Weather Underground

The Weather Underground Organization (WUO), commonly known as the Weather Underground, was a radical left militant organization active in the late 1960s and 1970s, founded on the Ann Arbor campus of the University of Michigan. It was originally called the Weathermen. The WUO organized in 1969 as a faction of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) largely composed of the national office leadership of SDS and their supporters. Beginning in 1974, the organization's express political goal was to create a revolutionary party to overthrow American imperialism. The FBI described the WUO as a domestic terrorist group, with revolutionary positions characterized by black power and opposition to the Vietnam War. The WUO took part in domestic attacks such as the jailbreak of Timothy Leary in 1970. The «Days of Rage» was the WUO's first riot in October 1969 in Chicago, timed to coincide with the trial of the Chicago Seven. In 1970, the group issued a «Declaration of a State of War» against the United States government under the name «Weather Underground Organization». In the 1970s, the WUO conducted a bombing campaign targeting government buildings and several banks. Some attacks were preceded by evacuation warnings, along with threats identifying the particular matter that the attack was intended to protest. Three members of the group were killed in an accidental Greenwich Village townhouse explosion, but none were killed in any of the bombings. The WUO communiqué issued in connection with the bombing of the United States Capitol on March 1, 1971 indicated that it was «in protest of the U.S. invasion of Laos». The WUO asserted that its May 19, 1972 bombing of the Pentagon was «in retaliation for the U.S. bombing raid in Hanoi». The WUO announced that its January 29, 1975 bombing of the United States Department of State building was «in response to the escalation in Vietnam». The WUO began to disintegrate after the United States reached a peace accord in Vietnam in 1973, and it was defunct by 1977.