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| Predecessor | Weather Underground |
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| Location |
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| Website | www.prairiefire.org[ dead link ] |
The Prairie Fire Organizing Committee is an American far left organization that evolved from the Weather Underground.
| | |
| Predecessor | Weather Underground |
|---|---|
| Location |
|
| Website | www.prairiefire.org[ dead link ] |
The Prairie Fire Organizing Committee is an American far left organization that evolved from the Weather Underground.
In 1974, the Weather Underground released the book Prairie Fire: The Politics of Revolutionary Anti-imperialism. [1] [2] Since the Weather Underground was engaged in illegal bombings and its leaders were fugitives, it required help from aboveground supporters to distribute the book; participants in this work included Van Lydegraf and Jennifer Dohrn. [3] Over 40,000 copies were distributed. [4] Discussion groups were created to discuss the issues that arose from the book. [5] This above ground organizing is how the Prairie Fire Distribution Committee was created, which in 1975 became the Prairie Fire Organizing Committee.
The book's preparation was a 12-month process. It was written collaboratively and adopted as the collective statement of the Weather Underground. [6] Mark Rudd stated that the book "was an attempt to influence the movement that we had abandoned back in 1969. It tried to reach many thousands of New Leftist and former New Leftists by saying "'Don't despair, we're all part of the same thing'". [7] Bill Ayers explains that Prairie Fire "was an attempt to sum up our thinking since the 'Weatherman' paper and especially since the townhouse. Through it we hoped to consolidate our political organization and to forge unity with progressive activist". [8] Ayers is referring to the 1970 Greenwich Village townhouse explosion which killed 3 members of Weatherman, Diana Oughton, Theodore Gold, and Terry Robbins. [9]
Prairie Fire Organizing Committee regards American imperialism as the main enemy of the world's people, a position it initially took in contradiction to the Communist Party of China's critique of Soviet imperialism. [10] They claim a long history of fighting for rights of all people and opposes white supremacy in all its forms, believing that it persists through practices such as racial profiling. [11] They call attention to prisoners it deems political and state, "We know that close to 100 women and men are in U.S. prisons because they have dared to struggle for the liberation of oppressed peoples". [11] The group's members are typically activists fighting U.S. imperialism. Their work proceeds from the premise that, while the U.S. remains in the global position that it currently occupies, there will be no freedom or peace for anyone.
The book Prairie Fire was explicitly feminist, based on an understanding that success of imperialism relied on the oppression of women. [4] One result of this point of view was the creation of childcare teams which collectivized the labor of raising children within the organization. [12]
Much of the work of Prairie Fire focused on international solidarity. [5] In 1976, the Committee joined the "July 4th Coalition" which was a larger solidarity alliance of a variety of leftist organizations including the Palestinian Liberation Organization and the Puerto Rican Solidarity Committee as part of an effort of organizing counterdemonstrations for the official U.S. governmental commemorations of the Bicentennial. [13]
In 1979, the victory of the Sandinistas in Nicaragua and the FMLN-led "people's war" in El Salvador put the ideals of a just society at the center of attention. In the 1980s, a large solidarity movement developed in the U.S. in response to America's military intervention in Central America. Prairie Fire Organizing Committee actively participated in these efforts.
In 1980, the U.S. government arrested eleven Puerto Rican members of the Fuerzas Armadas de Liberacion Nacional (FALN, the Armed Forces of National Liberation) who were committing acts of terrorism to gain independence for Puerto Rico. Prairie Fire worked as allies with the Puerto Rican independent movement to demand the release of these prisoners. [14] [15]
Since 1984 Prairie Fire has been active in the annual International Women's Day celebration that is held on March 8 in Chicago. Members participate in marches and programs based around the event. [16] [17]
In the 1990s, Prairie Fire joined WAC, the Women's Action Coalition, to take direct action against sexism by fighting for women's rights to their bodies and access to women's clinics.
