A Single Spark Can’t Start a Prairie Fire: Violence and the Weathermen
Teddy Witt, '24
Issue: 1
On March 6, 1970, a bomb went off in a Greenwich Village townhouse, shattering the windows of nearby homes, blowing a hole in the front wall and starting a fire that burned the structure to the ground. Three people died in the blast: Diana Oughton, Terry Robbins, and Ted Goldman, all young college graduates and activists. Two more were injured: Catherine Wilkerson, whose father owned the townhouse, and Kathy Boudin, whose father was a prominent civil liberties lawyer. Authorities soon found large quantities of explosives in the basement, including four pipe bombs filled with dynamite and a vintage antitank shell, and determined beyond a doubt that “those in the house had been making bombs.”[1] The dead and the injured were all members of the Weathermen—a militant and radical leftist group. The organization was a splinter from Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), the most influential student protest organization of the decade known as “the Sixties.” For many, the Greenwich Village explosion posed a question critical to the legacy of that decade: why did these well-off, college-educated young people and civil rights activists make the decision to embrace deadly violence?
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The answer to this question is embedded in the dynamics and culture of Sixties radicalism and the New Left more generally. It is clear that many young people—including those who would become the Weathermen—were intensely disillusioned with America and its institutions. The 1962 Port Huron Statement, in many ways the foundational document of SDS, lamented that “the declaration ‘all men are created equal…’ rang hollow before the facts of Negro life in the South and the big cities of the North.”[2] What had once been sacred to generations of Americans now appeared to be empty promises. But two other, less well-recognized factors led from disillusionment to violence. First, the student groups of the Sixties failed to articulate a clear vision of their aims and means. This tactical and theoretical confusion made it easier for an insurrectionary few to decide that the “classic guerrilla strategy of the Viet Cong” was the path to change in the United States.[3] Second, the radical wings of SDS failed to establish strong connections to a broader movement. Their isolation from mass civil rights organizations and from organized labor helped breed and popularize violent ideology at the fringes of student movements. In all, the Weathermen’s turn to futile, self-defeating violence was a product of their outright rejection of mid-century America combined with the New Left’s lack of clear goals and their failure to connect to larger organizations and movements.
The Sixties didn’t have to end in futile violence—after all, the decade started during the rise of nonviolent protest in American activism. On the afternoon of February 1, 1960, Ezell Blair Jr. (now Jibreel Khazan), Franklin McCain, Joseph McNeil, and David Richmond, Black students at North Carolina A&T College, sat down at the local Woolworth’s lunch counter and asked to be served. The white staff and manager refused. But the “Greensboro Four” refused to leave their seats.[4] They came back the next day alongside more students, and very quickly they realized they had started a movement. Two months later, sit-ins like theirs had been held in 54 Southern cities.[5] The peaceful sit-in campaign that followed turned nonviolent demonstrations by young people, Black and white, into a national event, forming the beginnings of the Sixties student protest culture.[6]
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SDS had started as a peaceful and even optimistic organization, part of a variety of connected movements on and off college campuses around the country. Starting in 1962, at the first national convention, SDS became a leading voice on the student left.[7] In these early years its leaders articulated the optimistic vision many progressive, middle-class students had for America’s future. SDS would go on to organize many of the first anti-war protests around the country: the March on Washington in April 1965 and the International Days of Protest that October, for example, both drew tens of thousands of participants.[8]
Another organization felt so strongly about nonviolence that it named itself the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). SNCC represented young people’s hope and belief that nonviolent direct action could break the systems of racism and racial apartheid, first with the freedom riders of 1961 and later the “Freedom Summer” of 1964. Voter registration and the formation of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party soon became their main priority. During “Freedom Summer,” the majority-Black SNCC and northern white volunteers endured brutal segregationist violence. One historian writes that “three volunteers were killed, four shot and wounded, fifty-two beaten, and 250 arrested in connection with the project.”[9] Southern whites committed still more violence against Black Mississipians, but SNCC managed nonetheless to enroll 100,000 voters in time for the Democratic National Convention. Despite the risks of direct action, SNCC’s early years were marked by a certain idealism. “Love is the central motif of nonviolence,” argued the founding statement.[10] James Forman, the organization’s executive chairman throughout most of the decade, said that SNCC was a “a band of brothers standing in a circle of love.”[11] In this way, the movement embodied the optimism of the early-to-mid-Sixties.
