Bill Ayers (b. 1944) was a 1960s-era political activist and Weather Underground member. He grew up on the North Shore of Chicago in a privileged upper-middle class family and attended Lake Forest Academy. According to him, he became politicized at the University of Michigan. During his years there, he became involved in the New Left and became aware of what he casts as the injustice of U.S. involvement in Vietnam, inner-city race relations, and police brutality and battle tactics, especially in Chicago during demonstrations at the 1968 Democratic National Convention. Ayers went underground with several comrades after their co-conspirators' bomb accidentally exploded in 1970, destroying a Greenwich Village townhouse and killing some of the activists involved. He and his colleagues invented identities (often using names such as Nat Turner or Emma Goldman), traveled continuously and avoided the police and FBI during the Vietnam War. Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn raised two children underground before turning themselves in in 1981, when most charges were dropped because of "extreme governmental misconduct" during the long search for the fugitives.
Ayers is now a Distinguished Professor of Education at the University of Illinois. He published his memoirs in 2001 with the book Fugitive Days.
References
- Ayers, William. 2001. Fugitive Days: A Memoir. Boston: Beacon Press. ISBN 0807071242.
