“White Youth Must Choose Sides Now”

Zayd Ayers Dohrn is a writer, professor, playwright who spent his early childhood on the run from the FBI. He joins Khalil and Ben to talk about being raised by founding members of the Weather Underground and his award-winning podcast, Mother Country Radicals. They also discuss what we can learn in the current moment from radical movements of the past.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:14):
Pushing their slogan would literally bring the war home. And
that was a metaphor at first, but it became a
literal idea of like they're gonna go to war, we
gotta go to war. I'm Khalil Jibrad Muhammad. I'm Ben Austin.

(00:35):
We're two best friends, one black, one white. I'm a
historian and I'm a journalist. And this is some of
my best friends are Some of my best friends are like,
I'm not a blank, some of my best friends are blank.
In this show, we're going to wrestle with the challenges
and the absurdities of a deeply divided and unequal country.

(00:57):
And today we're talking with zade Air's Dorn about the
lesser known history of radical movements in the sixties. There
was so much to learn about the country we live
in and the fights people have had to make it better. Man, Khalil,

(01:29):
I am so excited about our conversation today. Yes, we
have Zaide Dorn on the show, one of my friends,
and he has this podcast Mother Country Radicals, like on
Top ten lists, It won awards. It is this amazing
podcast that in a lot of ways is about his parents.
Bernadine Dorn and Bill Ayres. Yeah, listen, I think getting

(01:54):
to talk to his aid right now is so important
because as the Democrats can see, the House to the
Republicans and the investigation of the coup attempt on January sixth,
when a violent mob stormed the Capitol to try to
subvert democracy. This is an inversion of the attempts by
Bill and Bernadine Dorn back in the day to try

(02:18):
to change America for the better. So well, what do
you mean, what do you mean tell our listeners who
are Bill and Bernadine? Yeah, well, they are original members
of the Student for a Democratic Society, also known as SDS.
So like we're talking nineteen sixties, Yeah, early nineteen sixties,
part of a generation of young people who rejected the

(02:39):
Cold War anti communism of their parents, started to look
at the contradictions of American empire and inequality, the richest
country on earth with huge pockets of poverty and most
especially amongst black folks, and they wanted to change this country,
and they wanted to do something that they call participatory democracy.

(02:59):
And it's interesting, as you well know, because Bill and
Bernadine eventually break away from SDS. They totally broke away
they became members of the Weather Underground and a much
more radicalized group that resorted to violence to fight what
they thought was violence in the country. Yeah. It was
like violence on violence, and it's a complicated thing. And

(03:21):
in many ways, most of us our generation were educated
to reject what they did, to think of this as
a terrible change in direction from a country that was
getting it right, but in some ways couldn't be further
from the truth. Yeah, And I mean, this is what
I love about Zaide's podcast and about our conversation today,

(03:42):
is that this question of what must we do, what
should we do in the face of injustice, in the
face of grave injustice. So the Weatherman, the Weather Underground,
Bernadine Dorn and Bill Aires, they were going to risk
at all because they thought the country needed to be changed,
and they were going to take radical action. Yeah, and

(04:03):
that came at a cost. I mean, Zaide's mother, Bernadine,
becomes the most dangerous person in America. She is listed
on the FBI's most wanted list by Jay Edgar Hoover,
the then director of the FBI. Yeah, because they're doing
bombings and they're taking these actions. Are that involved violence? Yeah, Yeah,

(04:25):
And let's just say, you know, as a trigger warning,
we're not actually saying that they struck out to kill people.
In fact, it's important just before we get started that
the Weather Underground targeted buildings, they targeted property because it
was important for them to make it clear that this
country could not continue down the road that it was going.

(04:47):
And Zaide, because of this, ends up in the first
part of his life living underground. Yea, you know, I
know them from Chicago, but they're living in New York
and Harlem and they're hiding from the FBI early in
his life, and he's going to talk to us about that.
I got one other thing I want to say, Khalil,
what's that While we're talking to Zaide, he's got a
cat walking around and we hear it a couple of times.

(05:07):
He just want to tell people, it's not a sound
effect that we're putting in. Okay, all right, I think
people appreciate that, especially all those cat lovers YEP or
the cat haters. So let's let's let's get to it.
Let's talk to him. Zaid. Hello, it's so great for

(05:31):
you to join us on the podcast. Thanks Ben, Thanks Quil,
happy to be here. Yeah, we're so excited to have
you on the show's aide. So you're already one of
my favorite people. You know, I know your parents, your dad,
and I like a week or two ago we drove
to a prison together where we both teach, and you know,
the whole way, he's telling me stories and he's just
so like positive and outgoing. And I was thinking about

(05:53):
not too long ago, seeing your mom with your two daughters,
her grandchildren in the local Michaels the craft store. You know,
she's like tatted up your mom and like you know,
with all these bracelets, and her granddaughters are like embarrassed
of her, And I'm like that so interesting, just the
neighborhood like radical with her, Like you know, it was
just so normalized, not just radical, like one of America's

(06:16):
most wanted. Yeah, yeah, she's an institution. Although I will
tell you, like you say, embarrassed to her, and that's
true sometimes, but it's also true that, like you know,
they're bragging about her all the time. And actually when
they listened to the podcast and heard about her radical past,
they came home saying to me and my wife Rachel, like,
how come you guys aren't as cool? As the grandparents,
like I meant more embarrassed, like I'm in Michael's and

(06:38):
why are you speaking so loudly? Well that they're definitely
not they're embarrassed about so zaid, I know you and
your family from Chicago, from Hyde Park and from the
area on the South Side. But let's start this conversation
maybe by talking about your childhood. You grew up underground
under an assumed name, and so you have this very
early life before coming to Chicago, where you're living in

