The May 19th Communist Organization was founded in 1978 in New York by cadre from the collapsed Weather Underground and the Prairie Fire Organizing Committee — most prominently women, including Judith Clark, Susan Rosenberg, Marilyn Buck, Silvia Baraldini, Laura Whitehorn, and Linda Evans. Rejecting the Weather leadership's turn back toward open organizing, May 19th held that the primary duty of white revolutionaries was direct, material support for Black and Puerto Rican armed movements — above all the Black Liberation Army and the FALN — under Third-World leadership.
The organization operated above ground through solidarity committees and clinics while sustaining a clandestine apparatus of safehouses, false documents, and logistics. That dual structure — legal politics wrapped around an underground — shaped both its actions and the sweeping conspiracy prosecutions that eventually consumed it.