Night of Rage
Threats of Violence a Nod to the Past
A shadowy group calling itself “Jane’s Revenge” has vowed to commit acts of violence in response to the June 24th Supreme Court decision in Dobbs v Jackson. The group, which may have partnered with Antifa and other violent groups, has claimed credit for more than 15 attacks against pregnancy clinics, including the May 8th fire-bombing of a Wisconsin pregnancy center. Jane’s Revenge has threatened a “Night of Rage,” which is an apparent nod to several violent groups in the 1970s that committed dozens of acts of deadly violence targeting indiscriminate groups and organizations. Some of those groups in the 1970s unleashed what they called “Days of Rage.”
(This essay is adapted from Pardongate: How Bill & Hillary Clinton and Their Brothers Profited from Pardons.)
The Weathermen was a radical group with communist sympathies that advocated the revolutionary overthrow of the US government and an end to capitalism. The Weathermen had its birth on college campuses where like-minded students and non-students engaged in campus protests, often demonstrating against what the group claimed were American imperialism and institutional racism.
It is generally acknowledged the Weathermen organization was launched in June 1969 at the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) national convention.[i] Many of the Weathermen’s members came from the SDS. Its members pledged militant action and violence to bring about changes to society.
According to a Top Secret (and now declassified) report prepared by the Chicago Field Office of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Weathermen had “an unremitting commitment to armed struggle as the ultimate necessity to seize state power.”[ii]
The Weathermen idolized the worst examples of the world community: Angola, Libya, Cuba, and China, to name a few. Several Weathermen traveled to Cuba to meet with Cuban and North Vietnamese government officials. One Weathermen member, Linda Sue Evans, actually visited North Vietnam.
After her return from North Vietnam in August 1969, Evans spoke of her three-week trip and of being given the opportunity to hold an antiaircraft gun. She remarked she wished an American aircraft had flown over at that moment she was holding the antiaircraft gun.[iii] She falsely claimed that Americans held as prisoners of war by the North Vietnamese, and who were victims of years of unimaginable brutality, were receiving humane treatment.[iv]
Among the earliest known violent events linked to the Weathermen was a September 1968 arson attack against the Navy ROTC building at the University of Washington that destroyed much of the building.[v]
An October 1969 rally of several hundred in Chicago, promoted by the Weathermen and known as the “Days of Rage,” became violent when attendees smashed storefront windows and damaged several cars. The instigators arrived prepared for violence by wearing motorcycle helmets, steel-toed boots for kicking, and carrying steel rebar for fighting.
The Weathermen were comfortable with violence. The Weathermen claimed credit for the bombing of police cars in Chicago and Berkeley, California in late 1969 and early 1970. The group is suspected of a bombing that killed a San Francisco police officer in early 1970, and of responsibility for a police precinct bombing in Detroit.
Other bombings in 1970 that were tied to the Weathermen were at the National Guard Association building in Washington, D.C.; New York City police headquarters; San Francisco’s Presidio army base; the Marin, California courthouse; a Queens, New York traffic courthouse; and on the campus of Harvard University.
During the next few years, the Weathermen were complicit in several more bombings, including at the US Capitol, the Pentagon, the US State Department, Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Massachusetts, several federal and state government buildings, as well as private business offices. In all, the group was believed to have been responsible for at least forty bombings during the period of 1969 to 1975.[vi] Many of its members advocated violence as the sole tactic to achieve the group’s goals.
The Weathermen received unwanted scrutiny in March 1970 when a bomb-making factory located in a Greenwich Village townhouse next door to actor Dustin Hoffman blew up.[vii] Three Weathermen died in the explosion. Two women escaped with minor injuries. One was wearing clothes left in tattered shreds and the other had her clothes completely blown off.[viii] The group changed its name to the Weather Underground as its members went underground in an effort to avoid detection and capture.[ix]
An offshoot of the Weather Underground was a group linked to acts of even more violence, including murder. The May 19th Communist Organization derived its name from the May 19th birthdays of Malcolm X and Ho Chi Minh. Most of the May 19th members were white women who were looking for revolutionary causes to support.
They settled on two causes. One was the FALN, and the other was the violent Black Liberation Army. The May 19th members decided to ally their organization with the Black Liberation Army, forming a group that became known as the “Family.”
The Black Panther Party for Self-Defense formed in Oakland, California in 1966 following the death of Nation of Islam official Malcolm X. The Black Panthers espoused a militaristic doctrine of armed resistance against what its membership claimed was a racist and imperialistic American society.
