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John Jacobs and Terry Robbins at the Days of Rage, Chicago, October 1969 (Photo credit: David Fenton; publicity photo for film Weather Underground)

The Days of Rage riots in Chicago took place over a 4-day period beginning October 8, 1969, after members of the Weathermen, a militant offshoot of the Students for a Democratic Society, converged on the city to confront police in the streets in response to the trial of the group of anti-Vietnam War activists known as the “Chicago Eight“.

The riot began following a three-hour rally in the city’s Lincoln Park, a meeting that had begun with the construction of a bonfire. During the course of the rally, at least a dozen park benches were destroyed to keep the flames alive, with Weathermen members closing by urging the 600 attendees to “tear down the Drake Hotel and get Hoffman,” a reference to trial judge Julius Hoffman.

Heading both north and south on Clark Street, the rampaging mob broke windows and damaged cars along the way. This continued for several days, causing a large amount of property damage. One person was killed and many demonstrators were arrested. Some of the Weathermen members became fugitives and went underground when they failed to appear for trial in connection with their arrests during the riots; some only resurfaced decades later.

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And the following is from the PBS website about a 2003 film about the Days of Rage.  The film, DAYS OF RAGE, was nominated for an Academy Award in 2003 - how sweet.  This is one of the posters the Weathermen hung around Chicago.

In October 1969, hundreds of young people wielding lead pipes and clad in football helmets  marched through an upscale Chicago shopping district, pummeling parked cars and smashing shop windows. Thus began the “Days of Rage,” the first demonstration of the Weathermen, later known as the Weather Underground. Outraged by the Vietnam War and racism in America, this group of former student radicals waged a low-level war against the United States government through much of the 1970s, bombing the Capitol building, breaking Timothy Leary out of prison and finally evading the FBI by going into hiding. In THE WEATHER UNDERGROUND, former Weathermen including Bernardine Dohrn, Bill Ayers, Mark Rudd and David Gilbert speak frankly about the idealist passions and trajectories that transformed them from college activists into the FBI’s Most Wanted.

The Weather Underground emerged when Dohrn and a group of fellow University of Chicago students split with the campus-run Students for a Democratic Society, or SDS, because they disagreed with the SDS’s peaceful protest tactics against the Vietnam War. Dubbing itself the Weathermen, this new organization took its name from a line in Bob Dylan’s “Subterranean Homesick Blues”—“you don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows”—and within months had set off bombs at the National Guard headquarters and set in motion plans to bomb targets across the country that it considered emblematic of the worldwide violence sanctioned by the U.S. government. [the photo is from a video made in connection with Dylan's song]

Using extensive archival material such as photographs, film footage and FBI documents, THE WEATHER UNDERGROUND chronicles the Weathermen’s public rise and fall and offers a rare insider look into the group’s private conflicts. Fueled by righteous anger, these white,  middle-class students were also widely criticized for their controversial—some say misguided—politics. As former SDS president Todd Gitlin says: ”Like Bonnie and Clyde, many of them were attractive personally. They were into youth, exuberance, sex, drugs. They wanted action.” Ultimately, the Weathermen’s carefully organized, clandestine network managed to successfully dodge the FBI for years, although the group’s members would eventually reemerge to life in a country that was dramatically different than the one they had hoped their efforts would inspire.

As an exploration of the Weathermen in the context of other social movements of the time, the film also features rare footage and interviews with former SDS members and the Black Panthers, further examining the U.S. government’s suppression of dissent during the 1960s and 1970s. Looking back at their years underground, former Weather Underground members paint a compelling portrait of troubled times, revolutionary times and the forces that drove their resistance home.

Source:  http://www.pbs.org/independentlens/weatherunderground/film.html

Go to the source to see a  4 minute video of Bernadine Dohrn & Bill Ayers, Obama’s friends and neighbors, along with newsreel footage of what these fools did.  They also speak on film in 2003 about what they did.  Judge for yourself if you would even shake hands with people like this.  The description of the film says a lot about PBS, too.

At this link, PBS has a short history and timeline of the Weather Underground along with another video of Bernadine Dohrn showing the filmmakers around her hideout in a houseboat in Soscelito on San Francisco Bay in the 70s when the FBI was after her and Ayers.  How charming.  http://www.pbs.org/independentlens/weatherunderground/movement.html 

[I love this bit]:  And grab attention they did—in March 1970, just days after Bernardine Dohrn publicly announced a “declaration of war.” When an accidentally detonated bomb killed three Weathermen in the basement of a Manhattan townhouse, the group suddenly became the target of an FBI manhunt, and members were forced to go into hiding. The bomb had been intended to be set off at a dance at a local Army base.

Here’s part of an interview of Bernadine Dohrn and Bill Ayers in connection with the film.  Do you think Obama was unaware of the famous film starring his neighbors?  The caption says the photo is them with their kids in the 60s - can that be right.  Were they playing at revolution and endangering their own kids??? Listen to John Lenon’s song “Revolution” - he’ decrying just the idiocy these people were perpetrating. 

What led the Weathermen to violent action—and given the chance, would they do it again? Former Weather Underground members Bernardine Dohrn and Bill Ayers talked to members of the press about regret, the Sixties and student activism at the Television Critics’ Association Press Tour in January 2004 in Hollywood, California.

In the film, Mark Rudd talks about his qualms and his very divided feelings about what he did. You don’t make any equivalent statement, and I wondered why not… How do you feel about what you did? Would you do it again under similar circumstances?

Bill Ayers: I’ve thought about this a lot. Being almost 60, it’s impossible to not have lots and lots of regrets about lots and lots of things, but the question of did we do something that was horrendous, awful?… I don’t think so. I think what we did was to respond to a situation that was unconscionable.

Two thousand people a day were being murdered in Vietnam in a terrorist war, an official terrorist war… This was what was going on in our names. So we tried to resist it, tried to fight it. Built a huge mass movement, built a huge organization, and still the war went on and escalated. And every day we didn’t stop the war, two thousand people would be killed. I don’t think what we did was extreme…. We didn’t cross lines that were completely unacceptable. I don’t think so. We destroyed property in a fairly restrained level, given what we were up against.

Dohrn: I can iterate four or five things that I have profoundly complex feelings about. I wish that we hadn’t been hierarchical, and had a concept of leadership. I wish that I had bridged the feminist movement and the anti-war movement better than I did. I wish that we hadn’t used the language of war. You heard me saying a declaration of war. I wish we had used the language of resistance.

Obviously, we didn’t stop the war. We were part of an authentic, aroused opposition to the U.S. empire and to racism at home. Those were two issues we had a grip on…. Of course, I wish we had done better, and I wish we had stopped the war earlier, and I wish we had been more effective, and I wish we had been more unifying. Or at least fought for unity even when we couldn’t achieve it.

At the end of the day, I feel like we were lucky to be in that history. We were lucky to be in that history. We were lucky to be in that moment where there was hope and a sense of libratory possibility.

The last pictures are of them in court in 1970 and at the time of the interview in 2004.  Did you notice that she doesn’t address the violence.  She’s more into social structures and feminism.  Useless idiots.  Why is nobody playing this film on TV?  Does FOX know about this film?  The younger folks have got to see this to understand the enormity of what these people did and still have no serious regrets.  Go to the PBS site link and look around - that’s lots more to see and I think a few more clips.   

Julia