May 23, 2019 ¡ After all, before 1967, the procedure was basically a crime in every state, yet estimates of abortions in the 1950s and â60s range from 200,000 to 2 million each year. The women who sought underground abortions during this time period often faced painful, and sometimes deadly, consequences.
Apr 13, 2015 ¡ GROSS: After the disaster in the townhouse in New York when the bomb accidentally exploded and killed three members of the Weather Underground, Bernardine Dohrn, one of the leaders of the group ...
Apr 10, 2013 ¡ Former Weather Underground member Eleanor Raskin, who fled after being indicted for bomb making in the 1970s, is an associate professor at Albany Law School.
Jan 06, 2020 ¡ Left, part of the U.S. Capitol's north wing after a M19 bomb damaged it in 1983. Right, an image from a sympathetic pamphlet reading "Resistance is not a Crime! Stop the Political Show Trial!"
The women who sought underground abortions during the postwar years faced sexual assault, excruciating pain, and sometimes death. In 1961, The Saturday Evening Post revealed the awful realities of illegal abortion. âThere is no way getting around this: this is a frightening time,â Washington Senator Patty Murray began as she addressed ...
In 1959, 16-year-old Brenda Blonder was found dead on the lawn of Burbank Hospital in Los Angeles with three and a half times the proper dose of Sodium Pentothal in her body. Her mother had arranged an âillegal surgeryâ with a former salesman after the girl threatened to try it herself. Since Blonder belonged to a wealthy family, her death â and others like it â illustrated the problem of underground abortions that had plagued poor women and women of color for decades. In 1961, women of color in New York City faced four times as many deaths from abortion as white women, with abortion deaths accounting for almost half of maternal deaths of women of color.
Read âAbortionâ by John Bartlow Martin from the May 20, 1961, issue of the Post. Subscribe to the magazine for more art, inspiring stories, fiction, humor, and features from our archives.
During a D&C, the surgeon dilates the cervix and uses a curette to scrape the lining of the uterus. The procedure is tricky, but safe when performed correctly. The risks of a âback alleyâ D&C include infection, perforation of the uterus, and uncontrolled hemorrhage.
In 1978, the Bureau arrested five members who were plotting to bomb a politicianâs office. Others were captured after two policemen and a Brinksâ driver were murdered in a botched armored car robbery in Nanuet, New York, in 1981.
On January 29, 1975 , an explosion rocked the headquarters of the U.S. State Department in Washington, D.C. No one was hurt, but the damage was extensive, impacting 20 offices on three separate floors. Hours later, another bomb was found at a military induction center in Oakland, California, and safely detonated.
Weather Underground Bombings. Three Weather Underground members were killed when a bomb they had built exploded in the basement of a townhouse in Greenwich Village on March 6, 1970.
In addition to the Weather Underground, Burrough writes about the Black Panthers, the Black Liberation Army, which is an offshoot of the Panthers, the Symbionese Liberation Army, which kidnapped Patty Hearst, the Family, which was co-founded by Tupac Shakur's stepfather and FALN, a Puerto Rican independence group.
How Young People Went Underground During The '70s 'Days Of Rage' Bryan Burrough's new book describes the Weather Underground and other militant groups' tactics to protest the government. He interviews former radicals who had never gone on the record before.
BURROUGH: There was a sense that it was really violent, black rhetoric - especially that emanating from the Black Panthers - that informed most of the people that initially went underground - the first group, the Weather Underground and the second, the Black Liberation Army. And African-American militants at that point had an array of complaints, but chief among them, first among them, was always police brutality, that policemen throughout America largely were able to kill black men, black Americans, with impunity. And, you know, we quote people from Weather saying look, we wanted to do what the Panthers wanted to and what the Black Liberation Army wanted to do later and that is kill policeman, to, quote, "fight back." It seems amazing now, but that's what they intended to do.
They were committed to the struggle, committed to a violent struggle. And the only reason that didn't happen was because the bomb builder - the head of the collective, Terry Robbins - didn't know nearly as much as he thought about dynamite.
What makes the 1970s so different, especially from today, is that there were all these militants that believed that the way to right these wrongs was to detonate bombs, was to assassinate policemen, was to engage in shootouts and kidnappings.
The BLA went on to continue attacking and occasionally killing police officers throughout 1973 when one by one, its soldiers and ultimately its leaders and ultimately its last leader, Joanne Chesimard, now better known as Assata Shakur, who's still in the news for being in Cuba when the last of them were hunted down, captured and killed in 1973.
BURROUGH: They look up explosives, and they find that there is a dealer in explosives up in the Bronx. And this young man, Sam Melville, who led the group, he and a couple of buddies went there and crawled over the outer wall at night. They held up the night watchman, and they stole the dynamite.
After years on the run, having been indicted for her involvement in the Brinks robbery and murder in Nyack, Weather Underground member Susan Rosenberg was caught in 1985 moving â740 pounds of dynamite and weapons, including a submachine gun,â according to The New York Times, from her car into a storage locker.
