The Weather Underground’s template for action was to target a symbol of U.S. power and to publicly associate the act as a counterattack against government repression. Among their targets were the U.S. Capitol, the Pentagon, the U.S. Justice Department, a Long Island Courthouse, the New York Police Department, banks, and police cars. The only human casualties of their operations were three of their own members: Diana Oughton, Terry Robbins, and Teddy Gold were killed when a bomb they were constructing in a New York townhouse accidentally detonated.
From 1969 to 1975, the Weather Underground published communiqués, a volume of revolutionary women’s poetry titled Sing a Battle Song, and a detailed exposition of their political ideology titled Prairie Fire: The Politics of Revolutionary Anti-Imperialism. The group’s statements warmly embraced revolutionary movements across the globe and upheld them as the basis of change. They were pessimistic about building a strategy around economic class, especially one that relied on participation from its white section. Weather Underground members saw revolutionary potential in “Third World peoples in the U.S., and also women, youth and members of the armed forces.” It was an outlook that would be adopted by many organizations long after the Weather Underground’s eventual demise.64
The United States was in a position of overwhelming power after World War II, and in post-war restructuring, the U.S. supported imperial European forces in regaining access to their previous colonies, such as France’s rule over Vietnam. The United States also fought to prevent Vietnam from becoming an independent state capable of influencing other Asian countries, including Japan and Indonesia, and thus restructuring the balance of regional power.65 When John F. Kennedy escalated the war, it became clear that Vietnam would not be an obedient colony.
The standard liberal account of the Vietnam War has been that the United States tried to save South Vietnam from the threat of communism, and despite a valiant effort, was not able to see it through, and thus retreated. A right-wing account, on the other hand, has been that the U.S. military was stabbed in the back by American society and politicians, and if there had been more time and resources, the United States would have won. Polls conducted in 1975 by the Chicago Council of Foreign Affairs indicated that two-thirds of the U.S. population believed the war was fundamentally wrong and immoral, and not a mistake the U.S. government happened to make. Television played a significant role in popular disproval, bringing the violence of the U.S. government into the homes of average Americans. Within this vast tilt toward condemnation, many in the radical left saw the Vietnamese resistance, led by a diplomat turned revolutionary, Ho Chi Minh, as a living model for fighting imperial powers such as France and the United States. In fact, the struggle of Vietnam seemed to indicate that it was, at least in some ways, possible for a small country to pull out of the transnational economic system.
Decolonization efforts in developing countries provided both inspiration and a road map for action. European countries were being shown the door from occupied territories on an annual basis. In the year 1960 alone, more than a dozen African nations—including Cameroon, Senegal, Togo, Mali, Madagascar, Congo/Kinshasa, Congo/Brazzaville, Somalia, Benin, Burkina Faso, Ivory Coast, Niger, Gabon, Chad, Nigeria, Mauritania—gained independence from European empires. In 1962, the same year the Port Huron Statement was signed, many young people in the United States were gaining political consciousness through the Civil Rights movement. The Algerian struggle for self-determination successfully liberated the country from France. In 1974, Angola and Mozambique won independence from Portuguese rule. The following year, the Portuguese were ejected from Cape Verde and Guinea-Bissau. In Latin America, revolutions by socialist and national liberation forces, such as the Sandinistas in Nicaragua, were beginning to emerge. At the same time, U.S. interventions, often violent and covert, increasingly destabilized the region.
In 1976, the Weathermen initiated the Hard Times Conference in an attempt to consolidate different radical strands of the movement. If unity was the goal, then Hard Times failed. The Prairie Fire Organizing Committee criticized what they believed to be an effort to submerge anti-imperialism and racism into class-only politics and challenged the conference leadership to explicitly embrace women’s struggles. This perspective was shared by the members of the John Brown Book Club who were in attendance. A year later, at a conference, Prairie Fire finally split in two, with the May 19th Communist Organization (named after the joint birthdays of Ho Chi Minh and Malcolm X) organizing on the East Coast. Both organizations would eventually promote John Brown Anti-Klan Committee chapters across the country.
“There really was a sense that the movements from the 1960s and 1970s had failed,” recalled Laura Whitehorn. One of the ways activists adapted to this massive political shift in the late ’70s was to double down on their commitment to movements for self-determination. The concept of self-determination was rooted in Malcolm X’s assessment, following his return from Mecca, that liberation for Black people in the United States involved forming a separate nation.66 For Committee members, it was national liberation struggles that animated their political imagination. As China Brotsky, a member of the San Francisco chapter of the Committee, explained: “National liberation movements were setting the world on fire, at the very moment we were formulating our politics—between American Indian Movement, and Puerto Ricans, the FALN in New York, the Panthers, and Vietnamese, Cambodians, Chicano, and Mozambique. For us, it was completely normal and logical.”
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