We spend the hour with an activist who replaced Angela Davis on the FBI’s 10 Most Wanted List: Bernardine Dohrn, a leader in the radical 1960s organization called the Weather Underground. Dohrn, along with her activist husband Bill Ayers, went underground to avoid being arrested. They then had a family and continued fighting for revolution. Their family history is now explored in a podcast created, written, and hosted by Zayd Ayers. Dohrn and Ayers discuss how they were radicalized, how they raised their children underground and why they resurfaced, and respond to whether they think their actions — like bombing the Pentagon to protest the war in Vietnam — perpetuated violence. We feature segments from the podcast that include the family as well as former Weather Underground leaders, including Kathy Boudin, mother, of former San Francisco District attorney Chesa Boudin. Kakuya, daughter of Assata, is still exiled in Cuba. “This is an important part of the story to the collateral damage to the next generation,” says Ayers Dohrn. “None of those kids chose to be part of the revolution. They, we, were born into it and still had to suffer the consequences.”
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
AMY GOODMAN: Today we spend the hour with an activist who replaced Angela Davis on the FBI’s 10 Most Wanted List: Bernardine Dohrn, leader of the radical ’60s and ’70s organization called the Weather Underground. This year marks 50 years since they bombed Pentagon in protest of Vietnam War. They also fought with police in Days of Rage in Chicago and teamed up with Black liberation groups to rob banks. Bernardine Dohrn, her husband Bill Ayers, a Weather Underground activist, went underground to avoid arrest. They then started a family and fought for revolution.
There is a new way to do it. podcast seriesExplores their family history. It’s produced by their son, Zayd Ayers Dohrn. This is the trailer. Mother Country Radicals.
AMY GOODMAN:The Mother Country Radicals podcast series was created, written and hosted by Zayd Ayers Dohrn for Crooked Media and Audacy and features interviews with his parents, Bernardine Dohrn and Bill Ayers, as well as other former Weather Underground leaders who were captured and went to prison, like the late Kathy Boudin, who’s mother of former San Francisco District Attorney Chesa Boudin, who then became a brother to Zayd, raised by Ayers and Dohrn. Kakuya Shakur is the daughter of Assata Sharkur and Zayd also speaks with her. We’ll hear from both later. After the resurfacing of their relationship, Bernardine Dohrn was appointed the founding director of Northwestern University School of Law’s Children and Family Justice Center. Bill Ayers is now a retired professor at the College of Education, University of Illinois Chicago. This is the last installment of the 10-part series. Mother Country RadicalsThe series is here.
Today, we present our interview with Zayd’s parents about the series that premiered last month. I spoke with them as well. Democracy Now! co-host Juan González. We start with one of the many archival clips from Archive. Mother Country Radicals.
ZAYD AYERS DOHRN: In May 1970, Los Angeles radio station KPFKThey received an anonymous call that led them to a cassette tape hidden in the public telephone booth. It starts like this.
BERNARDINE DOHRN: Hello. This is Bernardine. I’m going to read a declaration of a state of war. This is the Weatherman Underground’s initial communication.
ZAYD AYERS DOHRN:My mother is Bernardine Dohrn. She’s recording this tape when she’s just 28 years old, surrounded by a few friends in a safe house in San Francisco, a one-room apartment they’ve rented using a fake ID. The room is packed. Most of the people in it are younger than she, including student activists and grad school dropouts who are in their mid- to late twenties. There’s a device the size of a lunchbox set up in the middle of a table, an old-school tape cassette player with a red record button.
BERNARDINE DOHRN: All over the world, people fighting American imperialism look to America’s youth to use our strategic position behind enemy lines to join forces in the destruction of the empire. The lines are drawn are clear to children. Revolution is affecting all aspects of our lives.
AMY GOODMAN:So Zayd Ayers Donn, can you take it from here? We just listened to Bernardine Dohrn’s voice on Pacifica radio station. KPFK in Los Angeles. Describe how the cassette was put on the air.