In some ways, what paved the way for the later years of the decade was the Free Speech movement at Berkeley. Using experiences brought back from Mississippi, student activists such as Mario Savio and Jack Weinberg led protests against the administration’s decision to close a central area of campus to political speech.[12] In the most famous episode, students surrounded a police car containing Weinberg for 32 hours. This more direct confrontation with the law helped encourage growing combativeness at campuses across the country. As one protester shouted at the 1968 Columbia University uprising: “Berkeley started it, Columbia will finish it!”[13] “Berkeley East,” as some called it, marked a further escalation of student protest. In response to Columbia’s expansion into the poor Black community in Harlem and to the school’s membership in the counterinsurgent Institute for Defense Analysis, a thousand students occupied and “liberated” buildings across campus.[14] Although they were soon forced out in brutal fashion by police, the occupation created a national frenzy. Tom Hayden—one of the most famous student radicals and the intellectual force behind the Port Huron Statement—wrote that after Columbia, violence “could not be ignored as an option” and that the movement had moved “from symbolic civil disobedience to barricaded resistance.”[15] By the end of the Sixties, the conditions were ripe for a small group to take revolution into their own hands.
College students and young people in the Sixties became disenchanted with what were seen as American ideals—and this bitterness and anger made possible the explosive ideology of the Weathermen, later known as the Weather Underground. The disenchantment of a generation was visible even in the 1962 national convention of SDS and its famous Port Huron Statement, which opened: “We are people of this generation, bred in at least modest comfort, housed now in universities, looking uncomfortably to see the world we inherit.”[16] The Statement went on to note that its authors’ “uncomfort” was based on their discovery of the wrongs of segregation during the civil rights movement. Having been brought up to believe in the essential goodness of America, the realization that millions of Americans were still oppressed, degraded, and dehumanized was a shock and a betrayal. The other main factor the statement cited was the then-ongoing threat of nuclear annihilation. “The enclosing fact of the Cold War, symbolized by the presence of the Bomb, brought awareness that we ourselves, and our friends, and millions of abstract ‘others’… might die at any time.”[17] Let down by the older generation of politicians and statesmen, the fear of “the Bomb” added a sense of urgency to every movement young people participated in.
Jim Mellen was an SDS revolutionary and a Marxist throughout the Sixties, a professor and a history PhD, who also became one of the founding Weathermen.[18] He recalls being first drawn to counterculture and radical politics through another channel: the Beatniks of San Francisco: “What the beatniks were saying about the hollowness of American life, the deadliness of a career and a house in the suburbs... all that excited me.”[19] That commonly-held belief in the “hollowness in American life” undergirded the Weathermen’s transition from university students to revolutionaries.
Bill Ayers, former school organizer and an original member of the Weathermen, was another middle-class convert to radicalism. In a 2016 interview with Truthout, Ayers said: “I was coming out of this cushy safe suburban environment and suddenly I was looking around at a world in flames and I was trying to figure out who am I in the midst of this.”[20] Far before they became Weathermen, Ayers and people like him felt that the American ideals had failed and that something had to be done about it.
The experiences of the New Left’s attempts at reform led many students to believe meaningful reform was impossible within the system. The “sit-ins, registration of voters, freedom rides” hadn’t challenged the basic assumptions of their society: market capitalism, racism, and the power of the middle and upper class.[21] Even the Democratic Party, the party of the New Deal and the future vehicle of the Great Society, seemed hopelessly moderate at best and a bastion of the ruling class at worst. Lyndon Johnson’s refusal to give the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party seats at the 1964 Democratic National Convention in Atlantic City drove SDS to the left and gave young radicals reason to believe nonviolent strategies were impotent when faced with real political power.[22] It also widened the split between student leftists and mainstream liberals. As historian and former student activist Todd Gitlin, who was president of SDS at the time of the convention, wrote, “for SNCC and its supporters, including SDS, Atlantic City flashed the testament: Moment of Truth. The very name became synonymous with liberal betrayal.”[23]
Atlantic City drove the student movement outside of establishment politics. In May 1965, the SDS Bulletin recognized “the critical importance of the Freedom Democratic Party” even after the failure at the convention, yet refocused on the possibilities for the movement outside establishment politics.
