When Zayd Ayers Dohrn was born in New York in 1978, his mother was on the FBI’s top ten most wanted fugitives. His parents, Bernadine Dohrn and Bill Ayers, had lived underground for nearly a decade because of their prominent roles with the Weathermen, later the Weather Underground. By unleashing armed struggle on their own soil, this radical group of young white Americans set out to destroy US imperialism and end the Vietnam War.
In the fascinating podcast Mother Country Radicals Zayd Ayers Dohrn reconstructs the history of the Weathermen, from the late 1960s to the early 1980s. The young Zayd − named after the murdered Black Panther Zayd Shakur − found it perfectly normal to be on the run. As a toddler, his father taught him to identify undercover cops (and yes, he picks them out right away one day).
The 10-part podcast tells a behind-the-scenes look at how a group of well-born white teens and twenty-somethings are driven by hatred of the Vietnam War. How they declare war on their own country starting with the pigs, the pigs of the police force. How they declare their solidarity with the Black Panthers and the more radical Black Liberation Army in word and deed. They actually help LSD guru Timothy Leary escape from prison, something that will cost them years later.
In 1969, nine years before Zayd’s birth, The Weathermen stage major protests in Chicago, the Days of Rage. In 1970, the group blows up a statue of a police officer in the same city – the gigantic explosion also destroys hundreds of windows. But when they plan an attack on a party of dozens of soldiers who are soon to go to Vietnam, the house in New York where they make the bomb explodes.
Three members of the Weathermen are killed, the others decide to plan attacks without taking any casualties. That does not make any difference to the intensive manhunt by the police and FBI for the group. The members must assume false identities and go underground.
Playwright and screenwriter Zayd Ayers Dohrn can tell about The Weathermen like no other ‘from the inside’. He not only talks extensively with his parents (both later became professors), but also with their comrades of the time, including the Black Panthers and the Black Liberation Army. It is painful to realize that the black activists had to pay for their struggle much more often with death or a (life) long prison term.
He painstakingly tells how his parents’ radical choices still affect his own life and that of other children of the Weather Underground and the Black Panthers. He does not reject his parents, supports their struggle, but is also critical. Yet it is not so much a question of moral judgment or the question of what it has all resulted in. The insane true story of bombings, prison break and a dramatic final attack on a money transport in 1981, ultimately revolves around rock-solid principles and unshakable convictions and the price you pay for them.
Mother Country Radicals
★★★★
Zayd Ayers Dohrn
10 episodes
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