The goal was to blind, maim, and kill. Boudin was present, but escaped the explosion and evaded capture. She insisted during her 2003 parole hearing, against logic and and all available evidence, that she was unaware the house was being used to construct bombs.
Sam brandished the .45 automatic as he held Rackleyâs arms, which were tied together with ropes.â Warren Kimbro shot Alex Rackley in the head. He later confessed to the murder and was sentenced to life in prison, but only served four years. By 1975, he was an assistant dean at Eastern Connecticut State University.
Or take former Black Panther party grandee Ericka Huggins, who is now a professor of womenâs studies at California State University, a professor of sociology at Laney and Berkeley City College, and, according to one official biography, a âhuman rights activist.â In 2011, students at the University of Kentucky could receive extra credit for attending a lecture by Huggins, described as a âpolitical prisoner and human rights activist.â It does not seem to bother these universities that in 1970 Huggins was brought to trial on charges of âaiding and abettingâ the murder of Alex Rackley, a fellow Panther they wrongly believed to be a police informant. She was acquitted.
Former Weather Underground member Eleanor Raskin, who fled after being indicted for bomb making in the 1970s, is an associate professor at Albany Law School. In 1981, Raskin and her husband were arrested in connection with an explosives cache uncovered two years earlier by New Jersey police (her husband was placed on probation; the charges against Raskin were dropped). After years in hiding, Mark Rudd, a Weather leader who also fled indictment and went âunderground,â turned himself in 1977 and was sentenced to two yearsâ probation. He later taught at Central New Mexico Community College.
NYU Law just announced the appointment of former Weather Underground member and convicted murderer Kathy Boudin as a scholar-in-residence. Michael Moynihan on the latest university appointment for former radicals.
Susan Rosenberg, left, was one of M19's most central members in its early years. Starting in high school, Rosenberg spent time with members of the Black Panthers and Young Lords, and her politics remained leftist through her brief time at Barnard. Linda Sue Evans, right, hailed from the Midwest.
The resulting book, Tonight We Bombed the Capitol, pieces together the unfamiliar story of âa group of essentially middle-class, well educated, white people who made a journey essentially from anti-war and civil rights protest to terrorism, â he says.
During the Nazi occupation of France, many valuable works of art were stolen from the Jeu de Paume museum and relocated to Germany. One brave French woman kept detailed notes of the thefts
Rosenau writes of âself-described âcorn-fed girlââ Linda Sue Evans, whose politics took a radical turn while attending Michigan State University in the midst of the Vietnam War.
Today, Blunk is a florist in New Jersey. (Courtesy of William Rosenau) As M19âs spree turned more and more violent, M19âs members became evermore insular and paranoid, nearly cultish, living communally and rotating through aliases and disguises until, in 1985, law enforcement captured the groupâs most devoted lieutenants. ...
16 March â Mildred Harrison, a Protestant, was the first RUC woman to be murdered on duty by an explosion from a UVF bomb while on foot patrol passing Ormeau Arms Bar, High Street, Bangor, County Down.
20 September The IRA exploded a bomb in the Bluebell Bar in the Loyalist Sandy Row area, injuring 27 people.
23 March Donegall Street bombing â the Provisional IRA detonated a massive car bomb in Lower Donegall Street in Belfast city centre Seven people were killed in the explosion, including two members of the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC) and 148 people were injured.
The attack was the first major breach of the February truce. 27 August â Caterham Arms pub bombing The IRA bombed a pub in Surrey, injuring 33 people. 5 September Two killed and 63 injured when a bomb was detonated in the lobby of London's Hilton Hotel.
The checkpoint was obliterated when the 1,000 kg bomb exploded, killing one soldier and injuring 23.
29 October 1969 â The UVF exploded a bomb at the gravestone of Wolfe Tone (the founding father of Irish Republicanism) in Bodenstown, Sallins, County Kildare in the Republic of Ireland. The blast occurred at 5.00 am and destroyed a headstone.
18 February 1970 â The UVF exploded a bomb at a 240-foot radio mast on Mongary Hill, near Raphoe, County Donegal. The explosion put the transmitter out of action. The mast had allowed RTĂ programs to be received over a large part of Northern Ireland than had been the case. (The UVF claimed responsibility for this bomb in a statement issued on 19 February 1970.)
Eventually, the Marine Midland bombing â and several other major bombings that rattled the city in 1969 â were ultimately attributed to one Samuel J. Melville, who was charged as the principal conspirator and bomb-setter.
Mr. Melville was apprehended with three others: George Demmerle, John D. Hughey III and Jane L. Alpert , a Swarthmore College alumna who was romantically linked with Mr. Melville. (Mr.
In 1970, Mr. Melville was sentenced to 13 to 18 years in prison for his role plotting the eight bombings. The following year, he was killed during the Attica prison uprising. The 1969 bombings were part of a wave of similar episodes across the nation that spurred fear and anxiety. (One study found that from January 1969 to October 1970, ...
