The Boy Who Grew Up on the Run From the FBI
In spring 1970, Bernardine Dohrn, the 28-year-old leader of the radical leftist group the Weather Underground, declared a “state of war” against America. “Black people have been fighting almost alone for years,” she argued. “We’ve known that our job is to lead white kids into armed revolution.”The declaration kicked off the Weather Underground’s yearslong bombing campaign against institutions of “American injustice,” including the New York Police Department headquarters, the State Department building, and the Pentagon. Young white Weatherwomen would dress as secretaries, plant incendiary devices in bathrooms, set timers, and walk out undetected. Later, someone would call in a warning to evacuate the targeted building before the bombs went off; there were never any fatalities. The goal was to draw attention to the Weather Underground’s causes—fighting for an end to the war in Vietnam and to racism at home.In the 1960s, when Dohrn was studying at the University of Chicago, she had participated in the civil rights and anti-war movements in legal ways. As a law student in 1966, she conducted research on Chicago slumlords for Martin Luther King Jr. and marched with him through all-white neighborhoods to promote integration. She joined Students for a Democratic Society, or SDS, in 1967 and traveled the country to provide advice to college students on how they could legally avoid conscription. But after King’s assassination and the My Lai massacre, Dohrn and many other white student activists in the SDS opted for militant action. “There’s no way to be committed to nonviolence in the middle of the most violent society history has ever created!” she told an SDS crowd in 1968. The next year, she split off a faction of the SDS into the Weathermen, committed to solidarity with the Black liberation struggle and with the Vietcong and other guerrillas fighting American imperialism abroad.Dohrn became a counterculture hero and a symbol of anxiety over how America could turn a well-educated, middle-class white girl into a violent revolutionary. In fall 1970, FBI chief J. Edgar Hoover called her “The Most Dangerous Woman in America.” She became the fourth woman in history to be placed on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted list, replacing Angela Davis. Along with her partner, Bill Ayers, also a member of the Weather Underground, she would spend nearly a decade as a fugitive, frequently changing identities and apartments and low-paying jobs, moving from city to city, all while remaining dedicated to the idea that the only worthwhile response to injustice is militant struggle.But by the end of 1980—five years after the fall of Saigon, and with Ronald Reagan recently elected president—Dohrn felt that “the world had moved on.” It was time for her and Ayers to surface. The federal conspiracy charges against the two had long since been dropped, thanks to the FBI’s use of illegal surveillance tactics in the COINTELPRO program, but Dohrn was still wanted in Illinois on misdemeanor charges stemming from her role in a 1969 SDS uprising in Chicago called “the Days of Rage.” Her lawyer worked out a plea deal for probation, and she and Ayers drove from Harlem to Chicago so she could turn herself in.For Dohrn and Ayers, the strongest motive to leave the fugitive lifestyle behind was the fact that they had two additional passengers in their blue station wagon: their sons Zayd, almost four, and Malik, not yet one. In his new book, Dangerous, Dirty, Violent, and Young: A Fugitive Family in the Revolutionary Underground, Zayd Ayers Dohrn, now a playwright and professor at Northwestern University, returns to what he calls “one of the most challenging tasks of my early childhood”—“understanding my mother’s revolutionary commitment.” Through interviews with his parents and their fellow radicals, as well as access to family documents and thousands of pages of newly declassified FBI documents, Dohrn pieces together his parents’ motivations, the extreme personal costs of their actions, and their conflicted loyalties—to the movement on the one hand and to their young family on the other.Dangerous, Dirty, Violent, and Young, which takes its title from the 1969 Jefferson Airplane song “We Can Be Together,” represents Dohrn’s second attempt to understand his family’s revolutionary history. In 2022, he released a 10-part podcast series with Crooked Media called Mother Country Radicals, which traces his parents’ radicalization in the 1960s and involvement in the Weather Underground in the 1970s, tells the story of the group’s rise through the counterculture, and explores its collaborations with groups like the Black Panthers and its splinter cell, the Black Liberation Army.The book’s structure highlights the tension between his parents’ dedication to changing the world and their responsibilities toward their family; each section of the book opens with a chapter set during Dohrn’s early childhood. The effect is to highlight the burdens of being raised underground, “living on the margins of society, under assumed names, with no school or regular place to call home, all to fight for ideals that were too abstract for us kids to begin to understand,” as Dohrn puts it. Both he and his brother were born at home and lacked