11.) The Weather Underground

ORIGINS/MISSION

The Weather Underground was a radical leftist movement in the United States that formed as an offshoot of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS).  The Weather Underground was first known as the Weathermen,  but the name was later changed because of feminist opposition to the term “man” to represent all the people involved.  It splintered off from SDS in 1969, identifying itself as a revolutionary organization of communists who sought to overthrow the US government by military action.  It is also known for coining concepts such as “white privilege” and for holding forums to discuss possible coalition between the predominantly white leftist groups and African-American groups such as the Black Panther party.  Like their radical black counterparts, the Weather Underground believed that armed revolution was the most effective path to ridding the United States of oppressive, imperialist leadership. 

ACTIONS

The earliest notable event staged by the Weathermen was the October 8th, 1969 Vietnam protest in Chicago.  Weathermen collectives, located in New York, Boston, Seattle, San Francisco, Cincinnati, Ann Arbor, Cleveland, and Detroit, all sent members.  On October 6th, the Weatherman destroyed a statue of a policeman in Haymarket Square, and two days later, a march occurred in Chicago. Heather and Joe Though the protest only contained several hundred people, a riot occurred in the wealthy Gold Coast Area, where windows of a bank and many cars were smashed.  The police shot six rioters and arrested seventy.

In November of the same year, the Weathermen became involved in the nationwide General Motors strike, participating in picket lines and demonstrations.  They also began to distribute their newspaper, FIRE! on high school and college campuses across the United States.  1970, following a police raid that resulted in the death of Black Panther Fred Hampton, the Weathermen group issued a “Declaration of War” on the US government, and went underground. 

While preparing to bomb a US military officers’ dance in Fort Dix, New Jersey, there was an accidental explosion in Greenwich Village that killed three WU members.  Membership of the organization shrank considerably.  However, the WU pressed on with bombing actions against the Pentagon, the Capital, prisons and police stations, and (again) Haymarket Square. 

In February of 1970, Timothy Leary, who was known as the “Harvard psychologist turned high priest of the counter-culture” (Jacobs 117), was convicted in California, then in Texas for possession of a small amount of marijuana.  He was denied appeal and sentenced to ten years.  The Weather Underground, securing a 25,000$ payment from an LSD supplier (one of Leary’s friends), broke Leary out of prison.  He was eventually captured by the FBI and offered to serve as an informant to capture the Weather Underground in exchange for a reduced prison sentence.

MEMBERS
Diana Oughton, Ted Gold, and Terry Robbins died in the Greenwich Village Explosion in 1970.
Bernardine Dohrn. She was considered the organization’s figurehead. She spent the 1970s living underground and was on the FBI's Ten Most Wanted list. Today, Dohrn is an associate professor and director at Northwestern University's Children and Justice Center.
David Gilbert. When the organization dismantled, Gilbert joined the Black Liberation Army and plunged deeper into revolutionary violence. He is currently serving a life sentence in New York’s Attica Correctional Facility for his role in a 1981 robbery gone awry, committed with his wife and fellow ex-Weatherman Kathy Boudin.
Bill Ayers. A central figure in the Weathermen, Ayers lived underground for ten years, an experience he wrote about in his memoir, Fugitive Days. Now married to Dohrn, Ayers is currently a school reform activist and a professor of education at the University of Illinois at Chicago.
DEMISE
The Weather Underground’s last major activities were the bombings of the Agency for International Development in D.C., the Department of Defense in Oakland, the Rockefeller Center, and the Kennecott Corporation Headquarters in Salt Lake City, all in 1975.  By 1977, however, the group began to dissolve after its members moved on to other revolutionary groups, especially the Prairie Fire Organizing Committee, which focused on ending imperialism and sought to liberate colonized people worldwide.  Most Weather Underground members did not serve prison time; the group had been covert enough to avoid the police and FBI in many of its activities.  
Classroom Activity:  Demonstrations and Crowds

Have the students discuss what social or political causes are important to them?  Ask the class who has ever participated in a political demonstration or even a big parade?  Have the students discuss what some of the differences are between the two?  Ask them to discuss how they would go about staging a political demonstration or even a street crowd scene?  One of the tasks here is negotiating how to “stage” random groupings of people.

 

David Dorfman’s underground begins with a prelude, danced by Dorfman while the audience enters the theater.  This is a series of movements and posed gestures, like physical snap shots from another time.  The most recognizable of these include a lunge, a raised fist, a baseball pitch.  While early rock music from the 60’s and early 70’s plays, Dorfman repeats this series, over and over again.  At first the combination of these gestures seems random, but eventually, after many repetitions, they begin to carry their own meanings.  Certainly by the end of the evening-length dance, they have acquired multiple resonances.  For instance, what starts out as a simple baseball pitch at the beginning of the piece, eventually morphs into throwing bombs, and then at the end becomes a gesture of reaching out for something.

Classroom Activity:  Repetition and Variation
Divide into groups of four or five.  Have each person select a pedestrian gesture.  Find movements to connect these gestures and teach the sequence to all members of the group.  Then one by one, have each person repeat this sequence, allowing the gestures to evolve with each repetition.  After each person has experimented with this exercise, have the group discuss how they interpreted this evolution.