By Joseph Epstein
What's in a name? Consider the name of Zayd Ayers Dohrn, the author of "Dangerous, Dirty, Violent, and Young." His first name derives from that of Zayd Shakur, the minister of information of the East Coast Panthers, a radical group formed in the late 1960s. Ayers was his father's name, his father being William Ayers, a leader of the Students for a Democratic Society $(SDS)$, a founder of the terrorist group the Weather Underground and a relentless organizer on behalf of revolution. Dohrn was his mother's name, and she, Bernardine Dohrn, was a fellow member of the Weather Underground, as well as the fourth woman to appear on the FBI's 10 Most Wanted List. Quite a bit, it would seem, can be in a name.
The subtitle of Zayd Ayers Dohrn's book is "A Fugitive Family in the Revolutionary Underground." Reading it, I was more than grateful for the ticket I had drawn in the parent lottery. Throughout his book, Mr. Dohrn, who was born in 1977, wonders how much he, his younger brother and his foster brother really meant to their parents. As a child he feared, and he reports he fears still, that next to their commitment to revolution, perhaps not all that much.
"Dangerous, Dirty, Violent, and Young" (the title derives from a Jefferson Airplane song) is ultimately an account of being brought up by parents who rarely put him and his brothers ahead of their radical left-wing politics. Well into the book, he writes that, after his birth, his parents claimed they had given up on their fight to try to build a better world. But he knows better, calling this "a myth," adding that "Bill and Bernardine were still desperate to be part of something larger than themselves. Larger than their relationship. Larger, even, than our family." That seems to remain true to this day.
The book offers an account of both of his parents' revolutionary careers. Neither was brought up in a radically political family. Both came to their politics in their early adulthood.
His mother, whom J. Edgar Hoover would call "the most dangerous woman in America," was born into a middle-class home and grew up in a suburb north of Milwaukee. Strikingly good-looking and an excellent student, she went off to college at Miami of Ohio, where she was rejected by every sorority on campus because she was Jewish. Doubtless this rejection set her off on her political path.
Soon, the author explains, Ms. Dohrn transferred to the University of Chicago, where she fell in with the political faction among the students. (Bernie Sanders, later a firebrand senator, attended at the same time.) She went on to law school, though at the time she had little interest in a legal career. She would work with Martin Luther King Jr. on his rent strike in Chicago and, her son reports, had a single magical meeting with Muhammad Ali.
Ms. Dohrn would later have a hand in planning the student riots in Chicago in 1968. "I consider myself a revolutionary Communist," she declared when she was elected to the SDS national board that year. "There's no way to be committed to nonviolence," she said, "in the middle of the most violent society history has ever created." Her hatred for America was unqualified.
Mr. Dohrn writes of Bernardine Dohrn's life in the late 1960s:
Over the next year and a half, she would be arrested nearly a dozen times. She would brawl with riot cops on the streets in Chicago, split SDS in half to follow the leadership of the Black militant vanguard, travel to Havana to meet up with real-life global revolutionaries, and become the focus of simultaneous FBI, CIA, and congressional investigations. . . . [She] would submerge into the underground, declare war on the United States, set off bombs across the country, and wind up on the FBI's Ten Most Wanted list."
William Ayers grew up in the middle-class Chicago suburb of Glen Ellyn, the son of a high-level executive at Commonwealth Edison (he would eventually become its Chief Executive Officer). In 1963 Mr. Ayers went off to college at the University of Michigan, at the time the residence of the political organizer Tom Hayden and the scene of the founding of SDS. Not political before then, Mr. Ayers began showing up at protests. Soon he quit his fraternity and not long after dropped out of school.
The Weather Underground became infamous for placing bombs at the New York City Police Headquarters, the U.S. Capitol and the Pentagon. The author's mother and father went into hiding and had their first child, Mr. Dohrn, in 1977, while they were living as fugitives. A few years later they had a second son, and in late 1980 finally turned themselves in and accepted a plea bargain. They didn't marry until 1982, when Ms. Dohrn was 40 and Mr. Ayers was in his late 30s. They settled in Hyde Park, Chicago, where they also raised Chesa Boudin, the son of comrades who were serving long prison terms.
The author has an excellent few paragraphs on what he calls "the big leap -- from liberalism to radicalism." Both his parents took it. Finding injustice all around the world and feeling the pressing need to fight against it, he writes, "you may even become willing to sacrifice yourself -- or your family -- to help people on the other side of the world." Why his parents wanted children at all is less than particularly clear, from his account. Perhaps to supply fighters for the continuing revolution.
While "Dangerous, Dirty, Violent, and Young" provides a minihistory of radical activity, both black and white, from the middle 1960s until the end of the Vietnam War in 1975, the book's most interesting passages take up its author's reaction to his parents' radicalism as a child and then an adolescent. In the author's nursery, we learn, there were pictures of Che Guevara, Malcolm X and Ho Chi Minh. From early childhood he was taught to identify and steer clear of FBI, CIA and plainclothes policemen. He recalls his family going on long trips disguised, in effect, as an ordinary family, and the emotional toll this took on him.
By the time Mr. Dohrn was 14, he tells us, "I'd been to literally hundreds of protests: for abortion rights and nuclear disarmament; against South African apartheid, CIA assassinations, and racist police violence; to undam the Klamath and to save the whales. In my family, we went to protests and demonstrations the way some families go tailgating -- a near-weekly ritual of family bonding and community and tradition." Yet none of this finally came to feel normal for Mr. Dohrn.
"Marching in protests always made me feel self-conscious and out of place," he writes, "like a bad extra in a movie, playing an assigned role." He was well aware of the limits of these protests: "Of course I knew, in the back of my mind, that smashing up downtown Chicago wasn't going to help the cause or stop the war. But that rational thought was overwhelmed by the rush of doing something."
Today, now nearly 50 and with children of his own, the author is a playwright and screenwriter and the director of the Master of Fine Arts in Writing for Screen and Stage program at Northwestern University. He continues to march in protests, as when he did so against white supremacists in Charlottesville, Va., and against police violence in Ferguson, Mo. "I still feel uncomfortable being part of a protest or crowd," he writes at one point. His father, the old radical, responds: "There is something good about being in the crowd, about being comrades, shoulder to shoulder with others. And I think there is also something absolutely destructive about it."
I concluded "Dangerous, Dirty, Violent, and Young" struck by how much better it is not to feel the need to fight full time against the world but to feel instead reasonably contented, indeed privileged, to live in it as it is. Or at least to have parents who do.
--Mr. Epstein is author of "Never Say You've Had a Lucky Life."
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
May 29, 2026 12:42 ET (16:42 GMT)
Copyright (c) 2026 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
Comments