Records
Bad Moon Rising: How the Weather Underground Beat the FBI and Lost the Revolution — Arthur Eckstein (2016)
Arthur Eckstein's history of the Weather Underground, drawing heavily on FBI files. Covers the 1976 split and the emergence of PFOC, the May 19th Communist Organization, and the Resistance Conspiracy formation.
Clayton Van Lydegraf — FBI File
FBI file on Clayton Van Lydegraf (1915–1992), the veteran Communist Party USA member turned Weather Underground / PFOC theorist who was the political mentor of the post-1976 PFOC. Arrested in November 1977 as part of the 'LA 5' on conspiracy/explosives charges. The file documents decades of FBI surveillance from the Smith Act era through the Weather Undergro...
Erosion of Law Enforcement Intelligence and its Impact on the Public Security — Senate Hearings, 1978
1978 Senate Subcommittee hearings (95th Congress) lamenting the post-Church Committee curtailment of FBI domestic intelligence. PFOC, the Weather Underground, the FALN, and the BLA are repeatedly cited as the threats the committee believed the FBI was no longer monitoring adequately. A key document for understanding the political backlash that fed the FBI's...
Outlaws of America: The Weather Underground and the Politics of Solidarity — Dan Berger (2006)
Dan Berger's history of the Weather Underground and its post-1976 successor formations, including extensive treatment of PFOC's role as the above-ground political organization of the anti-imperialist white left. Indispensable for understanding PFOC's place in the broader anti-imperialist solidarity tradition.
Prairie Fire: The Politics of Revolutionary Anti-Imperialism — The Political Statement of the Weather Underground
1974 political statement of the Weather Underground Organization, produced clandestinely and distributed via the U.S. radical-left press during the group's underground period. The 156-page manifesto sets out the WUO's analysis of U.S. imperialism in the wake of Vietnam, the Watergate-era state-crisis, the Indochinese revolutions, the Black liberation movemen...
The Split Of The Weather Underground Organization
Movement document on the 1976–77 split of the Weather Underground Organization that produced both the Prairie Fire Organizing Committee and the John Brown Anti-Klan Committee tendency on one side, and the 'Revolutionary Committee' that issued the 1976 self-criticism on the other. Essential context for the political conditions under which PFOC consolidated it...
The Way the Wind Blew: A History of the Weather Underground — Ron Jacobs (1997)
Ron Jacobs's history of the Weather Underground Organization — the immediate political predecessor of PFOC. Covers the 1969 founding through the 1976–77 split that produced PFOC and the May 19th Communist Organization.
Threats to the Peaceful Observance of the Bicentennial — Senate Subcommittee Hearing, June 18, 1976
Hearing before the Senate Subcommittee to Investigate the Administration of the Internal Security Act and Other Internal Security Laws (the 'Eastland Subcommittee') of the Committee on the Judiciary, 94th Congress, 2nd Session. One of the most extensive government documents on the Weather Underground Organization and the newly above-ground Prairie Fire Organ...
You Don't Need a Weatherman to Know Which Way the Wind Blows (1969)
The founding political document of the Weather Underground Organization, presented at the June 18, 1969 Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) National Convention in Chicago by the faction that called itself the Revolutionary Youth Movement. Co-authored by Karen Ashley, Bill Ayers, Bernardine Dohrn, John Jacobs, Jeff Jones, Gerry Long, Howie Machtinger, Jim...
Bring the War Home
Compilation on the U.S. anti-imperialist armed-struggle tradition — Weather Underground, May 19 Communist Organization, United Freedom Front — that took the slogan "Bring the war home" literally during the Vietnam War and after. Sourced from azinelibrary.org (Anarchist Zine Library).