Out From the Weather Underground

The following is an excerpt from Cathy Wilkerson's book Flying Close to the Sun (Seven Stories Press, 2007).

We drove into the vast grid of Chicago streets, filled with children finding ways to pass the hot, steamy summer days, and I was anxious to find a place to land, to begin to work. We started at the SDS national office, where the massive Heidelberg press was running leaflets for the Black Panther Party up the street. The few staff people around seemed intent on their tasks, none of which seemed to involve casual talk. The familiar, dusty rooms no longer felt like a place for travelers to hang out and exchange stories. Instead, we arranged to meet with friends Jeff Jones and Phoebe Hirsch later that day at their apartment uptown.

Jeff and Phoebe had moved from New York to California the previous winter and had immediately immersed themselves in the active political life of the Bay Area. They leafleted to support the chemical and oil workers' strike, along with a mixed conglomerate of other movement activists. They got involved in the student-faculty strike at San Francisco State, which had continued for most of the year, even as they were immersed in the celebration of counterculture in Berkeley and the struggles to sustain it.

In June, however, Jeff had been enlisted by his friends, the coauthors of the Weatherman paper, to run for SDS national officer. When he reluctantly agreed, Phoebe resigned herself to going too. Phoebe became a member of the local Chicago Weatherman collective, while Jeff worked out of the national office as part of the national leadership collective, now dubbed the Weather Bureau. I imagined the Chicago collective to be like our Washington collective, although perhaps more disciplined and with less spontaneous side activities. Both Bill Willett and Jonny Lerner from the Washington staff were around, but I didn't know where exactly, or what they were doing. Both, it turned out, were working on specific tasks for members of the Weather Bureau as sort of aides de camp, and neither was formally in any collective.

When we got uptown, Jeff, Phoebe, Mike, and I sat around their tiny kitchen table. As always, I was glad to see them and wanted to catch up on the happenings since the convention. Immediately, Jeff got down to business, launching into his summation of Weatherman's current activities and thinking. In the five weeks since the national council, Weatherman had set up collectives in almost a dozen cities. The primary work of these groups of between ten and twenty young people was to establish themselves as the most militant, aggressive, outspoken voice in the area, on the theory that this would attract untold numbers of alienated young people. Many out-of-school youths didn't take movement people seriously, they believed, because local activists were all talk and no action. So people in the collectives would prove incontestably that they were the "baddest dudes in town."

Weathermen were also addressing another problem. The police had been harassing and threatening black activists with a relentlessness and brutality rarely used against white activists. If Weathermen constantly challenged the police, they argued, they could divert some police energy onto themselves, distracting them a little from the black activists. This strategy also enabled the organization to prove its resoluteness and to be taken seriously as allies of the black movement. In any event, to sit by quietly while the black movement was undergoing such a pummeling seemed yet another instance of hiding behind the cloak of privilege.

As I listened to Jeff and Phoebe make this argument, I wondered if this was what we had been doing in Washington. For the first time, I began to look at the aggressiveness displayed by many of the current Weather leaders in a new light. The strategic objective of their provocations, both to other activists and to the authorities, was to challenge whites in the most immediate way to step up and not be silent. I still wasn't convinced that physically aggressive, provocative confrontations would organize many more people, although events sometimes seemed to prove me wrong. But I had never before considered that our failure to "go berserk" meant that the police assaults on blacks went unchallenged. This was both a moral argument -- to not be "good Germans" -- and a tactical conjecture, that we could draw away some of the intensity of the heat. This direct challenge to complicity would compel others to actively confront police racism.