Bill Ayers

This article is about the 1960s and 1970s political activist. For the disc jockey and anti-hunger leader, see Bill Ayres. For the former football player and manager, see Billy Ayre.

William C. Ayers
Born	1944 (age 79–80) Glen Ellyn, Illinois
Nationality	United States
Citizenship	United States
Known for	Urban educational reform Former member of the Weather Underground Organization
Academic background
Alma mater	University of Michigan Bank Street College Teachers College, Columbia University Columbia University
Academic work
Institutions	University of Illinois at Chicago

William Charles "Bill" Ayers (born 1944) is a professor in the College of Education at the University of Illinois at Chicago, known for his work in school reform and community organizing. In the 1960s he was a radical activist. In 1969 he co-founded the violent radical left organization Weather Underground Organization.

Early life

Ayers grew up in Glen Ellyn, a suburb of Chicago, Illinois. He attended public schools there until his second year in high school, when he transferred to Lake Forest Academy, a small prep school. Ayers earned a B.A. from the University of Michigan in American Studies in 1968. (His father, mother and older brother had preceded him there.) He is the son of Thomas G. Ayers, former Chairman and CEO of Commonwealth Edison (1973 to 1980), Chicago philanthropist and the namesake of the Thomas G. Ayers College of Commerce and Industry.

Ayers was affected when SDS President Paul Potter, at a 1965 Ann Arbor Teach-In against the Vietnam war, asked his audience, "How will you live your life so that it doesn't make a mockery of your values?" Ayers later wrote in his memoir, Fugitive Days, that his reaction was: "You could not be a moral person with the means to act, and stand still. [...] To stand still was to choose indifference. Indifference was the opposite of moral"

In 1965 Ayers joined a picket line protesting an Ann Arbor, Michigan, pizzeria for refusing to seat African Americans. His first arrest came for a sit-in at a local draft board, resulting in 10 days in jail. His first teaching job came shortly afterward at the Children's Community, a preschool with a handful of students and located in a church basement. The school was a part of the nationwide "free school movement". Schools in the movement had no grades or report cards. They stressed cooperation rather than competition, and teachers were addressed by their first names. Within a few months, at age 21, Ayers became director of the school. There he also met Diana Oughton, who would become his girlfriend until her death in a bomb blast in 1970.

Radical history

Further information: Weatherman (organization)

File:Bill Ayers mug shot.jpg

Bill Ayers' booking photo taken in 1968 by the Chicago Police Dept.

Ayers became involved in the New Left and the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). He rose to national prominence as an SDS leader in 1968 and 1969. As head of an SDS regional group, the "Jesse James Gang", Ayers made decisive contributions to the Weatherman orientation toward militancy.

The groups Ayers headed in Detroit, Michigan became one of the earliest gatherings of what became the Weatherman. Between the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago and the June 1969 SDS convention, Ayers became a prominent leader of the group, which arose as a result of a schism in SDS.

"During that time his infatuation with street fighting grew and he developed a language of confrontational militancy that became more and more extreme over the year [1969]", former Weatherman member Cathy Wilkerson wrote in 2001. Before this time, Ayers had become a roommate of and strong influence on Terry Robbins, who was two years younger and "came to idolize him", Wilkerson wrote. From the summer of 1968 to summer 1969, the pair worked closely together, "appearing inseparable at most SDS conventions and meetings", she wrote. The two competed over things small and large, "including the ability to come up with quick one-liners, quirky names, sexual conquests, street fighting ability, and eventually the ability to talk tough", she wrote. As Ayers started glorifying violence more and more, Robbins was affected by it. "But while Ayers, according to what he writes, knew that his language, which increasingly glorified violence, was just show, Robbins was one of those who really believed all of it." Robbins would later be killed while making a bomb.

In June 1969, the Weatherman took control of the SDS at its national convention, where Ayers was elected "Education Secretary".

Later in 1969, Ayers participated in planting a bomb at a statue dedicated to police casualties in the 1886 Haymarket Riot. The blast broke almost 100 windows and blew pieces of the statue onto the nearby Kennedy Expressway. (The statue was rebuilt and unveiled on May 4, 1970, and blown up again by other Weathermen on October 6, 1970. Built yet again, the city posted a 24-hour police guard to prevent another blast.) Ayers participated in the Days of Rage riot in Chicago in October 1969, and in December was at the "War Council" meeting in Flint, Michigan.