(06:59):
Harlem and you and your parents are on the run
from the FBI. I mean, that's crazy. Can you talk
about that experience? What was it? Like? How much did
you know? What did your parents tell you about about
living underground? Yeah, my earliest memories are road trips and
driving around and living in the Bay Area in California

(07:19):
and sometimes in Harlem and New York and knowing that
I had to call my parents Rose and Tony. You
knew those weren't their names, Like I knew those weren't
there their names? Yeah, And I knew that the FBI
was chasing us, although I don't think I knew what
the FBI was exactly. I mean, I knew something was
chasing us. It didn't sound good. I knew we weren't
supposed to get caught. I mean, the way my parents
explained it to me was through kind of childhood metaphors,

(07:42):
you know. They said were like Robin Hood, you know,
to stealing from the rich and giving to the poor.
Were like Luke Skywalker fighting against an evil empire, and
you know, we're trying to fight against racism. We're like
John Brown, We're trying you know, I mean, those kind
of people. But they would say, you know, the government
is doing a lot of bad things and we're fighting
against them. And you know, sometimes you have to resist
the government when it's in the wrong, like these people did.

(08:05):
And so I knew all those stories growing up, and
I knew that they were outlaws. I knew that we
if they got caught, they'd go to jail. So that
was a lot to absorb as a kid. But at
the same time, I mean, the weird thing is it
never seemed strange to me, Like any kid you're growing up,
it's all you've ever known. I just figured that's how
things were. Most of my friends were also on the run.
I had friends, you know, who were children of weathermen,

(08:27):
children of Black panthers and DLA people, and they were
they were all fugitives. I think this is really fascinating
because I know all of us are socialized within the
limitations of our own family. You know, I was a
kid of an educator and a photographer, and I spent
a lot of time both in my mom's classroom while
she was teaching and on the road while my father
was covering sports or political events. But here you are

(08:49):
being socialized within the context of this crazy radical movement.
Like I mean, there are kids today who are overhearing
their parents talk about the Trump era and having some
sense of dread and fear and anxiety that has passed
on to them. I mean, I'm trying to figure out, like,
did you do any independent research on your own. Did

(09:11):
you pull out the Encyclopedia Britannica, look up John Brown
and say, let me just try to figure out exactly
what's going on here? Or did you feel, even in
the conversations on the playground of Harlem like that you
were the only kid having this experience and no other
kid was like this except for you and your two brothers.
I mean, the weirdest thing about it is that I
wasn't the only kid I mean I was, of course,

(09:32):
I was the only kid who was whose mom had
been on the FBI's ten Most Wanted list, but who
replaced Angela Davis, by the way, just for our listeners, right,
that's true. Yeah, But you know, in my school in
New York at PS eighty four, I knew other kids
whose parents were in prison. I knew other kids whose
parents had broken the law. I knew other kids who
visited their dad in jail. So yeah, I mean it

(09:53):
was weird, but it wasn't that weird, and so yeah,
I was socialized into it. I mean I felt like
I knew there was something unusual about my parents, but
I admired them, still admire them. I mean I felt
like they didn't lie to me. You know one thing
when people ask me, like, how come you didn't bell
against your parents? First of all, I did rebel against
my parents the way every kid does. Right, But you

(10:14):
became a playwright. Yeah, yeah, exactly. They became a writer
and an artist instead of an activist. But no, I
mean I just been like I didn't come home some
nights in high school, and I did stuff they probably
wouldn't have approved of, but like making friends with the cops.
I mean, not that kind of thing. That's what I mean.
Like this, I think when people say did you rebel,
what they mean is like, were you like Michael Pete Keaton,

(10:35):
like being a Reagan you know, like right wing? And
I was not that at all. And I think the
reason for that is I think family ties reference. So
just for our audience, that was one of my favorite shows,
by the way, because Khalil you were you were like
Michael pee Keaton, you were totally had that vibe. I
was the Malik pee Keaton. Yeah. Yeah, But I mean

(10:59):
I didn't have that instinct. And I think the reason
is I think a lot of kids rebel against their
parents because they noticed the hypocrisy. You know, they see
like their parents say one thing and then they do
another thing. My parents, you know, they made mistakes, they
have problems, but they are what they say they are.
And when I was a kid, you know, if I
asked them questions about it, if I was like, why
is the FBI chasing you? What did you do? The

(11:21):
answers were real. You know. They didn't lie to me
about those things, and they never hid from me the
fact that they were wanted, and so I never felt
like I was being deceived. I just felt like we
were born into this situation and we had to make
the best of it. Let's take a quick break and
when we come back, we're going to talk more about
Zaid's podcast, Mother Country Radicals. It's so damn good. Welcome

(11:57):
back to some of my best friends. Are we're here
with Zay dorn Zaide. I just want to tell you
how fantastic your podcast is than Mother Country Radicals. It
is great in so many different ways. One is just
the storytelling that you have, like you are an amazing
writer and storyteller. The archival tape that digs into the
history of radical movements in the sixties and seventies, and

(12:20):
then the interviews you have, your interview your parents of course,
but everyone from Angela Davis to Black Panthers to the FBI,
the FBI agents who hunted them, you got it all. Yeah,
it's a sweeping history. And then it's also such an
intimate story. Just before you go further, Ben, I just
really appreciate how sensitive you are to the tensions, both

(12:43):
not romanticizing the relationship between say sds and what becomes
a Weatherman and the Black Panther Party and what becomes
a Black Liberation Army. But you find really effective ways
to show the nuances in those relationships and through storytelling
to actually help people who don't really know this history
very well to understand precisely why they would work together

