# data[].attributes.body
--Youth activist deserved the same notoriety as the Adult led Civil Rights groups due to their ability to cause similar or more impactful change.

-Why are youth group beginnings important for this conversation

-Youth beginnings are important  when you see an adult it makes sense for them to be protesting because they have experiences going through stages of life, possibly being a parent, or a mentor to a younger person. Youth may not have the same knowledge in comparison to their counterparts making their presence much for important as they stand side by side with adults.

-Thesis needed in Analysis only, no need to reference directly but can allude mention phrases directly from thesis but don't make it repetitive, rephrases it everytime or use aspects of it.

-Write conclusion and see if it can fit a introduction don't be afraid to move paragraphs around.

-Put headers if they are distinct sections, but not needed if there are transition sentences between sentences or paragraphs.

-Explain why people need to read this. Good writing is not complex but can include certain phrases, credible in writing but don't want to lose audience.

-Youth activism is an important piece of social change, and while looking a youth activist we can create systems or frameworks that encourage more youth activist to i be activist

-Look at each example given and cleary lay out why it is significant generally and why it is significant to youth activism

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ON THE BLACK STUDENT MOVEMENT - 1960-70 on JSTOR

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Muhammad Ahmad, ON THE BLACK STUDENT MOVEMENT - 1960-70, The Black Scholar, Vol. 9, No. 8/9, The 1960's (May/June 1978), pp. 2-11

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Little Rock Arkansas and CORE

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Sign in with your credentials to access the EBSCOhost premium information resources provided by your subscribing institution.

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Orion, define what each group did, how effective it was, and what their methods were compared to those of the adult activists.

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Create a new document and edit with others at the same time -- from your computer, phone or tablet. Get stuff done with or without an internet connection. Use Docs to edit Word files. Free from Google.

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Depths of Activism:
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I.Introduction-

Thesis-Adult activists like Rosa Parks, Malcolm X, and MLK are popular names that are that are appreciated and studied despite the fact that youth activists of the time had a similar impact on the Civil Rights Movement.
II.Body Paragraph-
Paragraph (a)-What the Adults did
Paragraph(b)-What the youth did Paragraph
Paragraph(c)-Interracial Youth Activism
a.Topic Sentence
b.Reasoning
Why they were active protestors

Evidence:

III.Conclusion-

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Example Body Paragraph:
Makinpoint-
Water
Hydrogen
How they work together

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135
110 for Rayne
72

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Will the Real Black, Afro-American, Mixed, Colored, Negro Please Stand Up?: Impact of the Black Social Movement, Twenty Years Later on JSTOR

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K. Sue Jewell, Will the Real Black, Afro-American, Mixed, Colored, Negro Please Stand Up?: Impact of the Black Social Movement, Twenty Years Later, Journal of Black Studies, Vol. 16, No. 1 (Sep., 1985), pp. 57-75

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Franklin, V. P. "Introduction: African American Student Activism in the 20th Century." The Journal of African American History 88, no. 2 (2003): 105-09. doi:10.2307/3559059.

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Making the World in Atlanta's Image: The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, Morris Abram, and the Legislative History of the United Nations Race Convention on JSTOR

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H. TIMOTHY LOVELACE JR., Making the World in Atlanta's Image: The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, Morris Abram, and the Legislative History of the United Nations Race Convention, Law and History Review, Vol. 32, No. 2 (May 2014), pp. 385-429

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From left to right: David "Chip" Richmond (son of the late David L. Richmond), Franklin McCain Sr. '63, Jibreel Khazan '63 & Joseph A. McNeil '63 pose in front of the statue commemorating the A&T Four on the A&T campus. Photo courtesy of A&T University Relations.

Jibreel Khazan recounts that "...on Sunday night, January 31, 1960, we decided we were going to request equal service for all Americans at F. W. Woolworth's lunch counter on Monday, February 1, 1960."

Biographies of the A&T Four

Jibreel Khazan

Jibreel Khazan (Ezell Blair, Jr.) was born in Greensboro, North Carolina on October 18, 1941. He graduated from James B. Dudley High School in 1959 and began his freshman year at A&T College having received an A&T College Alumni Association Scholarship. Jibreel and his roommate, Joe McNeil, one of the A&T Four, lived in Scott Hall their freshman year. He recounts that "on Sunday night, January 31, 1960, we decided we were going to request equal service for all Americans at F. W. Woolworth's lunch counter on Monday, February 1, 1960."

Dr. Khazan graduated from A&T with a Bachelor of Science in sociology and social studies. He studied law at Howard University Law School in Washington, DC, education at Massachusetts University in Dartmouth, Massachusetts and voice at the New England Conservatory of Music. Dr. Khazan has worked as a teacher and counselor and is an oral historian, oracle, Mass-Star Story teller and lecturer.

Dr. Khazan received the honorary doctorate of humanities degree from North Carolina A&T State University on May 5, 1991.

