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.
Bernardine Rae Dohrn is a retired American 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 Progressive Labor Party (PLP) is an anti-revisionist Marxist–Leninist communist party in the United States. It was established in January 1962 as the Progressive Labor Movement following a split in the Communist Party USA, adopting its new name at a convention held in the spring of 1965. It was involved in the anti-Vietnam War movement of the 1960s and early 1970s through its Worker Student Alliance faction of Students for a Democratic Society.
The New Communist movement (NCM) was a diverse left-wing political movement during the 1970s and 1980s in the United States. The NCM were a movement of the New Left that represented a diverse grouping of Marxist–Leninists and Maoists inspired by Cuban, Chinese, and Vietnamese revolutions. This movement emphasized opposition to racism and sexism, solidarity with oppressed peoples of the third-world, and the establishment of socialism by popular revolution. The movement, according to historian and NCM activist Max Elbaum, had an estimated 10,000 cadre members at its peak influence.
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 (SDS).
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.
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 after 1970, he died in 1997 in Canada.
Mark Naison is a professor of history at Fordham University, the Jesuit University of New York.
Robert Roth was an active member of the anti-war, anti-racism and anti-imperialism movements of the 1960s and 1970s and a 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.
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 International Committee Against Racism was the "mass organization" of the Progressive Labor Party in the United States. It was founded in 1973 once it had become clear that the Worker Student Alliance section of the Students for a Democratic Society could not sustain itself and that a new group with a more long-term vision not focused on students was going to be needed. Anti-racism was chosen as the focus for that new group.
Jailbreaks were demonstrations staged by members of Weatherman during the summer and fall of 1969 in an effort to recruit high school and community college students to join their movement against the United States government and its policies.
The American left can refer to multiple concepts. It is sometimes used as a shorthand for groups aligned with the Democratic Party. At other times, it refers to groups that have sought egalitarian changes in the economic, political, and cultural institutions of the United States. Various subgroups with a national scope are active. Liberals and progressives believe that equality can be accommodated into existing capitalist structures, but they differ in their criticism of capitalism and on the extent of reform and the welfare state. Anarchists, communists, and socialists with international imperatives are also present within this macro-movement. Many communes and egalitarian communities have existed in the United States as a sub-category of the broader intentional community movement, some of which were based on utopian socialist ideals. The left has been involved in both the Democratic and Republican parties at different times, having originated in the Democratic-Republican Party as opposed to the Federalist Party.
In the United States, the Revolutionary Youth Movement (RYM) is 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.
The Revolutionary Communist Party, USA is a new communist party in the United States founded in 1975 and led by its chairman, Bob Avakian. The party organizes for a revolution to overthrow the system of capitalism and replace it with a socialist state, with the final aim of world communism. The RCP is frequently described as a cult around Avakian.
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.
Eric Mann is a civil rights, anti-war, labor, and environmental organizer whose career spans more than 50 years. He has worked with the Congress of Racial Equality, Newark Community Union Project, Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), the Black Panther Party, the United Automobile Workers and the New Directions Movement. He was also active as a leader of SDS faction the Weathermen, which later became the militant left-wing organization Weather Underground. He was arrested in September 1969 for participation in a direct action against the Harvard Center for International Affairs and sentenced to two years in prison on charges of conspiracy to commit murder after two bullets were fired through a window of the Cambridge police headquarters on November 8, 1969. He was instrumental in the movement that helped to keep a General Motors assembly plant in Van Nuys, California open for ten years. Mann has been credited for helping to shape the environmental justice movement in the U.S. He founded the Labor/Community Strategy Center in Los Angeles, California and has been its director for 25 years. In addition, Mann is founder and co-chair of the Bus Riders Union, which sued the Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority for what it called “transit racism”, resulting in a precedent-setting civil rights lawsuit, Labor Community Strategy Center et al. v. MTA.
The history of left-wing politics in the United States consists of a broad range of individuals and groups that have sought fundamental egalitarian changes. Left-wing activists in the United States have been credited with advancing social change on issues such as labor and civil rights as well as providing critiques of capitalism.
The 1969 Students for a Democratic Society National Convention held in June of that year in Chicago, Illinois was the final convention held by the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). The gathering, which took place over June 18–22, was one of four conventions that officers and members of SDS attended each year. Taking place at the Chicago Coliseum, the convention was the site of chaos and tension, with members breaking into factions, each vying for control of the organization. Prior to this convention, one of the factions, the Revolutionary Youth Movement (RYM), soon to be renamed the Weathermen, wrote a manifesto regarding the ways and means by which to take SDS in the years to come. The creation of the Weathermen, from RYM, was essentially the main reason for the functioning, and later the disintegration, of SDS. Leading members of the college-based organization wanted to push its boundaries in order to create real revolution and change in America. The SDS National Convention of June 1969 was the culmination of all disagreement within its membership. The result of the convention was a disoriented and gutted organization, complete in only its name.
