Son of radicals, Zayd Ayers Dohrn grew up underground & on the run
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Before Bernie Sanders or AOC, a man named Michael Harrington tried to market socialism to the American public. Tens of millions of Americans were poor, miserable, in body and in spirit. On NPR's Through Line, how the founder of the DSA created a modern political movement. Listen to Throughline in the NPR app or wherever you get your podcasts. This is fresh air.
I'm Terry Gross. As the child of parents who were radicals in the sixties and revolutionaries in the seventies, my guest Zayd Ayersdorn spent his early years underground, with parents who were on the run, disguising themselves with fake identities. Zayd Ayres Dorn's name gives you a sense of his story. His mother, Bernadine Dorn, was a leader of the sixties 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, Bernadine 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 advance warning to people in those buildings to evacuate.
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