related charges be dropped against the Weather Underground. The most well-publicized of these tactics were the "]," referring to searches conducted in the homes of relatives and acquaintances of Weatherman.{{sfn|Varon|2004|p=292-298}} The Weather Underground was no longer a fugitive organization and could turn themselves in with minimal charges against them.{{sfn|Varon|2004|p=292-298}} Additionally, the illegal domestic spying conducted by the CIA in collaboration with the FBI also lessened the legal repercussions for Weatherman turning themselves in.{{sfn|Varon|2004|pp=292–298}}
*] ] – A federal grand jury in Detroit, Michigan, returns indictments against a number of underground WUO members and former WUO members charging violations of various explosives and firearms laws. (These indictments were later dropped in October, 1973.)


===Investigation and trial===
*] ] - The ] base at ] in San Francisco is bombed on the 11th anniversary of the ].
After the ] revealed the FBI's illegal activities, many agents were investigated. In 1976, former FBI Associate Director W. ] publicly stated he had ordered break-ins and that individual agents were merely obeying orders and should not be punished for it. Felt also stated that acting Director ] had also authorized the break-ins, but Gray denied this. Felt said on the CBS television program ''Face the Nation'' that he would probably be a "]" for the Bureau's work.<ref>John Crewdson (August 30, 1976), "Ex-F.B.I. Aide Sees 'Scapegoat' Role", ''The New York Times'', p. 21.</ref> "I think this is justified and I'd do it again tomorrow," he said on the program. While admitting the break-ins were "extralegal," he justified it as protecting the "greater good." Felt said, "To not take action against these people and know of a bombing in advance would simply be to stick your fingers in your ears and protect your eardrums when the explosion went off and then start the investigation."


The Attorney General in the new ], ], investigated, and on April 10, 1978, a federal grand jury charged Felt, ], and Gray with conspiracy to violate the constitutional rights of American citizens by searching their homes without warrants. The case did not go to trial and was dropped by the government for lack of evidence on December 11, 1980.{{sfn|Jacobs|1971}}{{page needed|date=November 2024}}
*] ] – The WUO helps Dr. ] escape from the ] prison.


The indictment charged violations of Title 18, Section 241 of the ]. The indictment charged Felt and the others "did unlawfully, willfully, and knowingly combine, conspire, confederate, and agree together and with each other to injure and oppress citizens of the United States who were relatives and acquaintances of the Weatherman fugitives, in the free exercise and enjoyments of certain rights and privileges secured to them by the Constitution and the laws of the United States of America.<ref>Felt, FBI Pyramid, p. 333.</ref>
*] ] - Bombing of ] courthouse. WUO states this is in retaliation for the killings of ], ], and ].


Felt and Miller attempted to plea bargain with the government, willing to agree to a misdemeanor guilty plea to conducting searches without warrants—a violation of 18 U.S.C. sec. 2236—but the government rejected the offer in 1979. After eight postponements, the case against Felt and Miller went to trial in the ] on September 18, 1980.<ref>Robert Pear: "Conspiracy Trial for 2 Ex-F.B.I. Officials Accused in Break-ins", ''The New York Times'', September 19, 1980; & "Long Delayed Trial Over F.B.I. Break-ins to Start in Capital Tomorrow", ''The New York Times'', September 14, 1980, p. 30.</ref> On October 29, former President ] appeared as a rebuttal witness for the defense, and testified that presidents since ] had authorized the bureau to engage in break-ins while conducting foreign intelligence and counterespionage investigations.<ref>Robert Pear, "Testimony by Nixon Heard in F.B.I. Trial", ''The New York Times'', October 30, 1980.</ref>
*] ] - A ] traffic-court building is bombed. WUO claims this is to express support for the ].


It was Nixon's first courtroom appearance since his resignation in 1974. Nixon also contributed money to Felt's legal defense fund, with Felt's legal expenses running over $600,000. Also testifying were former Attorneys General ], ], ], ], and ], all of whom said warrantless searches in ] matters were commonplace and not understood to be illegal, but Mitchell and Kleindienst denied they had authorized any of the break-ins at issue in the trial.
*] ] - The ] is bombed. WUO claims this is to protest the war in ].


The jury returned guilty verdicts on November 6, 1980. Although the charge carried a maximum sentence of 10 years in prison, Felt was fined $5,000. (Miller was fined $3,500.)<ref>Kessler, F.B.I.: Inside the Agency, p. 194.</ref> Writing in '']'' a week after the conviction, ] claimed that Felt and Miller were being used as scapegoats by the Carter administration and that it was an unfair prosecution. Cohn wrote it was the "final dirty trick" and that there had been no "personal motive" for their actions.<ref>Roy Cohn, "Stabbing the F.B.I.", ''The New York Times'', November 15, 1980, p. 20.</ref>
*December, 1970 – Fugitive WUO member ], who fled the country for ], is arrested by the ] in ]. Fugitive WUO member ] is arrested by the FBI in New York.


'']'' saluted the convictions, saying that it showed "the case has established that zeal is no excuse for violating the Constitution".<ref>"The Right Punishment for F.B.I. Crimes." (Editorial), ''The New York Times'', December 18, 1980.</ref> Felt and Miller appealed the verdict, and they were later pardoned by ].<ref>{{cite web |url=http://www.reagan.utexas.edu/archives/speeches/1981/41581d.htm |title=Statement on Granting Pardons to W. Mark Felt and Edward S. Miller |publisher=Reagan.utexas.edu |date=1981-04-15 |access-date=June 2, 2010 |archive-date=September 24, 2015 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20150924085227/http://www.reagan.utexas.edu/archives/speeches/1981/41581d.htm }}</ref>
*] ] - The ] is bombed. WUO states this is to protest the invasion of ]. ] ] denounces the bombing as a "shocking act of violence that will outrage all Americans."


==Dissolution==
*April, 1971 – FBI agents discover an abandoned WUO "bomb factory" in ].
Despite the change in their legal status, the Weather Underground remained underground for a few more years. However, by 1976 the organization was disintegrating. The Weather Underground held a conference in Chicago called Hard Times. The idea was to create an umbrella organization for all radical groups. However, the event turned sour when Hispanic and Black groups accused the Weather Underground and the ] Committee of limiting their roles in racial issues.{{sfn|Varon|2004|pp=292–298}} The Weather Underground faced accusations of abandonment of the revolution by reversing their original ideology.


The conference increased divisions within the Weather Underground. East coast members favored a commitment to violence and challenged the commitments of old leaders, ], ], and ]. These older members found they were no longer liable for federal prosecution because of illegal wire taps and the government's unwillingness to reveal sources and methods favored a strategy of inversion where they would be above-ground "revolutionary leaders". Jeremy Varon argues that by 1977 the WUO had disbanded.{{sfn|Varon|2004|pp=292–298}}
*] ] - Bombing of the ], allegedly in retaliation for the killing of ].


] appeared on the lead segment of CBS's ''60 Minutes'' in 1976 and was interviewed by ] about the ease of creating fake identification, the first ex-Weatherman interview on national television.<ref>United States. Congress. House. Committee on the Judiciary. Subcommittee on Crime. (1984). False identification: hearing before the Subcommittee on Crime of the Committee on the Judiciary, House of Representatives, Ninety-seventh Congress, second session, on H.R. 352, H.R. 6105, H.R. 6946, and S. 2043 false identification, May 5, 1982. Washington: U.S. G.P.O.. p. 55</ref><ref name="babel.hathitrust.org">{{cite book |title=False identification hearing before the Subcommittee on Crime of the Committee on the Judiciary, House of Representatives, Ninety-seventh Congress, second session, on H.R. 352, H.R. 6105, H.R. 6946, and S. 2043 false identification, May 5, 1982.|year=1984|publisher=U.S. Government Printing Office |location=Washington, D.C.|hdl = 2027/mdp.39015082323240}}</ref> (The House document has the date wrong, it aired February 1, 1976, and the title was Fake ID.)
*] ] - The ] in Albany, New York is bombed, as per the WUO to protest the killing of 29 inmates at ].


The federal government estimated that only 38 Weathermen had gone underground in 1970, though the estimates varied widely, according to a variety of official and unofficial sources, as between 50 and 600 members. Most modern sources lean towards a much larger number than the FBI reference.<ref>{{Cite book |title=State Department bombing by Weatherman Underground: hearing before the Subcommittee to Investigate the Administration of the Internal Security Act and Other Internal Security Laws of the Committee on the Judiciary, United States Senate, Ninety-fourth Congress, first session, January 31, 1975 |year=1975 |publisher=US Government Printing Office |location=Washington, D.C. |pages=43–45 |url=https://archive.org/details/statedepartmentb00unit }}</ref> An FBI estimate in 1976, or slightly later, of the current membership was down to 30 or fewer.<ref>{{Cite web|url=http://foia.fbi.gov/weather/weath2a.pdf |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20090320174944/http://foia.fbi.gov/weather/weath2a.pdf|title=Weathermen Underground Summary <!-- Dated .. --> Part #2 |date=August 20, 1976 |archive-date=2009-03-20 |publisher=FBI}}</ref>
*] ] - The bombing of ]'s office in the ] research center.


===Plot to bomb the office of a California State Senator===
*] ] - Bombing of ], "in retaliation for the U.S. bombing raid in ]."
In November 1977, five WUO members were arrested on conspiracy to bomb the office of California State Senator ]. It was later revealed that the Revolutionary Committee and the PFOC had both been infiltrated by the ] for almost six years. FBI agents Richard J. Gianotti and William D. Reagan lost their cover in November when federal judges needed their testimony to issue warrants for the arrest of ] and four Weather people. The arrests were the results of the infiltration.<ref name=g38>Gilbert 38</ref><ref>{{cite news |title= Nation: Infiltrating the Underground
|newspaper= ]
|date= January 9, 1978 |url= http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,912056,00.html
|archive-url= https://web.archive.org/web/20091204151846/http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,912056,00.html
|archive-date= December 4, 2009
|access-date=December 26, 2009}}</ref> WUO members Judith Bissell, Thomas Justesen, Leslie Mullin, and Marc Curtis pleaded guilty while Van Lydegraf, who helped write the 1974 Prairie Fire Manifesto, went to trial.<ref>{{cite news |title= Radicals Admit Bomb Attempts |agency= Associated Press |newspaper= Spokane Daily Chronicle |date= December 20, 1978 |url= https://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=1338&dat=19781220&id=4MUSAAAAIBAJ&pg=6874,794947 |access-date= December 29, 2009 }}{{Dead link|date=October 2022 |bot=InternetArchiveBot |fix-attempted=yes }}</ref>


Within two years, many members took advantage of President ]'s amnesty for draft dodgers by turning themselves in.{{sfn|Jacobs|1997}}{{Page needed|date=November 2024}} Mark Rudd turned himself into authorities on January 20, 1978. Rudd was fined $4,000 and received two years' probation.{{sfn|Jacobs|1997}}{{Page needed|date=November 2024}} Bernardine Dohrn and Bill Ayers turned themselves in on December 3, 1980, in New York, with substantial media coverage. Charges were dropped for Ayers. Dohrn received three years' probation and a $15,000 fine.{{sfn|Jacobs|1997}}{{Page needed|date=November 2024}}
*] ] - The bombing of the 103rd Police Precinct in New York. WUO states this is in response to the killing of 10-year-old black youth ] by police.


