Living Underground

Interview by Commonware with Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn, key figures in the Weather Underground, during their tour of Italy to launch the Italian version of Bill’s book “Fugitive Days: Memoirs of an Anti-War Activist” (Beacon Press, 2001).

The book is self-critical but not regretful. Given this, what do you think were the most significant contributions as well as the greatest limits of the Weather Underground?

BILL: I agree with your characterization, it’s critical but not regretful. Even though in many ways we’re sad, we’re burdened by the losses, by people like our friend David Gilbert still being in jail, by other political prisoners from those days still in jail, by the loss of our comrades in the explosion, but when people in the media in the US ask us to regret, they’re asking us to regret fighting against this genocidal monster that was murdering 6000 people a week in Vietnam. We don’t regret that. They want us to regret setting bombs in police stations when black people had been killed. We don’t regret that. What we regret, if we regret anything on a political level, is that for a relatively short but serious period of time, we became dogmatic, sectarian and self-righteous, and that was destructive, so we’ve learnt something from that. We’ve learnt to doubt. To act and then doubt. Not just act. But act and then rethink. But we don’t regret what the system wants us to regret, which is throwing ourselves against the war and racism with every fibre of our being.

BERNADINE: The anti-war movement was vast and powered in large part by returning veterans coming back from Vietnam. You can’t underestimate what an enormous role they played in building and deepening the anti-war movement. And the black freedom movement came out early against the war. And Muhammad Ali of course, and the Southern Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee, and the early civil rights movements, and ultimately Dr King all took a position opposing the war.

What we feel was maybe our special contribution to the movement was the idea of white people strongly feeling that it was our responsibility to be on the side of the black freedom movement, to interrupt the government programme which we then felt, and we now know, was a concerted conspiracy inside the FBI by J Edgar Hoover and the President to assassinate and criminalise the black freedom movement. And I think that to insist on the responsibility of white people to free themselves from white supremacy in order to be human beings and revolutionaries was a very particular role that we took on.

And as Bill said, we insisted on acting and were a little slow on reflecting on that action, but it was important to act and raise the stakes for what continued to be a war against the Vietnamese people. For even when the majority of American people had turned against the war and wanted the war to stop, it still continued for another five years.

To what extent do you think your biographies represent the experiences of a generation?

BERNADINE: We can’t speak for other people. We were on the far edge of politicos, but there was also a vast cultural movement at the same time, a disaffection of young people from the life that they had been raised to lead, jobs that were meaningless, living for making money, the American dream if you will. One of the things that’s clear to us is that when freedom is in the air - the black freedom movement being the first - it’s contagious and other people want it too. So there’s then an anti-war movement, and a womens’ movement and a gay rights movement, a movement to go to the country, to grow your own food, a movement to take over women’s healthcare, these were all happening simultaneously and they fed each other, even though they were distinct.

There is a strong sense in the book that yours was an ‘ethical revolt’ – a decision to live your lives according to your values. To what extent did you go beyond this to engage in political labour with other groups and struggles in the United States at the time?

BERNADINE: The black freedom movement separated from white people for that period and it wasn’t pleasant and it wasn’t what we wanted. We wanted to be with them, we wanted to work with them, we wanted to be in meetings, we wanted their wisdom and understanding, we wanted to be, in some ways instructed in a regular way. And so going off separately was also painful and difficult, and in the year that I was the head of SDS (Students for a Democratic Society), black student unions and Chicano student unions were growing up around campuses, so the task was to support their struggles as well.

And there was a Maoist tendency in the student movement that went across the world that said that students should leave campus and join workers’ organisations. Many people I think learnt from that to join struggles that were already happening so that, for example, workers on campus had a living wage. Many of the big campuses were surrounded by very impoverished black communities who were kept out of the resources of the campus, weren’t allowed to use the classrooms, the athletic facilities and so on, who were considered a menace and a threat. In many cases the notion of opening up the university, rather than restricting it to students became a very powerful argument and a mobilizing force with the community. Many students who graduated in the SDS then went to work in community organizing across the country, and tried to join the struggles with people there and recognise women’s struggles around welfare rights and childcare, as well as struggles for housing and healthcare and jobs.

BILL: Others of us went into factories, went into the fields and became organisers. But when we went underground, one of the hidden benefits of this was that we found ourselves living in the margins of society and so we found ourselves living in poor communities, in places that given our background and stuff we wouldn’t have migrated to. Bernadine found herself working as a domestic worker and as a waitress, and I found myself working in kitchens and working on the waterfront, in the shipyards. And we suddenly found ourselves for eleven years with friends that we never would have had, had it not been for that, and engaged in struggles that we might not have been engaged in. But they were part of the fabric of trying to live a life of purpose, and knowing that we were in mortal combat with the war machine, with the police and with the FBI, and at the same time we were living our lives underground. I worked in the shipyards for a long time and so I was in the union hiring hall day in and day out. We would get to the union every morning at five or six and try to get out on the job, so you’d have conversations, drink coffee, smoke with the guys for a long time, and one of the amusing things that happened to me all the time was that the communist organisers that were there would always try to get me to go to a meeting, and I never would, and they’d think “This guy seems like a conscious worker, why does he never go to our meetings?”. So I was part of the social world, I wasn’t on the run in some kind of isolated way, but at the same time I obviously couldn’t participate in those kinds of politics.