(13:04):
and what they had in common and what they shared
in common, including the name of this podcast. You say
that Mother Country Radicals is a term that Fred Hampton
uses to describe Bernadine and Bill and so many others
as people who come from within this country and want
to change it. And it's fascinating. Here's a clip of
Fred Hampton spelling out the solidarity and why he's choosing

(13:26):
to call your parents that a lot of people don't
understand the Black hath Party relationship with white Mother Country
radical What we're saying is there are white people in
the Mother Country that are of the same types of
things that we are for. We said that we work
with anybody from Polish, with anybody that has revolutions on
their mind. I just think that's a really terrific intervention,

(13:48):
even for professional historians who have often written about this
as one or the other, as the New Left or
the black militant phase of the Black freedom struggle. No,
I appreciate that that's exactly the intervention we were hoping
to make and the thing we thought was missing from
the histories. Yeah. Yeah, maybe the best way for us
to dive in is to talk about your mom, Bernadine Dorn.

(14:08):
Can you tell us who she was growing up and
how she became radicalized? Yeah, I mean it's it's a
crazy story and frankly a story I didn't really fully
understand myself before I started working on the show, but um, yeah,
And the first episode is about my mom's path from
kind of smalltown Wisconsin, daughter of a Jewish immigrant. Her
dad was was this deep believer in the American dream,

(14:32):
sort of a small time salesman in Green Bay, Wisconsin,
staunch Republican, voted for Joe McCarthy, wanted his daughters to
kind of have the American dream. So my mom was
the first person in her family to go to college,
ended up in Chicago at the University of Chicago, ended
up in law school, and then you know, I think
my father actually taught her. That's wild. Yeah, that makes sense. Yeah,

(14:52):
And by the way, just because I need to say
this for listeners. Your mom goes to the UFC at
a moment when it is because it is about to
become like the headquarters of some of the most conservative
thinking Milton Friedman, libertarianism, voucher school, choice, economics of free
market capitalism, all of it is unfolding right at this moment.

(15:13):
You know, the two most famous people in my mom's
graduating law school of class where her and John Ashcroft,
George Bush's attorney general, they just had their reunion and
they were the two speakers. So that's how weird this
class is. Yeah, well that's incredible. But anyway, she ends
up at the University of Chicago and ends up volunteering
for doctor Martin Luther King's wrench strike in Chicago. So

(15:34):
she starts kind of just as a sort of a
volunteer legal assistant trying to give advice to tenants who
are trying to fight the slumlords in Chicago, and ends
up marching with doctor King, ends up meeting Muhammad Ali,
ultimately meeting Fred Hampton, and really kind of following those
leaders of the movement into a more and more radical

(15:54):
stance against the Vietnam War and racism. So it is
this crazy arc between smalltown girl in Wisconsin ends up
FBI's top ten most wanted list, And it's a story
that could have only happened at that moment, just to
dwell on this for a moment in Chicago. So it's
nineteen sixty six, the civil rights movement, at least of
the legislative phase of it, with the passage of the

(16:16):
Accommodations Bill in sixty four and then Voting Rights Act
in sixty five. Some believed at that moment that, you know,
the victory had been won. And yet king redirects the
movement and takes it to this open housing campaign to
essentially fight against entrenched segregation in Chicago, where the legacies
of redlining and all of it are in rightful view.

(16:36):
One of the most radical interventions, Doctor king Maid was saying,
not only are we going to focus on the kind
of economic freedom and the and the redlining and the
real estate question, but we're gonna do it in Chicago.
I mean, he explicitly says, We've come to Chicago to
show that racism isn't just a Southern problem, It's an
America's problem. Right, That's right. So yeah, she's with doctor
king sees him get hit by rocks as their marching

(16:59):
engage park. Basically, she's at an eviction. The sheriffs have
taken some you know, family's belongings out of their house
and piled them up on the walk, and all these
people have gathered to watch this, and she's watching it
as a kind of legal advisor who's trying to help
people who are being evicted. But they all feel pretty

(17:19):
helpless and they're standing around, and then this man next
to her asks her to hold her his coat, and
she looks over and it's Muhammad Ali, most famous person
in the world at that point. Maybe wow. And she
says to you, have you ever stood next to an
NBA player like somebody lose presence? Yeah, she says she could.
She could sense the size of the guy and just
how imposing he was, but she didn't know who he

(17:41):
was at first. And then she looked up and it's
Muhammad Ali standing right there. She's holding his you know,
searsucker jacket. He walks forward, he picks up a table
that the sheriffs have taken out of these these people's house.
And from my mom, that was a moment of just
realizing what direct action could look like when you when
you were able to kind of lead people in that
way with action not words, and how how much of

(18:02):
a difference that could make. So she takes it more
than a step further, you know, So she sees direct action,
she sees protest, and she decides that's not enough. Yeah,
I mean, maybe you can describe how and why she
turns to violence, to violent acts against this country as
her form of protest. I wondered if your mom thought

(18:25):
of it as violence in other words, I mean, one
of the things the podcast keeps coming back to and
making clear is that American imperialism is by definition violence.
So did she actually call it violent in their early
days or did she see it that way? I think that, Yeah,
I would say that they her idea, their idea. The
weather men were thinking about violence a lot, and what

(18:49):
they were thinking about is that all the violence was
on the side of the state. And so, you know,
how did she go from thinking, okay, that that kind
of non violent you know, Martin Luther King, Muhammad al
Lei direct action all the way too, we should fight
back with bombs and guns. Well, the first thing that
happened was Martin Luther King was murdered and for her.
That was a big turning point, you know that his movement,

