John Gregory Jacobs
Biography
John Gregory Jacobs, commonly known as “J.J.”, was a Students for a Democratic Society leader and a principal founder and theoretician of the Weatherman faction. He was a leading author of the 1969 statement “You Don't Need a Weatherman to Know Which Way the Wind Blows” and helped plan the October 1969 Days of Rage in Chicago. The best contemporary evidence indicates that Jacobs was arrested during the final march on October 11, 1969 and released on bail after a brief period in custody. A federal grand jury subsequently indicted him on conspiracy and Federal Anti-Riot Act charges arising from the demonstrations.
Jacobs went underground in 1970 but was expelled from the Weather organization after its leaders rejected the strategy associated with him following the Greenwich Village townhouse explosion. Using the identity Wayne Curry, he eventually settled in Vancouver, British Columbia, where he remained concealed for the rest of his life, working in construction and other manual trades, as a tree planter and as a stonecutter. The principal federal charges were abandoned in 1973, and his federal warrant was reportedly dropped in October 1979. Jacobs died of complications of metastatic melanoma in Vancouver on October 20, 1997, aged fifty.
On the arrest date: some later summaries say he was arrested almost immediately, during the opening-night disturbance of October 8. A contemporary eyewitness account has him still at liberty at Haymarket Square immediately before the final Saturday march, addressing the crowd and specifically not yet arrested, and another contemporary account reports that by the end of that march all the Weatherman leaders were in custody. October 11 is the better-supported date and is what this record uses.
On his birth date: this record previously gave February 2, 1947. The Vancouver Magazine investigation, based on interviews with his brother, his partner, friends and former associates, gives his full name and a birth date of September 30, 1947.