birth certificates. As a toddler, Zayd learned from Ayers how to spot undercover FBI agents and plainclothes cops (“even disguised in long hair and scruffy jeans, undercovers usually wear cheap leather loafers, well-shined”). He recalls that “the closest I ever came to feeling totally safe in my family” was when they were together on the road, in flight.Growing up as the child of two Weather Underground revolutionaries also meant that Dorhn’s childhood education revolved around “radical lesson[s]” about race, class, and gender. Both boys were named for “freedom fighters”—Zayd for Zayd Shakur, a member of the Black Liberation Army killed in a shoot-out with New Jersey state troopers in 1973; Malik to honor the middle names of both Shakur and Malcolm X. “My parents always made it clear, even when my brother and I were still toddlers, that the only acceptable purpose in life, given our gender and skin color … was to find a way to fight for a better world,” he writes. “They showed us, in books and stories and by direct example, that white people in particular had a moral responsibility to be militant comrades in the struggle for Black liberation.”But while Dohrn makes clear his own leftist politics in the book, he didn’t choose to take up his parents’ brand of activism. He has carved out a more solitary path as a writer, observer, questioner. In a chapter about attending a protest against Operation Desert Storm with his parents as a teenager, Dohrn reflects on this split: He has always understood the necessity of mass protest, but he is temperamentally “suspicious” of crowds. He goes on to surmise that this characteristic could be “a reaction against my parents—their willingness to be swept away by a movement, to sacrifice their free will and agency, and even their own morality, in the name of mass solidarity.”Dohrn empathizes with his parents’ political motivations, weighing the personal and moral costs of revolution, while refusing to write off the idealism that powered it. “All of us kids who grew up in the underground know intimately the costs and tragedies of that struggle,” he writes. “But if all we inherit is their failure and tragedy, then we lose the value of their hope and idealism. Their youthful courage and fierce commitment to a cause. And the motive force of their wild and radical imagination.”And though Dohrn doesn’t dwell on recent events, he does note that Americans today are facing “a new era of American authoritarianism and racial reckoning, a new moment of widespread resistance and impetus for radical change”—a time when idealism and principled resistance is indispensable. It’s hard not to think of the nonviolent protesters and legal observers who have been met with harassment, violence, and even lethal force, as they came together to protect their neighbors from Donald Trump’s ICE surges in the last year. At a time when exercising one’s constitutionally protected right to protest can come with mortal danger, how do activists balance what they owe to the world against what they owe their families, especially their children?Dohrn’s parents had always told him a relatively neat story about where they placed the dividing line between activism and raising a family. When he was born, they assured him, they had forgone political violence in order to devote themselves to raising him—even if it didn’t always feel that way.When his parents came out of hiding in 1980, it seemed that they were choosing to give up their roles to dedicate themselves to their sons. As Dohrn writes, that was the narrative he absorbed from family as a child:If my mom and dad had done things in the past that were dangerous and illegal—I knew they had done them for the right reasons. To help people. To make the world a better place. And I trusted that they had stopped taking those terrifying risks after I was born. They had always told me—and I believed, as one of the first tenets of my childhood faith—that my brother and I were their first priority, the center of their hopes and dreams for the future.But the statement Bernardine Dohrn read after surrendering in a Chicago courtroom in 1980 made clear that becoming a mother had not softened her revolutionary ideals. “I regret not at all our efforts to side with the forces of liberation,” she said. “The nature of the system has not changed. Given the system which perpetuates such harsh oppression and suffering, rebellion is inevitable and continuous. And I remain committed to the struggle ahead.”Less than two years later, her family would be left to grapple with her revolutionary commitments when she was locked up in a federal jail in Manhattan, held in contempt of grand jury for refusing to testify against her comrades in the Black Liberation Army, against whom the government was trying to build a racketeering case. She would spend seven months incarcerated. Zayd was five years old when his worst fear as a child—that his mother would be caught and taken away from him—came true. “As the days of our separation stretched into weeks and then months—as it went from sudden rupture to bleak routine—I started to wonder how my mother could continue to choose loyalty to her friends over love for us,” he writes. “I didn’t understand the legal subtleties of her case, but I knew she was making a choice—day after day