(19:10):
you know, his non violent activism was met with this
lethal violence from white vigilantes in America. So that was
one thing that happened. And then the next thing that
happened was the Vietnam War escalated, and all this marching
and protesting and and kind of trying to stop it
through voter registration drives and demonstrations didn't seem to be working,
and thousands of people were being killed every day. So

(19:31):
that was the second thing. And then the third thing
is they became, you know, allies with the Black Panthers,
and in particular with Fred Hampton, who my mom was
quite friendly with, who's a chairman of the Illinois chapter
of the Black Panther Room. And he's like nineteen or
I think at that point he's I think he was twenty. Yeah,
but you know, a young guy five years younger than
my mom, charismatic as hell, yeah, and brilliant and a

(19:52):
real analysis and kind of the FBI singled him out
as a potential you know, black messiah who they were
worried might be able to you know, unite the black
freedom movement and kind of really threatened the American government
and just but just just because it's important, because this
is connected to your own, your own story, but that
he was actually connecting his analysis of American capitalism and

(20:14):
empire to the conditions of poor white people in Chicago
along with brown people. So this wasn't just unifying the
Black Freedom Strug, was also unifying across across racial differences
for people who had a similar class analysis. That's exactly right.
He called it the Rainbow Coalition. It was the original
before Jesse Jackson's Rainbow Coalition. It was Fred Hampton's Rainbow Coalition.
And my mom was the president of SDS at the time,

(20:36):
Students for Democratic Society, and STS was one of the
members of the Rainbow Coalition. So she was literally representing
the kind of white student wing of Fred Hampton's multiracial coalition.
So she was following his example. And he was doing
an incredible job of organizing all these disparate people into
this this powerful movement in Chicago, and he was being

(20:58):
targeted by the FBI and by police, you know, first
with harassment and arrest and intimidation, and then ultimately he
was murdered by the Chicago police. And I think for
a lot of activists, white and black, it was that
series of kind of watching black leaders be targeted and
killed over and over again, King and Med Grevers and

(21:18):
Fred Hampton and others, and you know, they started the
white activists like my mom started to feel like we
have to do more. We can't you be doing these
peaceful marches and resting on our privilege, which is our
privilege that the police are not going to come and
kill us because there would be an uproar, but they're
willing to kill black leaders, and so we have to
do more to try to kind of pull the attention

(21:41):
of law enforcement away from the panthers and make them
focus on something else. So that was I think that.
I mean, it's more complicated than that, of course, but
the Road to Violence was about watching state violence being
acted over and over and over and thinking like, we
can't just take this. We we have to give something back.
And their slogan was literally bring the war home, and
that was a metaphor at first, but it became a

(22:02):
literal idea of like they're going to go to war.
We got to go to war. In episode three, you
mentioned and explicitly in nineteen sixty nine alone, police had
killed twenty seven Black Panthers and had arrested seven hundred others.
And one of the things that I learned from the
podcast is that part of the strategy of the Weathermen,
working with either Black Panthers or the Black Liberation Army,

(22:26):
was to take some of the heat off of them,
to essentially absorb some of the state violence by creating
enough chaos through targeted strategic bombing so that the state
would focus on them at key moments as opposed to
just focusing on black radicals. That's pretty incredible, Yeah, And

(22:47):
you know, it's funny you mentioned earlier the kind of
the intervention we tried to do with kind of re
establishing the history of the fact that this really was
a movement about racism as much as anything else. I
think traditionally when people have written about the Weathermen and
about white activists in the sixties in general, they tend
to focus on the anti war activism, which was certainly
a part of it. But every time I went back

(23:08):
to the records that you know, I have a there's
archival audio of my dad giving a speech right before
the Days of Rage demonstration, and he's literally saying, we
have to take to the streets to draw the attention
to the police away from the Black Panthers. That's the
motivation this ball in Chicago. We will lead massive demonstrations
against the war in support of the Black Panther Party

(23:29):
and in solidarity with all political prisoners. And every time
my parents issued to communicate later when they were bombing
buildings and stuff, the communications are always about this is
in solidarity with the Black prisoners and the Black Panther Party,
and a lot of their just self conception was we
have to be out there, we have to be making
noise in order to make the government pay attention to

(23:49):
us instead of just being able to target black leaders. Yeah,
I mean, so Zay you're bringing that up. One of
the moments in the podcast that has stayed with me
since hearing it was I think as your mother at
an SDS convention in nineteen sixty nine, and I think
that's when they talk they become the action faction, right,
like they're like, we need to take more radical revolutionary action.

(24:11):
But she's up on stage with Black Panthers, and in
a way, there's this choice presented to her of fighting
missogyny or fighting white supremacy and you know, I think
about your mom in that moment, and she makes a
choice of fighting white supremacy, but I don't even think
she sees it in that choice. And you know that
she made that choice, Maybe you could unpack that a

(24:31):
little bit. I found it to be a fascinating moment,
and I ended up focusing on it a lot because
she was at that point the national secretary of the biggest,
well mostly white student anti war group in the country,
and they were trying to decide what was the way forward,
and a lot of the people within sts were kind
of the They were like the Bernie Bros of the time.
They were white kids who wanted to like focus on

(24:53):
class more than race. They wanted to go in the
factories and organize workers, and you know, they were Marxists,
and they wanted a kind of a class analysis. And
my mom and her allies in what they called the
Action Faction or what became the Weatherman Group, were thinking,
we have to follow the lead of black activists here
in America and radical nationalist anti imperialist movements abroad, like