ZAYD AYERS DOHRN:The Weather Underground had just gone underground, and was trying to decide what to do next. My mom recorded the tape and sent it to radio stations. It basically announced that they were going to launch a bombing campaign against U.S. government in protest against the War in Vietnam as well as the police violence against Black Americans here in America. And so, yeah, what the show does is goes back from that moment and tells the story of how my mom was radicalized, what took her from being a law student and a straight-A student at the University of Chicago all the way to being on the FBI’s top 10 wanted list, and her friends and comrades, and how they all got to that point, as well.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ:Zayd, can you tell us why you decided to start this podcast? It’s an amazing, amazing series of shows. Could you talk about the motivation behind this show and why it was created?
ZAYD AYERS DOHRN: Yeah. Thanks, Juan. There were two motivations. One was political and the other was personal. It was political because I started it before the pandemic hit, while Trump was president. I was thinking about America’s resistance history and how young people came together to resist fascism, authoritarianism, and white supremacy. As I was walking along, George Floyd was killed and there was a racial uprising in the streets. While that was happening I was interviewing my parents, Black Panther Party members, Black Liberation Army members, and I was learning how many of them were radicalized through violence from police against Black Americans. Fred Hampton’s killing, Clifford Glover’s 10-year-old death in Queens. Those were seminal events for so many of these radicals in the ’70s. And I started to realize there’s this kind of interesting echo happening today. That was the political motivation.
The personal motivation was, you know, I was really — we were separated by the pandemic. I was missing my family. And I was also thinking, you know, they were getting older, my mom was about to turn 80, and I was thinking about wanting to get — wanting to ask them questions I had never asked, wanting to get their voices on tape for my daughters and for future generations, and, yeah, just wanting to kind of have an archive of what they did, how they thought and what made them who they are today.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Well, and I’d like to welcome Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn, both former comrades of mine with Students for a Democratic Society decades ago. I wanted to ask Bill about the title. Mother Country RadicalsCan you tell me about the origin and meaning?
BILL AYERS: Yeah. I think that it’s a great title for this series, because what Zayd found as he was going through the archives and listening to people is that this was the title kind of given to us, white radicals at the time, by the Black Panther Party, by Fred Hampton, by Huey P. Newton. And they said they didn’t really — they weren’t interested in allies; they were interested in comrades. They wanted us to be seen as people who were not helping the struggle but people who were invested in the end white supremacy, the fight against police violence, and empire. They referred to us as our comrades, their mother-country radicals. And that’s what we took on. And I believe Zayd used that as a starting point to think about the coming together the Weather Underground and Black Liberation Army.
AMY GOODMAN: I want to get Zayd’s comment on this but first go to Fred Hampton himself, the Black Panther leader in Chicago, before he was assassinated by the Chicago police, but speaking that same year, in 1969.
FRED HAMPTON: A lot of people don’t understand the Black Panther Party’s relationship with white mother country radicals. A lot of people don’t even understand that word that Eldridge uses a lot. But what we’re saying is that there are white people in the mother country that are for the same types of things that we are for — stimulating revolution in the mother country. We also said that we would collaborate with anybody who is thinking of revolution.
AMY GOODMAN:Zayd Dohrn, discuss your decision to choose this title.
ZAYD AYERS DOHRN:Yes, well, I wanted to highlight something I discovered while researching my family’s history and this history. It was a remarkable moment when white radicals and black radicals came together to resist the American government, white superiority, imperialism abroad. Fred Hampton was involved in the formation of what he called a “rainbow coalition” of activist groups in Chicago right before his passing. My mom was also running SDSAt the time. They were part of the rainbow coalition. There was an effort to bring these groups together. Fred was then murdered by the Chicago Police. Part of the series focuses on trying to understand how black radicals and white radicals collaborated, how complicated it was, how messy it was, and what lessons we can take from that effort.
AMY GOODMAN: Let’s go to the remarkable archival footage that is in Mother Country Radicals of Fred Hampton’s assassination.
DEBORAH JOHNSON:About 10 Panthers went up to the Monroe Street address to get dinner and Kool Aid before they went to bed.
ZAYD AYERS DOHRN: Fred is supposed to stay at his mom’s house that night, but it’s late. He goes in the bedroom with his fiancée, Deborah Johnson. She’s 8 months pregnant with Fred’s child.
DEBORAH JOHNSON:I was still half asleep, so I looked up and saw bullets coming from the front of the apartment. It looked like it was coming from the kitchen area. They were — pigs were just shooting.
