Bernardine Dohrn

Domestic Terrorist, Bernardine Dohrn, booking photo

Bernardine Dohrn, born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin in 1942. Dohrn is a convicted domestic terrorist. Bernardine Dohrn is currently an Associate Professor of Law at Northwestern University, mainly teaching children's legal rights and she is also Director of the Legal Clinic's Children and Family Justice Center. She sits on important committees and boards of the American Bar Association and the American Civil Liberties Union.

In the 1960s, Dohrn was a leader of the Students for a Democratic Society's "Weatherman" faction, which in 1969 went underground to become America's first terrorist cult. At a 1969 "War Council" in Flint, Michigan, Dohrn gave her most memorable and notorious speech to her followers. Holding her fingers in what became the Weatherman "fork salute," she said of the bloody murders recently committed by the Manson Family in which the pregnant actress Sharon Tate and a Folgers Coffee heiress and several other inhabitants of a Benedict Canyon mansion were brutally stabbed to death: "Dig it! First they killed those pigs, then they ate dinner in the same room with them. They even shoved a fork into the victim's stomach! Wild!" The "War Council" ended with a formal declaration of war against "AmeriKKKa," always spelled with three K's to signify the United States' allegedly ineradicable white racism. Dohrn has said of her Weatherman past, "We rejected terrorism. We were careful not to hurt anybody." Both statements are 100% false. Weatherman's twofold agenda was terrorism (which is why Charles Manson was Dohrn's hero) and war (the organization's very existence was launched with a formal "declaration of war"), and Dohrn periodically issued "war communiqués" to the public at large. The intention of the group was to shed their "white skin privilege" and launch a violent race war on behalf of Third World People. A Chicago district attorney named Richard Elrod was seriously injured in the Weatherman riot that erupted during the Chicago "Days of Rage" in October 1969, and he was paralyzed for life as a result. Dohrn later led a celebration of Elrod's paralysis by leading her comrades in a parody of a Bob Dylan song -- "Lay, Elrod, Lay." Law-enforcement is still investigating a bombing in San Francisco that killed a policeman, for which Dohrn is one of the suspects.

Dohrn spent most of the 1970s with her accomplices running from the FBI, who placed her on its "Ten Most Wanted List." During the final years of their underground life, Dohrn and her husband Bill Ayers resided in Chicago's Logan Square neighborhood where they used the aliases Christine Louise Douglas and Anthony J. Lee. In 1980 Dohrn and her fellow terrorists surrendered, but all charges against them were dropped on the grounds that the fugitives had been under an illegal surveillance. Dohrn eventually plead guilty to charges of aggravated battery and bail-jumping, paid a fine of $1,500 and only received probation. Dohrn and her domestic terrorist husband, William Ayers are both close political and personal confidantes of President Barack Obama

Shortly after turning themselves in, Dohrn and Ayers adopted Chesa Boudin, son of former Weather Underground members Kathy Boudin and David Gilbert, when the parents were arrested for their activities with the Black Liberation Army, and are in jail for their roles in a 1981 Brink's robbery, in which a Brink's guard and two police officers were killed.

Education/Professional

• High School: Whitefish Bay High School, Whitefish Bay, WI
• University: BA Political Science, University of Chicago (1963)
• Law School: JD, University of Chicago Law School (1967)
• Professor: Associate Professor of Law, Northwestern University (1991-)
• Professor: Adjunct Professor of Criminal Justice, University of Illinois at Chicago (2000-)

External link

• Weather Underground Declaration of War, ABC News Anchorman Frank Reynolds; audiotape of Bernadine Dohrn. 1970.