Terry Robbins
This article relies largely or entirely on a single source. (December 2011) |
Terry Robbins | |
---|---|
Born | October 4, 1947 Queens County, New York, USA |
Died | March 6, 1970 , USA | (aged 22)
Known for | Student activism |
Terry Robbins (October 4, 1947 – March 6, 1970) was an American
Early life
Terry Robbins was raised in
Two years after his mother's death, Robbins' father remarried. Robbins became withdrawn and buried himself in schoolwork. He also began to turn to poetry and music as a refuge, and with his sister and cousins discovered the musical world of the
After graduating from
In the following 1966 spring semester, he was able to team up with the chaplain of the school and organize a Student-Faculty Committee on the Vietnam War. In an informal letter to Magidoff, Robbins spoke of his successful strategy at the Kenyon College campus and how he was able to get the support of "five faculty members and at least eighteen students to gather together and attempt to make a case for a critical approach to American foreign policy."[1]
After Kenyon College (1966–1967)
After his sophomore year in 1966, Robbins decided to drop out of Kenyon College due to his unpopularity and inability to recruit students for his SDS chapter.[1] He began his summer working with the Cleveland Project, which was concentrating their efforts on creating an alternative school for children to attend in order to escape the perceived racial inequalities of the public school system.[3] It was then that Robbins met Bill Ayers and Diana Oughton, other SDS members that were a part of the Children's Community in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Ayers and Robbins' interest in writing became a bond between them; they collaborated for the first time, authoring a lengthy paper called Turn Toward Children, which discussed the educational and political philosophies of the Children's Community of both Ann Arbor and Cleveland.[1] At the end of that summer Robbins left Cleveland and joined Ayers and Oughton in Ann Arbor to spend some time trying to use the long history of SDS to encourage more student activity at the University of Michigan.[1] Robbins felt he had more in common with the members of the Michigan SDS. They were a much younger chapter than in Cleveland and they all shared a great passion for music and sarcasm.[1]
Jesse James Gang (1968)
Working in partnership with Jim Mellen from the Revolutionary Youth Movement, Ayers, Oughton, and Robbins began a new faction of the Ann Arbor SDS set out to transform SDS's identity in their area.[3] They were excited by the idea of militancy and in the words of writer Jeremy Varon, they used "confrontational action, in your face politics and their boisterous, even anarchic, spirit to help build large SDS chapters at colleges and universities everywhere."[3] Robbins and the other founding members recognized that the politics of the old SDS did not command any appeal to their younger student members.[1] The gang felt that the younger students were now being attracted by culture and not by politics.[1] They were in search for validation in their anger over the war.[1] As a main member of the gang, Robbins and the others embarked on a project that included: classroom disruptions, burning exams, public critiques of courses/and professors, and the disruption of the upcoming presidential elections.[1]
Case Western Reserve University and Kent State (1968)
As student activism and community organizing became two of his passions, Robbins traveled to other surrounding campuses to help other students establish their own SDS chapters.[1] While traveling back to the Cleveland area, Ohio SDS Regional staff member Lisa Meisel and several other students passed out leaflets that drew about a hundred people to Case Western Reserve University to hear Robbins and Ayers talk about the possibility of a revolution. They addressed the issues of the draft, university complicity, women's liberation, and the protest of the upcoming presidential election.[1] The following day, Robbins and Ayers led sixty students in a "shout-down" demonstration disrupting presidential candidate Hubert Humphrey's speech.[1]
During a 1968 spring semester visit to Kent State, one of Ohio's most radical chapters,[3] Robbins was able to convince a small group of activists in using a more forceful approach in their demonstration methods. In a statement from Robbins and Meisel titled The War At Kent State, both claimed that a war was on at Kent State and demanded the university "abolish ROTC because it protected imperialism by suppressing popular movements at home and abroad, end the Project Themis Grant and the universities involvement in developing sophisticated weaponry used against people's struggles for freedom, abolish the Law Enforcement School and abolish the Northeast Ohio Crime Lab because both institutions defended the American status quo and protected the interests of the ruling class."[4] The first of such action against the university began on April 8, 1969. The SDS held a rally that attracted about 400 people in support of their demands and led 200 of them to march on to the administration buildings and use force to get past the police that were blocking their way.[4] The university responded by suspending seven Kent State students and ended up pressing charges against five other people.[4] Several other rallies were conducted over the next few days while the university continued to ignore the SDS's demands.[4] Robbins and the remainder of the SDS members reaffirmed their demands and added a fifth demand that called for open and collective hearings of the suspended students.[4] On April 16, 1969 fellow SDS member Colin Nieberger's university trial was to be held on campus, 2,000 supporters came to support the rally and approximately 700 of them marched to the Music and Speech building where Nieberger's trial was being conducted.[4] The passage from author Dan Berger's book Outlaws of America describes how Robbins and a few other SDS members "moved past an army of athletes and policemen to successfully disrupt a university hearing on disciplinary and student-power issues."[5] After an hour of struggle the trials were canceled[4] and Robbins was ultimately given credit for being the leader of the first student rebellions at Kent State.[6] Robbins was arrested for his involvement during the demonstrations and was sentenced to serve a three-month prison term for his actions.[1] In December 1969, Robbins served six weeks of his three-month jail sentence in a Cleveland area prison.[1]
Weathermen (1969)
In a special edition of the New Left Notes for the upcoming 1969 SDS National Convention, Robbins and ten other SDS members had created a manifesto for students to become revolutionaries. Taking inspiration from Bob Dylan's track Subterranean Homesick Blues, Robbins had played with the meanings of the line "you don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows" which later became the title for the Weathermen's founding statement for their organization and developed the Weathermen Organization's identity.
