Bernardine Dohrn

Bernardine Dohrn, activist, academic and child advocate, was clinical associate professor of the Northwestern University School of Law, and founding director of the Children and Family Justice Center. Dohrn was a national leader of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) and the Weather Underground, and was on the FBI's 10 Most Wanted List for over a decade. Her books include Race Course: Against White Supremacy, A Century of Juvenile Justice, and Resisting Zero Tolerance: A Handbook for Parents, Teachers and Students. Dohrn and Bill Ayers have three sons, each raised in an environment, they say, where politics was constantly discussed but never imposed: Zayd is a playwright and graduate student in New York; Malik studies and teaches in Guatemala; and Chesa is a Yale graduate, Rhodes scholar and the only activist in the bunch. Chesa is the couple's adopted son and has lived with them since he was 14 months old. His parents, former Weather Underground members Kathy Boudin and David Gilbert, are maximum-security inmates in the New York state prison system, incarcerated for their roles in a 1981 Brink's robbery in upstate New York, in which a guard and two police officers were killed. In March 1970, the fate of Weathermen shifted when Terry Robbins, Ted Gold and Diana Oughton died in a bomb blast at a Greenwich Village townhouse. The bomb that was being assembled, probably by Robbins, had accidentally exploded. Dohrn, Ayers and their fellow radicals went underground, and changed their name to the Weather Underground. It was their growing family, Dohrn says, that prompted them to surrender to federal authorities on Dec. 3, 1980.