Franklin Eugene McCain

Franklin Eugene McCain was born in Union County, North Carolina but grew up in Washington, DC. After graduating from Eastern High School, he entered A&T College and earned a Bachelor of Science in chemistry and biology in 1964. He later earned his Master of Arts from A&T and also studied and trained at North Carolina State University in Raleigh, North Carolina, Princeton University in New Jersey, Farr Associates in Greensboro and American Management Association in New York City. McCain recalls that as they talked from September 1959 until January 31, 1960, "we had a common outlook to change the unjust conditions in the society that was pushed forward by frustration."

Dr. McCain has held leadership positions in numerous community organizations including the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Inc. and the National Conference of Christians and Jews. He has sat on the Board of Visitors at Bennett College for Women and the Board of Trustees at North Carolina Central University (July 1, 2005-June 30, 2009) among many others. Dr. McCain was chair of A&T's Board of Trustees from 2008-2009 and is now a member of the UNC Board of Governors (2009-2013). He holds membership in the A&T Alumni Association.

Dr. McCain was awarded the honorary Doctor of Philosophy in humanities from NC A&T State University on May 5, 1991.

McCain Audio Interview

Hear what Franklin McCain has to say about that historical day in 1960 (RealPlayer required, download it here):

Joseph Alfred McNeil

Joseph Alfred McNeil was born in Wilmington, North Carolina on March 25, 1942. He graduated from Williston Senior High School and entered A&T College having received an A&T College Alumni Association Scholarship. Joe and his roommate, Ezell Blair, Jr., one of the A&T Four, lived in Scott Hall their freshman year. McNeil says of the sit-ins... "they were just doing what was right"

In 1963, Dr. McNeil earned a Bachelor of Science in engineering physics from A&T and was commissioned a second lieutenant through the Air Force ROTC program on June 1, 1963. He retired from the Air Force Reserves in 2000 as a Major General having being promoted to the rank on February 29, 1996. After a military career of over thirty seven years, Major General McNeil received the Air Force Distinguished Service Medal upon retirement.

As a civilian, Dr. McNeil developed a management background in corporate finance, investment banking and public services.

Dr. McNeil was awarded the honorary Doctor of Philosophy in humanities from North Carolina A&T State University on May 5, 1991 and the honorary Doctor of Laws from St. John's University in Jamaica, New York in 1998.

David Leinail Richmond

David Richmond was born in Greensboro, North Carolina on April 20, 1941. After graduating from Greensboro's James B. Dudley High School, he entered A&T in the fall of 1959. David majored in business administration and accounting. "We were scared," Richmond said in 1987. "We tried to encourage each other. We said, 'I'll do it if you do it.' But after we got past Belk's and turned the corner, I think everybody was ready to do it. Fear will make you crazy, I think. The adrenalin was pumping but if anybody had said, 'Boo' at that counter, I think I would have run."

He became a counselor-coordinator for the CETA program in Greensboro. His work with the CETA program allowed him to work with disadvantaged youth and adults.

David Richmond died at forty nine years of age in Greensboro on December 7, 1990. Dr. Richmond received the honorary doctorate of humanities degree posthumously from North Carolina A&T State University at his funeral services on December 12, 1990.

On Saturday, February 1, 1997, Dr. Richmond's unmarked grave was to be memorialized with a monument that read, "David L. Richmond, 1941-1990, civil rights hero; one of the original Greensboro Four; Feb. 1, 1960; Love leads to Freedom." The monument didn't arrive in time for the ceremony; however, the dedication took place anyway. David Richmond's life was celebrated with the play, David Richmond, written in 1998 by Dr. Sam Hay, former A&T faculty member and former executive director of A&T's Paul Robeson Theatre.

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On February 1st, 1960 in Greensboro, North Carolina, four A&T freshmen students, Ezell Blair, Jr. (Jibreel Khazan), Franklin McCain, Joseph McNeil & David Richmond walked downtown and "sat - in" at the whites-only lunch counter at Woolworth's. They refused to leave when denied service and stayed until the store closed.

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Segregation Within Higher Education(Not for me)

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Segregation Within Higher Education(Not for me)

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https://www.jstor.org/stable/1069464

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The Changing Social Base of the American Student Movement on JSTOR

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A major finding of the pioneering empirical research on the American student movement of the 1960's was that students who engaged in campus protest were pri...

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What does segregation do to a student activist
Why protest
Why choose a specific kind of protest

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How does this relate to The Color of Law

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How does this relate to The Color of Law

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Rothstein argues that segregation De Jure rather than De Facto.
The ways he show:
Housing
Education
Employment
Voting
Transportation
Public Accomodations

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Forgotten history is not lost history and

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SDS-Fighting for black radicalism, but soon arguing to end Vietnam War.
Big Part of History forgotten, just not discussed

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Look at the chapters on Activism

African American Eras: Segregation to Civil Rights Times. 4 vols. Detroit: UXL, 2011. Gale Virtual Reference Library (accessed September 14, 2018).

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What did the SDS do with regard to civil disobedience that you do not want to be forgotten or lost.

