Zayd Ayers Dohrn recalls a childhood with fugitive parents : NPR

Zayd Ayers Dohrn spent much of his childhood in hiding and on the run. His mother, Bernardine Dohrn, was a leader of the 1960s radical student group, Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), which opposed the Vietnam War and racism. Along with Dohrn’s father, Bill Ayers, she helped found the Weather Underground, a group engaged in armed resistance against the government.

“From my earliest memories, I knew the FBI was after us,” he says. “My parents tried to explain it in terms [like] we were like Robin Hood or we were like the Rebel Alliance in STar Wars. So I knew, as a child, that our lives were precarious.”

Dohrn describes his mother as a “liberal, progressive activist” who was radicalized following the assassinations of black civil rights leaders and the escalation of the Vietnam War: “Once she helped found the Weather Underground, I would say her mission was to overthrow the United States government,” he says.

The Weather Underground planted bombs in empty police cars, the Pentagon, and other locations they considered opposition symbols, warning people in those buildings in advance to avoid casualties. For years, Bernardine Dohrn was on the FBI’s 10 Most Wanted list.

Zayd Ayers Dohrn is a playwright and screenwriter who teaches at Northwestern University and also hosts and produces the podcast “Mother Country Radicals.” In his new memoir, Dangerous, dirty, violent and young: a fugitive family in the revolutionary undergroundDohrn struggles with her own family history and her parents’ decision to have children while living on the run.

“It’s a contradiction that came up in all sorts of ways, most dramatically when they committed crimes and left their children behind,” he says. “But I think… my mother couldn’t have been someone who decided to give up on the movement and just settle down and have kids. She had to try to do both.”

Bernadine Dohrn surrendered to authorities in 1980 and spent nearly a year in prison. Upon her release, she passed the bar exam, while Zayd Ayers Dohrn’s father earned his doctorate in education.

“They became middle-class professionals,” says Dohrn. “When I was 12, we lived in Chicago. We went to school. We played Little League. At that point in our lives – in the ’90s – we could have passed for ordinary Americans.”

Interview Highlights

On the title of his memoirs, which borrows from Jefferson Airplane song “We can be together“

The complete range [from the song] ” means “we are all outlaws in America’s eyes.” We are obscene, lawless, hideous, dangerous, dirty, violent and young.” And it became sort of a rallying cry, not only for my parents, but for a lot of the youth counterculture, this idea that we’re all outlaws in a society that demonizes black people, demonizes gay people, oppresses women, doesn’t understand young people. And so this idea of ​​being an outlaw in your own country and being dangerous and dirty and violent and young really encapsulates a lot of what my parents stood for at the time.

On his memory of visiting his mother in prison

She was imprisoned at MCC, Manhattan Correctional Center. …It’s kind of a big brutalist building in downtown Manhattan and kind of a giant concrete structure with no windows. My father would take me and my brothers there to visit my mother and we would go through metal detectors, talk to the guards and see my mother twice a week and spend some time with her. And I remember smuggling in little children’s books, Peter Rabbit And In the night kitchenthings like that, putting them in my pants so I can go through the metal detector and my mom will have something to read to me.

The visiting room was a big sort of cavernous space with a bunch of tables and we would spend a few hours talking to him, making him read, and then we would leave and 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 [turn] the lights turning on and off in her cell so we could see that she was back in her cell and she was safe, and it was kind of like saying goodbye to her.

On his family who takes care of Chesa Boudinthe grandson of imprisoned revolutionaries

Kathy [Boudin] and David [Gilbert] participated in a bank robbery, the Brinks robbery in 1981, during which a police officer and two guards were killed. So they stayed in prison for a long time and left their 18-month-old son Chesa at home with a babysitter when they went out to rob that bank. So my parents… took Chesa in when he was very little. He became my brother, we grew up together. … He became part of our family because his parents were sent to prison for a long, long time. …

[Chesa] represented to me what it might have been like if my parents had been arrested, if they had stayed on the subway for another month or a year, what it might have been like if they had been sent to prison forever and I had to grow up without them because that’s what happened to Chesa.

On how his parents obtained fake IDs and birth certificates while on the run

They would drive to a rural cemetery and wander around until they found the grave of a child who died young, someone who died before the age of 2 or 3, so they never applied for a driver’s license. And it had to be someone who was born around the same time as them. …And then they’d go to the county courthouse and say, “I’m so-and-so.” I lost my ID, but here is my date of birth. This is where I was born. And usually the county clerk would issue them a new birth certificate right away. They knew enough to show that they were that person. No one else had requested documents using these names. And then once they had a birth certificate, they could use it to apply for a driver’s license and ultimately they had a whole new identity with a real official government ID.

On what he thinks his parents’ activism accomplished

Here we are in another moment of authoritarianism and war abroad and police violence and racism have not gone away. So on one level you could say, well, what did they accomplish? We still face the same problems. On another level, I think you could say that at that time, the ’60s and ’70s, they were part of a radical reimagining of what this country should be, could be. And I disagree with a lot of what my parents did. Like everyone else, they are complicated and imperfect human beings, but I think they made some important choices that deserve admiration and respect.

Opposing the Vietnam War with everything they had was part of it. Looking back, it seems like most young people opposed the Vietnam War, but that wasn’t the case at the time. It was a very unpopular position. And then the second big choice is to oppose racism with everything they have, by being white people who risked their lives, their careers and their futures in the fight for black liberation. And I think that’s something they accomplished. This does not mean that racism is over, that white supremacy is over. But they set an example of what it means for white people to do everything they can to fight racism.

Thea Chaloner and Susan Nyakundi produced and edited this interview for broadcast. Bridget Bentz, Molly Seavy-Nesper and Meghan Sullivan adapted it for the web.