Bernardine Rae Dohrn (née Ohrnstein; born January 12, 1942) is a retired American law professor and a former leader of the far-left militant organization Weather Underground in the United States.

[1] Her father, Bernard D. Ohrnstein, changed the family surname to Dohrn (his middle initial plus the first letters of his last name) when Bernardine was in high school.

[2] Her father was Jewish, although the name change was intended to obscure that,[3] and her mother, Dorothy (née Soderberg), was of Swedish background and a Christian Scientist.

[6] Dohrn became one of the leaders of the Revolutionary Youth Movement (RYM), a radical wing of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), in the late 1960s.

Dohrn with ten other SDS members associated with the RYM issued, on June 18, 1969, a sixteen-thousand-word manifesto entitled "You Don't Need a Weatherman to Know Which Way the Wind Blows", in New Left Notes.

"[8] The manifesto concludes with the following: The RYM must also lead to the effective organization needed to survive and to create another battlefield of the revolution.

[9][10] Larry Grathwohl, an FBI informant who was with the Weathermen from autumn 1969 through spring 1970, considered her one of the two top leaders of the organization, along with Bill Ayers.

"[13] Dohrn continued to give speeches on behalf of SDS and Weather Underground and attend leadership conferences for both organizations.

On January 29 and 30, 1969, in recognition of the tenth anniversary of the Cuban Revolution, the University of Washington held a Cuba teach-in where Dohrn was a speaker on campus.

[14] The Weather Underground was a radical left militant organization responsible for bombings of the United States Capitol, the Pentagon, and several police stations in New York, as well as the Greenwich Village townhouse explosion that killed three of its members.

Dohrn also co-wrote (with Bill Ayers) and published the subversive manifesto Prairie Fire in 1974 and participated in the covertly filmed Underground in 1976.

... We discovered thru our own experiences what revolutionaries all over the world have found — that Marxism-Leninism is the science of revolution, the revolutionary ideology of the working class, our guide to the struggle ...According to a 1974 FBI study of the group, Dohrn's article signaled a developing commitment to Marxism-Leninism that had not been clear in the group's previous statements, despite their trips to Cuba and contact with Vietnamese communists there.

[16] Dohrn was criticized for comments she made about the murders of actress Sharon Tate and retail store owners Leno and Rosemary LaBianca by the Charles Manson clan.

On September 20, 1969, at an anti-Vietnam War rally at the Davis Cup tennis tournament in Cleveland, police arrested Dohrn and twenty other persons on charges of disorderly conduct.

Dohrn was next arrested on October 9, 1969, by the Chicago police during a rally for the women's faction of the Weathermen group and was later released on a $1,000 bond.

During the last years of their underground life, Dohrn and Ayers resided in Chicago, where they used the aliases Christine Louise Douglas and Anthony J.

[26] After refusing to testify against ex-Weatherman Susan Rosenberg in an armed robbery case,[24] Dohrn was held in contempt of a grand jury[27] and served seven months in prison.

[28] Shortly after turning themselves in, Dohrn and Ayers became legal guardians of future San Francisco District Attorney Chesa Boudin, the son of former members of the Weather Underground Kathy Boudin and David Gilbert, after the couple were convicted of murder for their roles in a 1981 armored car robbery.

Referring to the August 28, 2010 Restoring Honor rally which was promoted by Glenn Beck and held at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C., Dorhn said, "You have white people armed, demanding the end to the [Obama] presidency."