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segregation and youth
segregation and youth activism
Watch Terms you use try other names/euphemisms.

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TERRY GROSS, HOST:

This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross. The American radical underground of the 1970s is the subject of my guest Bryan Burrough's new book, "Days Of Rage." He writes about the Weather Underground and other groups whose members he says, quote, "mistakenly believed the country was on the brink of a genuine, political revolution and thought that violence would speed the change," unquote. Some of the groups were fully committed to their political ideals. Others had vague and incoherent ideologies. In addition to the Weather Underground, Burrough writes about the Black Panthers, the Black Liberation Army, which is an offshoot of the Panthers, the Symbionese Liberation Army, which kidnapped Patty Hearst, the Family, which was co-founded by Tupac Shakur's stepfather and FALN, a Puerto Rican independence group. Burrough spoke to several members of these groups who had never spoken on the record before and offered new insights into how these groups operated. Burrough also spoke with retired FBI agents. Burrough was a special correspondent for Vanity Fair. He also wrote the best-seller "Barbarians At The Gate: The Fall Of RJR Nabisco."

Bryan Burrough, welcome back to FRESH AIR. So you're trying to take several of the radical groups from the '70s and late '60s and put them into context. So as part of doing that, you said that the number of bombings by radical groups in an 18-month period between 1971 and '72 - 2,500 bombings on U.S. soil during the 18-month period. But you also say that those bombings, although more widespread, were less lethal than attacks today. There weren't many casualties. So was that intentional?

BRYAN BURROUGH: Yes, by and large, it was. And that, of course, is the challenge for an author - is trying to explain to people today the incredible differences in the way the American public regarded all these bombings during the 1970s. These bombings were far more widespread and far less lethal. Less than 1 percent of them led to any type of serious injury, much less a fatality. Bombs, I write, basically functioned as exploding press releases at a time when there was no Internet or much way of, let's say, a radical getting his views out to the public. If you exploded a bomb and then taped a communique beneath a telephone booth or called it into a radio station, that was the way that these underground radicals got their message out.

GROSS: You write

(Reading) the challenge for me is to explain to people today why this all didn't seem as insane then as it does now.

Do you feel like you have a better understanding now for the reasons behind the actions of the radical armed groups?

BURROUGH: I do. Look, I'm not here to condone or to condemn them, merely to present things accurately. So the challenge is to explain to people today why radical bombings didn't seem like something, you know, a crazy person like the Unabomber would be doing. You have to explain the fact that the Nixon administration really was as corrupt as many of them believed, that the war was misguided...

GROSS: The war in Vietnam?

BURROUGH: ...That generations of African - yes - that generations of African-Americans had undergone, you know, hellish experiences. There were reasons - legitimate reasons - to have these grievances. What makes the 1970s so different, especially from today, is that there were all these militants that believed that the way to right these wrongs was to detonate bombs, was to assassinate policemen, was to engage in shootouts and kidnappings. It was a very different time from today.

GROSS: Well, there really was a belief that there was going to be a revolution. What's your understanding of some of the different concepts of that revolution that people were planning for?

BURROUGH: Well, across all these groups, they all read the same things. They had the same philosophers and the same philosophies. And I think, in general, the young people who went underground and declared this kind of war against America in the 1970s were mostly one-time protesters and student militants from the '60s who really were not able to escape the dream of 1968. And that is the dream that, in fact, a new world order was dawning, that governments were falling. The hardcore of the '60s protest movement really did believe that a second American Revolution was imminent. I quote one of the Weatherman memorably saying, I kind of thought it would be 1975, maybe the revolution would come in '77. But that they believed a revolution was imminent and that violence would speed the change as it had in China, in North Vietnam and in Cuba.

GROSS: Let's start with one of the most famous of the radical underground groups of the period - the Weather Underground, which was an offshoot of the radical student group SDS, Students for a Democratic Society. How would you describe the philosophy of the Weather Underground?

BURROUGH: The Weather Underground was the leadership of SDS. And they went underground essentially to join the war they imagined African-Americans were launching, the revolution that they believed the Black Panthers were launching. They went underground essentially - we show - I think we prove with on-the-record interviews in the book with an intention of attacking and attempting to kill policemen and military officers. This was a strategy that did not last long because their political prowess far exceeded their technical prowess and they had a bomb go off that killed three of their people. It was after that that they embarked on a very different strategy of largely symbolic protest bombings - bombings done late at night of empty buildings.

GROSS: A lot of the targets of the anger of radical groups in the '60s and '70s were corporations - the Pentagon corporations, in part for their perceived greed, but also for their participation in manufacturing things that were used in the war in Vietnam, like napalm. But the target early on for the Weather Underground, as you describe it, was police. Why police?

