During the Days of Rage Vietnam protests in Chicago, they bombed a statue of a policeman on October 7, 1969. They proposed acts of armed propaganda aimed at pitting anti- Vietnam War protesters against the police. The Weathermen saw themselves as the vanguard that would ignite a revolution. Members became the Weathermen (later changed to the nonsexist Weather Underground). At a national SDS meeting a few days later, the group split between people who advocated violence and those who did not. The title of the statement came from folksinger Bob Dylan's lyrics. Eleven SDS members had authored a June 18, 1969, New Left Notes statement entitled 'You Don't Need a Weatherman to Know Which Way the Wind Blows,' calling for a white fighting force to support the black liberation movement.

The Weathermen emerged in June 1969, during an SDS conference. In the 1980s, the members began to reappear to face trial. Pursued by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), much of the group went underground in 1969. In the years between 19, the Weathermen bombed seventeen targets, mostly government buildings. Agreeing that traditional political protest had done little to end the civil rights problems of American society, Weather members advocated the violent destruction of the capitalist system. Its members, including Cathy Wilkerson, were white, middle class, well educated, and formerly members of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), the major student activist organization of the 1960s.

The Weather Underground, also known as the Weathermen, was a leftist terrorist group that grew out of the student radicalism of the late 1960s.

Source: The Washington Post, a daily national newspaper based in Washington, D.C.Ībout the Author: Award-winning journalist Margot Hornblower was a staff reporter for the Washington Post for 13 years, and later, known as Margot Roosevelt, became a national correspondent for Time magazine. 'Cathy Wilkerson: The Evolution of a Revolutionary'

Weather underground history