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It was the era of peace and love, of flower power, of “give peace a chance”. Yet, the 1960s was also the era of napalm, the Detroit riots and the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X. While it’s tempting to view the countercultural age through rose-tinted spectacles, to do so would mean ignoring the extreme lengths young people were willing to go to change their world.

In 1969, students across America formed in opposition to the Vietnam War. After the collapse and fragmentation of the Students for a Democratic Society Party, a splinter group known as The Weathermen – a reference to Bob Dylan’s observation that “you don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows” – emerged as a distinct entity. The organisation had two simple goals: to end the Vietnam war and racism in the United States.

It took two years before the Weathermen’s frustration with peaceful protest grew so much that they resorted to bombs. After being faced with police violence on the streets of Chicago, the organisation decided that traditional protest tactics were useless in the face of such opposition. Instead, they transformed themselves into a weaponised, revolutionary youth force, employing underground guerrilla war tactics to cripple the American government. This, they said, was the only way to achieve real change.

Bill Ayers, later demonised for releasing an ill-timed memoir about The Weathermen on September 11th, 2001, was at the centre of the action. Born to a middle-class family in Illinois, Ayers studied at Michigan University, where he was radicalised after joining the 1965 Ann Arbor teach-in against the Vietnam War.

Committed to the Weathermen’s cause, Ayers helped launch the organisation’s first offensive in the summer of 1969. One branch attempted to recreate the actions of Chairman Mao’s ‘Red Guard’ by marching into local schools, gagging, tying and occasionally beating teachers, and then delivering revolutionary speeches to the bewildered students.

By October 1969, The Weathermen were organising a large-scale assault on police with the help of thousands of students. This new phase of “national action”, as it was called, was supposed to start on the second anniversary of the death of Argentine-Cuban revolutionary Che Guevara.

All of this attracted the attention of the FBI, who kept an especially eager eye on a “mini-skirted Weatherwoman” called Bernadine Dohrn. She had led 30 radicalised Weathermen on a window-smashing rampage around Harvard University Campus and taken responsibility for the successful bombing of a police memorial statue in Chicago’s Haymarket Square.

The Weathermen’s readiness to fight fire with fire was echoed in their slogan “bring the war home”, though it quickly became apparent that their tactics didn’t have sufficient impact. Demonstrations had low turnouts, and huge amounts of people were being arrested. After calling a national “War Council” or “Wargasm”, where drug use and group sex rubbed alongside radical political discourse, it was established that Weatherman members should be trained to use firearms, make bombs, and kill policemen.

By 1970, the organisation had split into several underground cells, usually comprised of three or four members living in the same house. One of these houses belonged to Calthyn Wilkerson, who had joined The Weatherman in the summer of 1969 and was involved in some of the collective most violent offensives, including the firebombing of the home of New York State Supreme Court Justice Murtagh.

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On March 6th, 1970, one of the Weathermen’s bomb factories exploded, destroying an entire townhouse in the centre of Manhattan and killing three founding members of the collective – Diana Oughton, Ted Gold, and Terry Robbins. Wilkerson and her friend Kathy Boudin were rescued from the debris.

When police investigated the bomb site, they found a women’s torso on the first floor, along with 60 sticks of dynamite, an anti-tan shell and a pile of metal pipes packed with explosives, nails and shrapnel. Wilkerson and Co. had planned to use the latter against soldiers at an officer’s dance at Fort Dix, New Jersey, that evening.

The bombings continued throughout 1970 and ’71. The most significant targets included the New York City Police Department headquarters, Presidio army base in San Francisco, Long Island City Courthouse, and several New York and Boston banks. These bombings were often preceded by ‘Weather Reports’, or public warnings, to prevent civilian casualties.

There was a burgeoning disillusionment with the Weathermen’s violent rhetoric, and the Greenwich townhouse incident had reminded members that choosing to fight fire with fire meant eventually getting burnt. By the end of 1970, Dohrn was number one on the FBI’s most-wanted list, and key members of the Weather Underground, as it was now known, were on the run.

The collective continued to bomb tactical locations for political reasons, but the frequency of the attacks, not to mention their motivations, changed greatly. For the next seven years, The Weather underground continued to bomb America, though never again did they attempt to kill or harm anyone.

In the eyes of its members, the Weather Underground’s dissident activity was an attempt to get to the root cause of deep-seated problems accepted by the rest of society. According to Bill Ayers, the domestic terrorism of the Weathermen was the most obvious course of action for a radical movement determined to fix inequality and state-sponsored conflict once and for all.

Today, Ayers, Dohrn and the Weather Underground as a whole remain incredibly divisive. In a sense, their project was an utter failure. The Iraq War is proof that they failed to change The US Government’s policy on foreign conflicts, just as the death of George Floyd is proof that institutionalised racism is still an inescapable part of American life. That being said, one thing is clear: those looking to change American politics would do well to learn from The Weather Underground’s mistakes.

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