https://www.npr.org/2026/05/18/nx-s1-5823595/zayd-ayers-dohrn-dangerous-dirty-violent-young
https://www.powells.com/book/dangerous-dirty-violent-and-young-9781324089315?condition=New
TERRY GROSS, HOST:
This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross. As the child of parents who were radicals in the '60s and revolutionaries in the '70s, my guest, Zayd Ayers Dohrn, spent his early years underground with parents who were on the run, disguising themselves with fake identities.
Zayd Ayers Dohrn's name gives you a sense of his story. His mother, Bernardine Dohrn, was a leader of the '60s radical student group SDS, Students for a Democratic Society, which opposed the war in Vietnam and racism. She and Zayd's father, Bill Ayers, helped found the more militant faction that split off from SDS in 1969 and became the Weather Underground, committed to armed resistance against the government. For years, Bernardine was on the FBI's Ten Most Wanted list.
Zayd is also named after Zayd Malik Shakur, the minister of information for the New York Black Panthers, who designed some of their clothes, as well as their disguises, and was killed after a traffic stop that ended in a shootout with police in 1973. The Weather Underground and the Panthers had been working together. In protest against the war in Vietnam and against racism, the Weather Underground planted bombs in empty police cars, the Pentagon and other places they considered symbols of the opposition, giving advanced warning to people in those buildings to evacuate.
In Zayd's new memoir, he wrestles with the contradictions between his parents' commitment to their cause and how they and other members of the Underground left their children, quote, "unwilling casualties of their parents' war." The book is titled "Dangerous, Dirty, Violent, And Young: A Fugitive Family In The Revolutionary Underground." It's his family story and the larger story of the radical underground, based on personal experience, as well as interviews with his family, former members of the Weather Underground and the Black Panthers, and their children, as well as Bernardine Dohrn's FBI files. Zayd is also a playwright and screenwriter and professor and director of the MFA program in writing for the screen and stage at Northwestern University.
Zayd Ayers Dohrn, welcome to FRESH AIR. I'm so glad you wrote this book. It fills in so many blanks in my mind. And I was in college during the years of SDS and the beginning of the Weather Underground, 'cause I was in grad school, too. And I always wanted to know, what are the children of these revolutionaries going to be like? And your book told me so much about that and filled in so many blanks. Thank you for writing it.
ZAYD AYERS DOHRN: Yeah. Thank you, Terry.
GROSS: So I'm going to start by asking you to set the scene before we talk about you as the child of revolutionaries. Tell us what your parents' mission was, how they saw their mission, how they saw themselves as revolutionaries.
DOHRN: Yeah. Well, I think their mission evolved over time. You know, I would say for my mother, for example, she started out as a civil rights activist. She was in law school in Chicago, and she joined Dr. King's rent strike in Chicago, kind of earnest young law student trying to make a difference in the Civil Rights Movement. And then once Dr. King was killed, she joined SDS. She developed an alliance with Fred Hampton and the Black Panthers, and then he was killed. And so what started out as a kind of liberal, progressive sort of activist's goal turned into a radical revolutionary goal as she saw Black leaders being killed and the Vietnam War escalating. And so, eventually, once she helped found the Weather Underground, I would say the mission was to overthrow the United States government and to end racism and end the Vietnam War.
GROSS: Did she think that was a realistic goal, overthrowing the government? This is, like, a small band of people, 'cause when they split from SDS, SDS had people on so many college campuses. The Weather Underground did not. They were a pretty small faction.
DOHRN: Correct. I mean, when - she was one of the heads of SDS when it was the largest student protest group in the country. And so she spent many years, you know, organizing voter drives and then peace marches and then sit-ins. But by the time she split off into the Weather Underground, she had become part of a much smaller radicalized faction of SDS. And, yeah, as to whether she thought it was a realistic goal, I think it's a good question. I think on the one hand, it was a way of saying, we need radical, transformative change now.
But also, you have to remember, in the kind of mid to late 20th century, it was an era of revolution. So they had just watched Cuba and Algeria, and these were places where small bands of committed activists had actually brought down regimes and changed their countries. So I don't know if they thought it was realistic right then, but I do think that they had aspirations towards really radical change in this country.
GROSS: What about your father, Bill Ayers?
DOHRN: Yeah. Well, my dad started - you know, he was - kind of grew up a privileged kid in suburban Chicago. And then he joined the peace movement at University of Michigan. He was drafted. He burned his draft card. And like my mom, he became increasingly radicalized as the Vietnam War went on, as he felt like there was this genocide being carried out by his country and his name and became, you know, first an antiwar activist, then an antiwar militant and then joined my mom in the Weather Underground and went underground and became a revolutionary.
