It is commonplace for historians to imagine a “good 1960s”—one typified by the triumphs of the civil rights movement, the 1967 Summer of Love, the emergence of women’s, queer, and Black liberation movements, and the 1969 Woodstock summer music festival. In this paradigm, after Woodstock come the “bad 1960s”—a period marked by social, political, and state violence.
But a close look at Weatherman, a faction of SDS that pledged itself to militant violence in support of the Black freedom struggle in the United States, confounds that model. Activists like Bernardine Dohrn, a law student at the University of Chicago, and Bill Ayers, an early childhood teacher and undergraduate at the University of Michigan, entered the struggle because of the appeal of the “good 1960s”—only to find that the ideals of the nonviolent civil rights and anti-war movements could not be realized in the face of domestic forces, and a United States government, opposed to change.
Initially in support of the Black Panthers, Weatherman provoked violent clashes with the police, and blew things up—a period that was punctuated by five activists setting off a device by mistake in a townhouse on 11th street in Greenwich Village, New York. Three activists were killed and two escaped: Weatherman then disappeared, became the Weather Underground, vowed to not take lives again, and declared war on the United States government.
Over a decade later, these activists began to surface. Some were arrested, some rejoined society, some were killed and many of them had children whose early years were spent moving between safe houses, remembering new names, and keeping an eye out for the police.
Now, the Weather Kids and Panther Cubs are starting to tell their stories. One of them is Zayd Ayers Dohrn, one of three brothers raised by Bernardine Dohrn and Bill Ayers. He dropped in to Political Junkie to talk about his new book, Dangerous, Dirty, Violent, and Young: A Fugitive Family in the Revolutionary Underground (W.W. Norton, 2026).
New York City firefighters at the scene of bomb explosion in Greenwich Village on March 6, 1970. The bomb exploded while being assembled by members of the Weathermen Underground. Photo credit: Steven Denenberg/Wikimedia Commons
Today’s theme is Backseat Fuse by The Revolution. You can hear the voices of many of the people Zayd interviews on his podcast, “Mother Country Radicals,” (Crooked Media, 2022.) This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity
Claire Potter: Zayd, your new book, Dangerous, Dirty, Violent and Young, tells a personal history of the Weather Underground. You started with a wonderful podcast you did called Mother Country Radicals (Crooked Media, 2022).
Can you just talk to our listeners about what inspired you to do this research on your family and on the political events that they were enmeshed in?
Zayd Ayers Dohrn: It’s a personal story for me. I grew up underground when my parents were fugitives. I’ve thought about the story a lot. I’ve talked to my parents about it a lot. But I never wrote about it. In fact, I’ve been a professional writer for 20 years and never really touched my parents’ story.
I think what inspired that first version, the podcast, was during the pandemic, my theater and film projects were stalled. I was separated from my parents and they were getting older. And I was just kind of wanting to have conversations thought maybe it was a last chance to talk to people who I’m separated from. And so, I started recording our phone calls first, and then our in-person conversations.
At the same time, of course, during the pandemic, we had George Floyd’s murder; Ferguson was a couple of years before that. It was the first Trump administration. You had this sort of cascading sense that we were facing authoritarianism, racism, Christian nationalism in a way that maybe hadn’t been seen since the 1960s and 1970s.
I just found myself suddenly very eager to think about how do people resist that kind of fascist takeover? How have people tried to challenge an out-of-control law enforcement apparatus and a Justice Department gone rogue and all those kinds of things.
Those conversations became the podcast. Then, through a very weird series of events, I realized I hadn’t told the full story—and that became the book.
Your parents, Bernardine Dohrn and Bill Ayers, were involved in social movements: Bernardine when she was at the University of Chicago, Bill when he was at the University of Michigan. They became activists long before they become a couple, or your parents.
What caused each of them to become more and more radicalized? Because lots of people didn’t. Lots of people marched and then they went home, or they went into the Peace Corps or something like that. But your parents decided to fight. Why?
A big part of the book is devoted to trying to understand exactly that. As you said, when we think about the 1960s now, there’s this mythology that all college students were radical and that resisting the war and resisting racism were the default mode. But of course, they weren’t. Especially in the early days of the 1960s, it was very uncommon, especially for white people, to be out there protesting against police racism, for example.
My parents took different trajectories. My mother was a law student at the University of Chicago when Dr. King showed up in that city to lead the rent strike against housing discrimination and exploitation by racist slumlords. And my mom volunteered as a sort of legal observer and started working for the civil rights movement.
A couple of years later, Dr. King was killed, of course, and that really sent her on a different trajectory: away from the politics of nonviolence and into a more radical and confrontational stance. She became the leader of a group called Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). Through that group, she became involved with Fred Hampton and the Chicago Black Panthers, what Fred called the Rainbow Coalition of activist groups. They were fighting for a more just society through more confrontational street protests.
Then, Fred Hampton was murdered. So, I think my mom’s radicalization really took the form of following Black mentors in the Black freedom movement, then watching them killed by racist vigilantes and by the state.
My father was at the University of Michigan where he became an anti-war activist. Like a lot of young men, he was radicalized by the draft and that brought him to Chicago to join SDS. Then, he followed my mother when she broke with SDS and formed Weatherman.
So eventually, they became allies and comrades and eventually a couple. But as you say, it was really two separate trajectories that merged in our family.