Years underground

In 1970 he "went underground" with several associates after the Greenwich Village townhouse explosion, in which Weatherman member Ted Gold, Ayers' close friend Terry Robbins, and Ayers girlfriend, Oughton, were killed when a nail bomb that was under construction exploded. Kathy Boudin and Cathy Wilkerson survived the blast. Ayers was not facing criminal charges at the time, but the federal government later filed charges against him.

In 2001 Ayers released a book, Fugitive Days, in which he discussed participating in the bombings of New York City Police Headquarters in 1970, the Capitol building in 1971, and the Pentagon in 1972. He also said, however, that the book was partly fiction.

While underground, he and fellow member Bernardine Dohrn married, and the two remained fugitives together, changing identities, jobs and locations. By 1976 or 1977, with federal charges against both fugitives dropped due to prosecutorial misconduct (see COINTELPRO), Ayers was ready to turn himself in to authorities, but Dohrn remained reluctant until after she gave birth to two sons, one born in 1977, the other in 1980. "He was sweet and patient, as he always is, to let me come to my senses on my own", she later said. The couple turned themselves in in 1980.

Ayers and Dohrn later became legal guardians to the son of former Weathermen David Gilbert and Kathy Boudin after the boy's parents were convicted and sent to prison for their part in the Brinks Robbery of 1981.

Later reflections on his past

Fugitive Days: A Memoir

In 2001, Ayers published Fugitive Days: A Memoir, which he explained in part as an attempt to answer the questions of Kathy Boudin's son, and his speculation that Diana Oughton died trying to stop the Greenwich Village bomb makers.

Some have questioned the truth, accuracy, and tone of the book. Brent Staples, wrote for The New York Times Book Review that "Ayers reminds us often that he can't tell everything without endangering people involved in the story. Historian Jesse Lemisch (himself a former member of SDS) contrasted Ayers' recollections with those of other former members of Weatherman and has alleged serious factual errors. Ayers, in the foreword to his book, states that it was written as his personal memories and impressions over time, not a scholarly research project. David Farber, reviewing the book for the Chicago Tribune pointed out that in the book, Ayers "blandly tells us" the bomb that killed three members of the Weatherman in the Greenwich Village townhouse explosion in March 1970 was, in Ayers' words, "destined for the army base nearby," (Fort Dix in New Jersey).

Statements made in 2001

In the months before Ayers' memoir was published on September 10, 2001, the author gave numerous interviews with newspaper and magazine writers in which he defended his overall history of radical words and actions. Some of the resulting articles were written just before the September 11 terrorist attacks and appeared immediately after, including one often-noted article in The New York Times, and another in the Chicago Tribune. Numerous observations were made in the media comparing the statements Ayers was making about his own past just as a dramatic new terrorist incident shocked the public.

Much of the controversy about Ayers during the decade since the year 2000 stems from an interview he gave to the New York Times on the occasion of the memoir's publication. The reporter quoted him as saying "I don't regret setting bombs" and "I feel we didn't do enough", and, when asked if he would "do it all again" as saying "I don't want to discount the possibility." Ayers has not denied the quotes, but he protested the interviewer's characterizations in a Letter to the Editor published September 15, 2001: "This is not a question of being misunderstood or 'taken out of context', but of deliberate distortion." In the ensuing years, Ayers has repeatedly avowed that when he said he had "no regrets" and that "we didn't do enough" he was speaking only in reference to his efforts to stop the United States from waging the Vietnam War, efforts which he has described as ". . . inadequate [as] the war dragged on for a decade." Ayers has maintained that the two statements were not intended to imply a wish they had set more bombs. The interviewer also quoted some of Ayers' own criticism of Weatherman in the foreword to the memoir, whereby Ayers reacts to having watched Emile de Antonio's 1976 documentary film about Weatherman, Underground: "[Ayers] was 'embarrassed by the arrogance, the solipsism, the absolute certainty that we and we alone knew the way. The rigidity and the narcissism.' "

Ayers on whether he was a terrorist

"We weren't terrorists," Ayers told an interviewer for the Chicago Tribune in 2001. "The reason we weren't terrorists is because we did not commit random acts of terror against people. Terrorism was what was being practiced in the countryside of Vietnam by the United States." In a letter to the editor in the Chicago Tribune, Ayers wrote, "I condemn all forms of terrorism — individual, group and official". He also condemned the September 11 terrorist attacks in that letter. "Today we are witnessing crimes against humanity on our own shores on an unthinkable scale, and I fear that we may soon see more innocent people in other parts of the world dying in response."