BURROUGH: There was a sense that it was really violent, black rhetoric - especially that emanating from the Black Panthers - that informed most of the people that initially went underground - the first group, the Weather Underground and the second, the Black Liberation Army. And African-American militants at that point had an array of complaints, but chief among them, first among them, was always police brutality, that policemen throughout America largely were able to kill black men, black Americans, with impunity. And, you know, we quote people from Weather saying look, we wanted to do what the Panthers wanted to and what the Black Liberation Army wanted to do later and that is kill policeman, to, quote, "fight back." It seems amazing now, but that's what they intended to do.

GROSS: Did the Weather Underground actually hurt or kill any people before changing their tactics?

BURROUGH: They hurt a policeman in Berkeley, Calif., in their first attack.

GROSS: Describe it for us.

BURROUGH: The early weeks of the Weather Underground have always been kind of cloaked in secrecy and now I understand why - because there were a series of attacks and plans for attacks on policemen, on military installations that were sharply different in strategy - you know, kind of a murderous strategy and very different from what they did later. This first attack is described in the book on the record by the young man, now in his 60s, who built the bomb and organized the attack. His name is Howard Machtinger. It was launched against the police station in Berkeley, Calif., late on a - I think it was a Thursday night in February 1970. There was a shift change at 11 p.m. The officers came out of the station into the parking lot, where the first device went off. There were many shattered windows. One officer's arm was mangled. He went through six hours of surgery to save it. Just as everyone was recovering from that bomb, a second one went off, which caused further injuries. This attack, which was, I believe, the first ever done by the Weather Underground, they took no credit for, and it has never been credited to them.

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

GROSS: One of the turning points in the history of the Weather Underground is the infamous story of a bomb that actually exploded in the townhouse where the bomb was being prepared. Three members of the Weather Underground were killed. Two of them escaped. And you spoke to the woman whose townhouse it was who escaped from that accidental bombing, Cathy Wilkerson. And just to refresh our memories, what was that bomb being prepared for - the one that accidentally exploded?

BURROUGH: This bomb was being prepared to be set. One of several bombs was going to be set at an officer's dance that night in Fort Dix, N.J. If in fact Weatherman had gone through with that, they would have been mass-murderers. That was what they were attempting to do. Talking to Cathy, talking to other members of the collective who were not in the building that day, there was not a lot of discussion about the morals of this.

One way to look at Weatherman is as a political cult. People had really all drank the Kool-Aid, and they were ready to do this, with one notable exception. I did interview the family of a young man who did kind of, in his words, wig out about it the night before and scream at the other members in the club to - what are we doing? We can't just kill people like this. And he was told, you need to calm down or we'll have to kill you (laughter). And I don't think they were joking.

This was considered deadly serious. People understood what they were doing. They were committed to the struggle, committed to a violent struggle. And the only reason that didn't happen was because the bomb builder - the head of the collective, Terry Robbins - didn't know nearly as much as he thought about dynamite. And it went off in his hands. He died along with two others, and Cathy Wilkerson, whose family townhouse it was, was one of two survivors who crawled from the rubble and went underground. I had many interviews with Cathy. I have deep respect for her. She went on to a long career as a teacher here in New York.

GROSS: After the disaster in the townhouse in New York when the bomb accidentally exploded and killed three members of the Weather Underground, Bernardine Dohrn, one of the leaders of the group, issued a new strategy for a form of, like, armed propaganda where instead of, like, targeting people, it was more going to be about symbolic bombings. So would you describe this change in strategy?

BURROUGH: You're exactly right. After the townhouse, Bernardine Dohrn and her partner at that time, Jeff Jones, more or less took control of Weatherman and said, you know, a strategy of murder just - we can't do. We need something much more life-affirming. We'll never rally America to the revolution we want by killing people.

And she ordained or she worked with the others to come up with a strategy that they called armed propaganda. Others dubbed it responsible terrorism, as one editorialist called it, in which the new strategy would be to bomb symbols of government power, typically late at night, with warnings phoned in so that people would not be killed. Once a young man named Ron Fliegelman in New York perfected a new, safer bomb design, they were able to do this. They initiated this new theater of operations by detonating a bomb out (laughter) in a restroom just down from the commissioner of the New York Police - his office in Police headquarters.

The bombings went on for five or six years. The most high-profile of them would include a bomb that the Weather set off at the U.S. Capitol in - I think it was February '71 - and a restroom at the Pentagon in May of 1972.

GROSS: Since you have described some of these bombings as basically exploding press releases, a way of calling attention very dramatically to the causes that the Weather Underground embraced, how did the statements read?

BURROUGH: That's funny. They start off in 1970 at a time where Weatherman, who were largely very serious, east coast student militants, were aware that the protest movement was kind of changing dramatically and rapidly in front of them in a kind of a flood of tie-dye and LSD, that hippies and the counterculture was taking over. So the early communiques are very rich and kind of hippie-dippie, almost comical jargon about, you know, Attorney General Mitchell, dog, look out, we're coming for you, dude - this type of stuff. And after a few months, that began to melt away and especially with the famous communique called New Morning in December 1970. Dohrn seems to have taken much more responsibility for the communiques. And they became, I think, much more mature in terms of their political message, certainly in the verbiage and the language. And they became much, much more sober documents that lasted on for most of the next six years. Every time they bombed something, there was a new communique.