===Brink's robbery===
*] ] – A WUO member is arrested by the FBI in New York. Released on bond, this member again submerges into the underground.
{{Main|Brink's robbery (1981)}}
Some members remained underground and joined splinter radical groups. The U.S. government states that years after the dissolution of the Weather Underground, three former members, ], ], and ], joined the May 19 Communist Organization, and on October 20, 1981, in ], New York, the group helped the ] ] containing $1.6 million. The robbery resulted in a shootout and the deaths of Brink's Guard Peter Paige, Police Sergeant Edward O'Grady Jr., and Police Officer Waverly Brown, the first black police officer on the ] police force.{{sfn|Jacobs|1997}}{{Page needed|date=November 2024}}
<ref>{{cite web|last1=Batson|first1=Bill|title=Nyack Sketch Log: The Brink's Robbery|url=http://www.nyacknewsandviews.com/2011/10/bb_brinksrobbery20111018/|website=nyacknewsandviews.com|date=October 19, 2021 |archive-url=https://archive.today/20230604032832/https://nyacknewsandviews.com/blog/2021/10/bb_brinksrobbery20111018/|archive-date=2023-06-04|url-status=live}}</ref>
<ref name="mark-gado">{{cite web|author=Mark Gado|title=The Agony of Parole|url=https://freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2100019/posts|publisher=TruTV.com|website=freerepublic.com|date=October 2008|archive-url=https://archive.today/20230604033002/https://freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2100019/posts|archive-date=2023-06-04|url-status=live}}</ref>
<ref name="memorial-Grady">{{cite web| url=https://www.odmp.org/officer/10136-sergeant-edward-j-ogrady-jr|title=Sergeant Edward J. O'Grady, Jr. | publisher= The Officer Down Memorial Page, Inc|date=2023|archive-url=https://archive.today/20230604034235/https://www.odmp.org/officer/10136-sergeant-edward-j-ogrady-jr|archive-date=2023-06-04}}</ref>
<ref name="memorial-Waverly">{{cite web| url=https://www.odmp.org/officer/2372-police-officer-waverly-l-brown |title=Police Officer Waverly L. Brown | publisher= The Officer Down Memorial Page, Inc|date=2023|archive-url=https://archive.today/20130415113857/http://www.odmp.org/officer/2372-police-officer-waverly-l-brown|archive-date=2013-04-15}}</ref>


Boudin, Clark, and Gilbert were found guilty and sentenced to lengthy terms in prison.<ref name="mark-gado"/> Media reports listed them as former Weatherman Underground members<ref>{{cite web |url=http://www.trutv.com/library/crime/terrorists_spies/terrorists/brinks/1.html |title=The Brink's Robbery of 1981 – The Crime Library |publisher=TruTV.com |date=1970-03-06 |access-date=June 2, 2010 |archive-date=November 16, 2018 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20181116084903/https://www.trutv.com/library/crime/terrorists_spies/terrorists/brinks/1.html }}</ref> considered the "last gasps" of the Weather Underground.<ref>] and Margret M. Braungart, "From Protest to Terrorism: The Case of the SDS and The Weathermen.", International Movement And Research: Social Movements and Violence: Participation in Underground Organizations, Vol. 4, (Greenwich: Jai Press, 1992.), 67.</ref> The documentary ''The Weather Underground'' described the ] as the "unofficial end" of the Weather Underground.<ref name="PBS-Lens-2010">{{cite web |url=https://www.pbs.org/independentlens/weatherunderground/movement.html |title=The Weather Underground. The Movement |publisher=Independent Lens |website=PBS |access-date=June 2, 2010 |archive-date=September 14, 2018 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20180914160355/http://www.pbs.org/independentlens/weatherunderground/movement.html }}</ref>
*] ] - The ] headquarters in ] and Rome, Italy are bombed. WUO states this is in response to ITT's alleged role in the Chilean coup earlier that month.


===May 19th Communist Organization===
*] ] - Bombing of the ] offices in ]. WUO states this is to protest alleged ] of poor women. In the accompanying communiqué, the ] argues for "the need for women to take control of daycare, healthcare, birth control and other aspects of women's daily lives."
{{Main|May 19th Communist Organization}}
The Weather Underground members who were involved in the ]'s alliance with the Black Liberation Army continued to perpetrate a series of jail breaks, armed robberies and bombings until 1985, when most of them were finally arrested and sentenced for their involvement in the Brink's robbery and the ].<ref>{{cite news|title=May 19 Communist Order|url=http://www.trackingterrorism.org/group/may-19-communist-order-m19co?ip_login_no_cache=601a108ae35afef68dde7a0db31c0683|newspaper=Trac}}</ref>


==Coalitions with non-WUO members==
*] ] - The Office of the ] is bombed. WUO states this is in response to the killing of six members of the ].
{{Main|Mother Right and the WUO|Jane Alpert}}
Throughout their years in the underground, the members of the Weather Underground worked closely with their counterparts in other organizations, including ], to bring attention to their further actions to the press. She helped the Weathermen pursue their main goal of overthrowing the U.S. government through her writings.{{sfn|Alpert|1981}}{{page needed|date=November 2024}} However, there were tensions within the organization, brought about by her famous manifesto, "]", that specifically called on the female members of the organization to focus on their own cause rather than anti-imperialist causes.<ref name=alpert>Alpert, Jane (1974). ''Mother Right: A New Feminist Theory''. Pittsburgh: Know, Inc.</ref> Weather members then wrote in response to her manifesto.


==Legacy==
*] ] - ]'s Pittsburgh headquarters is bombed. WUO states this is to protest the company's actions in ], ], and elsewhere.
Widely known members of the Weather Underground include ], ], ], ], ], ], ], Joe Kelly, ], ], ], ], ], ], ], ], ], and the married couple ] and ].


The Weather Underground was referred to as a terrorist group by articles in ''The New York Times'', United Press International, and ''Time'' Magazine.<ref>No byline, UPI wire story, "Weathermen Got Name From Song: Groups Latest Designation Is Weather Underground", as published in ''The New York Times'', January 30, 1975; Montgomery, Paul L., "Guilty Plea Entered in 'Village' Bombing: Cathy Wilkerson Could Be Given Probation or Up to 7 Years", article, ''The New York Times'', July 19, 1980: "the terrorist Weather Underground"; Powers, Thomas, and Franks, Lucinda, "Diana: The Making of a Terrorist," UPI, news feature series and winner of the Pulitzer Prize; ; Ayers, Bill, , post April 20, 2006, "Bill Ayers" blog, retrieved September 21, 2008</ref><ref>, 1998, p 331</ref><ref>Mehnert, Klaus, "Twilight of the Young, The Radical Movements of the 1960s and Their Legacy," Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1977, page 47; Martin, Gus, ; Pruthi, R.K., {{Dead link|date=February 2023 |bot=InternetArchiveBot |fix-attempted=yes }}, 2003, p. 182; by Jeffrey David Simon p 96</ref> The group fell under the jurisdiction of the FBI-New York City Police Anti-Terrorist Task Force, a forerunner of the FBI's Joint Terrorism Task Forces. The FBI refers to the organization in a 2004 news story titled "Byte out of History" published on its website as having been a "domestic terrorist group" that is no longer an active concern.<ref>Web page titled, {{webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20161225063707/https://www2.fbi.gov/page2/jan04/weather012904.htm |date=December 25, 2016 }}, at F.B.I. website, dated January 29, 2004. Retrieved September 2, 2008.</ref> Some members have disputed the "terrorist" categorization and justified the group's actions as an appropriate response to what they described as the "terrorist activities" of the war in Vietnam, domestic racism, and the deaths of black leaders.<ref>''Sing a Battle Song: The Revolutionary Poetry, Statements, and Communiques of the Weather Underground, 1970–1974''; edited by Bernardine Dohrn, Bill Ayers, and Jeff Jones; Seven Stories Press; 2006; pp. 21–42, 121–129</ref>
*July, 1974 – The WUO releases the book '']'', in which they indicate the need for a unified ]. They encourage the creation of study groups to discuss their ideology, and continue to stress the need for violent acts. The book also admits WUO responsibility of several actions from previous years. The ] (PFOC) arises from the teachings in this book and is organized by many former WUO members.


Ayers objected to the description of the WUO as a terrorist organization in his 2001 book ''Fugitive Days''. "Terrorists terrorize," he argues, "they kill innocent civilians, while we organized and agitated. Terrorists destroy randomly, while our actions bore, we hoped, the precise stamp of a cut diamond. Terrorists intimidate, while we aimed only to educate."{{sfn|Ayers|2008|p=263}} Dan Berger asserts in ''Outlaws of America'' that the group "purposefully and successfully avoided injuring anyone" as an argument that their actions were not terrorism. "Its war against property by definition means that the WUO was not a terrorist organization."{{sfn|Berger|2006|pp=268–287}}
*] ] – Bombing of ] (part of the ]). WUO states this is in retribution for Anaconda’s alleged involvement in the Chilean coup the previous year.