That the FDP delegates would not accept token compromise at the Atlantic City convention was a shock to the manipulators of the system and a step toward proving the effectiveness of grass roots organization outside of the power structure… Faith in local organization and independent activity must not be displaced by the proclaimed intentions of legislators. The history of the Negro in America offers ample evidence of this fact. Legislation can be evaded; genuine change, which the challange [sic] demands, cannot be.[24]
Being outside of the “power structure” was a necessary step that let SDS and the New Left organize independently, without reliance on moderates. On the other hand, it opened up the possibility of stepping even farther out of tradition—as the Weathermen later would. Additionally, the final sentence begged the question: what was genuine change? Especially after SDS radicals embraced Black nationalism in the late Sixties, “genuine change” might have come to mean violence, bombings, riots—anything but “legislation” or traditional reform through establishment processes. Either way, members of SDS evidently came to believe that the earlier tactics and participation in the normal political process were futile after the denial of the Freedom Democratic Party.
In 1970, after a four-day long protest and riot organized by Weathermen known as the “Days of Rage,” the organization went underground. According to the New York Times, they “virtually disappeared from sight, severing their contacts with many radical groups. Weathermen are reputed to be operating in small groups in several cities and are believed by many to be preparing for terrorist activity.”[25] The group’s first public communication afterwards, Communique #1, was a recording made by founding member Bernardine Dohrn, featuring the phrase: “the alienation and contempt that young people have for this country has created the ocean for this revolution.”[26] “Alienation” and “contempt” are not feelings that often lead to reform and compromise. Instead, they lend a window into the passionate hatred that the Weathermen felt towards the United States, which they saw as the imperial perpetrator of injustice and atrocity throughout the world.
What convinced radicals of America’s imperial position was the horrific violence of the United States military in Vietnam. In a 1982 interview with Phil Donahue, Dohrn defended the Weathermen: “This is the most violent society that’s ever existed… Some people have the luxury of having other people carry out their violence for them.”[27] In the context of the Vietnam War, the violence carried out by the American government made that of the Weathermen puny by comparison. A 1969 statement of the Weathermen’s ideology and program, titled “You Don’t Need a Weatherman to Know Which Way the Wind Blows,” after the Bob Dylan lyric, cited the brutality of Vietnam as a catalyst for their turn to violence:
And the war against Vietnam is not “the heroic war against the Nazis”; it’s the big lie, with napalm burning through everything we had heard this country stood for. Kids begin to ask questions... people no longer merely want the plastic ’50s restored, but glimpse an alternative (like inside the Columbia buildings) and begin to fight for it. We don’t want teachers to be more kindly cops; we want to smash cops, and build a new life.[28]
This was a time when millions of Vietnamese were killed and hundreds of thousands of American soldiers were in the field, when atrocities like My Lai were being revealed to the public. Those who would become the Weathermen felt that violence was justified against the perpetrator of these acts, the United States; the nation that Bill Ayers, admiringly quoting Martin Luther King Jr., calls the “biggest purveyor of violence on earth.”[29]
In 1974, the Weather Underground issued Prairie Fire: The Politics of Revolutionary Anti-Imperialism, a tract written by the group as a whole to express its “politics and collective efforts” and to describe its strategy for fostering “anti-imperialism and revolution inside the imperial US.”[30] They wrote “We stood up and defied propriety, the state and the law, in street demonstrations and outrageous actions. Militant confrontation politics transformed us, we broke with a powerless past.”[31] The defining institutions of the postwar world were “propriety, the state and the law”—and the Weather Underground’s in many ways rightful disillusionment with those supposedly bedrock principles planted the seeds of violent discontent. Prairie Fire’s authors even disparaged peaceful protest and disobedience, the famous tactics of the civil rights movement, as “powerless,” hopelessly antiquated, and insufficiently radical. Ultimately, their disenchantment with all of the American tradition, even with the old American left, left them adrift with very little but contempt for the country and its oft-neglected ideals.
At odds with mainstream America, the problems of disenchanted student groups were compounded by an inability or an unwillingness to outline specific goals and acceptable means towards those goals. According to James Gilbert in Partisan Review, the lack of a theoretical basis for New Left politics was caused by “a revulsion to the rigid ideology of the past as much as the uneven development of a new radical tradition with roots in a middle class student movement.”[32] Either way, the absence of a strong foundation for their radical ideas opened the door to violence. And to make the connection, the New Left’s absolute abhorrence for everything “old,” for the institutions of America and for the old radical tradition, left them without a base to build a “new.” Without a “new,” they were reduced to simply destroying the old—hence the ruinous bomb-making of the Weathermen.
