Weather Underground

The Weather Underground grew out of Students for a Democratic Society — the largest white left student organization in American history, which had grown to 100,000 members by 1969 before fragmenting under the pressure of the Vietnam War, the assassinations of King and Robert Kennedy, and intensifying state repression of the civil rights and antiwar movements. The faction that became the Weathermen took its name from a Bob Dylan lyric: "You don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows."

The founding document, written primarily by Bill Ayers, Bernardine Dohrn, Mark Rudd, and Jeff Jones, argued that the white American left had failed — that while Black and Third World revolutionaries were fighting and dying, white radicals were holding teach-ins and marching on permit. The Weathermen argued for "bringing the war home": armed resistance in the United States, in solidarity with the Vietnamese, in solidarity with the Black liberation movement, directed at the institutions of American power rather than at people.

The fracture from SDS was formalized at the organization's 1969 national convention in Chicago, where the Weathermen and the SDS's Revolutionary Youth Movement II faction fought for control of the organization and effectively destroyed it. The largest white student organization in American history ceased to function as a national force within weeks.

The Weathermen's first major action was the Days of Rage — four days of street fighting in Chicago in October 1969, timed to coincide with the Chicago Eight trial. They expected thousands. Approximately 300 people came. They ran through the streets of Chicago's Gold Coast neighborhood in helmets, smashing car windows and storefront glass. Chicago police beat them, arrested them, and charged them. The action cost the organization enormous amounts in bail money and demonstrated the gap between their revolutionary self-conception and the actual level of mass support for armed white left action in the United States.

Fred Hampton, who was alive and watching, called it "Custeristic" — a reference to Custer's Last Stand — meaning tactically suicidal and politically disconnected from the Black community the Weathermen claimed to be fighting alongside. It was one of the most precise political assessments made of the organization, by a 21-year-old who understood organizing in a way the Weathermen, for all their theoretical sophistication, did not.

On March 6, 1970, a townhouse at 18 West 11th Street in Greenwich Village, New York, exploded. The building belonged to the father of Weatherman member Cathy Wilkerson. In the basement, members Terry Robbins, Diana Oughton, and Ted Gold had been assembling nail bombs — designed with nails intended to shred human flesh — apparently intended for a dance at Fort Dix, New Jersey, where U.S. soldiers and their dates would be present. The bomb went off prematurely. All three were killed. Wilkerson and Kathy Boudin, who were in the building, escaped.

The townhouse explosion was a turning point. The organization had come within a planning error of carrying out a mass casualty attack. The surviving leadership made a deliberate decision to change the target set: no more actions where people could be killed. Future bombings would target buildings, would be preceded by warnings, and would be timed for when buildings were empty. They kept that commitment for the remainder of their active campaign. Whether the commitment was moral principle or strategic calculation — or both — is a question the participants have answered differently at different times.

After the townhouse explosion, the surviving leadership went underground and reorganized as the Weather Underground Organization. Over the next seven years, they conducted more than 20 bombings. The targets were chosen for symbolic weight and maximum institutional impact with minimum human casualty risk:

Each bombing was accompanied by a communiqué explaining the political rationale. The communiqués were carefully written and widely circulated. They read as a running political commentary on American foreign policy and domestic repression, timed to specific events — the invasion of Laos, the mining of Haiphong harbor, the Chilean coup, the continuation of the Vietnam War. No civilians were killed in any Weather Underground bombing.

The Weather Underground's relationship to the Black liberation movement was central to its self-conception and contradictory in practice. Its founding documents argued that white radicals had an obligation to support Black liberation by fighting the institutions of white power in the United States. After Fred Hampton's assassination in December 1969, the organization issued a declaration of war on the U.S. government, citing Hampton's murder as the direct cause.

In 1970, the Weather Underground broke Timothy Leary — the LSD advocate who had been imprisoned on marijuana charges — out of the California Men's Colony prison, smuggled him out of the country, and delivered him to the Black Panthers' international section in Algiers, where Eldridge Cleaver was based. The operation demonstrated their capacity for complex covert action. It also illustrated the contradictions: the Black Panther leadership was deeply skeptical of white radical politics, and Cleaver and Leary had a famously uncomfortable relationship in Algiers before Leary was placed under house arrest by Cleaver and eventually escaped.

By the mid-1970s, the Weather Underground had effectively severed operational ties with Black liberation organizations. The politics of "white skin privilege" — the argument that white radicals could never be full comrades of Black revolutionaries because they retained structural racial advantages even underground — created fractures within the organization itself. A faction called the May 19th Communist Organization split off to work in direct support of Black liberation organizations. The main organization continued on its own trajectory until surfacing.

The FBI's pursuit of the Weather Underground involved systematic illegal activity — warrantless break-ins, illegal wiretaps, mail openings, and what the bureau called "black bag jobs." When these illegal surveillance methods were exposed during the 1975–76 Church Committee investigations into FBI and CIA abuses, the evidence they had produced became inadmissible. The charges against most Weather Underground members were ultimately dropped — not because the government decided they hadn't committed crimes, but because the government had committed crimes in pursuing them and couldn't use the resulting evidence.

Members began surfacing in the late 1970s. Bernardine Dohrn turned herself in in 1980 and received probation. Bill Ayers surfaced in 1980 — charges against him had been dropped in 1974. Mark Rudd surfaced in 1977. Most received minimal or no prison time. The government's illegal surveillance had, in a deeply ironic outcome, effectively immunized them.

The aftermath was varied. Ayers became a professor of education at the University of Illinois at Chicago and a school reform advocate. Dohrn became a law professor at Northwestern. Both became targets of conservative attacks during Barack Obama's 2008 presidential campaign, when their past association with Obama in Chicago education reform circles was used to suggest Obama was linked to domestic terrorism. Rudd became a community college math teacher in New Mexico. Jeff Jones became an environmental advocate in New York.

A different fraction of the network — those who had moved toward direct support of Black liberation — continued armed action into the 1980s. The 1981 Brinks robbery in Nyack, New York, which killed two police officers and a security guard, involved former Weather Underground members Kathy Boudin and David Gilbert alongside members of the Black Liberation Army. Boudin served 22 years in prison. Gilbert served 40 years before being paroled in 2021 at age 76, following advocacy by his son, Chesa Boudin, who became San Francisco District Attorney.

The Weather Underground's place in American political history is genuinely contested. On one side: they were a small group of mostly white, mostly privileged young people who chose armed action while the people they claimed to be fighting for — Black Americans, Vietnamese — bore the actual costs of the war and repression they were protesting. Their bombings produced no policy changes, ended no war, freed no prisoners, and created political costs for the broader antiwar movement that had to distance itself from them. Fred Hampton was right that it was Custeristic.

On the other side: the institutions they bombed — the Pentagon, the Capitol, police headquarters — were engaged in documented criminal activity on a vast scale, from the illegal bombing of Cambodia to COINTELPRO to the systematic assassination of Black political leaders. The bombings produced no civilian casualties despite seven years of active campaign. The organization's public communiqués, timed to specific government actions, contributed to the documentary record of what the U.S. government was doing domestically and abroad.

What they were not was effective — by any definition that includes actually changing the conditions they claimed to be fighting. The Vietnam War continued for five years after the bombings began. COINTELPRO continued destroying Black organizations. The racial wealth gap continued compounding. The Weather Underground is most useful as a case study in the limits of a politics that mistakes spectacular action for structural change, and the specific ways that white guilt and white privilege can produce a radicalism that is ultimately about the psychological needs of the radicals rather than the material conditions of the people they claim to be serving.