Weather Underground

One of the most famous groups to come out of the 1960s, the Weather Underground (also known as Weathermen Underground) was a clandestine organization of anti-imperialist whites in the United States in the 1970s. Emerging from the radical elements of the student movement, the Weather Underground comprised, at its height, a few hundred people, though its reach extended far beyond its membership. Anti-racism and support for the Third World were its guiding principles; the group took inspiration from the context established by movements for national liberation in the United States and around the world. The Weather Underground was a group of white North Americans who defined struggles against colonialism and white supremacy as central to any social justice movement. The group—one expression of armed struggle among many to emerge at this time—sought to use the white privilege and largely middle-class background of its members in the service of revolutionary change. It attacked government and corporate buildings with bombs, and also through its media savvy. It was, in short, part of a culture of resistance, a vibrant and dynamic revolutionary movement dedicated to fundamental and progressive social change.

Initially formed as a wing of the radical Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), Weatherman took its name from a Bob Dylan song lyric about not needing a weatherman to know the direction the wind blows. The group formed around a lengthy manifesto that appeared prior to the 1969 SDS convention in Chicago. The 10,000-word statement proclaimed the leading role of national liberation movements in political struggles worldwide, especially the Vietnamese National Liberation Front and the Black Power movement (as exemplified by the Black Panther Party). The paper argued that white revolutionaries had a special responsibility to staunchly support such movements through militant, even violent, action. Movements by Third World people—in particular, the black liberation movement in the United States—were the leading force in creating change, Weather said. As a result, whites had to act urgently in solidarity with them.

At the time of its demise, SDS claimed more than 100,000 members nationwide, though differing political strategies led to the group's fracturing at the 1969 conference, with Weatherman emerging as a major faction within SDS. Throughout the summer of 1969, members of the nascent Weatherman tried to organize white working-class youth and held a series of confrontational demonstrations in various cities across the country as the group prepared to go underground. Often held responsible for the waning of coordinated student activity at the end of the 1960s, Weather in fact arose amid a series of political and strategic differences within SDS over the importance of race, class, and militant confrontation with the state. When combined with an often haughty approach to organizing, these differences led the Weatherman faction to become isolated from much of the white left. Such cleavages culminated in the Days of Rage demonstration in Chicago: What was supposed to be a well-orchestrated action of tens of thousands of white revolutionaries was instead an inchoate street fight that saw several hundred members of the group attacking property and police.

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