GROSS: The recurring theme in your book is your fear that - during your childhood, that your parents would prioritize the revolution, the cause, over their role as your parents and that they could be imprisoned for years, for decades. They could be killed, and you could be left without a parent or without either parent. So how old were you when you understood enough to start worrying?
DOHRN: I think, like most kids, my life felt ordinary to me when I was growing up. The truth is I always knew - from my very first memories, I knew that the FBI was chasing us. I knew that we were fugitives. My parents tried to explain it in terms of, you know, we were like Robin Hood, or we were like the Rebel Alliance in Star Wars. And so I knew - in the way a kid knows - that our lives were precarious. And so I think I was worried early on, but I think most kids are worried, you know, that their parents might leave and not come back when - you know, if you get left in the car when your parents go to run an errand, there's a primal fear there.
I think my fear of those things was accentuated by what I knew about their situation. But, of course, as I grew up, I started to learn more about what that meant. And I both understood more why they were doing what they were doing, and it made my feeling about them more complicated because I realized that they had these other goals that transcended their roles as parents.
GROSS: Some of your early memories are of visiting your mother in prison. When she refused to testify against her fellow revolutionaries, she wouldn't name names. She wouldn't give up details. Can you describe your memory of what the prison looked like and how it felt to see your mother imprisoned there?
DOHRN: Yeah. So she was imprisoned at MCC, Manhattan Correctional Center. It was a big kind of brutalist building in downtown Manhattan and kind of a windowless giant concrete structure. My dad would take me and my brothers there to visit my mom, and, you know, we would go through metal detectors, talk to the guards and - you know, to see my mom twice a week and spend a little bit of time with her. And I remember smuggling in little child-sized books, you know, "Peter Rabbit" and "In The Night Kitchen," things like that, you know, putting them in my pants so that I could make it through the metal detector so my mom would have something to read to me.
The visiting room was a big, kind of cavernous space with a bunch of tables, and, you know, we would spend a couple hours talking to her, having her read to us. And then we would leave, and we would go outside and stand on the sidewalk. And we would wait there for half an hour, an hour until she was back in her cell and she could flip the lights on and off in her cell so that we could see that she was back in her cell and was safe, and it was kind of like waving goodbye. And I remember that being hard 'cause it meant that we were allowed to leave and she wasn't.
GROSS: Did she look worried or afraid when you saw her in prison?
DOHRN: My mother never looked worried or afraid. She was about as committed and courageous a person as I ever knew. I mean, I now know, having read her letters to my dad from prison, having talked to her all these decades later about what it was like, that she was, you know, in a lot of pain that she was suffering. She knew that she was making this choice. You know, to refuse to testify meant that she was held in contempt of a grand jury and was in prison while her kids were at home. And I was, you know, 4 or 5 at the time, and my little brother was 1 or 2. I think he was nursing when she went in.
So it was painful as a mother to be separated. And that's one of the things, of course, like you said - the theme of my book is trying to kind of come to grips with or understand the fact that even though she was a great mom, she had these ideals that were priorities for her, even over us.
GROSS: When you were, I think, 4, you kind of inherited a younger - well, you had a younger brother.
DOHRN: Yeah.
GROSS: But then you inherited a second brother, Chesa Boudin, when his parents were in prison. Would you describe why they were in prison?
DOHRN: Yeah. So, of course, we had been on the run my entire childhood. My mother was on the FBI's Ten Most Wanted list, and she was a very high-profile fugitive. But by the time I was 3 or 4 years old, the Vietnam War had ended. Most of the crimes she was accused of were in the past, and, in fact, many of the charges against my mother had been dropped due to FBI misconduct and the COINTELPRO scandal, you know, illegal wiretapping and searches and even blackmail and kidnapping attempts.
So most of the charges against my mother had dropped away, and my parents decided to turn themselves in. This was in 1980. And my mother ended up getting probation. She did not get prison time, even though she had been a very high-profile fugitive, because so many of her charges had been dismissed. But when we turned ourselves in as a family, some of their former comrades, including their close friends Kathy Boudin and David Gilbert, stayed underground and stayed committed to helping the New York Black Panthers in their continuing struggle against the police and the FBI.
Kathy and David took part in a bank robbery, the Brinks robbery in 1981, in which a police officer and two guards were killed. And so they went to prison for a long time, and they had left their 18-month-old son, Chesa, at home with a babysitter when they went out to rob this bank. So my parents, my family took Chesa in when he was very little. So, yeah, I inherited a second brother, and he became part of our family because his parents were sent to prison for a long, long time.
