The FBI's fevered response included the formation of a secret task force called Squad 47, dedicated to hunting the groups down and rolling them up.

Capitol, at a Boston courthouse and a Wall Street restaurant packed with lunchtime diners. In Days of Rage, Bryan Burrough re-creates an atmosphere that seems almost unbelievable just forty years later, conjuring a time of native-born radicals, most of them 'nice middle-class kids,' smuggling bombs into skyscrapers and detonating them inside the Pentagon and the U.S. The FBI combated these and other groups as nodes in a single revolutionary underground, dedicated to the violent overthrow of the American government. But there was a time in America, during the 1970s, when bombings by domestic underground groups were a daily occurrence. The names seem quaint now, when not forgotten altogether. Burrough’s account of how Donald DeFreeze, a nonintellectual, bungling burglar, reinvented himself as Cinque M’tume and with the aid of gullible white accomplices made himself and the SLA temporarily notorious, is exceptional.From the bestselling author of Public Enemies and The Big Rich, an explosive account of the decade-long battle between the FBI and the homegrown revolutionary movements of the 1970s He memorably describes how prisons became the most effective terrorist training grounds for black inmates, many of whom studied African history in government-approved seminars and emerged as free men steeped in ancestral grudges and ready to avenge them.

Three cell members were killed.īurrough hits the obvious high points - Weather’s Days of Rage attack on a tony Chicago suburb in October 1969 the kidnapping of Patricia Hearst by the SLA in February 1974 - but his best work lies in evocative glimpses into the recruitment and day-to-day activities of the radicals.

Often, the white amateurs were most dangerous to themselves, particularly on March 6, 1970, when a Weatherman branch blew up their Greenwich Village townhouse base while trying to construct bombs to attack an army dance at Fort Dix, N.J. BLA leaders hid out in vermin-ridden ghettos while Weather’s decision makers plotted in gated communities and oceanfront mini-mansions. Burrough’s contrast between the inner workings of the Weather Underground and the Black Liberation Army is especially informative.

Days of Rage by Bryan Burrough