The Weathermen, also known as the Weather Underground Organization, were a US-based, self-described "revolutionary organization of communist men and women" formed by splintered-off members and leaders of the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). The group, together with two small Maoist groups, was originally known as the Revolutionary Youth Movement. When they split-- first from the Maoists, and then from SDS itself-- Weathermen advocated the overthrow of the government of the United States and the system of capitalism; toward that end, they carried out a campaign of bombings, jailbreaks, and riots. The Weathermen were active from 1969 to 1976.

The name of the group derives from the Bob Dylan song "Subterranean Homesick Blues", which featured the lyrics, "You don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows", quoted at the bottom of an influential essay in the SDS newspaper, New Left Notes. By this they meant that anyone could see worldwide revolution was imminent. It appears also that the moniker was used as a rebuke against the Progressive Labor Party, whose Worker Student Alliance (WSA) SDS faction had succeeded in recruiting many SDSers to its ranks and had allegedly co-opted the 1969 Chicago SDS convention.

In October 1969, the Weathermen organized their first event, called the "Days of Rage," in Chicago. The opening salvo in the Days of Rage came on the night of October 6, when they blew up a statue dedicated to police casualties in the 1886 Haymarket Riot. Although the October 8 rally failed to draw as many participants as they had anticipated, the estimated three hundred who did attend shocked police by leading a riot through Chicago's business district, smashing windows and cars. Six people were shot and seventy arrested. Two smaller violent conflicts with police followed the next two nights.

In 1970, following the police raid that resulted in the death of Black Panther Fred Hampton, the group issued a Declaration of War against the United States government, changing its name to the "weather underground organization", adopting fake identities, and pursuing covert activities only. These initially included preparations for a bombing of a US military noncommissioned officers' dance at Fort Dix. But when three Underground members died in an accidental explosion while preparing the bomb in a Greenwich Village, New York City safe house, other cells re-evaluated their plans and decided to pursue only non-lethal projects.

The group released a number of manifestos and declarations while conducting a series of bombings. These attacked the U.S. Capitol, The Pentagon, police and prison buildings, and the rebuilt Haymarket statue again, among other targets. The group took ultimately successful measures to avoid any loss of life as a result of these bombings, issuing warnings to evacuate the building ahead of time via phone. They also took a $25,000 payment from a drugs group called The Brotherhood of Eternal Love to break LSD advocate Timothy Leary out of prison, transporting him to Algeria. They remained largely successful at avoiding the police and the FBI.

In the mid-to-late 1970s, the group began dissolving, as many members turned themselves in to the police, and others moved onto other armed revolutionary groups. Very few served prison sentences, since the evidence gathered against them, by the FBI's COINTELPRO program, was inadmissible in court, due to the illegal methods used to obtain it.

Famous members of the Weather Underground include Kathy Boudin, Mark Rudd , Terry Robbins , David Gilbert, and the still-married couple Bernardine Dohrn and Bill Ayers.

Many former Weathermen have re-integrated into society, without necessarily repudiating their original intent. Bill Ayers, now a Distinguished Professor of Education at the University of Illinois, said in a September 11, 2001 New York Times profile "I don't regret setting bombs [against non-human targets]. I believe we didn't do enough."

The organization was the subject of the Oscar-nominated 2002 documentary The Weather Underground by filmmakers Bill Siegel and Sam Green .

External links

• The Weather Underground, a 2002 documentary directed and produced by Sam Green, Bill Siegel and Carrie Lozano
  • Official site
  • PBS Independent Lens site
  • IMDB entry
• FBI files on Weathermen
• The Weathermen. Entry in the St. James Encyclopedia of Popular Culture.

Further reading

Osawatomie. Water Buffalo Print Collective. [Journal of the Weather Underground Organization]. Seattle. 1975.