The lack of theoretical cohesion of the New Left damaged its ability to organize and direct the various groups that constituted it—primarily SDS, SNCC, and the Free Speech Movement.[33] The Weathermen, first as a competing faction of SDS and later as its own splinter group, descended out of this absence of centrality—as well as out of the exhaustion with reform that poor organization breeds. No one group ever controlled, directed, or even encompassed the student movement and its “basically spontaneous” character; instead, it was made up out of many groups bound only to the ideological whims of their constituents.[34] The lack of centralization lent the New Left an unpredictable nature, prone to factions and fringe ideas like those of the Weathermen.
Winifred Breines, paraphrasing Jim Miller’s book Democracy is in the Streets, wrote that the classic SDS belief in participatory democracy was ill-defined and contradictory.[35] Participatory democracy, as Breines wrote, “implied a democratic experimentalism that encouraged spontaneity, imagination, and risk.”[36] But this never-clarified idea caused confusion and conflict within the organization. The idea that individuals or small groups could take up the mantle of “spontaneity, imagination, and risk” and thereby virtuously represent democracy provided a dangerous justification when those small groups spontaneously started building bombs.
The Weathermen’s lack of substance other than violence came under fire even from other radicals. Daniel Berrigan was a radical Jesuit priest who himself became an underground fugitive after taking and setting fire to draft records. He later served multiple years in prison. But in 1969, he wrote a sorrowful letter to the Weathermen criticizing their tendency to jump to violence.[37] In that letter, he wrote:
The history of the movement in the last years, it seems to me, shows how constantly and easily we are seduced by violence, not as a method but as an end in itself. With very little politics, very little ethics, very little direction and only a minimum of moral sense, if any at all, it might lead one to conclude in despair: the movement is debased beyond recognition. I can’t be a part of it.[38]
In the end, the confusion and unclear ideas of the New Left gave way to no ideas at all.
New Left student organizations—SDS in particular—also failed to develop connections to a broader American leftist movement that could have provided an ideological tether. Although SDS was descended from Old Left organizations, Old and New split in 1960 over SDS’s increasingly radical tendencies.[39] The most socialist-oriented out of the major Sixties student groups, SDS suffered from the lack of a supportive labor movement that could help contain its fringe, violent tendencies. By 1960, the main U.S. labor unions had purged their communist members. Virtually no communists remained in unions and organized labor had turned towards business unionism, away from politics. The AFL-CIO, for one, was staunchly anti-communist, essentially adhering to the Cold War mentality of the State Department.[40] If unions ventured into the domestic political sphere at all, it was as middle-of-the-road campaign boosters for the Democratic Party—far from the cutting edge of student activism.[41]
Certainly by the late Sixties, radical leaders had no interest in doing politics with more traditional civil rights or labor organizations, and vice versa. Maybe the area with the greatest disagreement between radicals and labor was the Vietnam War. AFL-CIO leadership backed the war—supporting Nixon’s invasion of Cambodia and reescalation in 1970—even after the public had turned against the war. Labor leaders even directly cooperated with the war effort. Between 1960 and 1968, the AFL-CIO funneled $20 million of federal government money to anti-communist unions in Vietnam.[42] While students blasted “the Machine” and the horrors of the war, organized labor was a key cog in that machine, leaving it little room for a strategic alliance with the new radicals.
Given the opposite positions, there was never any chance for student movements to find a sympathetic ally in organized labor—and by the mid-Sixties they didn’t want to find one, either. Gitlin notes that for the New Left, “Atlantic City discredited the politics of coalition—between militants in the liberal-labor establishment, between whites and blacks, between youth and elders.”[43] Once again, the disappointment of the 1964 Democratic Party convention had far-reaching ramifications. Looking at what they saw as betrayal, student radicals understandably moved away from the idea of joining with liberal groups—civil rights, labor, and political organizations alike. Yet this decision also deprived them of access to organizational experience, power, and in many ways the mass base that they needed.
