24 Facts About Weather Underground

Weather Underground was a radical left-wing militant organization first active in 1969, founded on the Ann Arbor campus of the University of Michigan.

The Weather Underground hoped to create underground collectives in major cities throughout the country.

Weather Underground maintained that their stance differed from the rest of the movements at the time in the sense that they predicated their critiques on the notion that they were engaged in "an anti-imperialist, anti-racist struggle".

Weather Underground put the international proletariat at the center of their political theory.

Weather Underground warned that other political theories, including those addressing class interests or youth interests, were "bound to lead in a racist and chauvinist direction".

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Weather Underground denounced other political theories of the time as "objectively racist" if they did not side with the international proletariat; such political theories, they argued, needed to be "smashed".

The collectives set up under the Weather Underground Bureau drew their design from Che Guevara's foco theory, which focused on the building of small, semi-autonomous cells guided by a central leadership.

Weather Underground used various means by which to recruit new members and set into motion a nationwide revolt against the government.

Weather Underground members aimed to mobilize people into action against the established leaders of the nation and the patterns of injustice which existed in America and abroad due to America's presence overseas.

Weather Underground aimed to develop roots within the class struggle, targeting white working-class youths.

In direct actions, dubbed Jailbreaks, Weather Underground members invaded educational institutions as a means by which to recruit high school and college students.

In 2003, Weather Underground members stated in interviews that they had wanted to convince the American public that the United States was truly responsible for the calamity in Vietnam.

On May 21, 1970, a communique from the Weather Underground was issued promising to attack a "symbol or institution of American injustice" within two weeks.

On March 1, 1971, members of the Weather Underground set off a bomb on the Senate side of the United States Capitol.

On May 19, 1972, Ho Chi Minh's birthday, the Weather Underground placed a bomb in the women's bathroom in the Air Force wing of the Pentagon.

The leading members of the Weather Underground collaborated on ideas and published a manifesto: Prairie Fire: The Politics of Revolutionary Anti-Imperialism.

Essentially, after the 1969 failure of the Days of Rage to involve thousands of youth in massive street fighting, Weather renounced most of the Left and decided to operate as an isolated underground group.

The Weather Underground was no longer a fugitive organization and could turn themselves in with minimal charges against them.

The Weather Underground faced accusations of abandonment of the revolution by reversing their original ideology.

The documentary The Weather Underground described the Brink's robbery as the "unofficial end" of the Weather Underground.

Weather Underground members involved in the May 19th Communist Organization alliance with the Black Liberation Army continued in a series of jail breaks, armed robberies and bombings until most members were finally arrested in 1985 and sentenced as part of the Brinks robbery and the Resistance Conspiracy case.

Weather Underground's helped Weatherman pursue their main goal of overthrowing the U S government through her writings.

Widely known members of the Weather Underground include Kathy Boudin, Linda Sue Evans, Brian Flanagan, David Gilbert, Ted Gold, Naomi Jaffe, Jeff Jones, Joe Kelly, Diana Oughton, Eleanor Raskin, Terry Robbins, Mark Rudd, Matthew Steen, Susan Stern, Laura Whitehorn, Eric Mann, Cathy Wilkerson, and the married couple Bernardine Dohrn and Bill Ayers.

Weather Underground was referred to as a terrorist group by articles in The New York Times, United Press International, and Time Magazine.