Todd Gitlin, a former SDS member and author of "The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage," harshly criticizes Ayers and other members of Weatherman for wanting to kill, even if they didn't. Gitlin said in 2001 that the only reason no one was murdered was because the first known attempt resulted in members of the group blowing themselves up instead: "OK, let's give them a medal for not killing anybody besides themselves. But they wanted to be terrorists. They planned on being terrorists. Then their bomb blew up and killed several of them and they thought better of it. They were failed terrorists."

Views on his past expressed since 2001

Ayers was asked in a January 2004 interview, "How do you feel about what you did? Would you do it again under similar circumstances?" He replied:

I’ve thought about this a lot. Being almost 60, it’s impossible to not have lots and lots of regrets about lots and lots of things, but the question of did we do something that was horrendous, awful? ... I don’t think so. I think what we did was to respond to a situation that was unconscionable.

Ayers' ideology

In an interview published in 1995, Ayers characterized his political beliefs at that time and in the 1960s and 1970s: "I am a radical, Leftist, small 'c' communist ... [Laughs] Maybe I'm the last communist who is willing to admit it. [Laughs] We have always been small 'c' communists in the sense that we were never in the [Communist] party and never Stalinists. The ethics of Communism still appeal to me. I don't like Lenin as much as the early Marx. I also like Henry David Thoreau, Mother Jones and Jane Addams [...]"

In 1970 Ayers was called "a national leader" of the Weatherman organization and "one of the chief theoreticians of the Weathermen". The Weathermen were initially part of the Revolutionary Youth Movement (RYM) within the SDS, splitting from the RYM's Maoists by claiming there was no time to build a vanguard party and that revolutionary war against the United States government and the capitalist system should begin immediately. Their founding document called for the establishment of a "white fighting force" to be allied with the "Black Liberation Movement" and other "anti-colonial" movements to achieve "the destruction of US imperialism and the achievement of a classless world: world communism." In June 1974, the Weather Underground released a 151-page volume titled Prairie Fire, which stated: "We are a guerrilla organization [...] We are communist women and men underground in the United States [...]"

Academic career

Ayers is currently a Distinguished Professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago, College of Education. His interests include teaching for social justice, urban educational reform, narrative and interpretive research, children in trouble with the law, and related issues.

He began his career in primary education while an undergraduate, teaching at the Children’s Community School (CCS), a project founded by a group of students and based on the Summerhill method of education. After leaving the underground, he earned an M.Ed from Bank Street College in Early Childhood Education (1984), an M.Ed from Teachers College, Columbia University in Early Childhood Education (1987) and an Ed.D from Columbia University in Curriculum and Instruction (1987).

He has edited and written many books and articles on education theory, policy and practice, and has appeared on many panels and symposia.

Civic and political life

Main article: Woods Fund of Chicago

Main article: Controversy over an Obama–Ayers connection

Ayers was tapped by Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley to help found the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, a school reform program. Since 1999 he has served on the board of directors of the Woods Fund of Chicago, an anti-poverty, philanthropic foundation established in 1941. Ayers' contacts with the 2008 Democratic Nominee for President of the United States, Barack Obama became controversial in the 2008 United States presidential election. The two served together on the Woods Fund Board from 1999 until Obama left in 2002. Ayers had other minimal contact with Obama as a resident of Chicago's Hyde Park neighborhood, including hosting a candidate reception attended by Obama early in Obama's first Illinois state Senate campaign in 1995, appearing on education panels together, and donating $200 to Obama's campaign in April 2001. .

According to Ayers, his radical past occasionally affects him, as when, by his account, he was asked not to attend a progressive educators' conference in the fall of 2006 on the basis that the organizers did not want to risk an association with his past.