The isolation of the New Left was worsened by some of its members’ insistence that youth be given primacy in protest movements. Jerry Rubin of the Yippies wrote that race, gender, and class were secondary to what he called “generational conflict.” “The most important political conflict in the United States today,” he said, “is the generational conflict.” As Rubin saw it, “generational war…cuts across class and race lines.”[44] And although Rubin was more of a countercultural icon than a student activist, he echoed the words of Bill Ayers. “Bring the revolution home,” the latter urged, “kill your parents, that’s where it's really at.”[45] The shocking language and condescension toward other struggles served to alienate potential allies and other activists more generally.
It was not just certain student radicals’ language, but their increasingly hostile and violent politics, that alienated committed revolutionaries. During the Days of Rage in Chicago—which the Weathermen believed would be a “guerrilla raid on the city” and an “all-out assault on the police and the National Guard”—Fred Hampton, chair of the Illinois Black Panther Party, gave a scathing speech chastising the rioters.[46] In that address, he focused mainly on the destructive tendencies that divided them from potential allies, calling their “fondness for violence” “anarchistic, opportunistic, adventuristic.”[47] Hampton was no pacifist: in another speech just a month later at Northern Illinois University, he quoted Mao Tse-Tung’s famous adage, saying, “We know that political power flows from the barrel of a gun.”[48] The Weathermen’s violence was so sporadic, so without purpose, that they isolated themselves from those who should have been their revolutionary allies.
While the futility and counterproductive nature of Weathermen violence seemed clear to other revolutionary leaders at the time, the Weathermen themselves thought otherwise. They styled themselves as guerrillas and clandestine freedom fighters. Communique #1 from the Weather Underground—published after their failure in the Days of Rage—announced that “Now we are adapting the classic guerrilla strategy of the Viet Cong and the urban guerrilla strategy of the Tupamaros to our own situation here in the most technically advanced country in the world.”[49] Instead of drawing upon the long American radical tradition, which might have been expected to produce the strategy most fitted for American conditions, the Weathermen turned to guerrilla groups of the third world—hardly likely to be good strategy in what they acknowledged was the “most technically advanced country in the world.” In the process, they betrayed their own lack of connection even to other American radicals.
Bizarrely, the Weather Underground’s imitation of third world guerrilla armies wasn’t only counterproductive, it was opposed by Vietnamese revolutionaries—the very people they were emulating. Mark Rudd, president of the SDS chapter at Columbia during the 1968 occupation and one of the founding Weathermen, traveled to Cuba in the late Sixties to learn from the Cuban Revolution. There, Rudd met with Vietnamese communists who told him that the most useful thing he could do in America was build a wide-ranging coalition against the war. Instead, he did the opposite. The Weathermen isolated themselves and shrunk down to an organization of only about 200 members. Rudd says “We didn’t want to build a broad antiwar movement… We wanted to jump many, many steps. Instead of building the base, we just wanted to go forward.”[50] Rudd was told this before Columbia, before the Weathermen, before he was committed to violence. Given the choice of adding to their numbers and building a movement, which would have required tempering their hardcore revolutionary ideas, SDS in the late Sixties chose to “move forward.” The organization ignored the role that non-revolutionary protestors had in the successes at Columbia and in the civil rights movement and instead walled themselves in, drifting farther and farther away from the realities of the world around them.
Such isolation was deepened by the student movement’s avowed enemies. On July 4, 1968, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover ordered the infiltration of New Left groups through the FBI’s counterintelligence project, COINTELPRO. Later, during the 1974 Congressional investigation of the illegal program, the FBI admitted to “2,370 COINTELPRO operations, usually involving the planting of informants on college and university campuses to undermine and discredit 1960s student movements.”[51] At LSU New Orleans campus, paid informant Harry Schafer became the head of the local SDS chapter, where the FBI ordered him to use his position to violently provoke the university. For example, in 1971 he pushed warymembers to attack New Orleans hotels, homes, and businesses, calling on students to frighten the “rich pigs”.[52] Situations like these occurred across the country, pushing leftist organizations farther and farther into extremism and violence.