ZAYD AYERS DOHRN:She later recalled that night. This is after she gave birth, and she’s cradling her baby, Fred Jr. You can hear him cooing in the background.
DEBORAH JOHNSON: The mattress is just going — you could feel bullets going into it. I just knew we’d be dead, everybody in there. When he looked up, just looked up, he didn’t say a word. He didn’t move, except moving his head up. He sat down and laid his head down. He never spoke a word and never got up from the bed. A person was in the room that kept hollering out, “Stop shooting! Stop shooting! We have a pregnant woman, or pregnant sister, in here.” Pigs kept on shooting. He continued to holler out. They finally stopped. They pushed me and my brother by the kitchen doors, and told us that we should face the wall. I heard a pig say, “He’s barely alive,” or “He’ll barely make it.” Then they started shooting — the pigs, they started shooting up — shooting again. I heard my sister scream. They stopped shooting. Pig said, “He’s good and dead now.”
ZAYD AYERS DOHRN:Fred Hampton doesn’t wake up despite all the gunfire and screaming. According to autopsy, Fred Hampton had secobarbitol in his system, which is a sedative. William O’Neal, the Panther who made the Kool-Aid that night, turns out he’s also an FBI informant. Fred was allegedly drugged and assassinated on federal orders by Chicago police.
AMY GOODMAN:It was December 4, 1969. And somehow, Bernardine, I seem to have seen footage of you entering the house. This was — was it the same day after he was assassinated? Did it happen a day after? It is possible to talk about Fred Hampton’s life and how it radicalized you.
BERNARDINE DOHRN: Well, Amy, I remember — everyone my age who was around remembers where they were the day that Fred Hampton was assassinated, and Mark Clark, his colleague. And, you know, it’s seared into our head because it was people we knew, because it was the city of Chicago, because the Red Squad and the sheriffs and the police all collaborated with the FBI. It took six years for us to bring them to trial, and prove it. The People’s Law Office did an incredible job doing that.
But I do remember one thing: they immediately took the door off its hinges and invited Chicago to enter that apartment building to see what the police and the courts had to say. FBII had done in the murder of Black radical revolutionary leaders such as Fred Hampton and Mark Clark. Yes, I was there that day, along with many others. It reminded me of other Chicago massacres. It had a Chicago vibe to it. And it was a somber and terrible moment, where we felt, you know, we must act, we must do more than we’ve been doing, we must do more than the kind of solidarity that we’ve offered. We used to refer to it as putting ourselves between the bullets of the Black radical leadership here in the United States.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Zayd, I wanted to ask you — some of the people — I mean, many of the people that you interviewed I knew personally back then, folks like Kathy Boudin, Cathy Wilkerson, Eleanor Stein, Jeff Jones, Jennifer Dohrn and Brian Flanagan, who was a good friend of mine back years ago. What did you take away from their assessment of their role back back then in the movement, and whether it’s bitterness, pride, contrition? What did they tell you about your interviews with them?
ZAYD AYERS DOHRN:Yes, it was. Well, it’s funny, because, Juan, the names you mention are all members of the Weather Underground. Angela Davis and Jamal Joseph, Jihad Abulmumit, Sekou Odinga were also interviewed. They are members of both the Black Panther Party (Black Liberation Army). And what I took away from all of them, you know, I was talking to a lot of them about how they had first become radicalized, and I kept hearing these echoes, white radicals and Black radicals, over and over, radicalized by state violence against Black leaders, so many of them — you know, Martin Luther King’s assassination, Fred Hampton’s assassination, other killings of Black people by police. One thing is certain, they were all telling me the exact same story about how and why they became involved in that struggle.
And then, in terms of how they look back on it, I would say — I mean, the series talks a lot about that. Later in the series I discuss regrets and questions about tactics and what they would have done differently. And I think the common denominator is that there’s a lot of acknowledgment of mistakes made, but there’s also a lot of sense of we were on the right side of history, we were struggling on the right side, and it’s hard to regret the kind of willingness to put yourself, put your future, put your body on the line for what you believe, if you feel like what you believe is right.
AMY GOODMAN: We’ll be back with Zayd Ayers Dohrn, producer of the Mother Country Radicalsseries, and his parents Bernardine Dohrn (and Bill Ayers), in 30 seconds.