Others, however, have suggested that these arguments are specious. Former Weather Underground member ] admitted that the group intended to target people prior to the accidental explosion in the town house. "On the morning of March 6, 1970, three of my comrades were building pipe bombs packed with dynamite and nails, destined for a dance of non-commissioned officers and their dates at Fort Dix, New Jersey, that night."<ref name="name">{{cite web
*] ] - Bombing of the State Department; WUO states this is in response to escalation in Vietnam. (AP. "State Department Rattled by Blast," ''The Daily Times-News'', ], ], p.1)
|url = http://www.markrudd.com/?organizing-and-activism-now/the-kids-are-all-right-2005.html
|archive-url = https://web.archive.org/web/20090403171308/http://www.markrudd.com/?organizing-and-activism-now%2Fthe-kids-are-all-right-2005.html
|archive-date = April 3, 2009
|title = The Kids are All Right
|last = Rudd
|first = Mark
|author-link = Mark Rudd
|access-date = May 18, 2009
|df = mdy-all
}}</ref><ref>{{cite web|url=http://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/S-F-police-union-accuses-Ayers-in-1970-bombing-3248056.php|title=S.F. police union accuses Ayers in 1970 bombing|work=SFGate|date=March 12, 2009|access-date=February 15, 2015}}</ref> Grand juries were convened in 2001 and 2009 to investigate whether Weather Underground was responsible for the ], in which one officer was killed, one was maimed, and eight more were wounded by shrapnel from a pipe bomb. They ultimately concluded that members of the Black Liberation Army were responsible, with whom WUO members were affiliated. They were also responsible for the bombing of another police precinct in San Francisco, as well as bombing the Catholic Church funeral services of the police officer killed in the Park Precinct bombing in the early summer of 1970.<ref name="Jamison">{{cite news |author=Peter Jamison |url=http://www.riverfronttimes.com/2009-09-16/news/blown-to-peaces-weather-underground-leaders-claimed-bombings-devised-to-avoid-bloodshed-fbi-agents-suspect-radical-70s-group-killed-cop-in-name-of-revolution/1/ |title=Blown to Peaces: Weather Underground leaders claimed their bombings were devised to avoid bloodshed. But FBI agents suspect the radical '70s group killed a cop in the name of revolution. |newspaper=Riverfront Times |date=2009-09-16 |access-date=2015-01-30 |archive-date=July 17, 2012 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20120717225509/http://www.riverfronttimes.com/2009-09-16/news/blown-to-peaces-weather-underground-leaders-claimed-bombings-devised-to-avoid-bloodshed-fbi-agents-suspect-radical-70s-group-killed-cop-in-name-of-revolution/1/ }}</ref><ref>''Allegiance to Liberty: The Changing Face of Patriots, Militias, and Political Violence in America''; Barry J. Balleck; ABC-CLIO; 2014; p. 89</ref> Ayers said in a 2001 ''New York Times'' interview, "I don't regret setting bombs".<ref>{{cite web|url=https://www.nytimes.com/2001/09/11/books/no-regrets-for-love-explosives-memoir-sorts-war-protester-talks-life-with.html|title=No Regrets for a Love Of Explosives – In a Memoir of Sorts, a War Protester Talks of Life With the Weathermen|date=September 11, 2001|publisher=Query.nytimes.com|access-date=February 15, 2015}}</ref> He has since claimed that he was misquoted.<ref>{{cite web|url=http://billayers.wordpress.com/2008/04/06/episodic-notoriety-fact-and-fantasy/|title=Episodic Notoriety – Fact and Fantasy |work=Bill Ayers|date=April 6, 2008|access-date=February 15, 2015}}</ref> Mark Rudd teaches mathematics at ], and he has said that he doesn't speak publicly about his experiences because he has "mixed feelings, guilt and shame". "These are things I am not proud of, and I find it hard to speak publicly about them and to tease out what was right from what was wrong."<ref name="The Weather Underground"/>


==See also==
*March, 1975 – The WUO releases its first edition of a new magazine entitled ''Osawatomie''.
* ]
* ]
* ]
* ]
* ]
* ]
* ]
* ]
* ]


===Films and videos===
*] ] - Weathermen bomb a ] (a Puerto Rican bank) in New York, WUO states this is in solidarity with striking Puerto Rican cement workers.
* '']'' (1976). Documentary directed by ], ] and Mary Lampson.
* ], nominated for ] for ]
* '']'' (2012). Fiction directed by ].


==References==
*]-13, 1975 – The PFOC holds its first national convention during which time they go through the formality of creating a new organization.
{{Reflist|30em}}


===Citations===
*September, 1975 – Bombing of the ]; WUO states this is in retribution for Kennecott's alleged involvement in the Chilean coup two years prior.<ref>http://www.spunk.org/texts/misc/sp000209.txt</ref>
* {{Cite book |last=Alpert |first=Jane |author-link=Jane Alpert |url=https://archive.org/details/growingupundergr00alpe_0 |title=Growing up underground |date=1981 |publisher=Morrow |isbn=0-688-00655-8 |edition=1st |location=New York}}
* {{Cite book |last=Ayers |first=Bill |author-link=William Ayers |url=https://archive.org/details/fugitivedayselec00ayer |title=Fugitive Days: Memoirs of an Antiwar Activist |publisher=Beacon Press |year=2008 |isbn=978-0-8070-3277-0 |location=Boston}}
* {{Cite book |last=Berger |first=Dan |title=Outlaws of America: The Weather Underground and the Politics of Solidarity |date=2006 |publisher=AK Press |isbn=1-904859-41-0 |location=Oakland}}
* {{Cite book |last=Burrough |first=Bryan |title=Days of Rage – America's Radical Underground, the FBI, and the Forgotten Age of Revolutionary Violence |date=2015 |publisher=Penguin Publishing Group |isbn=978-0-14-310797-2}}
* {{Cite book |last1=Dohrn |first1=Bernardine |author-link1=Bernardine Dohrn |title=Sing a Battle Song: The Revolutionary Poetry, Statements, and Communiqués of the Weather Underground, 1970–1974 |last2=Ayers |first2=Bill |last3=Jones |first3=Jeff |publisher=Seven Stories Press |date=2006 |isbn=1-58322-726-1 |location=New York}}
* {{Cite book |last=Eckstein |first=Arthur M. |title=Bad moon rising: how the weather underground beat the FBI and lost the revolution |date=2016 |publisher=Yale University Press |isbn=978-0-300-22118-3 |location=New Haven}}
* {{cite book |last1=Grathwohl |first1=Larry |last2=Frank |first2=Reagan |title=Bringing Down America: An FBI Informant in with the Weathermen |publisher=Arlington House |date=1977 |isbn=978-1-484-05887-9}}
* {{Cite book |last=Jacobs |first=Harold |title=Weatherman |publisher=Ramparts Press |date=1971 |isbn=978-0-87867-001-7 |location=San Francisco}}
* {{Cite book |last=Jacobs |first=Ron |title=The Way the Wind Blew: A History of the Weather Underground |publisher=Verso |date=1997 |isbn=1-85984-167-8 |location=London}}
* {{Cite book |last=Lerner |first=Jonathan |title=Swords in the Hands of Children: Reflections of an American Revolutionary |date=2017 |publisher=OR Books |isbn=978-1-682190-98-2}}
* {{Cite book |last=Sale |first=Kirkpatrick |author-link=Kirkpatrick Sale |title=SDS |publisher=Vintage Books |date=1974 |isbn=0-394-71965-4 |location=New York}}
* {{Cite book |last=Unger |first=Irwin |author-link=Irwin Unger |title=The Movement: A History of the American New Left, 1959–1972 |publisher=Dodd, Mead |year=1974 |isbn=0-396-06939-8 |location=New York}}
* {{Cite book |last=Varon |first=Jeremy |title=Bringing the War Home: The Weather Underground, the Red Army Faction, and Revolutionary Violence in the Sixties and Seventies |publisher=University of California Press |date=2004 |isbn=0-520-24119-3 |location=Berkeley and Los Angeles}}
* {{Cite book |last=Wilkerson |first=Cathy |author-link=Cathy Wilkerson |title=Flying Close to the Sun: My Life and Times as a Weatherman |publisher=Seven Stories Press |date=2007 |isbn=978-1-58322-771-8 |location=New York}}


==Further reading==
*], ] - ] in which Kathy Boudin and several members of the Weather Underground and the Black Liberation Army stole over $1 million from a Brinks armored car at the Nanuet Mall, near Nyack, New York on ], ]. The robbers were stopped by police later that day and engaged them in a shootout, killing two police officers and one Brinks guard as well as wounding several others.
===Government publications===
* United States. Congress. Senate. Committee on the Judiciary. Subcommittee to Investigate the Administration of the Internal Security Act and Other Internal Security Laws (1974). ''Terroristic Activity: Hearings before the Subcommittee to Investigate the Administration of the Internal Security Act and other Internal Security Laws, of the Committee on the Judiciary, United States Senate, Ninety-third Congress, Second Session.'' Part 2, ''Inside the Weatherman Movement.'' Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office.
* United States. Congress. Senate. Committee on the Judiciary. Subcommittee to Investigate the Administration of the Internal Security Act and Other Internal Security Laws of the Committee on the Judiciary, United States Senate, Ninety-fourth Congress, First Session (1975). ''The Weather Underground.'' Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office.


==External links==
</div>
{{wikiquote}}
* {{cite web |url=https://vault.fbi.gov/Weather%20Underground%20(Weathermen)|title=FBI files: Weather Underground Organization (Weathermen)}}
* {{cite web |url=http://www.sds-1960s.org/wuo.htm |title=WUO communiqués and other documents |publisher=SDS-60s.Org |access-date=January 18, 2011}}
* Full text of {{cite web |url=http://www.sds-1960s.org/books/weatherman.pdf |title=Harold Jacob's ''Weatherman'' (PDF format)
|publisher=SDS-60s.Org |access-date=January 18, 2011}}
* {{cite magazine |url=http://www.inthesetimes.com/article/4251/you_say_you_want_a_revolution/ |title=You Say You Want a Revolution |author=Machtinger, Howard |date=18 February 2009 |magazine=In These Times |access-date=January 18, 2011 |archive-date=December 23, 2010 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20101223060757/http://www.inthesetimes.com/article/4251/you_say_you_want_a_revolution/ }}
* {{cite web |url=http://www.markrudd.com/?sds-and-weather/the-death-of-sds.html |title=The Death of SDS |author=Rudd, Mark |year=2008 |publisher=MarkRudd.com |access-date=January 18, 2011}}
* {{cite web |url=http://www.prairiefire.org/ |title=Prairie Fire |publisher=Prairie Fire Organizing Committee (1975–present) |access-date=January 19, 2011}}
* {{cite web |url=http://www.modkraft.dk/spip.php?article11614 |title=Weatherman (Weather Underground Organization, WUO), 1969-77 |access-date=January 18, 2011 |quote=History, critics, books online |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20100726102513/http://www.modkraft.dk/spip.php?article11614 |archive-date=July 26, 2010 |df=mdy-all }}
*


==Members== ===Fiction===
* {{Cite book
<div style="-moz-column-count:3; column-count:3;">
| publisher = Curbstone Press; Distributed to the trade by the Talman Co
*]
| isbn = 0-915306-82-4
*]
| last = Bushell
*]
| first = Agnes
*]
| author-link = Agnes Bushell
*]
| title = Local deities: a novel
*]
| location = Willimantic, CT : New York, NY
*]
| date = 1990
*]
}}
*]
* {{Cite book
*]
| publisher = Viking
*]
| isbn = 0-670-03218-2
*]
| last = Gordon
*]
| first = Neil
*]
| title = The company you keep
*]
| location = New York
*]
| date = 2003
*]
| url = https://archive.org/details/companyyoukeep00gord
*]
}}
*]
*]
*]
*]
*]
*]
*]


