Son of radicals, Zayd Ayers Dohrn details a childhood underground and on the run

Zayd Ayers Dohrn walks with his parents Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn outside the Federal Court Building in New York, May 17, 1982. David Handschuh/Associated Press hide caption

Zayd Ayers Dohrn spent much of his childhood underground and on the run. His mother, Bernardine Dohrn, was a leader of the '60s radical student group Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), which opposed the war in Vietnam and racism. Along with Dohrn's father, Bill Ayers , she helped found the Weather Underground , a group committed to armed resistance against the government.

"From my very first memories, I knew that the FBI was chasing us," he says. "My parents tried to explain it in terms [like] we were like Robin Hood or we were like the Rebel Alliance in S tar Wars . So I knew in the way a kid knows that our lives were precarious."

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Dohrn describes his mother as a "liberal, progressive, activist" who became radicalized by the assassination of Black civil rights leaders and the escalation of the Vietnam War: "Once she helped found the Weather Underground, I would say the mission was to overthrow the United States government," he says.

The Weather Underground planted bombs in empty police cars, the Pentagon and other places they considered symbols of the opposition, giving advance warning to people in those buildings to prevent casualties. For years, Bernardine Dohrn was on the FBI's 10 Most Wanted list.

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Zayd Ayers Dohrn is a playwright and screenwriter who teaches at Northwestern University and also hosted and produced the podcast " Mother Country Radicals ." In his new memoir, Dangerous, Dirty, Violent, and Young: A Fugitive Family in the Revolutionary Underground , Dohrn grapples with his own family history and his parents' decision to have children while while living on the run.

"It was a contradiction that reared its head in all sorts of ways, most dramatically when they committed crimes and left their children behind," he says. "But I think ... my mom couldn't have been somebody who decided to abandon the movement and just settle down and have kids. She had to try to do both."

Bernadine Dohrn turned herself into the authorities in 1980 and spent nearly a year in prison. Upon release, she passed the bar exam, while Zayd Ayers Dohrn's father earned his doctorate in education.

"They became middle-class professionals," Dohrn says. "By the time I was 12, we were living in Chicago. We were going to school. We played in Little League. By that point in our lives — in the '90s — we could have passed for ordinary Americans."

Interview highlights

On the title of his memoir, which borrows from the Jefferson Airplane song " We Can Be Together "

The full line [from the song] is, "we are all outlaws in the eyes of America. We are obscene, lawless, hideous, dangerous, dirty, violent, and young." And that became kind of a rallying cry, not only for my parents, but for a big segment of the youth counterculture, this idea that we are all outlaws in a society that demonizes Black people, demonizes gay people, oppresses women, doesn't understand young people. And so that idea of being outlaws in your own country and of being dangerous, dirty, violent, and young really sums up a lot of what my parents stood for at the time.

On his memory of visiting his mom in prison

She was imprisoned at MCC, Manhattan Correctional Center. ... It's a big kind of brutalist building in downtown Manhattan and kind of a windowless giant concrete structure. My dad would take me and my brothers there to visit my mom and we would go through metal detectors, talk to the guards and to see my mom twice a week and spend a little bit of time with her. And I remember smuggling in little child-sized books, Peter Rabbit and In the Night Kitchen , things like that, putting them in my pants so that I could make it through the metal detector so my mom would have something to read to me.

I remember smuggling in little child-sized books, Peter Rabbit and In the Night Kitchen , ... so that I could make it through the metal detector so my mom would have something to read to me [in prison].

The visiting room was a big kind of cavernous space with a bunch of tables and we would spend a couple hours talking to her, having her read to us, and then we would leave and we would go outside and stand on the sidewalk. And we'd wait there for half an hour, an hour until she was back in her cell and she could [turn] the lights on and off in her cell so that we could see that she was back in her cell and was safe, and it was kind of like waving goodbye.

On his family taking custody of Chesa Boudin , the toddler son of imprisoned revolutionaries

Kathy [Boudin] and David [Gilbert] took part in a bank robbery, the Brinks robbery in 1981, in which a police officer and two guards were killed. And so they went to prison for a long time and they had left their 18-month-old son Chesa at home with a babysitter when they went out to rob this bank. So my parents ... took Chesa in when he was very little. He became my brother, we grew up together. … He became part of our family because his parents were sent to prison for a long, long time. …

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[Chesa] represented for me what it might look like if my parents had been caught, if they had stayed in the Underground for one more month, one more year, what it might've looked like if they had been sent to prison forever and I had to grow up without them because, that's what happened to Chesa.

On how his parents would get fake IDs and birth certificates when they were fugitives

They would drive out to a rural cemetery, and they would walk around until they found the grave of a kid who had died young, somebody who had died before they turned 2 or 3, so that they had never applied for a driver's license. And it had to be somebody who was born around the same time that they were born. ... And then they'd go to the county courthouse and they'd say, "I'm so-and-so. I've lost my ID, but here's my birthdate. Here's where I was born." And usually the county clerk would issue them a new birth certificate on the spot. They knew enough to show that they were that person. Nobody else had applied for any documents using those names. And then once they had a birth certificate, they could use that to apply for a driver's license and eventually they had a whole new identity with real official government ID.

On what he believes his parents' activism accomplished

Here we are in another moment of authoritarianism and war overseas and police violence and racism has not gone away. So on one level, you could say, well, what did they accomplish? We're still facing the same problems. On another level, I think you could say that that moment, the '60s and '70s, they were a part of a radical re-imagining of what this country should be, could be. And I disagree with much of what my parents did. Like all people, they're complicated, flawed human beings, but I think they made a few big choices that are deserving of admiration and respect.

"From my very first memories, I knew that the FBI was chasing us," Zayd Ayers Dohrn says of growing up with his fugative parents. Joe Mazza/W.W. Norton & Company hide caption

Opposing the Vietnam War with everything they had is one of them. We look back now and it feels like most young people opposed the Vietnam War, but that's not true at the time. It was a very unpopular position. And then the second big choice is opposing racism with everything they had, being white people who risked their lives and their careers and their futures in the struggle for Black liberation. And I think that's something they accomplished. It doesn't mean that racism is over, that white supremacy is over. But they set an example of what it looks like for white people to do everything they could to fight back against racism.

Thea Chaloner and Susan Nyakundi produced and edited this interview for broadcast. Bridget Bentz, Molly Seavy-Nesper and Meghan Sullivan adapted it for the web.