GROSS: Did that make you even more worried 'cause you saw somebody who did lose his parents to prison?
DOHRN: That's exactly right. Chesa for me was - I mean, he was my brother and is still one of my best friends, but he also represented for me what it might look like if my parents had been caught, if they had, you know, stayed in the Underground for one more month, one more year, what it might have looked like if they had been sent to prison forever and I had to grow up without them, because that's what happened to Chesa.
GROSS: Let me reintroduce you here. If you're just joining us, my guest is Zayd Ayers Dohrn. His new memoir is called "Dangerous, Dirty, Violent, And Young: A Fugitive Family In The Revolutionary Underground." We'll be right back. This is FRESH AIR.
This is FRESH AIR. Let's get back to my interview with Zayd Ayers Dohrn, author of the new memoir "Dangerous, Dirty, Violent, And Young: A Fugitive Family In The Revolutionary Underground." His parents are Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn. Bernardine Dohrn was a leader of SDS and then led the militant faction that broke away - called the Weather Underground - calling for armed resistance. Bill Ayers was a member of SDS and the Weather Underground.
You always wondered - well, when you got old enough to wonder, you started wondering, why would people have children if they were going to risk their lives constantly or risk prison constantly? Did you ever ask your parents that question?
DOHRN: Of course. I've asked them many times growing up, and then in the writing of this book I asked them over and over what they were thinking at that time. And, you know, their answers are funny. I mean, my mom, when I first asked her about it for the book, she said, well, we'd been fugitives for a long time, and we felt like we knew how to be safe, and we certainly wouldn't put our baby at risk. And I said, well, you know, you were an FBI Top Ten Most Wanted fugitive. Having a kid - by definition, that kid is at risk.
But I think they felt - you know, like a lot of young parents - my mom was in her early 30s. She finally wanted a kid. She had never thought she wanted to be a mother or a wife. She was a very antitraditional person. But I think once she started wanting a kid - and they'd been underground at that point for seven years. And so I think it felt to them like, well, we either do it in this strange circumstance or we don't do it at all.
And, you know, I talked to other children of Weather Underground fugitives. I also talked to Assata Shakur's daughter, Kakuya, and, you know, her mom, Assata, had Kakuya when she was in prison. She was facing life in prison for murder and she was in the psych ward at Rikers Island and she got pregnant, you know, with a codefendant of hers and had a child.
GROSS: In prison.
DOHRN: In prison.
GROSS: She got in pregnant in prison.
DOHRN: She got pregnant in prison. And people have asked Assata about this too, and she says, the choice was we knew that the world was a terrible, racist, horrible place to bring a Black child into, but we also felt like we have to live. Like, our grandparents and great-grandparents and great-great-grandparents had children even under slavery. And so the choice is not, you know, do you abandon the struggle for justice and have a normal life? The choice is, given that you're in the struggle, do you decide to live and have a family anyway? So I understand that decision, but, of course, as the kids, it's a complicated - the consequences are quite clear.
GROSS: They reassured you that they would always protect you, they'd always be with you, but you later learned that they took some really dangerous actions when you were very young that you did not know about. For example, you and your parents went on a camping trip in West Virginia. They're reassuring you they'll always protect you, they'll always be with you. You later learned that trip to West Virginia was because it was near a prison that they were casing to help break out Assata Shakur, a New York Panther - to help her break out of prison. She was moved to New Jersey, to a prison there, before the breakout, but your parents did later help her break out of that prison.
When you found that out later in life, that they were, you know, not being honest with you - you were very young during that camping trip - what was your reaction?
DOHRN: Well, yeah, when you say I found it out recently, I literally found it out while working on this book, so in my 40s. And so, yeah, it was surprising, definitely, but also not surprising in the sense that I've always known my parents had these goals that were foundational for them - that fighting racism, that being white activists in solidarity with the Black freedom struggle was their priority before I was born. And so even though I did always feel loved growing up - I always felt safe and protected to some extent. I mean, I felt like they definitely had my best interests in mind, but I also always knew that they had these goals that were bigger and preceded me. And so when I reconstructed the history and figured out, you know, where my parents had been, what they had been doing at that time, it made perfect sense that when the Black Panthers came calling for one more favor, my parents would have been - found it impossible to say no.
