A Child of the Weather Underground Looks Back
The moments of doubt and self-criticism in Zayd Ayers Dohrn’s memoir of growing up as the child of two Weather Underground leaders offer a history of the 1960s and ’70s that can inform healthier and more effective left strategy today.
Young activists march in Chicago for the Weathermen-organized “Days of Rage” in October 1969. Bill Ayers can be seen second from the right. (David Fenton / Getty Images)
A middle-aged Bill Ayers once asked his then-teenage son, Zayd Ayers Dohrn, to accompany him on a trip to Mississippi for his eighteenth birthday. Ayers and his wife, Bernardine Dohrn, two prominent, charismatic members of the militant group the Weather Underground that emerged out of the ferment of the 1960s, were now living a relatively quiet life above ground with their three children. Their adventurous sides had been dimmed in their later years but were still flickering.
Ayers said he wanted to travel down to Mississippi to kill Byron De La Beckwith. The now-elderly white southerner was the man who murdered National Association for the Advancement of Colored People Field Director Medgar Evers in June 1963, shooting the civil rights activist in the back from 150 feet away. More than three decades after an all-white jury failed to reach a verdict during De La Beckwith’s trial, the assassin was still a free man.
Bill, a symbol of New Left political violence during the Vietnam era, dreamed aloud of retribution with his son by his side.
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