Personal life

Ayers is married to Bernardine Dohrn, a fellow radical whom he met with during his time with Weather Underground with whom he has two adult children. They shared a legal guardianship of a third child, Chesa, who was Kathy Boudin's child with David Gilbert. Chesa was raised to adulthood while both his parents were in prison for the Brinks robbery (1981). Ayers and Dohrn currently live in currently live in the Hyde Park neighborhood of Chicago.

Works

• Education: An American Problem. Bill Ayers, Radical Education Project, 1968, ASIN B0007H31HU
• Hot town: Summer in the City: I ain't gonna work on Maggie's farm no more, Bill Ayers, Students for a Democratic Society, 1969, ASIN B0007I3CMI
• Good Preschool Teachers, William Ayers, Teachers College Press, 1989, ISBN 978-0807729472
• The Good Preschool Teacher: Six Teachers Reflect on Their Lives, William Ayers, Teachers College Press, 1989, ISBN 978-0807729465
• To Teach: The Journey of a Teacher, William Ayers, Teachers College Press, 1993, ISBN 978-0807732625
• To Become a Teacher: Making a Difference in Children's Lives, William Ayers, Teachers College Press, 1995, ISBN 978-0807734551
• City Kids, City Teachers: Reports from the Front Row, William Ayers (Editor) and Patricia Ford (Editor), New Press, 1996, ISBN 978-1565843288
• A Kind and Just Parent, William Ayers, Beacon Press, 1997, ISBN 978-0807044025
• A Light in Dark Times: Maxine Greene and the Unfinished Conversation, Maxine Greene (Editor), William Ayers (Editor), Janet L. Miller (Editor), Teachers College Press, 1998, ISBN 978-0807737217
• Teaching for Social Justice: A Democracy and Education Reader, William Ayers (Editor), Jean Ann Hunt (Editor), Therese Quinn (Editor), 1998, ISBN 978-1565844209
• Teacher Lore: Learning from Our Own Experience, William H. Schubert (Editor) and William C. Ayers (Editor), Educator's International Press, 1999, ISBN 978-1891928031
• Teaching from the Inside Out: The Eight-Fold Path to Creative Teaching and Living, Sue Sommers (Author), William Ayers (Foreword), Authority Press, 2000, ISBN 978-1929059027
• A Simple Justice: The Challenge of Small Schools, William Ayers, Teachers College Press, 2000, ISBN 978-0807739631
• Zero Tolerance: Resisting the Drive for Punishment, William Ayers (Editor), Rick Ayers (Editor), Bernardine Dohrn (Editor), Jesse L. Jackson (Author), New Press, 2001, ISBN 978-1565846661
• A School of Our Own: Parents, Power, and Community at the East Harlem Block Schools, Tom Roderick (Author), William Ayers (Author), Teachers College Press, 2001, ISBN 978-0807741573
• Refusing Racism: White Allies and the Struggle for Civil Rights, Cynthia Stokes Brown (Author), William Ayers (Editor), Therese Quinn (Editor), Teachers College Press, 2002, ISBN 978-0807742044
• On the Side of the Child: Summerhill Revisited, William Ayers, Teachers College Press, 2003, ISBN 978-0807744000
• Fugitive Days: A Memoir, Bill Ayers, Beacon Press, 2001, ISBN 0807071242 (Penguin, 2003, ISBN 978-0142002551)
• Teaching the Personal and the Political: Essays on Hope and Justice, William Ayers, Teachers College Press, 2004, ISBN 978-0807744611
• Teaching Toward Freedom: Moral Commitment and Ethical Action in the Classroom, William Ayers, Beacon Press, 2004, ISBN 978-080703269-5
• Sing a Battle Song: The Revolutionary Poetry, Statements, and Communiques of the Weather Underground 1970-1974, Bernardine Dohrn, Bill Ayers, and Jeff Jones, Seven Stories Press, 2006, ISBN 978-1583227268
• Handbook of Social Justice in Education, William C. Ayers, Routledge, June 2008, ISBN 978-0805859270
• City Kids, City Schools: More Reports from the Front Row, Ruby Dee (Foreword), Jeff Chang (Afterword), William Ayers (Editor), Billings, Gloria Ladson (Editor), Gregory Michie (Editor), Pedro Noguera (Editor), New Press, August 2008, ISBN 978-1595583383

External links

• Bill Ayers—official website
  • blog, CV
• Transcript of interview in 1996 with Bernardine Dohrn and Bill Ayers, PBS