GROSS: How do you look at it now? Is it better to risk your life as a parent for, like, the greater good, for the cause that you really believe in, or do you give up the cause or change your role in the cause to more of a background figure in order to be with your children and protect them from the larger world?
DOHRN: Yeah. I think it's a question I've wrestled with a lot. And I would say where I come down is it's a fundamental contradiction, if you are somebody who believes strongly in something, that you have to make a better world for your children, you know, you can't exactly choose between, I'm going to have kids and have a normal life or I'm going to fight for a better world. For my parents and their friends in the Panther Party and in the Weather Underground, the choice was more like, if we're going to have kids, knowing what we know about this world, we have to both fight for a better future and try to be decent parents. And that was a contradiction.
It was a contradiction that reared its head in all sorts of ways, and most dramatically when they committed crimes and left their children behind. But I think for my parents it was never a choice. My mom couldn't have been somebody who decided to abandon the movement and just settle down and have kids. She had to try to do both.
GROSS: While you were growing up and your parents were still underground - they had new identities, new hair color, clothes were different. Their behavior was designed not to call attention to themselves. They didn't tell strangers about their lives. They shared their lives only really with their fellow underground folks - did you feel like you didn't know who they were? You were so young, they might have had to be careful what they revealed to you. So did you feel like they were, by necessity, hiding who they were from you?
DOHRN: I didn't feel that way, weirdly. I think one of the strange things about my childhood was that my parents never really lied to me. I mean, as you say, of course there were things that they didn't talk about. There were lies of omission. But they never pretended that they were anybody other than who they were, and they never pretended our lives were anything but what it - you know, what our situation actually was. So I didn't feel like they were hiding from me. I felt like we were hiding from the world.
GROSS: It's an interesting story how they were able to get fake IDs and birth certificates. Would you tell that story involving cemeteries?
DOHRN: Yeah. Well, I mean, one of the funny things about my parents is they were college dropouts. My mom had been to law school. So they were not career criminals. They didn't grow up knowing how to be fugitives. I don't know if anybody grows up knowing how to be fugitives. But they were not...
GROSS: You did (laughter).
DOHRN: Yeah. Well, I did. Exactly.
GROSS: (Laughter).
DOHRN: But they were not trained for this. You know, they were making it up as they went along. But what they decided in 1970 - when they went underground and started to create this kind of clandestine revolutionary movement, they knew they needed a few things. They needed places to stay, they needed ways to make money and they needed new names. And the way they figured out how to make new names was they would drive out to a rural cemetery, and they would walk around until they found the grave of a kid who had died young - somebody who had died before they turned 2 or 3, so that they had never applied for a driver's license. And it had to be somebody who was born around the same time that they were born.
So they'd find this name on a gravestone - a kid who had been born around the same time as them but who had died young - and then they'd go to the county courthouse and they'd say, I'm so-and-so. I've lost my ID, but here's my birth date. Here's where I was born. And usually, the county clerk would issue them a new birth certificate on the spot. They knew enough to show that they were that person. Nobody else had applied for any documents using those names. And then once they had a birth certificate, they could use that to apply for a driver's license. And eventually, they had a whole new identity with real, official government ID.
GROSS: We need to take another break here, so let me reintroduce you. If you're just joining us, my guest is Zayd Ayers Dohrn, author of the new memoir "Dangerous, Dirty, Violent, And Young: A Fugitive Family In The Revolutionary Underground." We'll be back after a short break. I'm Terry Gross, and this is FRESH AIR.
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GROSS: This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross. Let's get back to my interview with Zayd Ayers Dohrn, author of the new memoir "Dangerous, Dirty, Violent And Young: A Fugitive Family In The Revolutionary Underground." Bernardine Dohrn, his mother, was a leader of SDS and a founder of the revolutionary underground militant movement the Weather Underground. Zayd's father, Bill Ayers, was active in SDS and the Weather Underground. They were living underground before Zayd was born and for the first few years of Zayd's life.
So your mother, Bernardine Dohrn, was a leader of SDS. And then she led the group that became the Weather Underground and supported armed resistance. She issued several statements over the years. I want you to read the one from 1970.
DOHRN: OK. The declaration of war.
GROSS: Yes.
DOHRN: Yeah, so this is a tape that she recorded and that was delivered to police stations and news outlets secretly all across the country in 1970 to announce that they had formed this underground resistance. She says, hello, this is Bernardine Dohrn. I'm going to read a declaration of a state of war. All over the world, people fighting American imperialism look to America's youth to use our strategic position behind enemy lines to join forces in the destruction of the empire.
