Bill Ayers
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Bill Ayers (b. 1944) is a former member of the Weather Underground who is now a Distinguished Professor of Education at the University of Illinois at Chicago.
Ayers was a 1960s-era political activist and Weather Underground member. He grew up in Glen Ellyn, Illinois, a suburb of Chicago in a highly privileged family (his father, Thomas Ayers, was Chairman and CEO of Commonwealth Edison) and attended Lake Forest Academy. According to Ayers' memoir Fugitive Days, he became radicalized at the University of Michigan. During his years there, he became involved in the New Left and the SDS.
Ayers went underground with several comrades after their co-conspirators' bomb accidentally exploded on March 6, 1970, destroying a Greenwich Village townhouse and killing three members of the Weather Underground (Ted Gold, Terry Robbins, and Diana Oughton, who was Ayers' girlfriend at the time). He and his colleagues invented identities and traveled continuously. They avoided the police and FBI, while bombing high-profile government buildings including; the United States Capitol, The Pentagon, and the Harry S Truman Building housing the State Department. Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn raised two children, Zayd and Malik, underground before turning themselves in 1981, when most charges were dropped because of what Ayers described as "extreme governmental misconduct" during the long search for the fugitives. They also adopted a son, Chesa Boudin. He published his memoirs in 2001 with the book Fugitive Days. He has also edited and written nearly a dozen books on education theory, policy and practice.
[edit] References
- Ayers, William. 2001. Fugitive Days: A Memoir. Boston: Beacon Press. ISBN 0-8070-7124-2.
- http://www.billayers.org/index.php
