DANGEROUS, DIRTY, VIOLENT, AND YOUNG

The son of 1960s radicals confronts the tangled family legacy of social justice activism and political violence.

Born in 1977, Zayd Ayers Dohrn is the son of Bernardine Dohrn and Bill Ayers, members of the Weather Underground, the revolutionary group that opposed the Vietnam War and fought for racial justice in America; their tactics involved the after-hours bombing of government buildings and led to the deaths of three Weathermen in an accidental explosion at a Greenwich Village townhouse that had served as a bomb-making studio. Bernardine became only the fourth woman in history on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted list, although federal charges against her were eventually dropped. “She was, and is, the most committed, fiercely determined person I’ve ever known,” Dohrn writes, yet she and his father were enigmas to him. For several years, the family, with his younger brother, Malik, lived off the grid, eluding law enforcement with disguises, assumed names, and jobs that paid in cash. “When I was just three years old, I learned to recognize plainclothes police officers and undercover agents in a crowd, to make our calls from payphones and speak in code, to walk a trajectory—the complicated mix of turns and switchbacks we used in a city to lose a tail,” Dohrn writes. This fugitive childhood was founded on what Dohrn calls the origin story: “After they had kids, they told us, they…stopped bombing buildings and breaking people out of jail. They started making plans to surface—to focus on being parents first.” The truth was a bit more complicated, as he discovered while interviewing them for the Mother Country Radicals podcast that led to this book. “Bill and Bernardine were still desperate to be part of something larger than themselves,” he writes, “even if it meant risking the safety of our family.”

A unique family memoir that doubles as social history.