GROSS: What were some of the causes that were mentioned in the so-called exploding press releases?

BURROUGH: (Laughter). They started off - Weather - very much in support of the black revolutionaries, such as the Black Panthers, that they believed were in open revolt against the U.S. government. Unfortunately, you know, after about a year into this, Weather came into conflict with their fellow travelers in the black underground who wanted to continue murderous violence, who wanted to continue killing cops. And as a result, Weather backed off from backing groups like the Black Liberation Army. And they began devoting their communiques increasingly to a broader version of revolution - that drugs could be revolutionary. And ultimately, as the '70s wore on, their communiques endorsed a variety of left-wing causes and notions, many of them popularized in mainstream today from feminism to environmentalism to the sins of American corporations and multinationals in the Third World.

GROSS: If you're just joining us, my guest is Bryan Burrough. He's the author of the new book "Days Of Rage: America's Radical Underground, The FBI, And The Forgotten Age of Revolutionary Violence." Let's take a short break, then we'll talk some more. This is FRESH AIR.

This is FRESH AIR. And if you're just joining us, my guest is Bryan Burrough. He's the author of the new book "Days Of Rage: America's Radical Underground, The FBI, And The Forgotten Age Of Revolutionary Violence." And that age is in the 1960s and '70s. Bryan Burrough is also a special correspondent for Vanity Fair.

So your book begins with you meeting with Cathy Wilkerson. And again, she's the woman whose family owned the townhouse that accidentally exploded after a bomb accidentally went off, a bomb that her friends in the Weather Underground were making. So when you meet Cathy Wilkerson, she's 68. She's a grandmother. And you found out she was actually one of the bomb makers, as you were telling us. And she specialized in making bombs that were safer so that they wouldn't accidentally explode like the one in her family townhouse did. How did you find that out? This was information she hadn't divulged before.

BURROUGH: No. What I found in approaching the book and looking at the existing literature is there was an awful lot out there about the politics of the radical underground. There was not much on the actual - the logistics, how they did it. That type of thing just had rarely been discussed. People were concerned about being prosecuted. Well, now it's 40 years later, and I had been able to talk to many of her peers in the Weather Underground, many of them in their 60s and 70s. In this case, the man that she had been lovers with in the late 1970s, named Ron Fliegelman, who was kind of the lead bomb maker, if you will, of the Weather Underground, had told me not only was he the lead underground, but that Cathy was the only one out on the west coast who knew how to, quote, "build the thing." And so there was a moment that I start the book with because it was important to show people what these people had to go through to begin to share their stories with an author, someone like me who's not radical. And so I said to her, I think I know what your role was. And this was about our sixth meeting and she'd never gone near that. She'd never been willing to go toward the bombings or toward what she actually did underground. She said - and I remember because she had her 5-month-old grandson with her kind of rocking him in her lap - and I said, yeah, I've been told. You were the west coast bomb maker. And there was this long, kind of dramatic silence. And she just said I felt an obligation to make the design safe - the bomb design, she meant. You know, she felt she needed to help the group get back on track after the devastation and the deaths at the townhouse. And that type of kind of eureka moment, I experienced literally dozens of times with people in a variety of these groups - talking with people in the Black Liberation Army about police shootouts, with people like the great revolutionary Ray Levasseur about his group's bank robberies and the like. You know, it's hard for a lot of these people to realize that it's safe, that they won't be prosecuted now, in all likelihood, for talking about these things that happened back in the 1970s.

GROSS: Can they still be prosecuted? Is there a statute of limitations?

BURROUGH: The statute of limitation - if it was just a property crime, meaning, let's say, a bombing at the Pentagon that just blew up a bathroom, that's long since passed. The only thing you have to worry about, generally speaking, is if you did something in the 1970s that led to a death, if there was a murder. And unfortunately, there are still several unsolved crimes that - that there are many out believe can be attributed to some of these underground groups, including the bombing death of a policeman in San Francisco in 1970.

GROSS: So one of the interesting details in your book is early on in the period of this militant activism, dynamite is sold over-the-counter. It's legal to buy it. It's legal to own it. And there's a group that precedes the Weather Underground that does some bomb-making. And they go to the phone book and what do they look up?

BURROUGH: They look up explosives, and they find that there is a dealer in explosives up in the Bronx. And this young man, Sam Melville, who led the group, he and a couple of buddies went there and crawled over the outer wall at night. They held up the night watchman, and they stole the dynamite. What they didn't know was what the Weather Underground learned several months later was you could walk into almost any construction supply outfit in New England and simply by presenting your driver's license, walk off with a crate of dynamite for about $60, I think Ron Fliegelman told me it was. And one of the amazing things is that during 1970, when Weather Underground embarked on the initial underground bombing campaign, you see state after state after state reacting to these bombs by really introducing not the first dynamite control laws, but they became widespread in 1970. And by 1971, it became much more difficult to buy dynamite. In fact, the Weather Underground bombing campaign, as well as all these campaigns, are really the genesis of most of the security measures in America that we now take for granted, from bomb-sniffing dogs to metal detectors to just the basic security that you see at government buildings and corporate headquarters.