Black people have been fighting almost alone for years. We've known that our job is to lead white kids into armed revolution. Within the next 14 days, we will attack a symbol or institution of American injustice. This is the way we celebrate the example of Eldridge Cleaver and H. Rap Brown and all Black revolutionaries, who first inspired us by their fight behind enemy lines for the liberation of their people. Never again will they fight alone.
GROSS: So what did they attack?
DOHRN: Yeah, 15 days later, they attacked New York City police headquarters, the headquarters of the NYPD. They smuggled a dynamite bomb into the headquarters, put it in an empty bathroom, and that night, they called in a warning, and then the bomb exploded. That was the first attack. But over the next few years, they bombed the Harvard Center for International Affairs. They bombed an Army base in the Presidio near San Francisco. They bombed the U.S. Capitol. They bombed the Pentagon.
GROSS: And so in those early days, most of the protests were against the war in Vietnam. And most of the symbols were symbols of police or symbols of what they called the war machine, you know, like the Pentagon. They were also fighting racism, which had to do with bombing the police headquarters. Can you talk some more about how the Weather Underground became aligned with the Black Panthers?
DOHRN: I think for my mother in particular, the question of race was always central to her politics. She started out in the Civil Rights Movement marching with Dr. King, volunteering during the rent strike in Chicago. And she was really radicalized by the deaths of these Black leaders, by the death of Martin Luther King, by the death of Fred Hampton. And the Weather Underground, my mom for sure, saw her role as being a white ally, or what they called a comrade, to the militant Black freedom struggle.
And so when my mom became one of the three national leaders of SDS, one of her programs was, how can we be better allies to the Black freedom struggle? She was based in Chicago. And Fred Hampton, who was only 26 at the time, was the head of the Illinois Black Panthers. And Fred was creating what he called a rainbow coalition of activist groups. He had put together this alliance where different activist groups of different races could work together in the struggle for - against the war and against racism, and ultimately the struggle to bring down the United States government.
And my mom, as the leader of SDS, they were one of the first groups to join that coalition. So they were allies already. And then when Fred Hampton was murdered by the Chicago police, that really kind of sent the Weather Underground over the edge in terms of their militancy and their determination to escalate that struggle against what they saw as a racist government.
GROSS: And the FBI had an informant in the Illinois Panthers. And that was key in the murder of Fred Hampton. Would you describe the role of the FBI informant?
DOHRN: So there was a Panther named William O'Neal, one of Fred Hampton's bodyguards, friends. But the FBI had recruited him as an informant. And we now know that J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI were determined to bring down the Black Panther Party and were determined to neutralize Fred Hampton as a charismatic revolutionary Black leader. So what they did is, William O'Neal, the FBI informant inside the Black Panther party, drugged Fred Hampton's Kool-Aid one night with a sedative. And Fred went to sleep. And that night, the Chicago police showed up armed at Fred Hampton's apartment and started firing through the doors. And they shot Fred Hampton.
They shot one of his bodyguards. And then when they burst into the apartment and found Fred basically asleep and wounded, he wasn't yet dead, and they shot him at point-blank range and killed him. And they later claimed that it had been a firefight and that the Panthers had fired back. But we now know from forensic evidence at the scene and from testimony that they were lying, that they came in and murdered Fred Hampton without the Panthers firing back at all.
GROSS: And his pregnant girlfriend was lying at his side in bed while this was happening.
DOHRN: Exactly. Deborah Johnson, yeah, was pregnant with their son, Fred Hampton Jr. And she survived, and the baby survived, but she was lying next to Fred in bed when he was killed.
GROSS: So how did that further radicalize your parents?
DOHRN: One thing was it became very clear to them that the government was targeting the Black Panthers and that any charismatic, effective leadership in the Black freedom struggle would not only be, you know, surveilled and harassed, but ultimately targeted with violence by the government. And so they felt that that required white kids, white activists to use their privilege to kind of try to help shield the Black Panthers. They felt like the country wasn't noticing that Black people were being killed, but they would notice if white people were putting their own bodies on the line.
The other thing it did is it convinced them that aboveground activist work was no longer viable, because they could try to organize against the war. They could try to protest. They could try to have demonstrations. But if the government was literally going to murder people who were opposing their policies, they felt like that meant that activist groups had to develop a clandestine structure where they could operate beyond the reach of law enforcement.
GROSS: Now, it was after the murder of Fred Hampton that your mother declares a state of war against the government.
