Weatherman Underground

Cathy Wilkerson will give a talk about her memoir Flying Close to the Sun. The book is a stunning memoir of a white middle-class girl from Connecticut who became a member of the Weather Underground, one of the most notorious groups of the 1960s. Wilkerson, who famously escaped the Greenwich Village townhouse explosion, wrestles with the legacy of the movement, at times finding contradictions that many others have avoided: the absence of women’s voices then, and in the retelling; the incompetence and the egos; the hundreds of bombs detonated in protest which caused little loss of life but which were also ineffective in fomenting revolution. In searching for new paradigms for change, Wilkerson asserts with brave humanity and confessional honesty an assessment of her past and somehow finds hope and faith in a world that at times seems to offer neither.

Susan Tipograph, a famous criminal defense attorney, will also present. In private practice for forty years, Tipograph has worked on notable cases like Lynne Stewart (the radical attorney who was arrested and jailed in NYC for her role in aiding terrorism), the eight plaintiffs who sued the FBI, Richard Nixon, and individual FBI officials for COINTELPRO activities by the government in their search for members of the Weather Underground Organization, one of the most notorious groups of the 1960s.

The event, sponsored by the Social Justice Committee, is free and open to the public.