GROSS: My guest is journalist Bryan Burrough, author of the new book "Days Of Rage: America's Radical Underground, The FBI, And The Forgotten Age Of Revolutionary Violence." After we take a short break, Burrough will talk about the Black Panthers and its splinter group, the Black Liberation Army. And we'll hear about the Family, which was co-founded by Tupac Shakur's stepfather. I'm Terry Gross, and this is FRESH AIR.

This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross back with Bryan Burrough, author of the new book "Days Of Rage" about the radical underground groups of the '70s, including the Weathermen, the Family, the FALN and the Black Liberation Army, which was an offshoot of the Black Panthers.

Let's talk a little bit about the Black Panthers. You describe that group as something new, strong, proud, black men with their guns facing down startled, white policemen. A lot of people, even if they don't know much about the Panthers, might remember, like, the posters, the images of Panthers with - is it machine guns?

BURROUGH: Every gun.

GROSS: (Laughter) OK. So what was the original philosophy behind the Panthers 'cause it's a dual philosophy? Like, there's the armed militant part, but there's also, like, let's do good in the neighborhood. Let's help people.

BURROUGH: Well, the Panthers really were - they were the kind of the logical culmination of 10 or 15 years of increasingly violent, black rhetoric that, we have to say, most of white America was unaware of. They were - most of white America is watching Martin Luther King and nonviolent. In fact, there were always those within the black community who felt that armed self-defense, as they called it, or arming themselves and fighting back was the way to go. And the Black Panthers with the natural culmination of all of this rhetoric, founded by Huey Newton and Bobby Seale in Oakland, it was originally to be a self-protective group there in the Bay Area. The Panthers ultimately became a very successful above-ground group. As you note, they did have a militant aspect to their public profile but also a very active social aspect - a breakfast program, babysitting, so all sorts of social welfare aspects. The group that I write about that was a successor to the Black Panthers was the Black Liberation Army, which was a violent spinoff of the Panthers much as the Weathermen were a violent spinoff of SDS.

GROSS: And what were the goals of the Black Liberation Army, which is a group, I think, most people have not heard of?

BURROUGH: Well, one reason you haven't heard of the Black Liberation Army is during the time of its existence, in the early 1970s, there was a public debate carried on in the pages of The New York Times, among other places, about whether this group actually even existed. In 1971, there were a series of attacks against New York police officers that led to the deaths of two of them. There were attacks also in the bay area in Atlanta by a group that called itself the Black Liberation Army. Many in the press and among police doubted that this group even existed. They believed that it was just some name that random black militants were using to make it sound as if there was a group. There has never been a narrative history of this group because none of its members have ever spoken until now. In fact, it's very clear that there was an actual group called the Black Liberation Army. They resulted from a split in the Black Panther Party in which the New York group of Panthers split off, pledged allegiance to Huey Newton's great rival, Eldridge Cleaver, and embarked on a campaign to take revenge against the policemen that they believed were killing their people in the ghettos.

GROSS: So what were their tactics?

BURROUGH: The Black Liberation Army, by and large, did not go in for bombings. They went in for the assassination of policemen. There were several attempts to assassinate police in New York in 1971 that resulted in two deaths. In January 1972, a group of BLA soldiers engaged probably the most gruesome assassination of NYPD officers in the city's history, the deaths of Greg Foster and Rocco Laurie. Those killings have officially never been solved, and I tell the backstory, the untold backstory, of that in great detail in the book.

The BLA went on to continue attacking and occasionally killing police officers throughout 1973 when one by one, its soldiers and ultimately its leaders and ultimately its last leader, Joanne Chesimard, now better known as Assata Shakur, who's still in the news for being in Cuba when the last of them were hunted down, captured and killed in 1973.

GROSS: So you spoke with one of the leaders of the BLA, Dhoruba bin Wahad, whose birth name was Richard Moore, and he told you about their plans to attack police who had killed African-Americans. Why did he talk with you? How did you get him to talk with you?

BURROUGH: Dhoruba is 70 years old now. He served, I want to say, 15 years in prison for his alleged role in some of these killings. He feels essentially safe to talk about this now. But more than anything, Dhoruba, looking back 40 years later, realizes that the most important thing he ever did was to be one of the initial co-founders of the Black Liberation Army.

And yet, this group has never attained any type of historical credibility. Most people outside the BLA don't even believe it existed. And part of the reason that Dhoruba and several of his colleagues spoke to me for the first time was they wanted the world to know that there actually had been a BLA. Whatever you may think about what they tried to do, whatever you may think about the assassination - attempted assassination of police officers, they want history to remember them, and that's why they spoke for this book.

GROSS: Does he still stand behind the tactic of assassinating policemen?