BERNADINE: So one of the things we found from being underground was that there were many undergrounds, we kept bumping into them. It turns out that there were people who were resisting the draft, who were under false identification, there were deserters from the military in large numbers, who were also trying to live a life without being caught, there were people running away from the constraints of life for women or for gay people in the middle of the country, and going to both coasts and trying to live a different life and changing their names, so there was a whole network of clandestine organizing and activity. So it was funny because there is no such place as underground but once you’re underground you see the people who are also underground.

BILL: You bump into all the rest of the criminals, even the mafia. Once I was waiting for a phone call from Bernadine at a payphone. It was a perfect payphone because it was in the basement of a restaurant. And suddenly two mafia guys show up and they’re waiting for a call too. And it was scary because you realise it was a perfect phone and everybody has to get a call…

Considering the key role of women in the Weather Underground, as well as feminist critiques at the time of gender relations within the organisation, what were the differences in men’s and women’s experiences in the organisation, and what problems arose in relation to gender?

BERNADINE: In that period there was also a lot of fragmentation around different issues, the woman’s movement, the gay movement, black and whites separating. I felt that I was a feminist, I was part of the early women’s consciousness raising groups, part of a women’s rebellion inside the SDS, and at the same time my feminism was international. From my point of view it was very much about revolutionary women and taking responsibility for what was being done in our name by our government to women around the world. So there were splits and angry recriminations at the time as if there was one right thing to do. I think now, looking back at it, there were many right things to do and we could have seen ourselves as part of a broad common movement. But that didn’t happen.

BILL: I think men and women had different experiences but socially we were trying to rethink everything, we were rethinking relationships, we were rethinking sexuality, rethinking what commitment meant and what it didn’t, and as we rethought these things of course we were dragging the old society with us. I feel very lucky that I came of age in a time that I could learn some things because I was challenged to rethink what I took as a given, the world I grew up in. And the people who did the challenging were often our best friends, our lovers, and it could be very painful and that pain was necessary if you were going to break out of the stupidity you’d grown up with. But our attitude towards sex and relationships and politics and ways of living and ways of celebrating and ways of having symbols and ceremonies was to say everything old will be immediately put on trial, everything new will be tried. And so we were very experimental, and we hurt each other, and we also learnt some things.

What was your relationship with the Black Panthers?

BILL: We had alliances with the Black Panthers when we were students, close relationships, and tension also sometimes. And then when we were underground there were groups of black revolutionaries, the Black Liberation Army, which was a split off from the Black Panthers, and we worked in coordination with them on several projects.

BERNADINE: But also its worth saying that the FBI at that time had a policy to assassinate black leaders, and to jail and criminalise them, and a policy to disrupt and destroy, and harass, revolutionary white organisations, but not to assassinate us, although for eleven years we lived with shoot to kill orders against us. So our close comrade in Chicago, the head of the Black Panther party there, Fred Hampton, was assassinated by the Chicago police and the FBI in the middle of the night. And that in many ways really impelled us faster than we were planning to go underground, because we had a little bit of the feeling that we have to put our bodies in front of the authorities who were trying to destroy other people.

What do you think has remained of that kind of refusal and revolt? And what can your experiences teach us in our struggles today?

BERNADINE: It’s too soon to tell, it was one series in a long series of uprisings in American political life. Sometimes I think it is glorified by organisers and activists in a way that puts a damper or pressure on organisers who don’t feel the same power. I think in other times we were obviously demonized and called terrorists and spoilt children and self-interested and all the other crazy things that the right wing says, but we were part of a global movement. Obviously there were liberation struggles around the world and that powered a lot of the impulse to ask why the US would be exempt from revolutionary struggle, why it would happen everywhere in the world but not in what we called the mother country of imperialism. And so we felt very responsible even in times when we were perhaps trying to imitate what was happening in liberation struggles around the world. But we took a lot of strength and inspiration from other struggles.

BILL: The problem is that if you take the sixties and freeze it in amber it becomes no lesson at all, but if you say its part of the struggle, we can see there were struggles in the thirties, there were struggles in the fifties, all the struggles in the early part of the century that led to the civil rights movement that are not celebrated, and that those are important too. And I think that when people have a pillow put over their head and they’re suffocating, they resist, and when we resist we get energy and hope from that resistance. Our resistance was one moment in the large hills and valleys of struggle, and we don’t romanticise it and think we were the greatest, in fact we think that the sixties was largely a myth and a symbol that was perpetrated by old people who were nostalgic. We’re not nostalgic.

BERNADINE: Or that period is commodified and so it’s a product.

BILL: And also it’s a wet blanket on young people. Over the years we’ve had many people say to us, “Gee, I wish I’d been born in the sixties!” and we say, “No you don’t”, as if we had the best sex, the best music, the best demonstrations…

BERNADINE: OK we did have the best…

BILL: We did have the best sex!

BERNADINE: …music.

 

* We would like to thank the comrades of Vag61 in Bologna, where the interview was carried out.