The Weather Underground
The Weather Underground is probably the most enigmatic of all the militant terror groups we have visited so far. It really amounted to nothing more than an action group of militant students on the Anne Arbor campus of the University of Michigan. It never achieved a membership of more than 100, and its operations tended to be confined to detonating dynamite in such places as bathrooms in government buildings and various corporate headquarters. It has been estimated that only twenty-five of these were reported in the group’s seven-year of existence.
Yet, from about 1970 onwards, a year or so after the group was founded, it was placed on the FBI’s most wanted list, and there it stayed for most of the seventies. A great many historians and no fewer journalists have wondered why? It certainly did not seem justified.
The Weather Underground began as the Weathermen in 1969, and its founding leaders, Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn, resembled a couple of counter-culture revolutionaries gone wrong. In fact, both are still alive today, and could quite easily blend into the Sunday morning crowd at Starbucks, a ‘Black Lives Matter’ decal prominent on the bumper of the Subaru.
In the 1970s, however, the FBI ranked the organization as a major national security threat, estimating a membership of thousands. In fact, the Weather Underground was protesting the very same things as every other student protester, but just doing it with a bit more attitude.
When it all died down, most of the Weathermen simply disappeared, and years later, with no real serious Federal charges against them, came out and settled in as respectable ex-revolutionaries in the nouveau civil rights movement.