===Audio sources===
</div>
* {{cite web |url=http://www.lib.berkeley.edu/MRC/pacificaviet/ |title=Vietnam: Index of /MRC/pacificaviet
|publisher=University of California, Berkeley |access-date=January 18, 2011 |quote=Contains online audiorecordings, texts, and other media related to the WUO }}
* {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20071116133016/http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=03%2F06%2F05%2F1821243&mode=thread&tid=42 |date=November 16, 2007 }}. Guests: Mark Rudd, former member of the Weather Underground, Sam Green and Bill Siegel, documentary filmmakers/directors. Interviewers: Juan Gonzalez and Amy Goodman. Democracy Now!. Segment available via {{Dead link|date=October 2022 |bot=InternetArchiveBot |fix-attempted=yes }}, or {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20170925214507/http://stream.paranode.com/democracynow//dn2003-0605-1.m3u |date=September 25, 2017 }}. 1 hour 40 minutes. Thursday, June 5, 2003. Retrieved May 20, 2005.
* {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20071114040943/http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=05%2F06%2F02%2F1445253 |date=November 14, 2007 }}. Guest: Jennifer Dohrn. Interviewers: Juan Gonzalez and Amy Goodman. Segment available via {{Dead link|date=October 2022 |bot=InternetArchiveBot |fix-attempted=yes }}, {{Dead link|date=October 2022 |bot=InternetArchiveBot |fix-attempted=yes }} or . 29:32 minutes. Thursday, June 2, 2005. Retrieved June 2, 2005.
* {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20071012102507/http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=04%2F12%2F03%2F1454204&mode=thread&tid=25 |date=October 12, 2007 }}. Guests: Thai Jones and Jeff Jones. Interviewers: ] and ]. '']''. Segment available in {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20071012102507/http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=04%2F12%2F03%2F1454204&mode=thread&tid=25#transcript |date=October 12, 2007 }} and via {{Dead link|date=October 2022 |bot=InternetArchiveBot |fix-attempted=yes }}, {{Dead link|date=October 2022 |bot=InternetArchiveBot |fix-attempted=yes }} or . 17:01 minutes. Friday, December 3, 2004. Retrieved May 20, 2005.
{{Weather Underground|state=expanded}}
{{American New Left}}
{{Authority control}}


]
==See also==
]
*'']'', documentary film
]
*'']'', documentary film
]
*]
]

]
==Further reading==
* (DOCUMENT 4 of 5) chronicles the last tumultuous days of the original Students for a Democratic Society and the rise of the Revolutionary Youth Movement and the Worker Student Alliance as the two principal SDS factions. Document 5 of 5 is the program of the section of the RYM that would later adopt the name "Weatherman".
*Alan Adelson's, "SDS" remains the best history of the organization.
* Harold Jacobs, editor (1970). ''Weatherman''. Ramparts Press.
* ]. Water Buffalo Print Collective. ]. Seattle. 1975. available on line. Retrieved ], ].
* Dan Berger (2006). ''Outlaws of America: The Weather Underground and the Politics of Solidarity''. Oakland: AK Press.
* Jeremy Varon (2004). ''Bringing the War Home: The Weather Underground, the Red Army Faction, and Revolutionary Violence in the Sixties and Seventies''. Berkeley: University of California Press. ISBN 0-520-24119-3
* Ron Jacobs (1997). ''The way the wind blew: a history of the Weather Underground''. London & New York: Verso. ISBN 1-85984-167-8
* Bill Ayers (2001). ''Fugitive Days''. Boston: Beacon Press.
* Bernardine Dohrn, Bill Ayers. and Jeff Jones, editors (2006). ''Sing a Battle Song: The Revolutionary Poetry, Statements, and Communiqués of the Weather Underground, 1970-1974''. New York: Seven Stories Press. ISBN 1-58322-726-1
* Cathy Wilkerson (2007). "Flying Close to the Sun," New York: Seven Story Press.
* Unger, Irwin. "The Movement A History of the American New Left, 1959-1972" New York: Dodd, Mead & Company, 1974.

==References==
{{reflist|2}}

==External links==
* - contains online audiorecordings, texts, and other media related to the Weather Underground
* ''The Weather Underground'', a 2002 documentary directed and produced by Sam Green, Bill Siegel and Carrie Lozano
**
**
**
* . 420 pages. Retrieved ], ].
* . Guests: Mark Rudd, former member of the Weather Underground, Sam Green and Bill Siegel, documentary filmmakers/directors. Interviewers: Juan Gonzalez and Amy Goodman. Democracy Now!. Segment available via , or . 1 hour 40 minutes. Thursday, ] ]. Retrieved ] ].
* . Guest: Jennifer Dohrn. Interviewers: Juan Gonzalez and Amy Goodman. Segment available in and via , or . 29:32 minutes. Thursday, ] ]. Retrieved ] ].
* . Guests: Thai Jones and Jeff Jones. Interviewers: ] and ]. '']''. Segment available in and via , or . 17:01 minutes. Friday, ] ]. Retrieved ] ].
* , by Ron Jacobs (1997) about the Weather Underground Organization.
* , ed. by Harold Jacobs, a collection of documents by and about SDS/Weatherman. This book was published in 1970 and deals only with WUO's early period. Out of print.
*

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Latest revision as of 18:27, 31 December 2024

American far-left militant organization, 1969–77 This article is about the United States militant organization. For the weather forecasting service, see Weather Underground (weather service). For other uses, see Weather Underground (disambiguation).

Weather Underground
Logo of the Weather Underground
Leaders
Dates of operation1969–1977
Group(s)
Active regionsUnited States
Ideology Anti-Vietnam War
Political positionFar-left
Part ofStudents for a Democratic Society
AlliesBlack Liberation Army
OpponentsUnited States
Battles and wars
Succeeded by
May 19th Communist Organization

The Weather Underground was a far-left Marxist militant organization first active in 1969, founded on the Ann Arbor campus of the University of Michigan. Originally known as the Weathermen, the group was organized as a faction of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) national leadership. Officially known as the Weather Underground Organization (WUO) beginning in 1970, the group's express political goal was to create a revolutionary party to overthrow the United States government, which WUO believed to be imperialist.

The FBI described the WUO as a domestic terrorist group, with revolutionary positions characterized by Black Power and opposition to the Vietnam War. The WUO took part in domestic attacks such as the jailbreak of Timothy Leary in 1970. The "Days of Rage" was the WUO's first riot in October 1969 in Chicago, timed to coincide with the trial of the Chicago Seven. In 1970, the group issued a "Declaration of a State of War" against the United States government under the name "Weather Underground Organization."

In the 1970s, the WUO conducted a bombing campaign targeting government buildings and several banks. Some attacks were preceded by evacuation warnings, along with threats identifying the particular matter that the attack was intended to protest. Three members of the group were killed in an accidental Greenwich Village townhouse explosion, but none were killed in any of the bombings. The WUO communiqué issued in connection with the bombing of the United States Capitol on March 1, 1971, indicated that it was "in protest of the U.S. invasion of Laos". The WUO asserted that its May 19, 1972 bombing of the Pentagon was "in retaliation for the U.S. bombing raid in Hanoi". On September 28, 1973, an ITT Inc building in New York City was bombed for the involvement of this company in the 1973 Chilean coup d'état. The WUO announced that its January 29, 1975 bombing of the United States Department of State building was "in response to the escalation in Vietnam".

The WUO began to disintegrate after the United States reached a peace accord in Vietnam in 1973, and it was defunct by 1977. Some members of the WUO joined the May 19th Communist Organization and continued their activities until that group disbanded in 1985.

The group took its name from Bob Dylan's lyric "You don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows", from the song "Subterranean Homesick Blues" (1965). That Dylan line was also the title of a position paper distributed at an SDS convention in Chicago on June 18, 1969. This founding document called for a "White fighting force" to be allied with the "Black Liberation Movement" and other radical movements to achieve "the destruction of U.S. imperialism and form a classless communist world".

Background and formation

The Weathermen emerged from the campus-based opposition to United States involvement in the Vietnam War as well as from the civil rights movement of the 1960s. One of the factors that contributed to the radicalization of SDS members was the Economic Research and Action Project that the SDS undertook in Northern urban neighborhoods from 1963 to 1968. This project was aimed at creating an interracial movement of the poor that would mobilize for full and fair employment or guaranteed annual income and political rights for poverty class Americans. Their goal was to create a more democratic society "which guarantees political freedom, economic and physical security, abundant education, and incentives for wide cultural variety". While the initial phase of the SDS involved campus organizing, phase two involved community organizing. These experiences led some SDS members to conclude that deep social change would not happen through community organizing and electoral politics, and that more radical and disruptive tactics were needed.

In the late 1960s, United States military action in Southeast Asia escalated, especially in Vietnam. In the U.S., the anti-war sentiment was particularly pronounced during the 1968 U.S. presidential election.

The origins of the Weathermen can be traced to the collapse and fragmentation of the Students for a Democratic Society following a split between office holders of the SDS, or the "National Office", and their supporters and the Progressive Labor Party (PLP). During the factional struggle, National Office leaders such as Bernardine Dohrn and Mike Klonsky began announcing their emerging perspectives, and Klonsky published a document titled "Toward a Revolutionary Youth Movement" (RYM).

RYM promoted the philosophy that young workers possessed the potential to be a revolutionary force which could overthrow capitalism, if not by themselves then by transmitting radical ideas to the working class. Klonsky's document reflected the philosophy of the National Office and it was eventually adopted as the SDS's official doctrine. During the summer of 1969, the National Office began to split. A group led by Klonsky became known as RYM II, and the other side, RYM I, was led by Dohrn and endorsed more aggressive tactics such as direct action, as some members felt that years of nonviolent resistance had done little or nothing to stop the Vietnam War. The Weathermen strongly sympathized with the radical Black Panther Party. The police killing of Panther Fred Hampton prompted the Weatherman to issue a declaration of war upon the United States government.

We petitioned, we demonstrated, we sat in. I was willing to get hit over the head, I did; I was willing to go to prison, I did. To me, it was a question of what had to be done to stop the much greater violence that was going on.

— David Gilbert

SDS Convention, June 1969

At an SDS convention in Chicago on June 18, 1969, the National Office attempted to persuade unaffiliated delegates not to endorse a takeover of SDS by Progressive Labor who had packed the convention with their supporters.It was at the 1966 convention of SDS that members of Progressive Labor Party began to make their presence known for the first time. The PLP was a Stalinist group that had turned to SDS as fertile ground for recruiting new members after meeting with little success in organizing industrial workers, their preferred base. SDS members of that time were nearly all anti-communist, but they also refused to be drawn into actions that appeared like red-baiting, which they viewed as mostly irrelevant and out of date. The PLP soon began to organize a Worker Student Alliance. By 1968 and 1969 they would profoundly affect SDS, particularly at national gatherings of the membership, forming a well-groomed, disciplined faction which followed the Progressive Labor Party line. At the beginning of the convention, two position papers were passed out by the National Office leadership, one a revised statement of Klonsky's RYM manifesto, the other called "You Don't Need a Weatherman to Know Which Way the Wind Blows".

The latter document outlined the position of the group that would become the Weathermen. It had been signed by Karen Ashley, Bill Ayers, Bernardine Dohrn, John Jacobs, Jeff Jones, Gerry Long, Howie Machtinger, Jim Mellen, Terry Robbins, Mark Rudd, and Steve Tappis. The document called for creating a clandestine revolutionary party.