(25:18):
the Vietcong, like the Tupamarrows. You know, they all had
a similar kind of sense of fighting American hegemony. But
my mom was about focusing on race and on imperialism.
And so the moment you're talking about then, what the
choice that was presented to hers. She was giving a
speech at this big convention. There was already a lot
of internal dissension and fighting within the group, and the

(25:42):
Black Panthers showed up, and she had actually invited them
to come and speak, yea, And they were giving a
speech about race and about American power, and one of
them said a couple of sexist things. He's you know,
somebody asked him what the place of women in the
movement was and he said prone as the position, you know,
and people started booing and there was a whole uproar

(26:02):
about it, and you know, my mom was presented with
this moment of like, do I denounce the Panthers for
as being sexist or do I kind of embrace the
idea that like, when given a choice, white activists have
to stand up for black people. And for her, that
was she says in the podcast, that was an easy choice.
That she considers herself a feminist, but she also thought
the Panthers were important feminist allies and La Davis, you know,

(26:25):
and sixty percent of the Panthers at the time were women,
so in any case, she decides, no, the SDS has
to follow the Panthers, and she basically makes a declaration
from the stage and she says, you know, we have
to be on the side of the vanguard of the revolution.
Anybody who's with me, we're leaving white youth must two
sides now. We must either fight on the side of

(26:45):
the oppressed or be on the side of the oppressor.
And she led half the half the group out of
the convention hall and split SDS and half more than
in half. I mean, she basically the group never recovered.
SDS was broken as an institution. But that's where the
kind of kernel of the weather Men came from. What
a badass your mom is picking up on your mom's

(27:07):
commitments here and essentially saying that the black Panthers are
the vanguard of the revolution and we have to follow
their lead. I mean, it seems to me that that break,
that inflection point in this radical movement has actually never
come back together again. I've been involved in a number
of conversations with leftists over the years, you know, many

(27:28):
of whom are white men, and there still remains this
kind of class analysis that hasn't taken stock of history, right,
That Marxism couldn't account for slavery, that the twentieth century
labor movements in the United States failed repeatedly to recognize

(27:48):
the shared interests of black workers and consistently chose whiteness
over solidarity. And here we are, you know, in this
moment of the sixties. And I guess I'm just really
struck by how your mom made this issue of sticking
with and standing up for black people. You know. I
think at some point that podcast says it's the central

(28:10):
dilemma of American history, and I just want to hear
you talk a little bit more about that, because it's
a recurring thread in the podcast itself. Yeah, you know,
it was complicated. I mean, part a lot of the
show is about the complexities of trying to be whatever.
You know, people talk about ally ship today, Right, every
time I mentioned being allies both to the weathermen and

(28:30):
to the panthers, they all said we weren't allies, we
were comrades. And I would try to say, what does
that mean, Like what's the difference? And they would say,
you know, ally ship means you're just kind of like, yeah,
I'm on your side. Comradeship means you're literally standing shoulder
to shoulder and fighting together. Your hands are getting dirty,
You're not, You're not You're not from a fire. Yeah, yeah, exactly.
And so these were people. I mean, again, there were

(28:52):
problems all throughout, and I don't mean to hold it
up as some kind of like this was an idyllic,
utopian society, but if you listen to the series, I
think you do see a model of like people who
were fighting together for the liberation of black people, but
the oberation of all people. I mean, I think the
weather Men were pretty convinced that white people couldn't be

(29:13):
free until black people were also free, and that you know,
they were therefore literally on the same side and literally
fighting for the same thing. And so yeah, what I
what I was impressed by with, you know, going back
over that this history is that for over a decade,
these people in the Panther Party, in the Black Liberation Army,
and in the weather Men were literally on the run

(29:33):
together and giving aid and comfort to each other and
aiding and abetting each other well on the run. And
that was that was real solidarity and a real attempt to,
you know, not to say like there's some theoretical economic
model that we should all be kind of focused on
as the only way to have a revolution, but really saying, look,
there's injustice right here. We all have to fight it together.

(29:56):
And I think that there's something powerful about that. Yeah, yeah,
for sure. And just something powerful about your parents commitments,
your mom and dad. I mean, your name from one
of the members of the Black Liberation Army who was
very much committed to these shared radical movements, and who
dies and for the sacrifice he made, your parents wanted

(30:17):
his memory to live all And I think that's pretty incredible. Yeah,
I'll tell you it's funny. You know. One of the
one of the most moving parts about it for me
was I never really knew much about the man I'm
named after, Zakour, you know, and so to get to
talk to some of these guys like Jamal Joseph or
seku Odinga, these Black Liberation Army guys who knew Zaid
you know, of course I never met him, he was

(30:38):
killed years before I was born, but hearing some of
the anecdotes about him, you know that he was this
super sharp dresser and a tailor, who made Dashiki's for
the members of the party and everything. Something really fun
about digging back into your own history, your own prehistory,
and you know, finding out the real lives of the
people whose names you carry. Yeah. So we are talking

(30:59):
to Zaid Ayers Dorn named after Zaide Malik Sakour, and
also talking about his radical parents, Bernadine Dorn and Bill
Ayers and his amazing podcast Mother Country Radicals. We're going
to take a break and after we come back, we're
going to talk about the future, about lessons that we
can learn from this past. Welcome back to some of

(31:39):
my best friends. Are we're here with Zai Dorn. Zaide
you say in Mother Country Radicals that you make the
podcast in part for your children, for your daughters and
your kids and my kids are in school together. They
know one another, they hang out their classmates, they're growing
up together. And I'm thinking, like, so, what are the
lessons right now in this country? You know, we feel

