Listen: Bill Ayers on the ‘68 Democratic National Convention in Chicago and Today

Bob Hennelly talks to Bill Ayers about the parallels between the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago and the upcoming one happening next week.

By Bob Hennelly

The Democratic National Convention in Chicago is just a week away, and there’s been much made of the parallels between 2024, and the tumultuous 1968 Democratic National Convention also held in Chicago.

That gathering 56 years ago, came as both the anti-Vietnam War movement and the civil rights movement were increasingly inspiring young people to resist what they saw as a corrupt and racist war machine they were being drafted into.

A 1967 Gallup poll found the American public very much evenly split on the war, but it was unpopular enough that President Lyndon Johnson opted not to run for a second full term. Ultimately, it was Vice President Hubert Humphrey who got the nomination. Of course, amidst the growing protest movement we had the assassination of Malcom X in 1965, and the 1968 murders of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King in April, and Senator Robert F. Kennedy following his California victory speech shortly thereafter.

In this episode of the Stuck Nation Labor Radio Hour, we talk to Bill Ayers, a witness to all that history, and a key leader in the militant protest movement that rocked the nation—as well as a member of the Weather Underground, a group that resorted to bombings as a strategy and was officially labeled a terrorist group by the FBI.

Today, Ayers is a retired Distinguished Professor of Education at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Ayers is a prolific author, social critic, community activist and prison abolitionist. He was one of the  founding members of the Students for Democratic Society that evolved into the Weather Underground, and was linked to bombings on the U.S. Capitol and Pentagon in protest of the Vietnam War. In March 1970, an explosion in the West Village killed three members of the militant protest group. Four years later, in Prairie Fire, the Weather Underground described those killed as “comrades who gave their lives in the struggle”

Ayers spent several years on the run. Ultimately, prosecutors opted to drop all of the charges because they didn’t want to disclose the degree to which they had relied on extra-legal burglaries, sabotage, electronic surveillance, agents provocateurs, or other "espionage techniques" against the Weatherman. 

Listen to the entire show below: