Bill Ayers

William Charles Ayers (born December 26, 1944) is an American retired professor and former militant organizer.

During the 1960s and 1970s, the Weather Underground conducted a campaign of bombing public buildings in opposition to U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War.

The bombings caused no fatalities, except for three members killed when one of the group's devices accidentally exploded.

The FBI described the Weather Underground as a domestic terrorist group.

Ayers was hunted as a fugitive for several years, until charges were dropped due to illegal actions by the FBI agents pursuing him and others.

Ayers went on to become a professor in the College of Education at the University of Illinois at Chicago, holding the titles of Distinguished Professor of Education and Senior University Scholar.

Ayers was influenced at a 1965 Ann Arbor teach-in against the Vietnam War, when Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) President Paul Potter, 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 ten days in jail.

His first teaching job came shortly afterward at the Children's Community School, a preschool with a very small enrollment operating in a church basement, founded by a group of students in emulation of the Summerhill method of education.

The school was a part of the nationwide "free school movement".

Schools in the movement had no grades or report cards; they aimed to encourage cooperation rather than competition, and pupils addressed teachers by their first names.

Within a few months, at age 21, Ayers became director of the school.

Ayers earned a Bachelor of Arts in American Studies from the University of Michigan in 1968 (where his father, mother and older brother had preceded him).

He rose to national prominence as an SDS leader in 1968 and 1969 as head of an SDS regional group, the "Jesse James Gang".

The group Ayers headed in Detroit, Michigan, became one of the earliest gatherings of what became the Weathermen.

In 1969, Ayers co-founded the far-left militant organization the Weather Underground, a revolutionary group that sought to overthrow what they viewed as American imperialism.

Before 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 pronounced over the year [1969]", disaffected former Weathermen member Cathy Wilkerson wrote in 2001.

In June 1969, the Weathermen 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 affair confrontation between labor supporters and the Chicago police.

The blast broke almost 100 windows and blew pieces of the statue onto the nearby Kennedy Expressway.

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.

Two major decisions came out of the "War Council".

The first was to immediately begin a violent, armed struggle (e.g., bombings and armed robberies) against the state without attempting to organize or mobilize a broad swath of the public.

The second was to create underground collectives in major cities throughout the country.

Larry Grathwohl, a Federal Bureau of Investigation informant in the Weathermen group from the fall of 1969 to the spring of 1970, stated that "Ayers, along with Bernardine Dohrn, probably had the most authority within the Weathermen".

There also he met Diana Oughton, who would become his girlfriend until her death in 1970 after a bomb exploded while being prepared for Weather Underground activities.

Ayers became involved in the New Left and the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS).

Ayers had previously been a roommate of Terry Robbins, a fellow militant who was killed in 1970 along with Ayers's girlfriend Oughton and one other member in the Greenwich Village townhouse explosion, while constructing anti-personnel bombs (nail bombs) intended for a non-commissioned officer dance at Fort Dix, New Jersey.

(The statue was rebuilt and unveiled on May 4, 1970, and blown up again by other Weathermen on October 6, 1970. Rebuilding it yet again, the city posted a 24-hour police guard to prevent another blast, and in January 1972 it was moved to Chicago police headquarters).

After the Greenwich Village townhouse explosion in 1970, in which Weatherman member Ted Gold, Ayers's close friend Terry Robbins, and Ayers's girlfriend, Diana Oughton, were killed when a nail bomb being assembled in the house exploded, Ayers and several associates evaded pursuit by law enforcement officials.

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.

His parents were Mary (née Andrew) and Thomas G. Ayers, who was later chairman and chief executive officer of Commonwealth Edison (1973 to 1980), and for whom Northwestern's Thomas G. Ayers College of Commerce and Industry was named.

He attended public schools until his second year in high school, when he transferred to Lake Forest Academy, a small prep school.

During the 2008 U.S. presidential campaign, a controversy arose over his contacts with then-candidate Barack Obama.

He is married to lawyer and law professor Bernardine Dohrn, who was also a leader in the Weather Underground.

Ayers grew up in Glen Ellyn, a suburb of Chicago, Illinois.