"Mother Country Radicals": Weather Underground's Bernardine Dohrn & Bill Ayers's Son Makes New Podcast

We spend the hour with an activist who replaced Angela Davis on the FBI’s 10 Most Wanted List: Bernardine Dohrn, a leader in the radical 1960s organization called the Weather Underground. When Dohrn and her activist husband Bill Ayers literally went underground to avoid arrest, they then raised a family as they continued to fight for revolution. Now a new podcast that was created, written and hosted by their son, Zayd Ayers Dohrn, explores their family history. Dohrn and Ayers discuss how they were radicalized, how they raised their children underground and why they resurfaced, and respond to whether they think their actions — like bombing the Pentagon to protest the war in Vietnam — perpetuated violence. We feature excerpts of the family from the podcast, as well as of former Weather Underground leaders who were captured and went to prison, like the late Kathy Boudin, mother of former San Francisco District Attorney Chesa Boudin, who then became a brother to Zayd, and Kakuya Shakur, daughter of Assata Shakur, who is still in exile in Cuba. “This is an important part of the story to the collateral damage to the next generation,” says Ayers Dohrn. “None of those kids chose to be part of the revolution. They, we, were born into it and still had to suffer the consequences.”