In 1996, Prairie Fire initiated the Not On The Guest List Coalition which organized a demonstration at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago. It was a demonstration that focused its attention on the Death Penalty, racism and classism within the criminal justice system, and for the release of political prisoners which are held within the U.S. prisons. Currently, Prairie Fire also works with thousands of people in the U.S. to protest the war against Iraq and they are activists in many other domains of societal issues that are prevalent in the global community. [18]
Prairie Fire Organizing Committee produced the journal Breakthrough. [19] [20] Fireworks Graphics Collective, a Bay area printing collective, was their graphic production wing. [21] [22] Fireworks produced posters for international solidarity movements, women's liberation movements, LGBT issues, release of political prisoners, and more. [21] [23]
The Weather Underground was a far-left Marxist militant organization first active in 1969, founded on the Ann Arbor campus of the University of Michigan. Originally known as the Weathermen, the group was organized as a faction of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) national leadership. Officially known as the Weather Underground Organization (WUO) beginning in 1970, the group's express political goal was to create a revolutionary party to overthrow the United States government, which WUO believed to be imperialist.
David Gilbert is an American radical leftist who participated in the deadly 1981 robbery of a Brinks armored vehicle. Gilbert was a founder of the Columbia University chapter of Students for a Democratic Society and became a member of the Weather Underground. Gilbert, who served as the getaway driver in the robbery, was convicted under New York's felony murder law in the killing by co-defendants of two Nyack, New York police officers and a Brink's security guard.
Bernardine Rae Dohrn is a retired law professor and a former leader of the far-left militant organization Weather Underground in the United States. 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.
The Days of Rage were a series of protests during three days in October 1969 in Chicago, organized by the emerging Weatherman faction of Students for a Democratic Society.
Diana Oughton was an American member of the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) Michigan Chapter and later, a member of the 1960s radical group Weather Underground. Oughton received her B.A. from Bryn Mawr College. After graduation, Oughton went to Guatemala with the American Friends Service Committee program to teach the young and older Native Americans.
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.
Terry Robbins was an American far left activist, a key member of the Ohio Students for a Democratic Society, and one of the three Weathermen who died in the Greenwich Village townhouse explosion.
Laura Jane Whitehorn is an American activist who participated in the 1983 United States Senate bombing and was imprisoned 14 years in federal prison. In the 1960s, she organized and participated in civil rights and anti-war movements.
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.
William Charles Ayers is an American retired professor and activist. During the 1960s, Ayers rose to prominence as a leader of the Weather Underground militant group, described by the FBI as a terrorist group.
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.
Scott Braley was a leftist activist and a regional organizer for the Michigan State University's chapter of the Students for a Democratic Society, better known as SDS. Braley became a member of Weatherman in 1969 and remained so until the group disbanded in 1977. Braley was one of the original members of the Revolutionary Youth Movement, a group devoted to anti-racism and Third World struggles which later evolved into Weatherman.
Initially called "The Proud Eagle Tribe," the communiqué from the Women's Brigade of the Weather Underground pledged to "build a militant women's movement that commits itself to the destruction of Amerikan imperialism" and exploit "the man's chauvinism" as a "strategic weakness."
Mother Right was a 10-page manifesto written in 1974 by Jane Alpert, a former Swarthmore College student, radical leftist feminist and associate of the Weather Underground Organization.
Osawatomie was a magazine published by the Weather Underground Organization (WUO), beginning in March 1975 and continuing for six issues until the June-July 1976 issue. It was started as a quarterly publication, but from the April/May 1976 issue its frequency became bimonthly. The magazine was based in Boston.
The Weather Underground organized collectives around the United States in an attempt "to challenge the state directly in solidarity with Third World liberation movements, particularly the Black Power movement here and the Vietnamese in Southeast Asia." Collectives organized the white working class against imperialism by holding militant demonstrations and engaging in small scale property damage.
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.
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