BURROUGH: Dhoruba is a smart and canny gentleman who will take you right up to the moment a gun was pulled, and he won't tell you what happened to the bullet. He will not advocate, today, violence against policemen, but he's quite open about what they were attempting to do beginning in May 1971. One of the more memorable quotes of his from the book, and I'm not quoting this exactly word to word, but that the tactical mistake was shooting the cops in uniform. We should have shot their higher-ups. That would have been much more effective.

GROSS: The FBI and police were really trying to find the people behind these targeted killings of police. You know, whether the BLA existed as an organization or not, the FBI and police were trying to get behind the story. How successful were they, and what tactics did they use?

BURROUGH: It differs between the police and the FBI. The FBI, in large part in chasing all these groups, was fairly ineffective. They did ultimately close in and capture some of them. For instance, the Symbionese Liberation Army - the remnants there. By and large, they never caught any of the Weathermen, and they never prosecuted - and they only prosecuted a handful of them. Difficult to generalize overall about the tactics.

Most famously, the FBI engaged in a series of illegal break-ins, illegal opening of mail, illegal just-about-everything-you-can-imagine in an effort to learn the whereabouts of Bernardine Dohrn, Bill Ayers and the rest of the Weather leadership. I talked with FBI agents who engaged in these break-ins, some of whom, you know, had to speak to grand juries later in the decade.

And it's one reason these stories have gone untold for so long because many of the alumni of the Underground didn't want to discuss them because of the crimes they felt they might be prosecuted for. And many of the police officers and FBI agents involved didn't want to discuss them because they too had committed illegal acts. So it took many decades (laughter) to pass before we could get everybody to kind of open up and start talking.

GROSS: I want to ask you about a group called The Family. Again, this is not a group that was very well known, but it's, I think, of special interest now because it was cofounded by Tupac Shakur's stepfather, Mutulu Shakur, whose birth name was Jeral Williams. And he married a former Panther, Afeni Shakur, who was part of The Panther 21. Those were 21 Panthers who were accused of attacking several locations. They were acquitted. She is - was Tupac's mother. To tell us a little bit about this group, The Family - what its goals and tactics were.

BURROUGH: The Family was composed of a number of alumni and supporters from both the Black Liberation Army and the Weather Underground who came together late in the decade to begin robbing banks in the New York area. It was an interesting group in that while all of them called themselves revolutionaries, it does seem like an awful lot of the profits from these bank robberies did not go toward helping the black community as they were supposed to - as many of them thought was going to happen. But a lot of it just went to buy cocaine for the group's leaders. So there was a - what leftists sometimes call a corruption at the core of this group from the beginning.

Initially, it was a series of black revolutionaries, and after a couple of years they were able to rope in several white women who had been on the fringes of the Weather Underground who began giving them material support, driving their getaway cars and the like. And for the first time, we have a couple of the leaders of the group, Sylvia Barildini (ph) who's now in exile in Rome and Sekou Odinga who most memorably engineered the prison breakout of Joanne Chesimard in 1979. For the first time they actually are talking in detail about, really, some of the most incredible radical actions or crimes of the late 1970s.

GROSS: Give us an example of one of those things that Sekou Odinga or the other person you referred to told you about that you don't think were written about or recorded or publicly discussed before.

BURROUGH: One of the most outlandish political actions of the late 1970s by the Underground was the breakout from prison in New Jersey of Joanne Chesimard, who had been the BLA's last great leader. Both Sylvia Barildini and Sekou Odinga speak and describe their roles in the prison breakout, and Sylvia was a getaway driver, but it was Sekou who engineered it all - who actually took a - managed to get a .357 Magnum stuck into the - beneath his shirt into the prison, went in. He and Assata, JoAnne Chesimard, came out, and he memorably talks about how he was tapping his gun on the window of the elderly lady guard there at this women's prison, attempting to persuade her to let them out. And when she wouldn't, he took out his kind of - his backup device, which was a single stick of dynamite from his pants and put it on the ledge and said, in essence, to this matron, either you let us out, or none of us will ever get out. And Sekou then, along with Sylvia, managed to get Assata Shakur out to a safe house and ultimately to Cuba where she lives to this day even though Sylvia and Sekou both did, you know, in the order of 20 or 30 years for these and other political actions. Sekou was just paroled in November.

GROSS: So did you find The Family being like a coherent group with a coherent strategy, whether you agree with it or not, you know?

BURROUGH: No. No, in fact it's fascinating. At the beginning of the decade, these first underground groups were so together. They really had their act together. They seemed to move as one. And by the end of the decade when many of them could clearly see that no second revolution was imminent in America, a certain amount of what leftists call corruption crept into these groups. It became less clear sometimes that their crimes were being done for revolutionary purposes as perhaps that somebody was behind their rent or wanted some cocaine. That was the problem with The Family - is that about half of them were genuine political revolutionaries who thought they were doing this to further their war against the government, and the others - chiefly, Mutulu Shakur - parroted this line, but seemed mostly interested in the amount of cocaine that they could buy.

