When he was just 3 years old, he learned to recognise undercover agents in a crowd…
The son of the FBI’s most wanted woman tells the electrifying story of a childhood on the run and asks hard questions about today’s appetite for political violence.
“We have to leave. Right away.”
And with that whisper from his mother, four-year-old Zayd Ayers Dorhrn was out the door, on tiptoe, lest he wake the neighbours.
Dohrn, now a highly acclaimed playwright, was born into a fugitive family in the violent revolutionary underground (the loose inspiration for the film One Battle After Another), leaving him with curiosity about his family legacy and its lessons for today’s pervasive political violence.
In the late 60s – during an intense period of political violence in 20th century America — Dohrn’s parents Bernardine Dohrn and William Ayers, belonged to the radical Weatherman (later ‘Weather Underground’), a group committed to both social justice and the violent overthrow of the US government.
Join us for a unique conversation with Dohrn about his widely hailed memoir Dangerous, Dirty, Violent and Young, and the hard questions he has about his strange inheritance and the role political violence plays in today’s movements of both right and left agitating for change.
The son of the FBI's most wanted woman tells the electrifying story of a childhood on the run and a half-century of revolutionary struggle in America for readers of Angela Davis' autobiography, THE RETURN by Hisham Matar, and JUST KIDS by Patti Smith