Terry Robbins

Terry Robbins (October 4, 1947 – March 6, 1970) was an American far left activist, a key member of the Ohio Students for a Democratic Society (The S.D.S.), and one of the three Weathermen who died in the Greenwich Village townhouse explosion.

Early life 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. When Robbins was six years old, his mother began to suffer from breast cancer, which eventually caused her death three years later. 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. 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. Ayers and Robbins's interest in writing became a bond between them; they collaborated for the first time, authoring a lengthy paper called Turn Toward Children, which discussed the educational and political philosophies of the Children's Community of both Ann Arbor and Cleveland. The first of such action against the university began on April 8, 1969. 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. After an hour of struggle the trials were canceled Robbins was arrested for his involvement during the demonstrations and was sentenced to serve a three-month prison term for his actions. both Robbins and Mark Rudd challenged Klonsky's approach by insisting that the first and most urgent obligation of whites was to fight in support of the peoples of the world who were "rising up against them"

Being one of the people in charge of the organizing and planning the national action for the organization, Robbins was based in Chicago, Illinois. The mayor called the act as an "attack on all the citizens of Chicago, called for law and order, and appealed to the youth." (Gold was not in the basement at the time; he had just returned from the Strand Bookstore). The explosion occurred in the basement floor of the townhouse at 18 West 11th in which Robbins and Oughton had been working. Terry Robbins was convinced that extreme acts of destruction were the way for the organization to move into a revolution.