DOHRN: Yeah. My parents were still aboveground when Fred was killed. They actually went over to his apartment. They saw the bloody mattress where he was killed. They saw the holes in the wall of his apartment. And that really kind of drove them a little bit crazy. The next night, they firebombed a bunch of police cars around Chicago, empty police cars, to kind of show that the SDS and white activist groups were going to try to respond to Fred's death.
A few months after that, my mom had what they called a war council, basically a meeting in Flint, Michigan, of the kind of remainders of the Weathermen organization. And at that meeting, they decided, we're going to go underground. We're going to build a violent, clandestine resistance to the government. And it was in, I think, March or April of that year that they declared war on the government.
GROSS: Let me reintroduce you here. If you're just joining us, my guest is Zayd Ayers Dohrn. His new memoir is called "Dangerous, Dirty, Violent And Young: A Fugitive Family In The Revolutionary Underground." We'll be right back. This is FRESH AIR.
This is FRESH AIR. Let's get back to my interview with Zayd Ayers Dohrn, author of the new memoir "Dangerous, Dirty, Violent, And Young: A Fugitive Family In The Revolutionary Underground." His parents are Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn. Bernardine Dohrn was a leader of SDS and then led the militant faction that broke away - called the Weather Underground - calling for armed resistance. Bill Ayers was a member of SDS and the Weather Underground.
You had several talks with your parents about whether, you know, bombing police cars, bombing police headquarters, bombing the Pentagon, bombing other symbols of the war in Vietnam or of racism were acts of revolutionary social justice to - in their goal of overthrowing the government or whether they were acts of terrorism. And, you know, some people would say, well, if you're trying to overthrow a government, isn't that, you know, a textbook definition of terrorism? But they saw it as something that would lead to justice and to the greater good. So can you talk about those discussions, which were sometimes debates, between you and your parents?
DOHRN: My parents made the very dramatic choice to, you know, move from peaceful activism to violent resistance against the government. And I think the - a lot of the book is dedicated to thinking through that choice - the consequences of it, the reasons for it. I mean, a lot of the book is about what turns somebody into a revolutionary. How did my mom go from a law student and a civil rights activist to a Top Ten Most Wanted fugitive and a person who advocated bombing government buildings?
And I think I would say a couple things about it. One thing is that they - there were debates within the group, even at the time, about how far to go, what was legitimate resistance, what would be illegitimate resistance. They had been working to end the Vietnam War, working to be a part of the Civil Rights Movement, and they felt like there was no progress. Black leaders were being murdered. Vietnamese civilians were being murdered. They got frustrated. They got angry. And many of them in the Weather Underground eventually decided, we have to do everything we can to resist this wholesale slaughter that's happening, and that - if that means violence to draw attention to what our government is doing, then that's justified.
They - you know, there were a lot of debates within the group at the time about, well, what does that mean? Their slogan at the time was bring the war home, meaning bring the violence of Vietnam home to the streets of America. Now, for many of them, that meant symbolic acts of violence - symbolic bombings of government buildings where they tried very hard - and succeeded - in not having any human casualties. For some of the people in the group, there was a sense that even if it means, you know, bombing an army base, if - even if it means attacking police officers, that's a legitimate resistance given what's happening. And there were a lot of debates within the group at the time.
In 1970, three of their friends - my dad's girlfriend, Diana, and also Terry Robbins and Teddy (ph) - were killed in an explosion in the West Village in New York when they were building bombs to attack an army base. And that was a really key turning point in my parents' lives because the surviving members of the group decided watching their friends die - to know that that was something they could never take back changed the way they thought about violent resistance. They decided, we should not be targeting people. We should not be risking our lives in quite that way. Of course, one of the ironies of it is that that didn't mean giving up on violent resistance. They continued to build bombs. They continued to blow up government buildings. But they really tried from that point on never to target human life.
GROSS: That's one of your parents' arguments about why it wasn't terrorism - because the bombs weren't intended to kill, but to send a message.
DOHRN: Correct. And I - you know, I pressed my parents about, well, there's - certainly those bombings, even if they didn't hurt anybody, even if they didn't kill anybody, they very well might have terrorized government workers who were working in the Pentagon. They - must have been very scary to be working at night in the Pentagon and hear an explosion down the hall. So there's an element of it that, you know, violence is always violence, and it's never clean and it's never tidy. And there were times when I think they took risks where somebody, you know, could've been hurt, but nobody was. And I think it's a testament to the discipline of the group not to go down the road of deadly violence. And so, yeah, the Weather Underground survived for 10 years underground without ever killing anybody.
GROSS: You write, blowing up a building doesn't help build a mass movement or create momentum for lasting change. That's a disagreement you've had with your parents. Tell me about your point of view.
