The Crazy True Story Of The Weather Underground

The U.S. government agreed to a cease-fire accord in Vietnam in 1973, a tipping point in the anti-war protests leading up to it, at times with more than 50,000 people taking their power to the streets. By March of that year, American troops had withdrawn, but the movements and protests it sparked continued. In the end, the cease-fire and troop withdrawal did little to help the Vietnamese people but rather served as a "face-saving gesture" by the US, according to History: "Even before the last American troops departed on March 29, the communists violated the cease-fire, and by early 1974 full-scale war had resumed."

And the Weather Underground's explosive protests raged on, too, targeting high-value locations like the U.S. Department of Health, Education and Welfare in San Francisco, Gulf Oil's Pittsburgh headquarters, and the State Department in Washington, DC. The militants also continued communiqués advancing the cause of black liberation, social justice, and political upheaval, including the Prairie Fire, issued in 1974. The document was the group's "political ideology — a strategy for anti-imperialism and revolution inside the imperial US" that called on others to join the cause and advance it.

Ultimately, by 1976, the momentum slowed, and the Weather Underground started to disband, a process that would take the next five years ... and see the re-emergence of a number of its fugitive members into mainstream society.

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