Days of Rage (82 page)

Bernardine Dohrn, brainy and charismatic, emerged as the queen of the 1970s-era underground: “La Pasionaria of the Lunatic Left,” as J. Edgar Hoover termed her. She spent much of her time underground in a beachside bungalow in Southern California, sometimes using a supporter’s small children as cover when scouting the Weather Underground’s bombing targets.

Weatherman leadership at the notorious Days of Rage protest, Chicago, October 1969; left to right, Jim Mellen, Peter Clapp, John “JJ” Jacobs, and best friends Bill Ayers and Terry Robbins.

Jeff Jones, the dashing Weatherman who orchestrated the disastrous “inversion” strategy that led to the group’s demise.

March 6, 1970: New York firefighters work to extinguish fires after the deadly Townhouse explosion in Greenwich Village that left three Weathermen dead and forever altered the trajectory of the underground movement.

Cathy Wilkerson, one of the Townhouse’s two survivors, became a West Coast bomb maker for the group.

Ron Fliegelman, the Weather Underground’s unsung hero, perfected a bomb design and became the group’s explosives guru. He later fathered a daughter with Wilkerson.

May 19, 1972: Pentagon officers guard the women’s restroom where a Weather Underground bomb exploded, destroying it.

Clayton Van Lydegraf, the aging Communist who led the internal purge that destroyed the group.

Mark Rudd, the hero of the 1968 Columbia riots who was marginalized after going underground and eventually surrendered in September 1977.

Joanne Chesimard, a.k.a. Assata Shakur, at left, being led into a New Jersey jail, January 29, 1976. Hailed as the “heart and soul” of the Black Liberation Army—an overstatement, some say—Chesimard was an archetype for a string of machine-gun-toting blaxploitation-film heroines during the 1970s.

Richard “Dhoruba” Moore, the BLA’s most important early organizer, escorted by New York detectives after his arrest, June 5, 1971.