The most important task for us toward making the revolution, and the work our collectives should engage in, is the creation of a mass revolutionary movement, without which a clandestine revolutionary party will be impossible. A revolutionary mass movement is different from the traditional revisionist mass base of "sympathizers". Rather it is akin to the Red Guard in China, based on the full participation and involvement of masses of people in the practice of making revolution; a movement with a full willingness to participate in the violent and illegal struggle.

At this convention the Weatherman's faction of the Students for a Democratic Society, planned for October 8–11, as a "National Action" built around John Jacobs' slogan, "bring the war home". The National Action grew out of a resolution drafted by Jacobs and introduced at the October 1968 SDS National Council meeting in Boulder, Colorado. The resolution, titled "The Elections Don't Mean Shit—Vote Where the Power Is—Our Power Is In The Street" and adopted by the council, was prompted by the success of the Democratic National Convention protests in August 1968 and reflected Jacobs' strong advocacy of direct action.

As part of the "National Action Staff", Jacobs was an integral part of the planning for what quickly came to be called "Four Days of Rage". For Jacobs, the goal of the "Days of Rage" was clear:

Weatherman would shove the war down their dumb, fascist throats and show them, while we were at it, how much better we were than them, both tactically and strategically, as a people. In an all-out civil war over Vietnam and other fascist U.S. imperialism, we were going to bring the war home. 'Turn the imperialists' war into a civil war', in Lenin's words. And we were going to kick ass.

In July 1969, 30 members of Weatherman leadership traveled to Cuba and met with North Vietnamese representatives to gain from their revolutionary experience. The North Vietnamese requested armed political action in order to stop the U.S. government's war in Vietnam. Subsequently, they accepted funding, training, recommendations on tactics and slogans from Cuba, and perhaps explosives as well.

SDS Convention, December 1969

After the Days of Rage riots the Weatherman held the last of its National Council meetings from December 26 to December 31, 1969, in Flint, Michigan. The meeting, dubbed the "War Council" by the 300 people who attended, adopted Jacobs' call for violent revolution. Dohrn opened the conference by telling the delegates they needed to stop being afraid and begin the "armed struggle." Over the next five days, the participants met in informal groups to discuss what "going underground" meant, how best to organize collectives, and justifications for violence. In the evening, the groups reconvened for a mass "wargasm"—practicing karate, engaging in physical exercise, singing songs, and listening to speeches.

The War Council ended with a major speech by John Jacobs. Jacobs condemned the "pacifism" of white middle-class American youth, a belief which he claimed they held because they were insulated from the violence which afflicted blacks and the poor. He predicted a successful revolution, and declared that youth were moving away from passivity and apathy and toward a new high-energy culture of "depersonalization" brought about by drugs, sex, and armed revolution. "We're against everything that's 'good and decent' in honky America," Jacobs said in his most commonly quoted statement. "We will burn and loot and destroy. We are the incubation of your mother's nightmare." Two major decisions came out of the War Council. The first was to go underground and to begin a violent, armed struggle against the state without attempting to organize or mobilize a broad swath of the public. The Weather Underground hoped to create underground collectives in major cities throughout the country. In fact, the Weathermen eventually created only three significant, active collectives; one in California, one in the Midwest, and one in New York City. The New York City collective was led by Jacobs and Terry Robbins, and included Ted Gold, Kathy Boudin, Cathy Wilkerson (Robbins' girlfriend), and Diana Oughton. Jacobs was one of Robbins' biggest supporters, and pushed the Weathermen to let Robbins be as violent as he wanted to be. The Weatherman national leadership agreed, as did the New York City collective. The collective's first target was Judge John Murtagh, who was overseeing the trial of the "Panther 21".

The second major decision was the dissolution of SDS. After the summer of 1969 fragmentation of SDS, Weatherman's adherents explicitly claimed themselves the real leaders of SDS and retained control of the SDS National Office. Thereafter, any leaflet, label, or logo bearing the name "Students for a Democratic Society" (SDS) was in fact the views and politics of Weatherman, not of the slate elected by Progressive Labor. Weatherman contained the vast majority of former SDS National Committee members, including Mark Rudd, David Gilbert and Bernardine Dohrn. The group, while small, was able to commandeer the mantle of SDS and all of its membership lists, but with Weatherman in charge there was little or no support from local branches or members of the organization, and local chapters soon disbanded. At the War Council, the Weathermen had decided to close the SDS National Office, ending the major campus-based organization of the 1960s which at its peak was a mass organization with 100,000 members.

Ideology

The thesis of Weatherman theory, as expounded in its founding document, You Don't Need a Weatherman to Know Which Way the Wind Blows, was that "the main struggle going on in the world today is between U.S. imperialism and the national liberation struggles against it", based on Lenin's theory of imperialism, first expounded in 1916 in Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism. In Weatherman theory "oppressed peoples" are the creators of the wealth of empire, "and it is to them that it belongs." "The goal of revolutionary struggle must be the control and use of this wealth in the interest of the oppressed peoples of the world." "The goal is the destruction of U.S. imperialism and the achievement of a classless world: world communism"

The Vietnamese and other third world countries, as well as third world people within the United States play a vanguard role. They "set the terms for class struggle in America ..." The role of the "Revolutionary Youth Movement" is to build a centralized organization of revolutionaries, a "Marxist–Leninist Party" supported by a mass revolutionary movement to support international liberation movements and "open another battlefield of the revolution."

The theoretical basis of the Revolutionary Youth Movement was an insight that most of the American population, including both students and the supposed "middle class," comprised, due to their relationship to the instruments of production, the working class, thus the organizational basis of the SDS, which had begun in the elite colleges and had been extended to public institutions as the organization grew could be extended to youth as a whole including students, those serving in the military, and the unemployed. Students could be viewed as workers gaining skills prior to employment. This contrasted to the Progressive Labor view which viewed students and workers as being in separate categories which could ally, but should not jointly organize.

FBI analysis of the travel history of the founders and initial followers of the organization emphasized contacts with foreign governments, particularly the Cuban and North Vietnamese and their influence on the ideology of the organization. Participation in the Venceremos Brigade, a program which involved U.S. students volunteering to work in the sugar harvest in Cuba, is highlighted as a common factor in the background of the founders of the Weather Underground, with China a secondary influence. This experience was cited by both Kathy Boudin and Bernardine Dohrn as a major influence on their political development.

Terry Robbins took the organization's name from the lyrics of the Bob Dylan song "Subterranean Homesick Blues," which featured the lyrics "You don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows." The lyrics had been quoted at the bottom of an influential essay in the SDS newspaper, New Left Notes. By using this title the Weathermen meant, partially, to appeal to the segment of U.S. youth inspired to action for social justice by Dylan's songs.

The Weatherman group had long held that militancy was becoming more important than nonviolent forms of anti-war action, and that university campus-based demonstrations needed to be punctuated with more dramatic actions, which had the potential to interfere with the U.S. military and internal security apparatus. The belief was that these types of urban guerrilla actions would act as a catalyst for the coming revolution. Many international events indeed seemed to support the Weathermen's overall assertion that worldwide revolution was imminent, such as the tumultuous Cultural Revolution in China; the 1968 student revolts in France, Mexico City and elsewhere; the Prague Spring; the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association; the emergence of the Tupamaros organization in Uruguay; the emergence of the Guinea-Bissauan Revolution and similar Marxist-led independence movements throughout Africa; and within the United States, the prominence of the Black Panther Party, together with a series of "ghetto rebellions" throughout poor black neighborhoods across the country.

We felt that doing nothing in a period of repressive violence is itself a form of violence. That's really the part that I think is the hardest for people to understand. If you sit in your house, live your white life and go to your white job, and allow the country that you live in to murder people and to commit genocide, and you sit there and you don't do anything about it, that's violence.

— Naomi Jaffe

The Weathermen were outspoken critics of the concepts that later came to be known as "white privilege" (described as white-skin privilege) and identity politics. As the civil disorder in poor black neighborhoods intensified in the early 1970s, Bernardine Dohrn said, "White youth must choose sides now. They must either fight on the side of the oppressed or be on the side of the oppressor."

The Weathermen called for the overthrow of the United States government.

Anti-imperialism, anti-racism, and white privilege

Weather maintained that their stance differed from the rest of the movements at the time in the sense that they predicated their critiques on the notion that they were engaged in "an anti-imperialist, anti-racist struggle". Weather put the international proletariat at the center of their political theory. Weather warned that other political theories, including those addressing class interests or youth interests, were "bound to lead in a racist and chauvinist direction". Weather denounced other political theories of the time as "objectively racist" if they did not side with the international proletariat; such political theories, they argued, needed to be "smashed".

Members of Weather further contended that efforts at "organizing whites against their own perceived oppression" were "attempts by whites to carve out even more privilege than they already derive from the imperialist nexus". Weather's political theory sought to make every struggle an anti-imperialist, anti-racist struggle; out of this premise came their interrogation of critical concepts that would later be known as "white privilege". As historian Dan Berger writes, Weather raised the question "what does it mean to be a white person opposing racism and imperialism?"

At one point, the Weathermen adopted the belief that all white babies were "tainted with the original sin of "skin privilege", declaring "all white babies are pigs" with one Weatherwoman telling feminist poet Robin Morgan "You have no right to that pig male baby" after she saw Morgan breastfeeding her son and told Morgan to put the baby in the garbage. Charles Manson was an obsession within the group and Bernardine Dohrn claimed he truly understood the iniquity of white America, with the Manson family being praised for the murder of Sharon Tate; Dohrn's cell subsequently made its salute a four-fingered gesture that represented the "fork" used to stab Tate.

Practice

Shortly after its formation as an independent group, Weatherman created a central committee, the Weather Bureau, which assigned its cadres to a series of collectives in major cities. These cities included New York, Boston, Seattle, Philadelphia, Cincinnati, Buffalo, and Chicago, the home of the SDS's head office. The collectives set up under the Weather Bureau drew their design from Che Guevara's foco theory, which focused on the building of small, semi-autonomous cells guided by a central leadership.

To try to turn their members into hardened revolutionaries and to promote solidarity and cohesion, members of collectives engaged in intensive criticism sessions which attempted to reconcile their prior and current activities to Weathermen doctrine. These "criticism self-criticism" sessions (also called "CSC" or "Weatherfries") were the most distressing part of life in the collective. Derived from Maoist techniques, it was intended to root out racist, individualist and chauvinist tendencies within group members. At its most intense, members would be berated for a dozen or more hours non-stop about their flaws. It was intended to make group members believe that they were, deep down, white supremacists by subjecting them to constant criticism to break them down. The sessions were used to ridicule and bully those who didn't agree with the party line and force them into acceptance. However, the sessions were also almost entirely successful at purging potential informants from the Weathermen's ranks, making them crucial to the Weathermen's survival as an underground organization. The Weathermen were also determined to destroy "bourgeois individualism" amongst members that would potentially interfere with their commitment to both the Weathermen and the goal of revolution. Personal property was either renounced or given to the collective, with income being used to purchase the needs of the group and members enduring Spartan living conditions. Conventional comforts were forbidden, and the leadership was exalted, giving them immense power over their subordinates (in some collectives the leadership could even dictate personal decisions such as where one went). Martial arts were practiced and occasional direct actions were engaged in. Critical of monogamy, they launched a "smash monogamy" campaign, in which couples (whose affection was deemed unacceptably possessive, counterrevolutionary or even selfish) were to be split apart; collectives underwent forced rotation of sex partners (including allegations that some male leaders rotated women between collectives in order to sleep with them) and in some cases engaged in sexual orgies. This formation continued during 1969 and 1970 until the group went underground and a more relaxed lifestyle was adopted as the group blended into the counterculture.