(32:02):
like white supremacy is ascendant again? What should we be doing? Like,
what is the lesson from the podcast from this past
that you dig too in? How should we be fighting injustice?
I think there's a couple of lessons. I mean I'll
start with the slightly more depressing one, because you know,
one of the things you do get a sense of
I think listening to the podcast, certainly I got a

(32:23):
sense making it is how intractable some of these problems are.
How for all the fighting that these people did, how
much we're still living in that world of racism and
white supremacy. I mean, one of the most vivid things
for me is I was making this show during the pandemic.
I was interviewing people over zoom and over and over again.
I was having these conversations with people weathermen and black panthers,

(32:46):
and I would ask them why they were radicalized, and
over and over again, the answer was because of police
killing a black person. You know. So it was my
mom radicalized by the killing of Fred Hampton, Jamal Joseph
radicalized first by the killing of Fred Hampton and then
by the killing of this ten year old boy, Clifford
Glover in Queens in nineteen seventy four, shot in the

(33:07):
back by an undercover cup And so, you know, and
I heard all these stories over and over and while
I was doing these interviews, George Floyd was murdered by
the police, and you know, we had the uprisings on
the street, and you couldn't help but be struck by
the cyclical nature of history and how disturbing and depressing
it is that these people fought so hard against white supremacy,

(33:28):
against police violence, and here we are in twenty twenty
twenty one, still dealing with the same problems. So one
lesson was the fight is not over, you know, and
that that can be a depressing lesson. The other lesson, though, was,
you know, it is impressive to me that every generation
throws up these people willing to fight back, willing to

(33:49):
put themselves on the line, willing to put their shoulders
to the wheel or whatever you want to say. Right,
And we do have these movements now, you know, everything
from Black Lives Matter to Sunrise to March for Our Lives,
young people who are rediscovering a kind of an activist
spirit and wanting to change the world in some way.
And I think, you know, every time we're in a

(34:10):
place in this country where it feels like bleak and
like you know, authoritarianism and law and order racism are ascendant,
you also get people fighting back against that and saying
like that's not the world we want to live in.
We want a better world, and so I think that's
the way progress works. You know, progress works through sort

(34:31):
of radical revolutionary imagination, and then there are there is
a reaction to that and a kind of a pushing back,
and so progress is halting and it's two steps forward,
one step back. But I think when you look at
this history, you can't help but feel inspired by both
the young people of that time, the members of the

(34:52):
Weather Underground, the Black Liberation Army, and the young people
of today who are trying to figure out, you know,
a better way forward. So I want to I want
to hold here and go back to even to that
question I asked about the lessons from your parents and
their activism because they resorted to violence, or not not
even resorted, they took to the streets and they committed
violent acts to oppose the violence of the state, as

(35:15):
you said, and that lesson for today, for you could
say for our kids, like what are you willing to
sacrifice in the face of injustice? And you know, here
we have racial apartheid in the country then and we
have a lot of it now. And I think of
also of your generation, like you you made this podcast,
and you know you told this deep history and you

(35:36):
explore like as you call them weather kids and panther cubs. Yeah,
the children of these radicals, like you guys, experienced that
sacrifice that your parents chose fighting over family. So what's
that lesson? I think, well, that's a big question. I
mean I spend a lot of time in the podcast thinking,

(35:58):
of course, I you know, I grew up on the run,
and then with my mom in jail, we adopted my
brother Chasa, whose parents did decades in prison. I also
talk on the show to Kakuya Shakur, the daughter of
Sada Shakur, who's still underground forty years later, fifty years later,
living on the run in Cuba for her day. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Asada was the kind of figurehead and kind of leader

(36:21):
of the Black Liberation Army for a time and ended
up fleeing to Cuba after breaking out of prison. And
I talked to her daughter, Kakuya, who's it's been twenty
some years since she saw her mom. Asada has never
met her grandkids. So there are these real big sacrifices
that these families made. The people themselves who committed the
violent criminal acts, the radicals themselves, but also their children

(36:43):
and their grandchildren. So the kind of fallout from those
actions is real, and people really suffered. But you know,
one of my favorite moments in the podcast is I
sort of managed to secretly record a conversation between my
dad Bill and my daughter, who was thirteen at the time,
and as I was trying to figure out how to
end the podcast, I happened to be sitting at dinner

(37:05):
with them, and they just got into an argument about
John Brown were dinner, the radical abolitionist who who stormed
Harper's ferry in eighteen fifty nine, exactly. And John Brown
is a hero of my dad's as a symbol of
a kind of a white person willing to risk everything.
He's got a big ass tattoo of John Brown on
his back, right. Yeah. And yet, and yet, my thirteen

(37:26):
year old daughter had been studying John Brown in school,
and she came back home saying, he sounds crazy. I mean,
he took his sons into this suicidal raid and his
sons were killed for this political idea. She's a very
sophisticated kid for a thirteen year old. I mean, I
don't want to diminish his sacrifice, like that's amazing. And
he made a difference, but like, come on, I mean,

(37:46):
it's not really a rational thing to give up your
family and then yourself lamb to the slaughter hypo deal.
So she's saying this, and my dad's arguing with her,
and I, of course, as a good podcaster, should I
slid my iPhone into the middle of the table and
hit record. The point is when you say he was
a fanatic, he was and extremist. That's true, and it's

(38:07):
also true that the rational thing, which is just lets
slavery be. I mean, what are you gonna do? That's
crazy to me? It doesn't crazy. What do you mean?
I don't like it. It unsettles me to think about
you or Bill caring about a political issue more than

(38:28):
you care about me. I feel like it's like weird,
think about a father who cares more about like sticking
it to the match than his songs. It ended up
being kind of the sort of culminating moment of the
show because they really have this interesting argument about what
is it worth to sacrifice? And not all of us
are able or willing to make the kind of sacrifices

