> June 2006
> by Ron Jacobs
>
> Dan Berger, Outlaws of America: The Weather Underground and the Politics of
> Solidarity(San Francisco: AK Press, 2006), 450 pages, paperback, $20.00.
> [clip]
> The
> only answer I felt necessary to provide then was that if we truly wanted to
> understand history, then we must examine it all. This meant that WUO was
> worth examining along with the New Mobe, SCLC, the Black Panthers, and all
> the other organizations and coalitions that were part of the historical
> period known in the United States as the sixties. This answer is still met
> with resistance by those historians and nostalgia buffs that like to
> pretend that groups like the Panthers and WUO were aberrations and
It is a serious distortion to put the Panthers and the WUO in the same phrase. Fred Hampton, for example, spent the last months of his life explaining to black high school students why the Weathermen were wrong.
The Panthers (like every branch of the movement) certainly had serious faults, but it is outrageous to compare them to the Weathermen. The Panthers were not like the Weathermen, and the Weathermen were not like the Panthers, and it corrupts understanding of both, and of the '60s, to suggest otherwise.
Carrol