According to Wikipedia's entry on Bill Ayers
The groups Ayers headed in Detroit and Michigan became one of the earliest gatherings of what became the Weatherman. Between the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago and the June 1969 SDS convention, Ayers became a prominent leader of the group, which arose as a result of a schism in SDS.[4]
"During that time his infatuation with street fighting grew and he developed a language of confrontational militancy that became more and more extreme over the year [1969]", former Weatherman member Cathy Wilkerson wrote in 2001...
In June 1969, the Weatherman took control of the SDS at its national convention, where Ayers was elected "Education Secretary".
What type of "Education" was Mr Ayers interested in? As a founder of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, Steve Diamond writes:
He argued then, as he does now, that “white supremacy” is the original sin of American life.
White racism represents for him the same kind of “oppression” that the maoist movement he was influenced by then said was responsible for the plight of poor countries. Just as rich countries (like the United States or Germany) exploited poor countries (like China or Cuba) on an international scale, the Weather Underground argued, white people in the United States exploited black people. Thus, the role of the “revolutionary vanguard” of students was to support black revolutionary groups at whatever cost, including armed robbery and bombings. While Ayers and his wife Bernardine Dohrn no longer engage in violence their political views have not changed.
Senator Barack Obama was Chairman of the Board of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge from 1995 to 1999 and after stepping down as Chairman, remained on the Board of Directors until the CACs demise in 2001.
When Obama was asked about Ayers during Wednesday's debate, he described him as "a guy who lives in my neighborhood." He said he does not exchange ideas with him "on a regular basis."
It seems, though, that a reasonable person could conclude otherwise:
During Obama’s time as Annenberg board chairman, Ayers’s own education projects received substantial funding. Indeed, during its first year, the Chicago Annenberg Challenge struggled with significant concerns about possible conflicts of interest. With a writ to aid Chicago’s public schools, the Annenberg challenge played a deeply political role in Chicago’s education wars, and as Annenberg board chairman, Obama clearly aligned himself with Ayers’s radical views on education issues. With Obama heading up the board and Ayers heading up the other key operating body of the Annenberg Challenge, the two would necessarily have had a close working relationship for years (therefore “exchanging ideas on a regular basis”). So when Ayers and Dorhn hosted that kickoff for the first Obama campaign, it was not a random happenstance, but merely further evidence of a close and ongoing political partnership. Of course, all of this clearly contradicts Obama’s dismissal of the significance of his relationship with Ayers.
But in trying to ascertain which story is correct, NRO Contributing Editor Stanley Kurtz ran into a roadblock: The Richard J. Daley Library at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC).
Within UIC resides a large cache of documents containing the internal files of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge. "The records in question are extensive, consisting of 132 boxes, containing 947 file folders, a total of about 70 linear feet of material."
But even though he was given permission to access these records, his access was revoked at the last minute.
The Special Collections section of the Richard J. Daley Library agreed to let me read them, but just before I boarded my flight to Chicago, the top library officials mysteriously intervened to bar access....
Just before my plane took off, I received an e-mail from the special-collections librarian informing me that she had “checked our collection file” and determined that “access to the collection is closed.” I would be permitted to view the single CAC-related file from the Office of the Chancellor records, but nothing from the CAC records proper....
After arriving in Chicago, I found a message, not from the special-collections librarian, but from Ann C. Weller, professor and head, Special Collections Department. In answer to my question of who had authority over access to the collection, Weller said, that “the decision was made by me” in consultation with the library director. Weller stated that no one currently has access to the collection and added that: “The Collection is closed because it has come to our attention that there is restricted material in the collection. Once the collection has been processed it will be open to any patron interested in viewing it.”
...I then noted that I had studied the CAC finding aid with considerable care. It was clear from that finding aid, I said, that only five out of the 947 folders were in any way restricted. Four folders, containing auditor’s reports, where clearly marked, in bold type, “THESE FOLDERS ARE RESTRICTED VIA ANNENBERG CHALLENGE until further notice.” A fifth folder, containing records of eight CAC Board of Directors meetings in 1995, when CAC was first set up, had a notation nearby with the word, “Consent.” It would be a simple matter, I said, to pull these five folders, allow me access to the remaining 942 folders, and contact the relevant authority for consent to view the records of the 1995 board meetings...
Weller replied to this message by dropping the restricted documents issue and saying instead that the donor of the CAC records “has alerted us to the fact that we do not have a signed deed of gift.” According to Weller, this means that UIC’s library has no legal right to make the material available. The donor, said Weller, is now working with UIC library to resolve the problem, and “we hope to be able to provide access within the next few weeks.”
...There are a number of disturbing elements to this story. Recall that, according to the graduate assistant, the collection had, in fact, already been “processed.” Yet Weller’s initial message to me used the unprocessed state of the collection as a reason for restricting access. And when I pointed out how easy it would be to remove the restricted files, Weller quickly came up with yet another reason to block access. At the moment, I have no way of verifying Weller’s claim that the library has no signed deed of gift, but how likely is it that a collection of such size and importance would have been housed in the library, and listed in publicly accessible international library catalogues, without this very basic detail having been attended to? It’s also puzzling that UIC now raises the absence of any formal agreement with the donor — and thus the absence of any formal restrictions by the donor — as a reason to deny access to a collection placed in library custody precisely to facilitate public access.
It appears that a critical biographical information regarding the connection between Senator Obama and the 1960's terrorist William Ayers is unavailable for independent verification.
What we do know is that Mike Klonsky is a member of the Obama Campaign.
Who is Mike Klonsky? Well, on one level, he might just appear to be a protege of Bill Ayers in the education world. He received, as I detail below, a $175,000 grant from the Ayers/Obama-led Annenberg Challenge to run the Small Schools Workshop that he and Ayers started in Chicago to push their school reform agenda.But that is only half the story. Klonsky was one of the most destructive hardline maoists in the SDS in the late 60's who emerged from SDS to form a pro-Chinese sect called the October League that later became the Beijing-recognized Communist Party (Marxist-Leninist). As chairman of the party, Klonsky travelled to Beijing itself in 1977 and, literally, toasted the Chinese stalinist leadership who, in turn, "hailed the formation of the CP(ML) as 'reflecting the aspirations of the proletariat and working people,' effectively recognizing the group as the all-but-official US Maoist party." (Elbaum, Revolution in the Air, 228).I know of no indications that Klonsky has ever expressed any regrets about that activity. Perhaps like his SDS comrade, Ayers, he, too, thinks he did not do enough back then. In my view they did more than enough.
Well, given that many of Obama's associates are Communists, it's not much of a surprise. And given the goals of the CAC, it's no surprise that he was a member of Rev Wright's Church.
But the nature of Obama's associations are clearly Top Secret.