Weather Underground Organization: Bombings, Leaders, Members, Movement, Radical Group – Compilation

The Weather Underground was a radical left wing militant organization first active in 1969, founded on the Ann Arbor campus of the University of Michigan. Listen to an audiobook on the Weather Underground for free: https://www.amazon.com/gp/search?ie=UTF8&tag=tra0c7-20&linkCode=ur2&linkId=72cf442f293aa9c43f5d1803934cd95a&camp=1789&creative=9325&index=books&keywords=weather%20underground%20audiobook

Originally known as the Weathermen, the group was organized as a faction of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) national leadership.[2] 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 American imperialism.

The FBI described the WUO as a domestic terrorist group,[3] 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”. 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.

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”.

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.[137][138][139] The group also fell under the auspices 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.[140] 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.[141]

Ayers objected to describing the WUO as terrorist 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.”[142] Dan Berger asserts in Outlaws in 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.”[143]

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 town house explosion. “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.”

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weather_Underground

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