Life in the collectives could be particularly hard for women, who made up about half the members. Their political awakening had included a growing awareness of sexism, yet they often found that men took the lead in political activities and discussion, with women often engaging in domestic work, as well as finding themselves confined to second-tier leadership roles. Certain feminist political beliefs had to be disavowed or muted and the women had to prove, regardless of prior activist credentials, that they were as capable as men in engaging in political action as part of "women's cadres", which were felt to be driven by coerced machismo and failed to promote genuine solidarity amongst the women. While the Weathermen's sexual politics did allow women to assert desire and explore relationships with each other, it also made them vulnerable to sexual exploitation.

Recruitment

Weather used various means by which to recruit new members and set into motion a nationwide revolt against the government. Weather members aimed to mobilize people into action against the established leaders of the nation and the patterns of injustice which existed in America and abroad due to America's presence overseas. They also aimed to convince people to resist reliance upon their given privilege and to rebel and take arms if necessary. According to Weatherman, if people tolerated the unjust actions of the state, they became complicit in those actions. In the manifesto compiled by Bill Ayers, Bernardine Dohrn, Jeff Jones, and Celia Sojourn, entitled "Prairie Fire: The Politics of Revolutionary Anti-Imperialism," Weatherman explained that their intention was to encourage the people and provoke leaps in confidence and consciousness in an attempt to stir the imagination, organize the masses, and join in the people's day-to-day struggles in every way possible.

In the year 1960, over a third of America's population was under 18 years of age. The number of young citizens set the stage for a widespread revolt against perceived structures of racism, sexism, and classism, the violence of the Vietnam War and America's interventions abroad. At college campuses throughout the country, anger against "the Establishment's" practices prompted both peaceful and violent protest. The members of Weatherman targeted high school and college students, assuming they would be willing to rebel against the authoritative figures who had oppressed them, including cops, principals, and bosses. Weather aimed to develop roots within the class struggle, targeting white working-class youths. The younger members of the working class became the focus of the organizing effort because they felt the oppression strongly in regard to the military draft, low-wage jobs, and schooling.

Schools became a common place of recruitment for the movement. In direct actions, dubbed Jailbreaks, Weather members invaded educational institutions as a means by which to recruit high school and college students. The motivation of these jailbreaks was the organization's belief that school was where the youth were oppressed by the system and where they learned to tolerate society's faults instead of rise against them. According to "Prairie Fire", young people are channeled, coerced, misled, miseducated, misused in the school setting. It is in schools that the youth of the nation become alienated from the authentic processes of learning about the world.

Factions of the Weatherman organization began recruiting members by applying their own strategies. Women's groups such as The Motor City Nine and Cell 16 took the lead in various recruitment efforts. Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, a member of the radical women's liberation group Cell 16 spoke about her personal recruitment agenda saying that she wanted their group to go out in every corner of the country and tell women the truth, recruit the local people, poor and working-class people, in order to build a new society.

Berger explains the controversy surrounding recruitment strategies saying, "As an organizing strategy it was less than successful: white working class youths were more alienated than organized by Weather's spectacles, and even some of those interested in the group were turned off by its early hi-jinks."

Armed propaganda

In 2006, Dan Berger (writer, activist, and longtime anti-racism organizer) states that following their initial set of bombings, which resulted in the Greenwich Village townhouse explosion, the organization adopted a new paradigm of direct action set forth in the communiqué New Morning, Changing Weather, which abjured attacks on people. The shift in the organization's outlook was in good part due to the 1970 death of Weatherman Terry Robbins, Diana Oughton and Ted Gold, all graduate students, in the Greenwich Village townhouse explosion.

According to Dan Berger a relatively sophisticated program of armed propaganda was adopted. This consisted of a series of bombings of government and corporate targets in retaliation for specific imperialist and oppressive acts. Small, well-constructed time bombs were used, generally in vents in restrooms, which exploded at times the spaces were empty. Timely warnings were made, and communiqués issued explaining the reason for the actions.

Major activities

Main article: List of Weatherman actions

Haymarket Police Memorial bombing

The Haymarket Square police memorial, seen in 1889

Shortly before the Days of Rage demonstrations on October 6, 1969, the Weatherman planted a bomb which blew up a statue in Chicago commemorating the deaths of police officers during the 1886 Haymarket Riot. The blast broke nearly 100 windows and scattered pieces of the statue onto the Kennedy Expressway below. The city rebuilt the statue and unveiled it on May 4, 1970, but the Weathermen blew it up as well on October 6, 1970. The city rebuilt the statue once again, and Mayor Richard J. Daley posted a 24-hour police guard to protect it, but the Weathermen destroyed the third one, as well. The city compromised and rebuilt the monument once more, but this time they located it at Chicago Police Headquarters.

"Days of Rage"

Main article: Days of Rage

One of the first acts of the Weathermen after splitting from SDS was to announce they would hold the "Days of Rage" that autumn. This was advertised to "Bring the war home!" Hoping to cause sufficient chaos to "wake" the American public out of what they saw as complacency toward the role of the U.S. in the Vietnam War, the Weathermen meant it to be the largest protest of the decade. They had been told by their regional cadre to expect thousands to attend; however, when they arrived, they found only a few hundred people.

According to Bill Ayers in 2003, "The Days of Rage was an attempt to break from the norms of kind of acceptable theatre of 'here are the anti-war people: containable, marginal, predictable, and here's the little path they're going to march down, and here's where they can make their little statement.' We wanted to say, "No, what we're going to do is whatever we had to do to stop the violence in Vietnam.'" The protests did not meet Ayers' stated expectations.

Though the October 8, 1969, rally in Chicago had failed to draw as many as the Weathermen had anticipated, the two or three hundred who did attend shocked police by rioting through the affluent Gold Coast neighborhood. They smashed the windows of a bank and those of many cars. The crowd ran four blocks before encountering police barricades. They charged the police but broke into small groups; more than 1,000 police counter attacked. Many protesters were wearing motorcycle or football helmets, but the police were well trained and armed. Large amounts of tear gas were used, and at least twice police ran squad cars into the mob. The rioting lasted about half an hour, during which 28 policemen were injured. Six Weathermen were shot by the police and an unknown number injured; 68 rioters were arrested.

For the next two days, the Weathermen held no rallies or protests. Supporters of the RYM II movement, led by Klonsky and Noel Ignatin, held peaceful rallies in front of the federal courthouse, an International Harvester factory, and Cook County Hospital. The largest event of the Days of Rage took place on Friday, October 9, when RYM II led an interracial march of 2,000 people through a Spanish-speaking part of Chicago.

On October 10, the Weatherman attempted to regroup and resume their demonstrations. About 300 protesters marched through The Loop, Chicago's main business district, watched by a double line of heavily armed police. The protesters suddenly broke through the police lines and rampaged through the Loop, smashing the windows of cars and stores. The police were prepared, and quickly isolated the rioters. Within 15 minutes, more than half the crowd had been arrested.

The Days of Rage cost Chicago and the state of Illinois about $183,000 ($100,000 for National Guard expenses, $35,000 in damages, and $20,000 for one injured citizen's medical expenses). Most of the Weathermen and SDS leaders were now in jail, and the Weathermen would have to pay over $243,000 for their bail.

Flint War Council

Main article: Flint War Council

The Flint War Council was a series of meetings of the Weather Underground Organization and associates in Flint, Michigan, that took place 27–31 December 1969. During these meetings, the decisions were made for the Weather Underground Organization to go underground and to "engage in guerilla warfare against the U.S. government." This decision was made in response to increased pressure from law enforcement, and a belief that underground guerilla warfare was the best way to combat the U.S. government.

During a closed-door meeting of the Weather Underground's leadership, the decision was also taken to abolish Students for a Democratic Society. This decision reflected the splintering of SDS into hostile rival factions.

New York City arson attacks

On February 21, 1970, at around 4:30 a.m., three gasoline-filled Molotov cocktails exploded in front of the home of New York Supreme Court Justice John M. Murtagh, who was presiding over the pretrial hearings of the so-called "Panther 21" members of the Black Panther Party over a plot to bomb New York landmarks and department stores. Justice Murtagh and his family were unharmed, but two panes of a front window were shattered, an overhanging wooden eave was scorched, and the paint on a car in the garage was charred. "Free the Panther 21" and "Viet Cong have won" were written in large red letters on the sidewalk in front of the judge's house at 529 W. 217th Street in the Inwood neighborhood of Manhattan. The judge's house had been under hourly police surveillance and an unidentified woman called the police a few minutes before the explosions to report several prowlers there, which resulted in a police car being sent immediately to the scene.

In the preceding hours, Molotov cocktails had been thrown at the second floor of Columbia University's International Law Library at 434 W. 116th Street and at a police car parked across the street from the Charles Street police station in the West Village in Manhattan, and at Army and Navy recruiting booths on Nostrand Avenue on the eastern fringe of the Brooklyn College campus in Brooklyn, causing no or minimal damage in incidents of unknown relation to that at Judge Murtagh's home.

According to the December 6, 1970, "New Morning—Changing Weather" Weather Underground communiqué signed by Bernardine Dohrn, and Cathy Wilkerson's 2007 memoir, the fire-bombing of Judge Murtagh's home, in solidarity with the Panther 21, was carried out by four members of the New York cell that was devastated two weeks later by the March 6, 1970 townhouse explosion.

Greenwich Village townhouse explosion

Main article: Greenwich Village townhouse explosion

Weather Underground members Diana Oughton, Ted Gold, Terry Robbins, Cathy Wilkerson, and Kathy Boudin were making bombs in a Greenwich Village townhouse on March 6, 1970, when one of the bombs detonated. Oughton, Gold, and Robbins were killed; Wilkerson and Boudin escaped unharmed.

These bombs were made to target a Non-Commissioned Officer (NCO) dance at Fort Dix, which would be attended by non-commissioned officers and their companions, as well as Butler Library at Columbia University. An FBI report stated that they had enough explosives to "level… both sides of the street". Weather Underground leadership members Bill Ayers, Bernardine Dohrn, and Jeff Jones claimed the planned bombings of the Fort Dix NCO dance and Columbia University building were a rogue operation led by more extreme Greenwich Village townhouse residents, Ayers singling out Terry Robbins. However, later researchers concluded Weather Underground leaders planned and approved the bombings of an NCO dance, a Columbia University building, and several bombings in Detroit which were defused by the Detroit Police aided by informant Larry Grathwohl.

