Daily Ramblings:
Johnny's In The Basement ...01/12/2005 09:58:17 am
In Chronicles, Dylan
writes (not warmly) about the Weathermen, who took
their name from a line in Subterranean
Homesick Blues. That
link is unfortunately forever present, almost always
brought up when the group's deeds are written about.
As here, in this story on
a church in Illinois that
was ultimately destroyed in part by a clash between
the left wing activists who sympathized with that
group and normal churchgoers who just wanted, well,
to go to church.
... Having enjoyed a period of
growth and optimism in the 1950s, when membership
hit a high of 1,700, the 1960s brought a new,
younger brand of liberal pastors who rattled
conservatives by pushing for social activism. ...
... With the congregation split
over the war, tension rose as the new pastors led
marches, invited long-haired seminary students to
teach Sunday school and found creative,
nontraditional ways to lead services. ...
Nelson, now retired and living
in Indiana, made the decision to allow members of
Students for a Democratic Society, or SDS, to
spend two nights in the church. He recalled
wrestling with the decision, feeling that the
church could not turn its back on the nation's
youth, who opposed a war that many considered
unjust.
Several United Methodist
ministers in Evanston sympathized with the
protesters, although they did not advocate
violence, Nelson said.
"We were really a
polarized society over the war with
Vietnam," Nelson said. "Many of us felt
it was a war of futility."
But the protesters
misrepresented themselves, said Nelson, 71.
"They told us they were the nonviolent
group," he said.
Nelson quickly found out that
he had sheltered the Weathermen,
a splinter group of the SDS that advocated
violence to "bring the war home." The
protesters also stayed at two other United
Methodist churches and at Garrett-Evangelical
Theological Seminary, all in Evanston.
"We had no idea what we
were in for," said Don Baker, 59, of
Evanston, who was a Garrett Seminary student who
helped coordinate the arrival of SDS members.
Today he heads a social service agency for youth.
"These were leather
jackets, combat boots, chains and nightsticks.
Wild talk_heading-into-the-street kind of talk.
They were barricading doors. We were freaking
out. This was not what anybody had in mind,"
he said.
Among the people being
"sheltered" were:
... Mark Rudd, Angela Davis and
Brian Flanagan, all notorious for their later
exploits with the Weathermen, said Brotheridge. The
group, named after the Bob Dylan song lyrics,
"You don't need a weatherman to know which
way the wind blows," later bombed
public targets including the U.S. Capitol, police
and prison buildings.
The police came to arrest the
Weathermen, in what became a violent and bloody
clash. Divisions dating back to those events
continued to take their toll over the years.
Today, the 92-year-old church
has shut its doors. A sign advertising that the
building at 2123 Harrison St. will be auctioned
Feb. 15 has churned up memories of that 1969
event, which former ministers and parishioners
agree was the flash point that fueled a painful
decline from which Covenant would never recover.
In Chronicles, Dylan's mention of the
Weathermen comes amidst a list of what he considered
hopeful indications back around 1970 that his
unwanted status as leader of the counterculture was
eroding:
Even the Russian newspaper Pravda
had called me a money hungry capitalist.
Even the Weathermen, a notorious group who made
homemade bombs in basements to blow up public
buildings, who had taken their name from a line
in one of my songs, had recently changed their
name from the Weathermen to the Weather
Undergound. I was losing all kinds of
credibility.
However, some marriages are
forever, whether you like it or not, and it's no
doubt true that someone will write something on the
1960s and the Weathermen fifty years from now, and it
will be said yet again that they took their name from
a Bob Dylan song. It's just important that it also be
remembered that though they took it, Dylan
didn't give it to them.
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