Weathermen Underground Poster, Penn State, 1969

Weathermen Underground Poster, Penn State, 1969

Few student political organizations had a bigger impact than Students for Democratic Society, which was conceived in the twilight of the Eisenhower era but held its first national convention in 1962 during the Kennedy Administration’s efforts to expand civil rights across the south. Following its Port Huron Statement, which was penned by Tom Hayden and issued as the SDS manifesto debuted at the group’s first national conclave, the group’s power on campuses grew dramatically across the American landscape as the turmoil over civil rights and the war in Vietnam. But in the aftermath of the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago and the election of Richard Nixon to the White House that same year, SDS collapsed into internecine warfare between rival factions. The Weathermen faction emerged in 1969, named after Bob Dylan’s Subterranean Homesick Blues in which the folk artist sings: “You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows,” and unleased a wave of street violence in October 1969 that targeted Chicago in what the group called its Days of Rage campaign. This poster, produced by an underground print facility of the era, uses a court-ordered injunction against student members of the SDS/Weatherman faction who had been protesting at Penn State University as its backdrop, over which a stenciled red clenched fist is place—the fist being the icon of the radical left in the late 1960s. The court order is dated April 24, 1970, and two weeks later, the National Guard opened fire at Kent State University in Ohio, killing four students and marking the beginning of the Weatherman’s transformation into the Weather Underground Organization and its decade-long campaign of bombings across the United States. This poster survives a time when it undoubtedly adorned the safehouse abode of the radical underground railroad.

Dimensions: Nineteen inches horizontally, Twenty-five inches vertically (19 x 25”)

Condition: Good, with some very minor tears along the edges.