DOHRN: So I challenge my parents on many of their choices in the book. And I think it's complicated because, of course, I think there are times when many of us might agree with the fact that resistance, even violent resistance, might be necessary in times of fascism or authoritarianism or genocide, things like, you know, the American South under slavery. Violent resistance to that kind of repression is sometimes inevitable and sometimes necessary. But I think the question for activists becomes, what is actually going to help create change?
And so, for example, right now, we're facing authoritarianism in America, and you do see people starting to feel like democratic change is impossible or that voting rights are being suppressed and that some kind of more direct action might be necessary. I think, you know, there's direct action like what we saw in Minneapolis - the resistance against ICE - which is not violent but is putting your own body on the line and trying to resist government oppression in that way. I think that's clearly effective and clearly valid. Once you start talking about blowing up buildings, I think you have to be very careful that you're not alienating your natural allies and that you're not preventing a kind of mass movement that actually might be able to create lasting change.
So I think it's a complicated question of how to resist when a country is trending towards authoritarianism when it feels like nothing is working to change that system. But I think ultimately, certainly deadly violence and even kind of symbolic violence is really a double-edged sword and it can harm the movement as much as it can harm the government that it's targeting.
GROSS: So when your parents did surface and resume their identities, did they get new jobs? Did they find new identities for themselves that they were comfortable with and that were fulfilling?
DOHRN: It took a while, but yes. Once my mother got out of prison and my father went back to school - and, you know, you have to remember that 10 years earlier, when they went underground, they had dropped what at the time were fairly promising academic careers. My father was an educator who had graduated from the University of Michigan. My mother was at law school at the University of Chicago when they went underground. So they had this 10-year gap in their resumes when they were fighting the government.
But by the time they turned themselves in and the charges were mostly dropped - and my mom did almost a year in prison for refusing to testify against her comrades. But after that, she went back and passed the bar exam. My father went back and got his doctorate in education. And they became, you know, middle-class professionals, still focused on their activism. Still both of them ended up working for decades - my mom to reform the criminal justice system. She worked on the juvenile justice system in Chicago. She ran a legal clinic focused on defending juvenile offenders in court. My father became an educator, taught generations of teachers in Chicago at the University of Illinois in Chicago. And my brothers and I had a fairly normal adolescence. Like, by the time I was 12, we were living in Chicago. We were going to school. We played in Little League. And so, you know, by that point in our lives, in the '90s, we could've passed for ordinary Americans.
GROSS: If you're just joining us, my guest is Zayd Ayers Dohrn. His new memoir is called "Dangerous, Dirty, Violent, And Young: A Fugitive Family In The Revolutionary Underground." We'll be right back. This is FRESH AIR.
This is FRESH AIR. Let's get back to my interview with Zayd Ayers Dohrn, author of the new memoir "Dangerous, Dirty, Violent, And Young: A Fugitive Family In The Revolutionary Underground."
You spent so much time, and your parents spent so much time, keeping secrets. And now, like, you've - a couple of years ago, you did your podcast that you've expanded into your memoir. And you're revealing, like, so much. It's, like, from one extreme to another.
DOHRN: That's true. It's funny. I mean, I've been a professional writer for 15 years and never really wanted to write my family story. And I think that might be because of what you're talking about, the kind of secrecy I grew up with and also the complexity of investigating the crime scene of your own childhood and trying to understand who your parents are. I mean, one thing I realized writing the book is, like, my family has a very crazy story.
I had a very strange childhood. But we all kind of have parents who we don't completely understand. And part of growing up, part of becoming an adult is trying to figure out, you know, where we came from, who our parents really were, what secrets were kept from us during our childhood. And I'm a parent myself now, so I've been - I think that's - it was becoming a parent that made me want to really understand my own family and where we came from.
GROSS: What do you think, and what do your parents think, that their battles accomplished?
DOHRN: I think my parents would say that they were one small part of a much larger movement that did end up ending the Vietnam War. They wouldn't take credit for it. In fact, when I asked my mother if she had any part in ending the war, she said, no, we didn't end the war. The Vietnamese ended the war by winning it. So I think they would say that they were trying to do whatever they could to be white people who were allies with the Vietnamese and allies with the struggle for Black liberation in this country.
What they accomplished? I think, you know, obviously, here we are in another moment of authoritarianism and war overseas. And police violence and racism has not gone away. So on one level, you could say, well, what did they accomplish? We're still facing the same problems. On another level, I think you could say that that moment, the '60s and '70s, they were a part of a radical reimagining of what this country should be, could be.