(38:50):
that John Brown or Asadah Shapour made or your parents, yeah,
or my parents. But I don't think any but any
of us would say the right moral thing is just
always to protect your own family and let the world burn.
So you have to find the line where you're willing
to sometimes put yourself and the things you love on
the line to make things better. Well, you know, and

(39:10):
listening to you answer that question, it hadn't occurred to
me listening to this moment that you just described in
the podcast itself. But here, all of a sudden, I'm like, look,
you've you've described the fact that your mom and dad,
Bill Ayres, did what they did because the monopoly of
violence by the state had could created the conditions of
suffering for all sorts of people, and most especially black

(39:31):
people in the United States, and that that was the
reason to do all of this. And yet as you
talk about like how you describe this to your daughter
and sacrifice in the trade offs between like self care
and being able to do something that won't risk your
life and your children are orfered and all this sort
of thing, I'm also like, white Americans proudly boast of

(39:51):
sacrificing their sons and daughters and military adventures all the time.
So this sort of routine notion of sacrifice in the
interests of the American state and the interest of patriotism
is unquestioned in this country. I mean, you can't board
a plane without giving it up to veterans for their sacrifices. Yeah,
every every sporting event, every yeah, yeah, I mean it's everywhere.

(40:13):
And so maybe it's just really about the socialization we've
all we've all come of age in. It's a notion
that this other kind of sacrifice, this other kind of
challenge to the state to change the state, is in
fact the one that we shouldn't do, because that's you know,
the costs are too great, and that's that's crazy. I
completely agree, and I'll add one thing, Khalil to that,
because I think you're exactly right that nobody really truly

(40:36):
believes that we shouldn't sacrifice or even that we should
never use violence. People believe that it is justified in
certain circumstances outside. The other thing people ask me about
all the time is they'll say, you know, if I'm
if I'm getting kind of hostile questions from a crowd
or from a journalist, the question often is something like,
you know, well, your parents did all this. They turned
to violence and it didn't work. And it's like, well, yeah,

(40:59):
I mean that's true, but like the people who did nothing,
they didn't end racism either, you know, and the idea
that that kind of this because an intractable problem problem,
you know, the original sin of this country still persists.
And people want to point at the activists and the
radicals and the peace movement and the anti racists and say, well,

(41:19):
you're not making enough progress. But those are the people
fighting for change, and it's the people doing nothing and
resisting that change who are actually standing in the way
of progress. You know. So everybody has to take a
long look, especially white people in America, take a long
look at what they're doing, what they're willing to do,
and what they're not doing, and take seriously the fact
that it's easy to throw stones from the sidelines, you know, Zaid.

(41:42):
I mean, I don't think your parents surprised you in
this podcast, Like they live out loud, as you said,
and they're sort of radically honest, you know what was
a surprise, and sort of digging into their story, into
their history, well, a couple of things really did surprise me. Actually.
I mean, it's true that they've always been honest, but
they've also always hidden things from me. I don't blame
them for it, because a lot of it was not

(42:04):
naming names and not talking about things that might implicate
other people, just being good to ask radicals like they
don't they don't talk. Yeah, yeah, my dad says often
in the podcast, I'll ask him a question and he says, well,
you know that action I can't talk about. That thing
I can't talk about. And it's often because it involves
somebody else. You know, when it's just him, he's pretty
willing to tell me things, but if it's an action

(42:25):
that other people were involved in, he doesn't want to
talk about it. And especially the actions that were collaborative
actions between the White Underground and the Black Underground. Nobody
really wants to be the one to say what was
happening because nobody wants to blow the whistle on the
other side. And there are people still in prison to
this day. But you know, one thing that really did
surprise me, and I found it I really had to

(42:47):
grapple with it was that, you know, my whole childhood,
one of the things they told me, one of the
kind of founding myths of my life, was that when
they had me, everything changed and they and they became parents,
and even though we were still underground, we were still
on the run from the FBI, they decided, you know,
we're no more violence and more things that could put

(43:10):
our lives at risk, because we have a kid now,
and you know, as a kid, you want to feel
like you're the center of the world and like your
parents would do anything for you. And so that was
always just something I accepted. And one of the things
as soon as I started digging into the timelines and
putting things together and making spreadsheets and you know, writing
down chronologies about like what was going on, when I

(43:30):
realized that that wasn't entirely true, and I started asking
my dad about what he was actually doing when I
was a little kid. And so one of the things
that really surprised me is that they kept up their
kind of violent revolutionary actions even as parents. Not quite
to the same extent, but there were a couple of
very risky things that happened when I was a toddler,
and you know, actions in solidarity with the Black Liberation Army.

(43:53):
And how'd you make sense of that? Like, how did
you feel? I mean, I we had a lot of
conversations about it, and I had to kind of think
about what to make of that, what it meant for
my own self conception or my conception of my parents
as people who prioritize their kids. Well, you know, but
what I ultimately make of it is that, like you said,
I mean, it surprises me, but it doesn't surprise me.
I mean, it surprises me that these specific things happened.

(44:16):
But when I really think about my parents, I always
knew that if they were called upon by you know,
comrades in the black underground to help with something, there
were very few things that we're going to stand in
the way of them trying to say yes to that,
even having a kid at home. So even today, even today,
I mean, they're they're pretty committed people, and it's complicated.

(44:37):
It makes my relationship with them complicated, But I also
feel like I admire and respect the fact that for them,
that fight and that struggle and that solidarity is as
important as anything else in their lives. Was it. I
want to just finish this conversation by saying that everyone
should listen to your podcast. Everyone should know this history.