after day after day—not to come home.”The “myth” Zayd and Malik were raised with was that their parents “gave up on political violence. They stopped bombing buildings and breaking people out of jail…. They told us they had committed themselves to love for us, to a different kind of future.” But while researching Dangerous, Dirty, Violent, and Young, Dohrn would learn that his father participated in a jailbreak in 1979, when Bernardine was pregnant with Malik. He would learn that, around that same time, his mother participated in an identity theft scheme to aid white female members of a Weather Underground splinter group, who were in turn offering solidarity to a cell of the Black Liberation Army, itself a splinter group of the Black Panthers.His parents would be forced to confront just how perilous it could be to continue to act as movement soldiers while starting a family when their comrades Kathy Boudin and David Gilbert received lengthy prison sentences for their roles in a 1981 armed robbery with members of the BLA that resulted in the deaths of two police officers and a security guard. Boudin and Gilbert’s son, Chesa, was only 14 months old at the time. Dorhn and Ayers adopted Chesa and raised him alongside Zayd and Malik.Some of the most affecting passages of the book come as Dohrn challenges his father to confront the risks he took even after Zayd’s and Malik’s births. “I am seventy-six years old, and I have felt the most vivid sense of having survived and squeaked through again and again and again,” Ayers said. “The sense Bernardine and I always had was, there but for fortune. Because we were all living on the edge.”In truth, his parents had been thinking for several years about how raising children could fit into their political vision. A Weather Underground communiqué from December 1970 holds hints of the parenting philosophy. Earlier that year, three Weathermen died in an accidental explosion of hundreds of pounds of dynamite in a West Village townhouse—dynamite that the New York cell of the group was planning to use at an officers’ dance at Fort Dix in New Jersey, which could have been deadly not just to members of the military but to civilians, as the Weathermen did not plan to call in a warning. In the aftermath, Bernardine reflected on a new path forward for the underground: “the townhouse forever destroyed our belief that armed struggle is the only real revolutionary struggle.” Instead, the group was thinking seriously “about how hard it will be to fight in Amerika and how long it will take for us to win.” In the meantime, she wrote, she suggested a turn to the personal and domestic:People have been experimenting with everything about their lives, fierce against the ways of the white man…. They’ve moved to the country and found new ways to bring up free wild children. People are forming new families ... they are units of people to trust each other both to live together and to organize and fight together.As Dohrn explains, the idea that “having children was revolutionary” was drawn from the Black liberation movement. His mother would go on to take inspiration from Assata Shakur, a member of the BLA, who in 1974 gave birth to a daughter conceived with a fellow BLA soldier behind bars. Shakur later explained how she thought about having a child when she saw the world as a “terrible, terrible place”: “I thought about my mother. My grandmother. My great-great-great-grandmothers. And what they must have thought about as slaves bringing life into this world. And we just decided that we were going to live, you know?”By the time Dohrn was born in 1977, the Weather Underground had dissolved. “Without the moral gravity of opposition to the Vietnam war, and with the cultural zeitgeist shifting against them, the group was isolated and adrift, increasingly vulnerable to the purity tests and infighting that have always afflicted progressive leftist movements,” Dohrn explains. His parents needed to find a new sense of purpose, a new way to make sense of their pasts and to move forward in a future they had not imagined living long enough to see.In his conversations with his parents and through revisiting their letters, statements, and other documents, Dohrn comes to understand that his parents did not see their commitments to the larger world and their commitments to their children as contradictory. “Asked to choose between solidarity and family, revolution and romantic or familial love, my parents and their comrades chose the cause every time,” he writes. “This bothered me for a long time—it still bothers me, as a son and as a father—but I’ve come to think that, in my parents’ minds, the two ideas are inseparable: the fight to build a better world is a manifestation of their hopes for the future; the revolution itself is a birthright to pass on to their children and their children’s children.”This is a complicated legacy, one that can come with devastating consequences, as evidenced by the fates of many from the radical underground of the 1960s and 1970s, who died or were imprisoned and left behind young children. But it opens up an enduring set of questions. What is worth fighting for? And who should be prepared to fight, when they have obligations to care for family? Is fighting for a better world also a fight for one’s children?