Brian Flanagan
| Brian Flanagan | |
|---|---|
| Born |
October 20, 1946 Manhattan, New York |
| Known for | former member of the 1960s radical left group Weather Underground |
Brian Flanagan is an Irish-American former member of the American radical left organizations Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) and the Weather Underground Organization (WUO).
Flanagan was born on October 20, 1946 and raised in Manhattan, New York. Both his parents were Irish. His father was an advertising executive and his mother a teacher, stockbroker and antique dealer. Flanagan was introduced to politics by his parents who supported Illinois Democratic governor Adlai E. Stevenson, an unsuccessful presidential candidate in 1952 and 1956.
From early on Flanagan felt the pull of militancy. He recalls, "I know that from a fairly early age, 11 or 12, I had really come to admire Fidel Castro. When he stood up to the United States, I thought that was a great thing".
During the 1960s, Flanagan attended Columbia University in New York, where he was a member of Students for a Democratic Society(SDS). Flanagan studied philosophy and economics at Columbia where he was a C student. Whatever passions academics failed to arouse, however, the rising opposition to the Vietnam War supplied. "That was the turning point for me," he says. "Being in New York, being at Columbia during the Vietnam War, you could not be oblivious to what was going on. People were lining up on one side or the other. And so I took my stand." Flanagan was one of the members that helped seize the mathematics building on the Columbia University campus. The 1968 Columbia Student Revolt involved students shutting down the campus by seizing buildings to attract attention for their cause. SDS confronted the university's involvement with the Institute for Defense Analysis, who provided research the military used in Vietnam, and the university gym located in Harlem, which would not benefit the African-American neighborhood population. In 1969, Flanagan joined Weatherman, a radical splinter group of the SDS, later known as the Weather Underground Organization (WUO).
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