(45:00):
This is a history that even when I was in
grad school, more than twenty years ago was treated as
as a failure in social movement history by mainstream historians.
It's a moment when social movements went off track, and
as you well know, neo conservatism of the nineteen eighties,
both in politics and even in scholarship, grew out of

(45:22):
the reactionary understanding of this moment. So you're helping to
write the historical record and bringing it in such a
wonderful storytelling way that new generations of young people will
have a chance to learn from this past and continue
the struggle. So thank you so much Zai for joining
us today. Than I really appreciate it. Thank you so much, Zaide.

(45:43):
It's really been amazing talking with you. Thanks Ben, great
being here. Oh Man, that was such a good conversation.
It was it was. Yeah. It has me thinking about
this moment in the summer of twenty twenty when white
activists in Portland were taking siege of a federal building

(46:08):
and Donald Trump was sending undercover people in black vans
and snatching people off the street, or even the Lafayatte
Square moment when part of the park outside of the
White House was on fire and then generals were standing
with Tromp and a photo op. So we're talking about
the moment after George Floyd's murder and these protests across

(46:30):
the country, and you're talking about the police response, the
state response to kind of squash this. Yeah, but I'm
really talking about both. I mean, people were in the
streets and in some cases there were buildings on fire,
a whole police station burned up in Minneapolis. I mean,
it looked exactly like what the grainy footage of the

(46:51):
sixties was what I grew up seeing, what I read about.
And the thing that's really fascinating, I mean, because that's
something everyone listening to this show right now witnessed, is
that so many people were asked the question, and I
will say it happened for me too, which is like,

(47:11):
is this a moment for change in America? Is this
the moment of the racial reckoning? Is this the moment
where we finally get this right? Journalists we're asking this question,
people were writing about it. I was participating, you were
in this moment. And the thing that I said, and
I remember others saying as well, including elected officials, as
long as people stay in the streets, we will see

(47:32):
change in this country. Only one is demanded is what
you're saying. Only one is demanded, and only when there
is a civil disobedience at a scale when you can't
have business as usual. Yeah. Yeah, and it turned out
to be right. I mean, we have the benefit of
hindsight in this moment to look back now two years
later and all these questions about whether this was a

(47:54):
quote unquote moment or movement have been answered. It was
a fucking moment, right, I mean, because once people are
off the streets, and once the demand is gone, the
action has gone, the change has gone. The change is gone. Yeah.
And yeah, there's this line from a Flannery O'Connor store
that I often think about. She would have been a
good woman if there was somebody there to shoot her

(48:16):
every day of her life. Oh shit, you know, without that,
you ain't the good woman. But only in that moment.
I mentioned this while we were talking with Zaide, But
there's that moment when his mother, Bernadine Dorn, you know,
chooses radicalism and she she forms the action faction. That
phrase has just stuck with me. What you're saying, like,

(48:37):
we need action factions, right, yeah, But then also all
the things that that means, because what does it mean
to ask people to stay on the streets indefinitely. Yeah,
I mean what does that demand on people in terms
of their lives, in terms of you know, society functioning,
And you know, it's like we need the change, but
also the demand on activists, I'm as on all of

(48:58):
us on society, it is an incredible amount. And that's
kind of what we were digging into today. And you know,
Zaid is so in a way unlike his parents, and
he says this on the podcast that that he created,
that they believe in moral absolutes and they think with
a kind of moral clarity. And he's this playwright, this
writer who explores the ambiguities, who explores the complexities and

(49:21):
in a way that's not action faction, but it's a
way why this podcast and exploring these ideas is so fascinating. Yeah,
And to show the context and the what's at stake here. Yeah, Well,
I think one takeaway, at least for me, is that
what the sixties presented as a choice in the way
that Bernadine and Bill made it, which is to say,

(49:44):
you know, even if you have to make a personal sacrifice,
that's the only way things change. And yeah, we are
at that moment again. And we don't know what's around
the corner in twenty twenty three, but I think we
do know that bodies in the street and sacrifices are
a crucial ingredient to social movement change. And you know,
let's hope that we can be part of encouraging people

(50:07):
and inspiring people to do that work. Yeah. Yeah, that's
really well put. And I think I think this podcast
that you know that we're doing, but also that zay
did is exactly doing that. Yeah, yeah, all right, all
right man, Well, Khalil, love you, Love you too, man.
Some of My Best Friends Are is a production of

(50:28):
Pushkin Industries. The show is written and hosted by me,
Khalil Dubron Muhammed and my best friend Ben Austin. It's
produced by John Assanti and Lucy Sullivan. Our editor is
Jasmine Morris, our engineer is Amanda ka Wang, and our
executive producer is Mia Lobelle. At Pushkin thanks to leitaal Mullad,
Julia Barton, Heather Fain, Carly Migliori, John Schnars, Gretta Khane,

(50:53):
and Jacob Weisberg. Our theme song, Little Lily, is by
Fellow chicagoan the brilliant Avery R. Young from his album Pubman.
You definitely want to check out his music at his
website avery R. Young dot com. You can find Pushkin
on all social platforms at Pushkin Pods, and you can
sign up for our newsletter at pushkin dot fm. To

(51:14):
find more Pushkin podcasts, listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
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our show, please give us a five star rating and
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give it a five star rating and a review, and
please tell all of your best friends about it. Thank you.

(51:45):
I mean, I love your Guys podcast. I feel like
it's one of those honors to be on it. I've
been listening and that's gonna be weird to be like
the guests. You know. Yeah, we'll wait till you hear
how we chop it up. It's gonna be even better.
You're not actually gonna be yea, they just back and further,
it's just an episode about Benea