The group, which later shortened its name to the Black Panther Party, adopted a Socialist doctrine. Cofounder Huey P. Newton declared, “The Black Panther Party is a Marxist-Leninist party.”[x] Panther Minister of Information Eldridge Cleaver stated the mission of the BPP was “to fight a revolutionary struggle for the violent overthrow of the United States government and the total destruction of the racist, capitalist, imperialist, neo-colonialist power structure.”[xi]
The BPP was an especially violent organization responsible for the deaths of dozens of party members, police officers, and civilians. The Panthers reserved much of their venom for law enforcement officers. A 1968 headline of the organ’s newspaper The Black Panther, referring to the police, stated “Pigs Want War.”[xii]
The party began to disintegrate when several national Panther leaders faced criminal charges. Newton and fellow cofounder Bobby Seale were arrested and tried for separate murders. Cleaver fled the country, spent several months in Cuba, and eventually settled in Algeria. When the national Black Panther Party finally fell apart, several Panthers joined other groups and causes.
The Black Liberation Army formed from the members of the New York City chapter of the Black Panthers. Its membership was made up of almost all black men. As with the Weather Underground, the BLA preached an armed struggle that included any number of violent acts, including shootings and bombings, to achieve the group’s goals. One of the goals was a separate black nation formed from the southern United States. A frequent target of the Black Liberation Army was police officers. The BLA took credit for the brutal slaying of a pair of police officers, one white and one black, on May 21, 1971, and of the murder of a second pair of black and white police officers on January 28, 1972.
The BLA’s partnership with the May 19th Communist Organization was a combination not previously observed by law enforcement authorities: groups of predominately black men and white women engaged in indiscriminate violence against a perceived enemy they believed was a racist, white society. In this relationship, the BLA called all the shots and the May 19th group performed supporting roles. Many of the BLA members referred to the May 19th members as “crackers.”
The Family perceived several institutions and organizations as obstacles to its goal of creating a separatist black nation made up from the southern states. The Family wanted to eliminate these obstacles, so it compiled a hit list of organizations and institutions it would target with violence. Among those on the list included the International Association of Police Chiefs, the FBI-New York City Police Department Joint Terrorist Task Force, and the United Jewish Appeal.[xiii]
In order to achieve its goal, the Family needed to raise money. Lots of it. The Family intended to raise the needed money through robbery. It also wanted to achieve the kind of notoriety of its predecessor groups, the Black Panthers and the Weather Underground.
One of the first activities of the Family was to garner publicity for the new and unknown group. The Family planned the prison escape of Assata Shakur, the only female member of the BLA. Like most BLA members, she preferred to use her “African” name, Assata Shakur, instead of her “slave name” given at birth, which was JoAnne Byron. Shakur was suspected of involvement in BLA orchestrated cop killings in 1971 and 1972. She was sentenced to prison for the shooting death of New Jersey State Trooper Werner Foerster and the wounding of State Trooper James Harper on May 2, 1973.
The May 19th members became actively involved in the Family’s criminal activities by supplying safe houses and acting as getaway drivers after armed robberies.[xiv]
Mark Hyman is an Emmy award-winning investigative journalist. Follow him on Twitter, Gettr, and Parler at @markhyman, and on Truth Social at @markhyman81.
His books Washington Babylon: From George Washington to Donald Trump, Scandals That Rocked the Nation and Pardongate: How Bill and Hillary Clinton and their Brothers Profited from Pardons are on sale now (here and here).
[i] Ron Jacobs, The Way the Wind Blew: A History of the Weather Underground, (New York: Verso, 1997), 13.
[ii] Federal Bureau of Investigation (Chicago Field Office), “Foreign Influence—Weather Underground Organization,” (WUO) CG 100-40903, classified Top Secret, August 20, 1976, 3.
[iii] “Terrorism: Review of 1988 and the Prospects for 1989,” press briefing at George Washington University, The Elliott School of International Affairs, December 19, 1988.
[iv] Federal Bureau of Investigation (Chicago Field Office), “Foreign Influence—Weather Underground Organization,” (WUO) CG 100-40903, classified Top Secret, August 20, 1976, 284.
[v] Sarah Anderson, “Blast from the Past: The UW in the Riotous 1960s and 70s,” The Daily, January 18, 2007.
[vi] “And Now for the Rest of the Story,” Washington Post, March 17, 1990. Editorial.
[vii] Douglas Robinson, “Townhouse Razed by Blast and Fire; Man’s Body Found,” New York Times, March 7, 1970.
[viii] Ibid.
[ix] Peter McGrath et al, “Return of the Weatherman,” Newsweek, November 2, 1981.
[x] Huey P. Newton, To Die for the People: The Writings of Huey P. Newton, (New York: Random House, 1972), 25.
[xi] Lee Lockwood, Conversation with Eldridge Cleaver: Algiers, (New York: Delta, 1970), 54.
[xii] Ruth-Marion Baruch and Pirkle Jones, The Vanguard: A Photographic Essay on the Black Panthers, (Boston: Beacon Press, 1970), 17.
[xiii] John Castellucci, The Big Dance: The Untold Story of Kathy Boudin and the Terrorist Family That Committed the Brinks Robbery Murders, (New York: Dodd, Mead & Company, 1986), 220.
[xiv] Ibid., 154.