The tragedy of the Weathermen is that their movement was, in many ways, right about America’s ills. The United States was in fact rife with gross inequality, racism, and injustice. American imperialism was responsible for the countless deaths of foreign “enemies,” civilians, and our own soldiers; even the suburban dream, the supposed ideal of the mid-century era, was built upon white flight from the industrial city centers and damaging, sexist assumptions about family life. But in frustration, despair, and chaos, the Weathermen turned to violence—a move that, in addition to its immorality, was simply poor strategy. They significantly damaged whatever sympathy the public had for them and ended any possibility that the student left would be a continued force for change. As such, the experience of the Weathermen and the demise of the Sixties protest movements gives student activists of the twenty-first century a model of how not to build a social movement. Clear and specific demands, a coherent political and social theory, and connection to larger and more experienced movements—these are useful tenets for current and future generations of progressive youth. Otherwise, radicalism and hope can decay into cynical, sporadic, and arbitrary violence, with fatal consequences to activists, onlookers, and the movement as a whole.
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Footnotes
[1] John Kifner, "That's what the Weathermen are supposed to be..," New York Times (New York, NY), January 4, 1970, accessed April 1, 2023, https://www.nytimes.com/1970/01/04/archives/thats-what-the-westhermen-are-supposed-to-be-vandals-in-the-mother.html?searchResultPosition=142.
[2] Douglas Robinson, “Bombs, Dynamite and Woman's Body Found in Ruins of 11th St. Townhouse,” New York Times (New York, NY), March 11, 1970, accessed February 26, 2023, https://www.nytimes.com/1970/03/11/archives/bombs-dynamite-and-womans-body-found-in-ruins-of-11th-st-townhouse.html?smid=url-share.
[3] “Student for a Democratic Society, 1966-1970, Item 29,” JSTOR, last modified 1966,01,01, https://jstor.org/stable/community.32711129.
[4] Bernadine Dohrn, Communiqué #1 from the Weatherman Underground (1970), accessed December 15, 2022, https://socialhistoryportal.org/sites/default/files/raf/0419700521.pdf.
[5] “February 1960: A Half-Century Ago, Black College Students Sparked the Civil Rights Movement,” The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education, no. 66 (2009), http://www.jstor.org/stable/20722143.
[6] Timothy N. Thurber, “February One: The Story of the Greensboro Four,” OAH Magazine of History 20, no. 1 (2006): 1, http://www.jstor.org/stable/25162015.
[7] Terry H. Anderson, The Movement and the Sixties (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 45.
[8] Caitlin M. Casey, “New Left,” in Encyclopedia of U.S. Political History, ed. Thomas S. Langston (Washington, DC: CQ Press, 2010), 6, https://link-gale-com.hopkins.idm.oclc.org/apps/doc/CX1364500080/GVRL?u=s0936&sid=bookmark-GVRL&xid=c1b81769.
[9] James P. O'Brien, “The Development of the New Left,” The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 395 (1971): 20, http://www.jstor.org/stable/1038572.
[10] R. Edward Nordhaus, “S. N. C. C. and the Civil Rights Movement in Mississippi, 1963-64: A Time of Change,” The History Teacher 17, no. 1 (1983): 97-98, https://doi.org/10.2307/493225.
[11] Statement of Purpose (Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, 1962), accessed March 31, 2023, http://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/pds/maai3/protest/text2/snccstatementofpurpose.pdf.
[12] Todd Gitlin, The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage (New York: Bantam, 1993), 107.
[13] Gitlin, The Sixties, 163.
[14] James L. Wood, “Remembering the Free Speech Movement: Notes of an Observer,” Sociological Focus 13, no. 3 (1980): 180-184, http://www.jstor.org/stable/20831159.
[15] Eleanor Raskin, “The Occupation of Columbia University: April 1968,” Journal of American Studies 19, no. 2 (1985): 256-258, http://www.jstor.org/stable/27554595.
[16] Anderson, The Movement, 201.
[17] “Student for a Democratic.”
[18] Ibid.
[19] Milton Viorst, Fire in the Streets: America in the 1960s (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1981), 469-472.
[20] Ibid.
[21] Bill Ayers, “We Only Move Forward When We Demand the Impossible: An Interview With Bill Ayers,” by Alice Kim, Truthout, last modified October 2, 2016, accessed April 1, 2023, https://truthout.org/articles/we-only-move-forward-when-we-demand-the-impossible-an-interview-with-bill-ayers/.
[22] Stuart Daniels, “The Weathermen,” Government and Opposition 9, no. 4 (1974): 432, http://www.jstor.org/stable/44482282.
[23] Ibid.
[24] Gitlin, The Sixties, 161.
[25] Bruce Schmeichen, “The Mississippi Challenge,” SDS Bulletin, May 1965, 3-4, https://jstor.org/stable/community.28044415.
