Bombs, blackmail and wire-taps: how I spent my childhood on the run from the FBI – The Guardian

I was born underground. When I was a kid, my parents were on the run from the FBI and my mom, Bernardine Dohrn, was on the US governments 10 Most Wanted List. J Edgar Hoover called her The most dangerous woman in America.

My parents never hid any of this from me. I knew, from when I was three or four, that we used fake names. I knew we moved around a lot, made calls from public phones, and paid for everything in cash. I knew somebody was chasing us, but didnt know what FBI meant why they, or it, wanted to catch us or what would happen if they did.

As I grew up, I learned my parents were leaders of the Weather Underground organisation, a militant leftwing group that carried out a series of bombings in the 1970s as a protest against the war in Vietnam, as well as police violence against Black people in the US.

When I was four, my parents turned themselves in after more than a decade underground. Most of the charges against them had been dropped due to government misconduct the FBI had illegally wire-tapped their friends and relatives, searched their apartments without warrants and even plotted using kidnapping and blackmail to catch them. Nonetheless, my mom still went to jail when I was five for refusing to testify against her friends and former comrades.

Some of my earliest memories are of visiting her behind bars, sneaking pocket-sized books past the metal detectors so she could read to me; and, later, visiting other radicals serving long prison sentences. Many had children my age; one of those kids, Chesa Boudin, became my adopted brother.

So I have thought a lot about the consequences of radicalism. About the damage extremist violence can do to a country or a society, and to the loved ones of political combatants on both sides.

I dont have the political certainty of my parents which is why Im a writer, not an activist. But Im interested in the messy tangle of personal and political forces that motivate people to risk their lives and families to try to change the world. So, over the past few years, Ive been writing a documentary podcast series, Mother Country Radicals, which is both a family memoir and a wider history of the revolutionary underground a story that turns out to be more dramatic and surprising than I ever imagined, and holds important lessons for today about what radicalises people, and how activists can fight creatively for political change.

As I was conducting interviews for the podcast, the murder of George Floyd provoked uprisings across the US. They came with a predictable reactionary response: white paramilitary vigilantes, such as the Proud Boys, the Patriot Front, and Kyle Rittenhouse preparing to defend their neighbourhoods from urban lawlessness and imaginary immigrant caravans and far-left Antifa hordes.

It stood in distinct contrast to something I came across during my research: the critical and complicated connection between Black and white revolutionaries in bygone decades. Members of the Weather Underground and the Black Panther Party (BBP) (and later, the BPPs militant offshoot, the Black Liberation Army) were allies. In fact, they were more than that; they were comrades who worked together, aided and abetted each other on the run and fought shoulder-to-shoulder in the struggle against racism.

Most of the people I spoke to be they members of the Weather Underground or the Black Liberation Army were first radicalised by the killing of Black people by police: specifically the murder of Fred Hampton in 1969 and Clifford Glover a 10-year-old boy shot by an undercover cop in Queens in 1973. These killings enraged an entire generation of young activists, setting them on a path to violent revolution.

The more research I did for the podcast, the more I realised that there are crucial differences between leftwing revolutionaries and the rightwing fascist movement of today. The radical undergrounds of the 1970s were fighting state violence and racism; the insurrectionists at the Capitol acted on the orders of a sitting authoritarian president, while literally waving the flag of white nationalism. One side attempted to resist state power and real systems of oppression; the other is fighting for state power and injustice, often based on lies.

None of this means the ends justify the means, or that leftwing radicals should be let off the hook for their mistakes. During our many conversations, I pressed my parents and their friends about the morality of violence, and about what they might regret today. Even though Weather Underground bombings never killed anyone, three of their own members including my dads girlfriend at the time, Diana Oughton died in 1970, building explosives in New Yorks Greenwich village. And most former revolutionaries now regret that turn towards a military strategy and disavow actions in which innocent people might be hurt or killed.

A member of the Black Panther Party told me that the word radical means seeking to understand root causes and the underlying nature of things. In this sense, it is radical to see racism as systemic, radical to understand the supreme courts attempts to control the bodies of women and LGBTQ+ people as rooted in a history of religious patriarchy, and radical to resist unjust laws when they conflict with basic human rights.

More than anything, the members of the revolutionary undergrounds of the 1970s expressed hope that the next generation of activists will do better than they did that young people today fighting for Black lives, abortion rights and climate justice will find new methods of radical resistance while avoiding the dangerous mistakes of the past.

Because, for my parents and their comrades in the Black underground, the struggle is not about any one strategy or tactic not about violence or clandestine organisations but about a long-term commitment to continue the fight for a better world. Thats an inheritance that can be passed on, to their children and to generations still to come.

Zayd Ayers Dohrn is a playwright and screenwriter, and a professor at Northwestern University. His 10-part audio series Mother Country Radicals is available on your podcast provider.

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Bombs, blackmail and wire-taps: how I spent my childhood on the run from the FBI - The Guardian