The Weather Underground Organization (WUO), commonly known as the Weather Underground, was a radical left militant organization active in the late 1960s and 1970s, founded on the Ann Arbor campus of the University of Michigan. It was originally called the Weathermen. The WUO organized in 1969 as a faction of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) largely composed of the national office leadership of SDS and their supporters. Beginning in 1974, the organization's express political goal was to create a revolutionary party to overthrow American imperialism.
The Seattle Liberation Front, or SLF, was a radical anti-Vietnam War movement, based in Seattle, Washington, in the United States. The group, founded by the University of Washington visiting philosophy professor and political activist Michael Lerner, carried out its protest activities from 1970 to 1971.
The terms underground press or clandestine press refer to periodicals and publications that are produced without official approval, illegally or against the wishes of a dominant group. In specific recent Asian, American and Western European context, the term "underground press" has most frequently been employed to refer to the independently published and distributed underground papers associated with the counterculture of the late 1960s and early 1970s in India and Bangladesh in Asia, in the United States and Canada in North America, and the United Kingdom and other western nations. It can also refer to the newspapers produced independently in repressive regimes. In German occupied Europe, for example, a thriving underground press operated, usually in association with the Resistance. Other notable examples include the samizdat and bibuła, which operated in the Soviet Union and Poland respectively, during the Cold War.
David Gilbert is an American activist who is currently serving a 75 year-to-life sentence for felony homicide at Shawangunk Correctional Facility in Shawangunk, New York. Gilbert was a founding member of the Columbia University chapter of Students for a Democratic Society and a member of the Weather Underground, a far-left militant organization. In October 1981, he participated in the robbery of a Brink's armored car, along with members of the Black Liberation Army and Kathy Boudin, his partner. Gilbert was convicted of the murders of two Nyack police officers and a Brinks guard, all of whom were killed in the robbery.
Bernardine Rae Dohrn is a retired law professor and a former leader of the radical Weather Underground. As a leader of the Weather Underground in the early 1970s, Dohrn was on the FBI's 10 Most Wanted list for several years. She remained a fugitive, even though she was removed from the list. After coming out of hiding in 1980, Dohrn pleaded guilty to misdemeanor charges of aggravated battery and bail jumping.
Mark William Rudd is a political organizer, mathematics instructor, anti-war activist and counterculture icon most well known for his involvement with the Weather Underground.
The Days of Rage demonstrations were a series of violent actions taken over a course of three days in October 1969 in Chicago, organized by the Weatherman faction of the counterculture-era group Students for a Democratic Society.
Rat Subterranean News, New York's second major underground newspaper, was created in March 1968, primarily by editor Jeff Shero, Alice Embree and Gary Thiher, who moved up from Austin, Texas, where they had been involved in The Rag.
Jeff Jones is an environmental activist and consultant in Upstate New York. He was a national officer in Students for a Democratic Society, a founding member of Weatherman, and a leader of the Weather Underground.
Naomi Esther Jaffe is a former undergraduate student of Herbert Marcuse and member of the Weather Underground Organization. Jaffe was recently the Executive Director of Holding Our Own, a multiracial foundation for women.
John Gregory Jacobs was an American student and anti-war activist in the 1960s and early 1970s. He was a leader in both Students for a Democratic Society and the Weatherman group, and an advocate of the use of violent force to overthrow the government of the United States. A fugitive since 1970, he died of melanoma in 1997.
Robert Roth was an active member in the anti-war, anti-racism and anti-imperialism movements of the 1960s and 70s, and key member of the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) political movement in the Columbia University Chapter in New York, where he eventually presided. Later, as a member of the Weatherman/Weather Underground Organization he used militant tactics to oppose the Vietnam War and racism. After the war ended, Roth surfaced from his underground status and has been involved in a variety of social causes to this day.
Howard Norton Machtinger is a former director of Carolina Teaching Fellows, a student teacher scholarship program at the University of North Carolina. He is an education and civil rights activist, a teacher, a forum leader, and a political commentator. Machtinger is a former member of Students For a Democratic Society and Weatherman.
The Berkeley Tribe was a radical counterculture underground newspaper published in Berkeley, California from 1969 to 1972. It was formed after a bitter staff dispute with publisher Max Scherr and split the nationally known Berkeley Barb into new competing underground weeklies. In July 1969 some 40 editorial and production staff with the Barb went on strike for three weeks, then started publishing the Berkeley Tribe as a rival paper, after first printing an interim issue called Barb on Strike to discuss the strike issues with the readership. They incorporated as Red Mountain Tribe, named after a popular brand of cheap California wine. It became a leading publication of the New Left.
Thorne Webb Dreyer is an American writer, editor, publisher, and political activist who played a major role in the 1960s-1970s counterculture, New Left, and underground press movements. Dreyer now lives in Austin, Texas, where he edits the progressive internet news magazine, The Rag Blog, hosts Rag Radio on KOOP 91.7-FM, and is a director of the New Journalism Project.
Roger Henry Lippman is an American political activist. He was a member of the anti-Vietnam War groups Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) and the Seattle collective of Weatherman. He is most commonly noted as a member of the Seattle Seven, who was accused of, and tried for, conspiracy charges in 1970.
In the United States, the Revolutionary Youth Movement (RYM) was the section of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) that opposed the Worker Student Alliance of the Progressive Labor Party (PLP). Most of the national leadership of SDS joined the RYM in order to oppose PLP's party line and what they alleged to be its attempted takeover of the SDS leadership structure, particularly at the 1969 SDS convention in Chicago.
Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) was a national student activist organization in the United States during the 1960s, and was one of the principal representations of the New Left. Disdaining permanent leaders, hierarchical relationships and parliamentary procedure, the founders conceived of the organization as a broad exercise in "participatory democracy." From its launch in 1960 it grew rapidly in the course of the tumultuous decade with over 300 campus chapters and 30,000 supporters recorded nationwide by its last national convention in 1969. The organization splintered at that convention amidst rivalry between factions seeking to impose national leadership and direction, and disputing "revolutionary" positions on, among other issues, the Vietnam War and Black Power.
Dock of the Bay was a radical New Left underground newspaper published weekly in San Francisco starting July 29, 1969. It was a member of the Underground Press Syndicate and the Liberation News Service. At least 17 issues were printed on a weekly basis from June 29, 1969, to November 25, 1969, when further publication was curtailed. Founded by young radicals and SDS members associated with the New Left activist paper Movement, staffers included Steve Diamond of the Liberation News Service. Controversy with other participants in the underground press movement in the Bay Area developed when some of the Dock of the Bay staff were involved in a side project to launch a separate paper to be called the San Francisco Sex Review with the idea that profits from sex ads could be used to subsidize Dock of the Bay and other New Left projects in San Francisco. This project was aborted after a clash with feminists, and Dock of the Bay ceased publication shortly afterward.