The site of the Village explosion was the former residence of Charles Merrill, co-founder of the Merrill Lynch brokerage firm, and the childhood home of his son James Merrill. James Merrill memorialized the event in his poem 18 West 11th Street, the address of the brownstone townhouse.

Underground strategy change

After the Greenwich Village townhouse explosion, per the December 1969 Flint War Council decisions the group was now well underground, and began to refer to themselves as the Weather Underground Organization. At this juncture, WUO shrank considerably, becoming even fewer than they had been when first formed. The group was devastated by the loss of their friends, and in late April 1970, members of the Weathermen met in California to discuss what had happened in New York and the future of the organization.

In 2003, Weather Underground members stated in interviews that they had wanted to convince the American public that the United States was truly responsible for the calamity in Vietnam. The group began striking at night, bombing empty offices, with warnings always issued in advance to ensure a safe evacuation. According to David Gilbert, who took part in the 1981 Brink's robbery that killed two police officers and a Brink's guard, and was jailed for murder, " goal was to not hurt any people, and a lot of work went into that. But we wanted to pick targets that showed to the public who was responsible for what was really going on." After the Greenwich Village explosion, in a review of the documentary film The Weather Underground (2002), a Guardian journalist restated the film's contention that no one was killed by WUO bombs.

We were very careful from the moment of the townhouse on to be sure we weren't going to hurt anybody, and we never did hurt anybody. Whenever we put a bomb in a public space, we had figured out all kinds of ways to put checks and balances on the thing and also to get people away from it, and we were remarkably successful.

— Bill Ayers, 2003

Declaration of war

In response to the death of Black Panther members Fred Hampton and Mark Clark in December 1969 during a police raid, and the Kent State Shootings 5 months later, on May 21, 1970 the Weather Underground issued a "Declaration of War" against the United States government, using for the first time its new name, the "Weather Underground Organization" (WUO), adopting fake identities, and pursuing covert activities only. These initially included preparations for a bombing of a U.S. military non-commissioned officers' dance at Fort Dix, New Jersey, in what Brian Flanagan said had been intended to be "the most horrific hit the United States government had ever suffered on its territory".

We've known that our job is to lead white kids into armed revolution. We never intended to spend the next five to twenty-five years of our lives in jail. Ever since SDS became revolutionary, we've been trying to show how it is possible to overcome frustration and impotence that comes from trying to reform this system. Kids know the lines are drawn: revolution is touching all of our lives. Tens of thousands have learned that protest and marches don't do it. Revolutionary violence is the only way.

— Bernardine Dohrn

Bernardine Dohrn subsequently stated that it was Fred Hampton's death that prompted the Weather Underground to declare war on the U.S. government.

We felt that the murder of Fred required us to be more grave, more serious, more determined to raise the stakes and not just be the white people who wrung their hands when black people were being murdered.

— Bernardine Dohrn

In December 1969, the Chicago Police Department, in conjunction with the FBI, conducted a raid on the home of Black Panther Fred Hampton, in which he and Mark Clark were killed, with four of the seven other people in the apartment wounded. The survivors of the raid were all charged with assault and attempted murder. The police claimed they shot in self-defense, although a controversy arose when the Panthers, other activists and a Chicago newspaper reporter presented visual evidence, as well as the testimony of an FBI ballistics expert, showing that the sleeping Panthers were not resisting arrest and fired only one shot, as opposed to the more than one hundred the police fired into the apartment. The charges were later dropped, and the families of the dead won a $1.8 million settlement from the government. It was discovered in 1971 that Hampton had been targeted by the FBI's COINTELPRO. True to Dohrn's words, this single event, in the continuing string of public killings of black leaders of any political stripe, was the trigger that pushed a large number of Weatherman and other students who had just attended the last SDS national convention months earlier to go underground and develop its logistical support network nationally.

On May 21, 1970, a communiqué from the Weather Underground was issued promising to attack a "symbol or institution of American injustice" within two weeks. The communiqué included taunts towards the FBI, daring them to try to find the group, whose members were spread throughout the United States. Many leftist organizations showed curiosity in the communiqué, and waited to see if the act would in fact occur. However, two weeks would pass without any occurrence. Then on June 9, 1970, their first publicly acknowledged bombing occurred at a New York City police station. The FBI placed the Weather Underground organization on the ten most-wanted list by the end of 1970.


Activity in 1970

On June 9, 1970, a bomb made with ten sticks of dynamite exploded in the 240 Centre Street headquarters of the New York City Police Department. The explosion was preceded by a warning about six minutes prior to the detonation and was followed by a WUO claim of responsibility.

On July 23, 1970, a Detroit federal grand jury indicted 13 Weathermen members in a national bombing conspiracy, along with several unnamed co-conspirators. Ten of the thirteen already had outstanding federal warrants.

In September 1970, the group accepted a $20,000 payment from the largest international psychedelic drug distribution organization, called The Brotherhood of Eternal Love, to break LSD advocate Timothy Leary out of a California prison in San Luis Obispo, north of Santa Barbara, California, and transport him and his wife to Algeria, where Leary joined Eldridge Cleaver.

In October 1970, Bernardine Dohrn was put on the FBI's Ten Most Wanted List.

United States Capitol bombing

On March 1, 1971, members of the Weather Underground set off a bomb on the Senate side of the United States Capitol. While the bomb smashed windows and caused hundreds of thousands of dollars' worth of damage, there were no casualties.

Pentagon bombing

Investigators search for clues after the May 19, 1972 Weatherman bombing of the Pentagon

On May 19, 1972, Ho Chi Minh's birthday, the Weather Underground placed a bomb in the women's bathroom in the Air Force wing of the Pentagon. The damage caused flooding that destroyed computer tapes holding classified information. Other radical groups worldwide applauded the bombing, illustrated by German youths protesting against American military systems in Frankfurt. This was "in retaliation for the U.S. bombing raid in Hanoi."

Withdrawal of charges

In 1973, the government requested dropping charges against most of the WUO members. The requests cited a recent decision by the Supreme Court of the United States that barred electronic surveillance without a court order. This Supreme Court decision would hamper any prosecution of the WUO cases. In addition, the government did not want to reveal foreign intelligence secrets that a trial would require. Bernardine Dohrn was removed from the FBI's Ten Most Wanted List on 7 December 1973. As with the earlier federal grand juries that subpoenaed Leslie Bacon and Stew Albert in the U.S. Capitol bombing case, these investigations were known as "fishing expeditions", with the evidence gathered through "black bag" jobs including illegal mail openings that involved the FBI and United States Postal Service, burglaries by FBI field offices, and electronic surveillance by the Central Intelligence Agency against the support network, friends, and family members of the Weather Underground as part of Nixon's COINTELPRO apparatus.

These grand juries caused Sylvia Jane Brown, Robert Gelbhard, and future members of the Seattle Weather Collective to be subpoenaed in Seattle and Portland for the investigation of one of the first (and last) captured WUO members. Four months afterwards the cases were dismissed. The decisions in these cases led directly to the subsequent resignation of FBI Director, L. Patrick Gray, and the federal indictments of W. Mark Felt or "Deep Throat" and Edwin Miller and which, earlier, was the factor leading to the removal of federal "most-wanted" status against members of the Weather Underground leadership in 1973.

Prairie Fire

With the help of Clayton Van Lydegraf, the Weather Underground sought a more Marxist–Leninist ideological approach to the post-Vietnam reality. The leading members of the Weather Underground (Bill Ayers, Bernardine Dohrn, Jeff Jones, and Celia Sojourn) collaborated on ideas and published a manifesto: Prairie Fire: The Politics of Revolutionary Anti-Imperialism. The name came from a quote by Mao Zedong, "a single spark can set a prairie fire." By the summer of 1974, five thousand copies had surfaced in coffee houses, bookstores and public libraries across the U.S. Leftist newspapers praised the manifesto.

Abbie Hoffman publicly praised Prairie Fire and believed every American should be given a copy. The manifesto's influence initiated the formation of the Prairie Fire Organizing Committee in several American cities. Hundreds of above-ground activists helped further the new political vision of the Weather Underground. Essentially, after the 1969 failure of the Days of Rage to involve thousands of youths in massive street fighting, Weather renounced most of the Left and decided to operate as an isolated underground group. Prairie Fire urged people to never "dissociate mass struggle from revolutionary violence". To do so, asserted Weather, was to do the state's work. Just as in 1969–1970, Weather still refused to renounce revolutionary violence for "to leave people unprepared to fight the state is to seriously mislead them about the inevitable nature of what lies ahead". However, the decision to build only an underground group caused the Weather Underground to lose sight of its commitment to mass struggle and made future alliances with the mass movement difficult and tenuous.

By 1974, Weather had recognized this shortcoming and in Prairie Fire detailed a different strategy for the 1970s which demanded both mass and clandestine organizations. The role of a clandestine organization would be to build the "consciousness of action" and prepare the way for the development of a people's militia. Concurrently, the role of the mass movement (i.e., above-ground Prairie Fire collective) would include support for, and encouragement of, armed action. Such an alliance would, according to Weather, "help create the 'sea' for the guerrillas to swim in".

According to Bill Ayers, writing in 2001, by the late 1970s, the Weatherman group had further split into two factions—the May 19th Communist Organization and the Prairie Fire Collective—with Bernardine Dohrn and Bill Ayers in the latter. The Prairie Fire Collective favored coming out of hiding and establishing an above-ground revolutionary mass movement. With most WUO members facing limited criminal charges (most charges had been dropped by the government in 1973) against them creating an above-ground organization was more feasible. The May 19 Communist Organization continued in hiding as the clandestine organization. A decisive factor in Dohrn's coming out of hiding was her concerns about her children. The Prairie Fire Collective faction started to surrender to the authorities from the late 1970s to the early 1980s. The remaining Weather Underground members continued to attack U.S. institutions.

COINTELPRO

Main article: COINTELPRO

Event

In April 1971, the "Citizens' Commission to Investigate the FBI" broke into an FBI office in Media, Pennsylvania. The group stole files with several hundred pages. The files detailed the targeting of civil rights leaders, labor rights organizations, and left-wing groups in general, and included documentation of acts of intimidation and disinformation by the FBI and attempts to erode public support for those popular movements. By the end of April, the FBI offices were to terminate all files dealing with leftist groups. The files were part of an FBI program called COINTELPRO.

After COINTELPRO was dissolved in 1971 by J. Edgar Hoover, the FBI continued its counterintelligence on groups like the Weather Underground. In 1973, the FBI established the "Special Target Information Development" program, where agents were sent undercover to penetrate the Weather Underground. Due to the illegal tactics of FBI agents involved with the program, government attorneys requested all weapons- and bomb-related charges be dropped against the Weather Underground. The most well-publicized of these tactics were the "black-bag jobs," referring to searches conducted in the homes of relatives and acquaintances of Weatherman. The Weather Underground was no longer a fugitive organization and could turn themselves in with minimal charges against them. Additionally, the illegal domestic spying conducted by the CIA in collaboration with the FBI also lessened the legal repercussions for Weatherman turning themselves in.

