Terry Robbins was raised in Queens, New York in a Jewish family by his mother Olga, a Hunter College alumna, and father Sam, who worked at a garment factory.
[citation needed] After graduating from Lawrence High School on Long Island,[2] Robbins attended Kenyon College in Ohio in the fall of 1964 and majored in English.
In his first year of college, Robbins heard about Dickie Magidoff, a member of a far left political group called Students for a Democratic Society, who was working in the Cleveland area.
In an informal letter to Magidoff, Robbins spoke of his successful strategy at the Kenyon College campus and how he was able to get the support of "five faculty members and at least eighteen students to gather together and attempt to make a case for a critical approach to American foreign policy.
"[1] After his sophomore year in 1966, Robbins decided to drop out of Kenyon College due to his unpopularity and inability to recruit students for his SDS chapter.
[3] It was then that Robbins met Bill Ayers and Diana Oughton, other SDS members that were a part of the Children's Community in Ann Arbor, Michigan.
[1] At the end of that summer Robbins left Cleveland and joined Ayers and Oughton in Ann Arbor to spend some time trying to use the long history of SDS to encourage more student activity at the University of Michigan.
[3] They were excited by the idea of militancy and in the words of writer Jeremy Varon, they used "confrontational action, in your face politics and their boisterous, even anarchic, spirit to help build large SDS chapters at colleges and universities everywhere.
[1] While traveling back to the Cleveland area, Ohio SDS Regional staff member Lisa Meisel and several other students passed out leaflets that drew about a hundred people to Case Western Reserve University to hear Robbins and Ayers talk about the possibility of a revolution.
[1] The following day, Robbins and Ayers led sixty students in a "shout-down" demonstration disrupting presidential candidate Hubert Humphrey's speech.
[1] During a 1968 spring semester visit to Kent State, one of Ohio's most radical chapters,[3] Robbins was able to convince a small group of activists in using a more forceful approach in their demonstration methods.
The SDS held a rally that attracted about 400 people in support of their demands and led 200 of them to march on to the administration buildings and use force to get past the police that were blocking their way.
[4] The passage from author Dan Berger's book Outlaws of America describes how Robbins and a few other SDS members "moved past an army of athletes and policemen to successfully disrupt a university hearing on disciplinary and student-power issues.
[1] In the publicity of the upcoming "Call for National Action"[1] Robbins and Ayers decided to bomb one of Chicago's historical monuments located at Haymarket Square, the exact place where they were to gather the next day.
[1] According to the accounts in Wilkerson's memoir, after Robbins had explained the step-by-step procedure he studied, which gave exact details on how to connect the electrical timing device, another member raised the issue of a safety switch.
[1] Shortly after the explosion, Weathermen leaders placed John Jacobs on indefinite leave from the WUO because he was the main advocate of Robbins' aggressive actions.