And I think, you know, I disagree with much of what my parents did. They're - like all people, they're complicated, flawed human beings. But I think they made a few big choices that are deserving of admiration and respect. You know, opposing the Vietnam War with everything they had is one of them. We look back now and it feels like most young people opposed the Vietnam War, but that's not true. At the time, it was a very unpopular position. And then the second big choice is opposing racism with everything they had, being white people who risked their lives and their careers and their futures in the struggle for Black liberation.
GROSS: Well, let's close with the Jefferson Airplane song...
DOHRN: (Laughter).
GROSS: ...That your - the title of your memoir "Dangerous, Dirty, Violent, And Young" is taken from.
DOHRN: Yeah.
GROSS: It's "We Can Be Together." Why did you take your title from this song?
DOHRN: Yeah. So this is a Jefferson Airplane song, "We Can Be Together, " from 1969. And I thought it was appropriate for two reasons. One is Jefferson Airplane was actually one of the groups that secretly sent money to the underground to support my parents and their revolutionary work. So that line from the song, the full line is, we are all outlaws in the eyes of America. We are obscene, lawless, hideous, dangerous, dirty, violent and young. And that became kind of a rallying cry, not only for my parents, but for a big segment of the youth counterculture. This idea of being outlaws in your own country really sums up a lot of what my parents stood for at the time.
GROSS: Zayd, thanks so much for writing this book. I just feel like you explained so much of the past. And it's so interesting to hear what your life was like. So I really appreciate that you wrote this. I recommend your podcast also, "Mother Country Radicals." Thank you so much.
DOHRN: Likewise, Terry. Thank you for having me.
GROSS: Zayd Ayers Dohrn is the author of the new memoir "Dangerous, Dirty, Violent, And Young: A Fugitive Family In The Revolutionary Underground."
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "WE CAN BE TOGETHER")
JEFFERSON AIRPLANE: (Singing) We are obscene, lawless, hideous, dangerous, dirty, violent and young. We should be together. Come on, all you people standing around. Our life's too fine to let it die. We should be together.
GROSS: Tomorrow on FRESH AIR, our guest will be Jesmyn Ward. She has a new essay collection on grief, motherhood and survival titled "On Witness And Respair." Ward won the National Book Award twice for her novels "Salvage The Bones" and "Sing, Unburied, Sing." She'll tell us about finding hope after losing her brother, her partner and her grandmother. I hope you'll join us.
I have some good news to end today's show. On Saturday, our book critic, Maureen Corrigan, received an honorary degree from her alma mater, Fordham University. The letter with the good news came from Fordham's president, Tania Tetlow, who wrote, quote, "your distinguished career as an author, scholar and literary critic exemplifies an intellectual curiosity and depth of insight that have enriched public understanding of literature and culture for decades. As one of the most recognizable voices in American book criticism, serving for more than 30 years as the book critic on NPR's FRESH AIR and as a respected reviewer for The Washington Post, you've helped millions of listeners and readers to approach literature with both discernment and delight. Your work honors the power of storytelling to shape how we see ourselves and one another. Your contributions as a teacher of literary criticism further testify to your commitment to forming minds that read with rigor, empathy and imagination." Unquote.
Maureen told us she was overwhelmed by having this degree given by Fordham, where two beloved English professors changed her life. Beloved is also the word the Fordham press release used to describe Maureen's voice on books and writing. I'll go with that word, too, to describe her place on our show. She's been our book critic for decades. And she still always has something fresh, meaningful and eloquent to say. Thank you, Maureen, and congratulations.
(SOUNDBITE OF LESTER YOUNG AND OSCAR PETERSON TRIO'S "ON THE SUNNY SIDE OF THE STREET")
GROSS: FRESH AIR's executive producer is Sam Briger. Our technical director and engineer is Audrey Bentham. Our engineer today is Adam Staniszewski. Our interviews and reviews are produced and edited by Phyllis Myers, Ann Marie Baldonado, Lauren Krenzel, Therese Madden, Monique Nazareth, Thea Chaloner, Susan Nyakundi, Anna Bauman and Nico Gonzalez-Wisler. Our digital media producer is Molly Seavy-Nesper. Roberta Shorrock directs the show. Our cohost is Tonya Mosley. I'm Terry Gross.
(SOUNDBITE OF LESTER YOUNG AND OSCAR PETERSON TRIO'S "ON THE SUNNY SIDE OF THE STREET")
Expected Release Date May 19th, 2026
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