In response to the resignation of
Being one of the people in charge of the organizing and planning the national action for the organization, Robbins was based in
"Days of Rage" (1969)
In the publicity of the upcoming "Call for National Action"
New York collective (1969–1970)
After the Chicago demonstration a few members of the Weathermen began developing a secret New York collective.
The explosion
The morning of March 6, 1970, while finishing up preparations to bomb the Non-Commissioned Officers Dance at
Shortly after the explosion, Weathermen leaders placed John Jacobs on indefinite leave from the WUO because he was the main advocate of Robbins' aggressive actions.[10] Terry Robbins was convinced that extreme acts of destruction was the way for the organization to move into a revolution.[3] He was seen as the main source of the Weathermen's aggressive tendencies; as friend Bill Ayers once said, "his extremism was an impulse in all of us."[3]
Because of the explosion, the Weathermen claimed to try not to hurt people:
We were very careful from the moment of the townhouse on to be sure we weren't going to hurt anybody, and we never did hurt anybody. Whenever we put a bomb in a public space, we had figured out all kinds of ways to put checks and balances on the thing and also to get people away from it, and we were remarkably successful.
Notes
- ^ a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p q r s t u v w x y z aa ab ac ad ae af ag ah ai aj ak al am Wilkerson, Cathy (2007). Flying Too Close To The Sun. New York, New York: Seven Stories Press.
- ^ Wilkerson (2001). Z Magazine.
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(help) - ^ a b c d e f g h Varon, Jeremy. Bringing the War Home: The Weather Underground, The Red Army Faction, and Revolutionary Violence In the Sixties and Seventies. University of California Press: Berkeley, California, 2004.
- ^ a b c d e f g Robbins and Meisel (1968) The War At Kent State
- ^ Berger (2006) pg. 112
- ^ Filler (1995) pg. 187
- ^ Jacobs (1997) pg.40
- ^ Jacobs(1997) pg.43
- ^ a b Ayers (2001) pg. 176
- ^ Flanagan,"Next Left Notes - A News Magazine Devoted to Participatory Democracy and Direct Action". Archived from the original on 2006-02-14. Retrieved 2006-02-14.
- ^ The Weather Underground, produced by Carrie Lozano, directed by Bill Siegel and Sam Green, New Video Group, 2003, DVD.
References
- Ayers, Bill. Fugitive Days. Beacon Press: Boston, Massachusetts, 2001.
- Berger, Dan. Outlaws of America: The Weather Underground and the Politics of Solidarity. AK Press: *Oakland, California, 2006.
- Filler, Louis. Vanguard and Followers: Youth in American Tradition. Transaction Publishers: Edison NJ, 1995.
- Flanagan, Brian. https://web.archive.org/web/20060214202459/http://antiauthoritarian.net/NLN/archive/brian_flanagan.html
- Goldman, Andrew. A Charred Madeleine'; The Weathermen's Blast on West 11th Street Still Resounds. New York Times: New York, New York, March 26, 2000.
- Jacobs, Ron. The Way The Wind Blew. Verso: New York, New York, 1997.
- Robbins, Terry and Meisel, Lisa. The War At Kent State. Document, 1968.
- Varon, Jeremy. Bringing the War Home: The Weather Underground, The Red Army Faction, and Revolutionary Violence In the Sixties and Seventies. University of California Press: Berkeley, California, 2004.
- Wilkerson, Cathy. Flying Too Close To The Sun. Seven Stories Press: New York, New York, 2007.
- Wilkerson Cathy. Book Review:Fugitive Days. Z Magazine, Dec. 2001. https://wayback.archive-it.org/all/20070807020415/http://www.zmag.org/ZMag/articles/dec01wilkerson.htm.
External links
- Cleveland Economic Research and Action Program. http://content.cdlib.org/ark:/13030/kt4k4003k7/?&query=&brand=oac.
- The War at Kent State. http://speccoll.library.kent.edu/4may70/box107/107f3p17.html
- Asbley, Karin; Ayers, Bill; Dohrn, Bernardine; Mellen, Jim; Jacobs, John; Jones, Jeff; Tappis, Steve; Long, Gerry; Machtinger, Home; Rudd, Mark; Robbins, Terry (2010). You Don't Need a Weatherman to Know Which Way the Wind Blows. CreateSpace. ISBN 978-1-4537-2675-4. Retrieved May 10, 2014.
- https://web.archive.org/web/20101001160109/http://www.antiauthoritarian.net/sds_wuo/weather/weatherman_document.txt
- http://www.sds-1960s.org/