In June 1969, at the Students for a Democratic Society convention in Chicago, a militant faction seized control of the organization and issued a manifesto titled "You Don't Need a Weatherman to Know Which Way the Wind Blows," borrowing a line from Bob Dylan. Calling themselves the Weathermen, they argued that the time for mass student protest had passed and that revolutionaries inside the imperialist United States had a duty to take direct, militant action in solidarity with Black liberation and Third World anti-colonial struggles.
The Weatherman takeover effectively destroyed SDS, the largest organization of the 1960s New Left, splitting it into warring factions. Rejecting the patient organizing of the student movement, the Weathermen set out to "bring the war home" — to make the cost of the Vietnam War felt inside the United States.