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Now teach-ins are fairly common or they become common place. But in 1965, the Students for Democratic Society in Ann Harbor organized the first teach-in. The way it happened was that we were advocating for a strike that we advocated that the faculty should strike in solidarity with the Vietnamese struggle.

Bill Ayers

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Bill Ayers
Age: 79
Born: 1944
Born: December 26
Autobiographer
Journalist
Peace Activist
Pedagogue
Philosopher
Professor
University Teacher
Glen Ellyn
Illinois
William Charles Bill Ayers
William Charles Ayers
Firsts
Students
Harbors
First
Struggle
Solidarity
Way
Teach
Strike
Happened
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Vietnamese
Place
Strikes
Advocating
Become
Democratic
Harbor

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I've said for thirty years that capitalism is an exhausted system. But now you can see the handwriting everywhere. And one especially horrifying part is the fiscal crisis.
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The Right said, [Barack Obama] is lying, he's a socialist who pals around with terrorists, he's a secret Muslim and blah blah blah. That was their line. The liberals all said, He's winking at me, I can feel him winking in my direction. He wasn't winking. He said exactly who he was and he's lived that out perfectly.
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It was Frederick Douglass, John Brown, Harriet Tubman, Wendell Phillips - these were the people who made abolition real. Now, none of you guys is in favor of slavery, right?
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What were the politics of my family? They were mainstream moderate politics.
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It's the height of the Cold War, but I grew up in apolitical family and politics wasn't on the agenda.
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Every revolution seems impossible at the beginning, and after it happens, it was inevitable.
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Part of the fun of writing, touring, teaching, is engaging with real people about all of it: what to do now, how to build a movement, of approaches to teaching, of parenting - it's exciting to be in that dialogue.
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I knew Barack Obama, absolutely. And I knew him probably as well as thousands of other Chicagoans.
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You will be raising these kids in your mind your whole life. And they will change you. Your little contribution to it - twenty years from now, they'll be marching off into other things and that's still the legacy you leave.
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I wasn't part of John Kennedy's vision of the world, or Lyndon Johnson's. I thought of them as anti-Communist imperial monsters.
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I don't regret setting bombs.
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Being an activist and an artist - those two things should go together. You should allow the artistic sensibility to control some of your activism, but never should it be allowed to paralyze you.
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That's what [Abraham] Lincoln said. The white man will always be above the black man. I don't want them to run for office, or have political rights, or vote. I want them to go back to Africa.
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I would say for the young: Don't be straight jacketed by ideology. Don't be driven by a structure of ideas.
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The idea that you live your life in phases - I've never bought that. I feel like I'm the same person who sat in at the draft board in 1965, I'm the same person who joined a fraternity, I'm the same person who got an MFA at Bennington, and I'm the same person who founded Weather Underground. My values are still intact.
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My brother and I met several times during that weekend trying to figure out what we were each going to do, and we met for breakfast the morning of the sit-in and I had decided that I was going to go get arrested, and he decided that he was going to have the harder job and go tell our parents that I'd been arrested.
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This 1965. We went to trial on our city. We were obviously borrowing tactics and strategy from the Black freedom movement, and we were echoing their approach to things.
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Now you may like the images of long-haired hippies running in the streets throwing tear gas canisters, but we didn't end the war. And that's what we set out to do. What was not ended by the anti-war movement was ended by the Vietnamese. That's our shame.
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Everyone who knew [Barack] Obama from being in Hyde Park knew he was the smartest guy in any room he walked into a decent, compassionate, lovely person pragmatic, middle-of-the-road and ambitious.
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I more or less shared the view that life should be lived.
Bill Ayers