Investigation and trial

After the Church Committee revealed the FBI's illegal activities, many agents were investigated. In 1976, former FBI Associate Director W. Mark Felt publicly stated he had ordered break-ins and that individual agents were merely obeying orders and should not be punished for it. Felt also stated that acting Director L. Patrick Gray had also authorized the break-ins, but Gray denied this. Felt said on the CBS television program Face the Nation that he would probably be a "scapegoat" for the Bureau's work. "I think this is justified and I'd do it again tomorrow," he said on the program. While admitting the break-ins were "extralegal," he justified it as protecting the "greater good." Felt said, "To not take action against these people and know of a bombing in advance would simply be to stick your fingers in your ears and protect your eardrums when the explosion went off and then start the investigation."

The Attorney General in the new Carter administration, Griffin Bell, investigated, and on April 10, 1978, a federal grand jury charged Felt, Edward S. Miller, and Gray with conspiracy to violate the constitutional rights of American citizens by searching their homes without warrants. The case did not go to trial and was dropped by the government for lack of evidence on December 11, 1980.

The indictment charged violations of Title 18, Section 241 of the United States Code. The indictment charged Felt and the others "did unlawfully, willfully, and knowingly combine, conspire, confederate, and agree together and with each other to injure and oppress citizens of the United States who were relatives and acquaintances of the Weatherman fugitives, in the free exercise and enjoyments of certain rights and privileges secured to them by the Constitution and the laws of the United States of America.

Felt and Miller attempted to plea bargain with the government, willing to agree to a misdemeanor guilty plea to conducting searches without warrants—a violation of 18 U.S.C. sec. 2236—but the government rejected the offer in 1979. After eight postponements, the case against Felt and Miller went to trial in the United States District Court for the District of Columbia on September 18, 1980. On October 29, former President Richard Nixon appeared as a rebuttal witness for the defense, and testified that presidents since Franklin D. Roosevelt had authorized the bureau to engage in break-ins while conducting foreign intelligence and counterespionage investigations.

It was Nixon's first courtroom appearance since his resignation in 1974. Nixon also contributed money to Felt's legal defense fund, with Felt's legal expenses running over $600,000. Also testifying were former Attorneys General Herbert Brownell Jr., Nicholas Katzenbach, Ramsey Clark, John N. Mitchell, and Richard G. Kleindienst, all of whom said warrantless searches in national security matters were commonplace and not understood to be illegal, but Mitchell and Kleindienst denied they had authorized any of the break-ins at issue in the trial.

The jury returned guilty verdicts on November 6, 1980. Although the charge carried a maximum sentence of 10 years in prison, Felt was fined $5,000. (Miller was fined $3,500.) Writing in The New York Times a week after the conviction, Roy Cohn claimed that Felt and Miller were being used as scapegoats by the Carter administration and that it was an unfair prosecution. Cohn wrote it was the "final dirty trick" and that there had been no "personal motive" for their actions.

The Times saluted the convictions, saying that it showed "the case has established that zeal is no excuse for violating the Constitution". Felt and Miller appealed the verdict, and they were later pardoned by Ronald Reagan.

Dissolution

Despite the change in their legal status, the Weather Underground remained underground for a few more years. However, by 1976 the organization was disintegrating. The Weather Underground held a conference in Chicago called Hard Times. The idea was to create an umbrella organization for all radical groups. However, the event turned sour when Hispanic and Black groups accused the Weather Underground and the Prairie Fire Committee of limiting their roles in racial issues. The Weather Underground faced accusations of abandonment of the revolution by reversing their original ideology.

The conference increased divisions within the Weather Underground. East coast members favored a commitment to violence and challenged the commitments of old leaders, Bernardine Dohrn, Bill Ayers, and Jeff Jones. These older members found they were no longer liable for federal prosecution because of illegal wire taps and the government's unwillingness to reveal sources and methods favored a strategy of inversion where they would be above-ground "revolutionary leaders". Jeremy Varon argues that by 1977 the WUO had disbanded.

Matthew Steen appeared on the lead segment of CBS's 60 Minutes in 1976 and was interviewed by Mike Wallace about the ease of creating fake identification, the first ex-Weatherman interview on national television. (The House document has the date wrong, it aired February 1, 1976, and the title was Fake ID.)

The federal government estimated that only 38 Weathermen had gone underground in 1970, though the estimates varied widely, according to a variety of official and unofficial sources, as between 50 and 600 members. Most modern sources lean towards a much larger number than the FBI reference. An FBI estimate in 1976, or slightly later, of the current membership was down to 30 or fewer.

Plot to bomb the office of a California State Senator

In November 1977, five WUO members were arrested on conspiracy to bomb the office of California State Senator John Briggs. It was later revealed that the Revolutionary Committee and the PFOC had both been infiltrated by the FBI for almost six years. FBI agents Richard J. Gianotti and William D. Reagan lost their cover in November when federal judges needed their testimony to issue warrants for the arrest of Clayton Van Lydegraf and four Weather people. The arrests were the results of the infiltration. WUO members Judith Bissell, Thomas Justesen, Leslie Mullin, and Marc Curtis pleaded guilty while Van Lydegraf, who helped write the 1974 Prairie Fire Manifesto, went to trial.

Within two years, many members took advantage of President Jimmy Carter's amnesty for draft dodgers by turning themselves in. Mark Rudd turned himself into authorities on January 20, 1978. Rudd was fined $4,000 and received two years' probation. Bernardine Dohrn and Bill Ayers turned themselves in on December 3, 1980, in New York, with substantial media coverage. Charges were dropped for Ayers. Dohrn received three years' probation and a $15,000 fine.

Brink's robbery

Main article: Brink's robbery (1981)

Some members remained underground and joined splinter radical groups. The U.S. government states that years after the dissolution of the Weather Underground, three former members, Kathy Boudin, Judith Alice Clark, and David Gilbert, joined the May 19 Communist Organization, and on October 20, 1981, in Nanuet, New York, the group helped the Black Liberation Army rob a Brink's armored truck containing $1.6 million. The robbery resulted in a shootout and the deaths of Brink's Guard Peter Paige, Police Sergeant Edward O'Grady Jr., and Police Officer Waverly Brown, the first black police officer on the Nyack police force.

Boudin, Clark, and Gilbert were found guilty and sentenced to lengthy terms in prison. Media reports listed them as former Weatherman Underground members considered the "last gasps" of the Weather Underground. The documentary The Weather Underground described the Brink's robbery as the "unofficial end" of the Weather Underground.

May 19th Communist Organization

Main article: May 19th Communist Organization

The Weather Underground members who were involved in the May 19th Communist Organization's alliance with the Black Liberation Army continued to perpetrate a series of jail breaks, armed robberies and bombings until 1985, when most of them were finally arrested and sentenced for their involvement in the Brink's robbery and the Resistance Conspiracy case.

Coalitions with non-WUO members

Main articles: Mother Right and the WUO and Jane Alpert

Throughout their years in the underground, the members of the Weather Underground worked closely with their counterparts in other organizations, including Jane Alpert, to bring attention to their further actions to the press. She helped the Weathermen pursue their main goal of overthrowing the U.S. government through her writings. However, there were tensions within the organization, brought about by her famous manifesto, "Mother Right", that specifically called on the female members of the organization to focus on their own cause rather than anti-imperialist causes. Weather members then wrote in response to her manifesto.

Legacy

Widely known members of the Weather Underground include Kathy Boudin, Linda Sue Evans, Brian Flanagan, David Gilbert, Ted Gold, Naomi Jaffe, Jeff Jones, Joe Kelly, Diana Oughton, Eleanor Raskin, Terry Robbins, Mark Rudd, Matthew Steen, Susan Stern, Laura Whitehorn, Eric Mann, Cathy Wilkerson, and the married couple Bernardine Dohrn and Bill Ayers.

The Weather Underground was referred to as a terrorist group by articles in The New York Times, United Press International, and Time Magazine. The group fell under the jurisdiction of the FBI-New York City Police Anti-Terrorist Task Force, a forerunner of the FBI's Joint Terrorism Task Forces. The FBI refers to the organization in a 2004 news story titled "Byte out of History" published on its website as having been a "domestic terrorist group" that is no longer an active concern. Some members have disputed the "terrorist" categorization and justified the group's actions as an appropriate response to what they described as the "terrorist activities" of the war in Vietnam, domestic racism, and the deaths of black leaders.

Ayers objected to the description of the WUO as a terrorist organization in his 2001 book Fugitive Days. "Terrorists terrorize," he argues, "they kill innocent civilians, while we organized and agitated. Terrorists destroy randomly, while our actions bore, we hoped, the precise stamp of a cut diamond. Terrorists intimidate, while we aimed only to educate." Dan Berger asserts in Outlaws of America that the group "purposefully and successfully avoided injuring anyone" as an argument that their actions were not terrorism. "Its war against property by definition means that the WUO was not a terrorist organization."

Others, however, have suggested that these arguments are specious. Former Weather Underground member Mark Rudd admitted that the group intended to target people prior to the accidental explosion in the town house. "On the morning of March 6, 1970, three of my comrades were building pipe bombs packed with dynamite and nails, destined for a dance of non-commissioned officers and their dates at Fort Dix, New Jersey, that night." Grand juries were convened in 2001 and 2009 to investigate whether Weather Underground was responsible for the San Francisco Police Department Park Station bombing, in which one officer was killed, one was maimed, and eight more were wounded by shrapnel from a pipe bomb. They ultimately concluded that members of the Black Liberation Army were responsible, with whom WUO members were affiliated. They were also responsible for the bombing of another police precinct in San Francisco, as well as bombing the Catholic Church funeral services of the police officer killed in the Park Precinct bombing in the early summer of 1970. Ayers said in a 2001 New York Times interview, "I don't regret setting bombs". He has since claimed that he was misquoted. Mark Rudd teaches mathematics at Central New Mexico Community College, and he has said that he doesn't speak publicly about his experiences because he has "mixed feelings, guilt and shame". "These are things I am not proud of, and I find it hard to speak publicly about them and to tease out what was right from what was wrong."

See also

Films and videos

References

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Citations

Further reading

Government publications

  • United States. Congress. Senate. Committee on the Judiciary. Subcommittee to Investigate the Administration of the Internal Security Act and Other Internal Security Laws (1974). Terroristic Activity: Hearings before the Subcommittee to Investigate the Administration of the Internal Security Act and other Internal Security Laws, of the Committee on the Judiciary, United States Senate, Ninety-third Congress, Second Session. Part 2, Inside the Weatherman Movement. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office.
  • United States. Congress. Senate. Committee on the Judiciary. Subcommittee to Investigate the Administration of the Internal Security Act and Other Internal Security Laws of the Committee on the Judiciary, United States Senate, Ninety-fourth Congress, First Session (1975). The Weather Underground. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office.

External links

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