GROSS: So in addition to talking to a lot of people who were members of radical underground militant groups in the '60s and '70s, you talked to at least one person who was the child of somebody who was killed in an attack by one of the underground groups. Tell us who you talked to.

BURROUGH: I talked to Joe Connor whose father, Frank Connor, was 1 of 4 people killed in an attack on a Wall Street restaurant named Fraunces Tavern in January 1975. That attack was one of the first attacks by a Puerto Rican independence group called the FALN that was kind of ore or less in partnership with the Weather Underground, if you will. And I spoke to Mr. Connor for the epilogue of the book in which I tips - take stock of what, if anything, the radical underground of the 1970s could claim credit for.

On one hand, there are alumni of the underground that say that the most important thing about the underground is simply that it existed - that it shows the links to which committed left-wing people will go to oppose power in America - corrupt power as personified by the Nixon administration in the Vietnam War. On the other side is that - of that is Joe Connor who says look, I don't care what these people say about their altruistic motives. The fact is they took it on themselves to blow up restaurants occasionally and kill innocent people. And, you know, your motives don't matter. You're just murderers. And I quote him at the end saying, you know, these people want you to believe that they're somehow soft revolutionaries and just trying to bring out their complaints about their government. The fact is they were terrorists and murderers.

And I get asked a lot why I call them revolutionaries instead of terrorists because most people now consider any type of bombing a terrorist act. And for me, it was not an ideological decision, but really one of precision of language. To me, a terrorist is someone who kills indiscriminately. And whatever you may say about the Weather Underground, it didn't do that. In fact, very few of these groups launched attacks that killed indiscriminately. And so therefore, I just decided that terrorist was not - it didn't have the precision of the word that I wanted. I thought revolutionary was probably more appropriate.

GROSS: How was this man's father killed?

BURROUGH: Frank Connor was one of a - six men sitting at a table in Fraunces Tavern. He worked for J.P. Morgan. Three of the men were J.P. Morgan bankers. Three of them were clients, and they had had a long meeting, and they just were out trying to blow off some steam when a waiter noticed a young man with a head of unruly curls and a duffel bag come into the dining room there at Fraunces Tavern. When the waiter turned his head and he turned around, the man was gone. Five minutes later, someone saw a duffel bag laying behind the wall where Joe Connor's father, Frank Connor, was calling for the check. About another five minutes later that duffel bag exploded. There were, like, 50 sticks of dynamite inside. The wall behind the bag evaporated, killing three of the people at Mr. Connor's table, including MR. Connor. The fourth individual was killed when a nail from the floor shot up like a bullet through the roof and went through the bottom of a chair inhabited by an investment banker named Harold Sherburne on the second floor, killing him instantly.

GROSS: Are there traces of these radical groups and the politics that they espouse, the social programs that they advocated, the language that they used that you still see reverberating in American culture today?

BURROUGH: The DNA of these groups still is out there. There are still people who call themselves Black Panthers. You know, after Ferguson last year, you saw all the echoes of the old debated. You know, black lives don't matter, how do we react - well, these days it is amazing to see that most activists want to react inside the system. They believed - they believe that, you know, marches - that protests can bring change. In the early '70s coming in the wake of the '60s, there was not that belief, and so you saw these underground groups such as the Black Liberation Army go underground and begin trying to kill officers.

And when - I've been asked, well, gosh, what's the difference between the attitudes today and the attitudes then? And I think by and large it's because activists today can see those tactics did not work during the 1970s. I think that's why by and large no one is espousing open violence. It's also because in the wake of 9/11, frankly, I think that there's almost no one in America that is willing to lend political violence any credibility. I think that's likely to last for generations in this country.

GROSS: Thank you, Bryan Burrough, so much for talking with us.

BURROUGH: Thank you.

GROSS: Bryan Burrough it the author of the new book "Days Of Rage," and he's a special correspondent for Vanity Fair.

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How Young People Went Underground During The '70s 'Days Of Rage'

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TERRY GROSS, HOST: This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross. The American radical underground of the 1970s is the subject of my guest Bryan Burrough's new book, "Days Of Rage." He writes about the Weather Underground and other groups whose members he says, quote, "mistakenly believed the country was on the brink of a genuine, political revolution and thought that violence would speed the change," unquote.

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1.Student fighting discrimination or segregation within their schools
2.Not all students were involved
3.They took part in the civil rights protest

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1. Were children/media involved, how were they influenced

2. How did this affect present day

3. What patterns have continued

4. What were the repercussion during the time

5. What role did the government play

6. What other terms were used along with activist

7. How did they react to different causes

8. What was their mindset

9. How did they work with adult activist

10. Did they receive support

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Performing Arts
Youth
Activism
Liberation
Social Sciences
Nonviolence
Political Regimes
Manifesto
Environment
Recreational Activities
Health
Politics
Law
Legislation
Housing
Transportation
Infrastructure
Food Access
Education
Suburbia
opposition
Redlining
Policy