Raucous protest greets William Ayers at Moraga speaking engagement
The shouts of “Shame on you!” resounded across the small Saint Mary’s College campus Wednesday night, where under the glare of television lights, a few hundred sign-carrying, flag-waving protesters gathered around a megaphone to object to an appearance by 1960s anti-war militant William Ayers.
Most of the protest and its speeches took place before Ayers spoke, but even as he took the stage inside the college’s Soda Center, protesters outside crowded toward the doors and shouted, “Cop Killer!”
Ayers has never been convicted of killing anyone.
Many who couldn’t get inside the center hung around the entrance.
At least one man had to be escorted out of the auditorium by campus public safety officials when he walked up to the podium where Ayers was speaking, carrying a book that resembled a Bible, and began shouting profanities.
Ayers was invited to Saint Mary’s as part of the college’s “Against the Grain” speaker series. A former leader of the Weather Underground, he is now a professor of education at University of Illinois-Chicago.
“I am appalled how Bill Ayers is able to come to a Christian-based campus to speak his rhetoric,” said Jerry Converse, of Concord, who carried an American flag. “It’s a free country, but this is the wrong place.”
The crowd roared and chanted, encouraged by speeches by an FBI informant who had infiltrated the Weathermen and by a police officer who had been on the scene of a bombing at a San Francisco police station that killed a sergeant. The officer said the bomb was set by Ayers’ wife, Bernardine Dohrn, a fellow Weather Underground leader.
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