The students are already seated, quiet and polite in perfectly aligned rows of chairs, when Bill Ayers walks into the classroom.
He wears shorts.
“We were anarchists,” he tells the class. “We were willing to get thrown out of school. We were willing to go to jail. I make no apologies. There comes a time in your life when you face a moral challenge. You have to ask yourself: ‘Will I bow to conformity and accede to the world as it is, or will I take a stand?’”
“School reform isn’t perfect, but it’s a beginning,” says Ayers. “It gives people some control, which is important; people have to take control of their lives. OK, the schools stink. They’re designed to separate people by class and race and then control them.
But Ayers was worse than dumb. He was arrogant, dogmatic, and unbearably self-righteous. He scorned his parents and turned on his friends. He was cruel.
That was 1937, and 22-year-old Tom Ayers, the son of a Detroit salesman who had gone broke during the Depression, had just graduated from the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor. By 1964 he was Edison’s president–and the epitome of the corporate Good Samaritan. He sat on the boards of First Federal Bank of Chicago, Northwestern University, and the Tribune Company. He served on civic groups and preached voluntary integration.
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Toward the end of the summer, the community exploded into a riot. The mayor called an eight o’clock curfew and the governor dispatched the National Guard.
