Bernardine Rae Dohrn

Bernardine Rae Dohrn (née Ohrnstein; born January 12, 1942) is a retired law professor and a former leader of the left-wing radical group Weather Underground in the United States. As a leader of the Weather Underground in the early 1970s, Dohrn was on the FBI's 10 Most Wanted list for several years. She remained a fugitive, even though she was removed from the list. After coming out of hiding in 1980, Dohrn pleaded guilty to misdemeanor charges of aggravated battery and bail jumping.

Dohrn had graduated from the University of Chicago Law School in 1967. During the 1980s, she was employed by the Sidley & Austin law firm. From 1991 to 2013, Dohrn was a Clinical Associate Professor of Law at the Children and Family Justice Center at Northwestern University School of Law. She is married to Bill Ayers, a co-founder of the Weather Underground.

Early life

Bernardine Dohrn was born Bernardine Ohrnstein in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, in 1942, and grew up in Whitefish Bay, an upper-middle-class suburb of Milwaukee.Grathwohl, Larry, and Frank, Reagan, ''Bringing Down America: An FBI Informant in with the Weathermen'', Arlington House, 1977, page 103 Her father, Bernard D. Ohrnstein, changed the family surname to Dohrn (his middle initial plus the first letters of his last name) when Bernardine was in high school. Her father was Jewish, although the name change was intended to obscure that, and her mother, Dorothy (née Soderberg), was of Swedish background and a Christian Scientist. Dohrn graduated from Whitefish Bay High School, where she was a cheerleader, treasurer of the Modern Dance Club, a member of the National Honor Society, and editor of the school newspaper.

She attended Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, for one year before transferring to the University of Chicago, where she graduated with honors with a B.A. in political science in 1963. Dohrn received her J.D. from the University of Chicago Law School in 1967. While attending law school, Dohrn began working in support of civil rights movement leader Martin Luther King Jr. and became the first law student organizer for the National Lawyers Guild.

Activist career

Students for a Democratic Society involvement

Dohrn became one of the leaders of the Revolutionary Youth Movement (RYM), a radical wing of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), in the late 1960s. Dohrn with ten other SDS members associated with the RYM issued, on June 18, 1969, a sixteen-thousand-word manifesto entitled "You Don't Need a Weatherman to Know Which Way the Wind Blows", in ''New Left Notes''. The title came from Bob Dylan's song, "Subterranean Homesick Blues."Kolbert, Elizabeth, "The Prisoner," ''The New Yorker Magazine,'' July 16, 2001, page 49. The manifesto stated that "the goal f revolutionis the destruction of US imperialism and the achievement of a classless world: world communism."

The manifesto concludes with the following:

The RYM must also lead to the effective organization needed to survive and to create another battlefield of the revolution. A revolution is a war; when the Movement in this country can defend itself militarily against total repression it will be part of the revolutionary war. This will require a cadre organization, effective secrecy, self-reliance among the cadres ...

The manifesto also asserted that African-Americans were a "black colony" within a U.S. government that was doomed to overextend itself. And the RYM was needed to quicken this process. Dohrn said, "The best thing that we can be doing for ourselves, as well as for the lackPanthers and the revolutionary black liberation struggle, is to build a fucking white revolutionary movement."

The ninth annual national SDS conference was held at the Chicago Coliseum on June 18–22, 1969, and the SDS collapsed in a Revolutionary Youth Movement-led upheaval

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