Bernardine Rae Dohrn (née Ohrnstein; born January 12, 1942) is a retired American law professor and a former leader of the far-left militant organization 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.
Bernardine Dohrn was born Bernardine Ohrnstein in Chicago, Illinois, in 1942, and moved to Whitefish Bay, an upper-middle-class suburb of Milwaukee as a young child, where she was raised the majority of her childhood. Her father, Bernard D. Ohrnstein, changed the family surname to Dohrn (the "D" for his wife, Dorothy, plus the first letters of his last name) when Bernardine was in high school. Her father was Jewish, which his name change was intended to obscure. 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.
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". The manifesto stated that "the goal [of revolution] is 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 [Black] Panthers 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. Soon after the Revolutionary Youth Movement became known as the Weathermen. Dohrn led the Weatherman faction in the SDS fight and continued to be a leader afterward. Larry Grathwohl, an FBI informant who was with the Weathermen from autumn 1969 through spring 1970, considered her one of the two top leaders of the organization, along with Bill Ayers.
On May 26, 1968, as a speaker for the National Lawyers Guild, Dohrn said she was filing a motion in federal court asking for an injunction to halt any disciplinary action that was being taken against student activists and represented students from Columbia University who were striking and protesting. On June 14, 1968, Dohrn was elected the Inter-organizational Secretary of SDS, and, once elected, was asked if she was a socialist. She replied, "I consider myself a revolutionary communist." From August 30 to September 1, 1968, Dohrn visited Yugoslavia. Her involvement with SDS and political advocacy stretch beyond the United States as well, as she and other SDS leaders had met with representatives from North Vietnam and the National Liberation Front of South Vietnam in Budapest, Hungary to discuss peace talks. She and a delegation from the SDS also traveled to Cuba via Mexico City, Mexico on July 4, 1969, and later arrived in Canada via a Cuban vessel on August 16, 1969.
On the night of October 1, 1968, Dohrn spoke at a meeting in Chicago to condemn Chicago's Mayor Daley's orders to attack protesters during the 1968 Democratic National Convention. Then, from October 11 to 13, she and SDS held a national meeting at the University of Colorado Boulder wherein Dohrn was a speaker addressing concerns about where the movement was headed and what involvement they could expect as governmental tensions mounted and the student movement splintered into factions. On October 11, 1968, Dohrn suggested she would expand the movement to non-students and do all that was necessary to complete the job of "attack, expose, destroy." Dohrn continued to give speeches on behalf of SDS and Weather Underground and attend leadership conferences for both organizations. On January 29 and 30, 1969, in recognition of the tenth anniversary of the Cuban Revolution, the University of Washington held a Cuba teach-in where Dohrn was a speaker on campus. A month later at a press conference at the regional headquarters of SDS in Chicago, Dohrn spoke of the plans that were under way to "attack" college graduation ceremonies across the country, saying, "Our presence will be known at the graduation ceremonies where the big people will come as speakers." By that time, Dohrn was known as a National Interim Committee member of the SDS and a member of the Weatherman group.
Weather Underground involvement
The Weather Underground was a radical left militant organization responsible for bombings of the United States Capitol, the Pentagon, and several police stations in New York, as well as the Greenwich Village townhouse explosion that killed three of its members.
Dohrn was a principal signatory on the Weather Underground's "Declaration of a State of War" in May 1970 that formally declared "war" on the U.S. Government, and completed the group's transformation from political advocacy to violent action. She recorded the declaration and sent a transcript of a tape recording to The New York Times. Dohrn also co-wrote (with Bill Ayers) and published the subversive manifesto Prairie Fire in 1974 and participated in the covertly filmed Underground in 1976. In late 1975, the Weather Underground put out an issue of a magazine, Osawatomie, which carried an article by Dohrn entitled "Our Class Struggle"; the article was described as a speech given to the organization's cadres on September 2 of that year. In the article, Dohrn clearly stated support for communist ideology:
We are building a communist organization to be part of the forces which build a revolutionary communist party to lead the working class to seize power and build socialism. ... We must further the study of Marxism-Leninism within the WUO [Weather Underground Organization]. The struggle for Marxism-Leninism is the most significant development in our recent history. ... We discovered thru our own experiences what revolutionaries all over the world have found — that Marxism-Leninism is the science of revolution, the revolutionary ideology of the working class, our guide to the struggle ...