Remembering the Weather Underground, a Columbia Protest Movement Gone Maximally Wrong
It'll take some doing for today's students to do worse
***Almost everything in this article comes from Bryan Burrough’s excellent book: “Days of Rage: America's Radical Underground, the FBI, and the Forgotten Age of Revolutionary Violence”. In addition to the Weather Underground, the book covers groups including the Black Liberation Army, the Puerto Rican separatist group FALN, and the Symbionese Liberation Army. I highly recommend it.
Last week, as protests at Columbia University began to capture the nation’s attention, this trended on Twitter:
Folks, the race for the Nobel Prize in Cherry Picking is over: Will Bunch is this year’s winner. Unless one is willing to argue that the America First movement, the Westboro Baptist Church, Illinois Nazis, the KKK (massive rally on the Mall in 1925!) and many others were actually on the right side of history, then one has to acknowledge that protesters are sometimes right and sometimes wrong. Declaring protests to be ipso-facto good seems like saying that all movies are good. Really? Plan 9 From Outer Space? George Clooney’s The Midnight Sky? Clearly some efforts succeed, others fail, and others are a moral stain on humanity’s collective soul (such as George Clooney’s The Midnight Sky).
One protest movement that not many people stand behind today is the group that became the Weather Underground. Though largely forgotten, the “Weathermen” bombed dozens of buildings in the early ‘70s including the Pentagon and the US Capitol. They grew out of a protest movement at Columbia University WHICH IS WHY I’M WRITING ABOUT THEM TODAY — GET THE CONNECTION??? Of course, the Columbia connection is superficial — they could have begun at Yale or Stanford or any place where young people’s guilt about their privilege manifests in weird ways. But I think there are some lessons we can draw about today’s protest, and also: This story has violence and orgies and a prison break so I’m guessing you’d rather read about this than the Pennsylvania primaries.