[26] John Kifner, “A Radical 'Declaration' Warns Of an Attack by Weathermen,” The New York Times (New York, NY), May 25, 1970, accessed December 15, 2022, https://www.nytimes.com/1970/05/25/archives/a-radical-declaration-warns-of-an-attack-by-weathermen.html.
[27] Dohrn, Communiqué #1 from the Weather Underground.
[28] "Donahue - “Weather Underground' (Raw Interview Footage, 1982),” video, 7:16, Youtube, posted by The Museum of Classic Chicago Television, February 15, 2019, accessed April 2, 2023, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pfYMhsboj4A.
[29] Karin Ashley et al., “You don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows,” New Left Notes, June 18, 1969, 5, accessed April 2, 2023, https://archive.org/details/NewLeftNotesJune181969/page/n7/mode/2up.
[30] “Part 6: Bill Ayers discusses the radicalization of the anti-war movement as well as himself.,” video, 4:56, Michigan in the World, posted March 26, 2015, accessed April 2, 2023, http://michiganintheworld.history.lsa.umich.edu/antivietnamwar/exhibits/show/interviews/bill_ayers/ayers_part2.
[31] Prairie Fire: The Politics of Revolutionary Anti-Imperialism (Prairie Fire Distributing Committee, 1974), accessed March 27, 2023, https://www.sds-1960s.org/PrairieFire-reprint.pdf.
[32] Prairie Fire, 7.
[33] James Gilbert, “The Left Young and Old,” Partisan Review, 1969, 352.
[34] Daniels, “The Weathermen,” 431.
[35] O'Brien, “The Development,” 24.
[36] Winifred Breines, “Whose New Left?,” The Journal of American History 75, no. 2 (1988): 532-533, https://doi.org/10.2307/1887869.
[37] Ibid.
[38] Daniel Lewis, “Daniel J. Berrigan, Defiant Priest Who Preached Pacifism, Dies at 94,” New York Times (New York, NY), April 30, 2016, Obituaries, accessed March 28, 2023, https://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/01/nyregion/daniel-j-berrigan-defiant-priest-who-preached-pacifism-dies-at-94.html.
[39] Daniels, “The Weathermen,” 444.
[40] Michael Daniel Goodnough, “Students for a Democratic Society (SDS),” in Opposition to War: An Encyclopedia of U.S. Peace and Antiwar Movements, ed. Mitchell K. Hall (Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 2018), https://link-gale-com.hopkins.idm.oclc.org/apps/doc/CX7418500317/GVRL?u=s0936&sid=bookmark-GVRL&xid=3b51d253.
[41] Andrew Battista, “Political Divisions in Organized Labor, 1968-1988,” Polity 24, no. 2 (1991): 175, https://doi.org/10.2307/3235037.
[42] John Godard, “The Exceptional Decline of the American Labor Movement,” ILR Review 63, no. 1 (2009): 88, http://www.jstor.org/stable/25594545.
[43] Battista, “Political Divisions,” 175-176.
[44] Gitlin, The Sixties, 161.
[45] Lewis S. Feuer, “Student Unrest in the United States,” The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 404 (1972): 176, http://www.jstor.org/stable/1038674.
[46] Ibid.
[47] Viorst, Fire in the Streets, 495-497.
[48] Ibid.
[49] Fred Hampton, “It's a Class Struggle, Goddamnit!,” speech presented at Northern Illinois University, November 1969, Hampton, last modified August 30, 2020, accessed March 28, 2023, https://www.hamptonthink.org/read/its-a-class-struggle-goddammit-fred-hampton.
[50] Dohrn, Communiqué #1 from the Weather Underground.
[51] Mark Rudd, “Mark Rudd's Lessons From SDS and the Weather Underground for Today's Radicals,” interview by Micah Uetricht, Jacobin, last modified March 29, 2021, accessed April 1, 2023, https://jacobin.com/2021/03/mark-rudd-interview-lessons-sds-weather-underground.
[52] Gregory DuhÉ, “The FBI and Students for a Democratic Society at the University of New Orleans, 1968-1971,” Louisiana History: The Journal of the Louisiana Historical Association 43, no. 1 (2002): 53, http://www.jstor.org/stable/4233812.
[53] DuhÉ, “The FBI and Students,” 70.