Mr. Melville, 34, an engineering technician turned antiwar radical, was arrested on Nov. 12, 1969, as he tried to place a knapsack full of dynamite on Army trucks at 68th Regiment Armory, at 26th Street and Lexington Avenue. Earlier that day, a bomb had damaged part of the fifth floor of the New York City Criminal Courts Building , the fourth such explosion in Manhattan in two days.
All of you might enjoy and find food for thought in Beverly Gageâs excellent book referred to in this article: âThe Day Wall Street Exploded: A Story of America in its First Age of Terrorâ (Oxford University Press, 2009). Professor Gageâs book is an exploration and reexamination of the policies and circumstances that lead to the bombing of Wall Street in 1920. The anarchists were a very different group in terms of background, education as well as in objectives than the fringe in the New Left who decided that bombs directed against property would somehow (mysteriously!) help bring an end to the War in Southeast Asia.
I arrested the bomb maker for MIRA in May of 1970 and he was ultimately convicted of 46 bombings in the NYC area. Those were certainly exciting times.
Less than a month later, members of the Weather Underground living in Greenwich Village were killed in an explosion when one of the bombs they were storing exploded, setting of a chain reaction with the rest of the explosives in the home. Diana Oughton, Ted Gold, and Terry Robbins were killed in the blast. In a report on the explosion, the FBI ...
Less than a month later, members of the Weather Underground living in Greenwich Village were killed in an explosion when one of the bombs they were storing exploded, setting of a chain reaction with the rest of the explosives in the home. Diana Oughton, Ted Gold, and Terry Robbins were killed in the blast. In a report on the explosion, the FBI claims that the group was housing enough explosives to destroy both sides of the street.
Beginning as a faction of Students for a Democratic Society, the Weather Underground declared all out war on the United States of America. Their transgressions made in protest against the Vietnam War ranged from staged riots to a series of bombings perpetrated against federal buildings. On March 1, 1971, the group detonated an explosion at ...
After the deaths of their friends in New York the remaining members of the Weather Underground met in California to rethink their strategy. They felt that it was important to destroy public and government property to remind Americans that the U.S. government was responsible for what was happening in Vietnam, but they didn't want to hurt anyone. They began picking targets that would be empty during the evenings, and they went out of their way to make sure that no one was in the area when an explosive was detonated.
Capitol and the Pentagon. The group's aim to form a "classless communist world" never came to fruition, but the often violent tactics of the Weather Underground took the beliefs of the anti-establishment movements ...
On May 19, 1972, the group placed an explosive device inside a bathroom at the Pentagon to celebrate Ho Chi Minh's birthday. Once again, no was hurt but the explosion did cause flooding and the destruction of government computer systems.
Members of the group traveled to Cuba one month later where they met with representatives from North Vietnam and discussed tactics and training. In 1975, a Senate Judiciary Committee alleged that the group also received explosives during this visit.
The first actual bombing campaign, the work of a group of New York City radicals led by a militant named Sam Melville, featured attacks on a dozen buildings around Manhattan between August and November 1969, when Melville and most of his pals were arrested.
And the violence actually grew more deadly as the number of underground groups dwindled and grew more desperate; the deadliest year for underground violence was 1981 , when eleven people were killed in bombings and bank robberies gone bad.
The deadliest underground attack of the decade, in fact, killed all of four people, in the January 1975 bombing of a Wall Street restaurant.
It may be hard to recall now, but there was a time when most Americans were decidedly more blasĂŠ about bombing attacks. This was during the 1970s, when protest bombings in America were commonplace, especially in hard-hit cities like New York, Chicago and San Francisco. Nearly a dozen radical underground groups, dimly remembered outfits such as the Weather Underground, the New World Liberation Front and the Symbionese Liberation Army, set off hundreds of bombs during that tumultuous decadeâso many, in fact, that many people all but accepted them as a part of daily life. As one woman sniffed to a New York Post reporter after an attack by a Puerto Rican independence group in 1977: âOh, another bombing? Who is it this time?ââ
The underground groups of the 1970s were a kind of grungy, bell-bottomed coda to the protests of the 1960s; their members were mostly onetime student leftists who refused to give up the utopian dreams of 1968. While little remembered today, there was a time during the early 1970s when the U.S. governmentâthe Nixon Administrationâconsidered these groups a genuine threat to national security. Alarmed by a series of Weatherman attacks, Nixon told J. Edgar Hoover during a June 1970 Oval Office meeting that ârevolutionary terrorâ represented the single greatest threat to American society. Hoover promised to do what he could, which wasnât much.
Construction workers and policemen stand around a pile of rubble in the police headquarters building after a bombing by the Weathermen Underground Organization, an offshoot of the SDS, New York, June 9, 1970. T oday, fifteen years after the 9/11 attacks, the explosion of a bomb remains a very big deal in this ...
Alarmed by a series of Weatherman attacks, Nixon told J. Edgar Hoover during a June 1970 Oval Office meeting that ârevolutionary terrorâ represented ...