called it the “Weather crud.”

In the meantime, the Days of Rage continued. Though many members were arrested and bail tallied in the millions, the Weather Underground had rendered enough damage to get noticed. They were “the ‘heavy edge’ of the New Left, the furthest left, the wildest, the craziest, the most committed,” writes Burrough.

Eventually, they graduated from hurling rocks and bottles at police. Weather members went underground and planned a full guerilla war, “leading white kids into armed revolution,” said leader Bernardine Dohrn. On March 6, 1970, however, a Weather bomb detonated prematurely in a Greenwich Village home. Three members were killed.

Outside the Greenwich Village “bomb factory” where three Weather Underground member were accidentally killed in 1970. (AP Photo/Jerry Mosey) Still, in June 1970 members bombed a NewYork City police department. In October, Dohrn was added to the FBI’s 10 most wanted list. On March 1, 1971, they bombed the US Capitol Building. On May 19, 1972, Ho Chi Minh’s birthday, a bomb erupted in a women’s bathroom at the Pentagon. The Weather Underground claimed responsibility, saying the event was “in retaliation for the U.S. bombing raid in Hanoi.”

Before their bombings, the Underground would release communiqués warning of the location. While no one was killed, revolutionary violence was crucial, they argued.

By 1975, the New Left had disintegrated and the Weather Underground shut down. But even decades later, Bill Ayers, dubbed one of the group’s “rich kid radicals” was largely unapologetic. Interviewed for a New York Times piece that published on September 11, 2001, he said,