How this headline may connect to industries in Illinois. Technical scores are below — click any ? for what a metric means.
Son of radicals, Zayd Ayers Dohrn details a childhood underground and on the run.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.