Word: wilkerson
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When she disappeared, fleeing from the explosion-shattered wreckage of a Manhattan town house, Cathlyn Platt Wilkerson was so perfect a symbol of the times as to be almost a macabre caricature. The date was March 6, 1970, and American society was torn by the tensions generated by the Viet Nam War and the preceding decade's civil rights agitation. Middle-class and wealthy youths were burning draft cards and marching in the streets shouting hate at the Establishment that had nurtured them. A few went beyond revolutionary rhetoric to amateur terrorism, and among them was Cathy Wilkerson...
...joined the radical Students for a Democratic Society and later its violent Weatherman faction, which fought pitched battles with police in Chicago and bombed a police station and a bank in Manhattan. While her father, who owned a string of Midwestern radio stations, was on vacation in the Caribbean, Wilkerson turned over his elegant Greenwich Village home to Weatherman friends, who apparently began making bombs in the basement. A series of dynamite blasts not only demolished the house, but also killed three Weathermen...
...years Wilkerson, who was charged with illegal possession of dynamite and criminally negligent homicide, avoided arrest. But last week in Manhattan she turned herself in. At 35, she is a different kind of symbol from the one she had been in 1970. Now she seemed spiritually akin to the Japanese soldiers who stumbled out of Pacific jungles 20 years after the end of World War II, still vowing to win for the Emperor...
...Wilkerson said she had surrendered for "personal" reasons and would not disclose where she had been for the past decade. The rest of her statement was a diatribe straight out of the '60s. She fumed against U.S. involvement in Viet Nam, as if the war had not ended five years ago. She applauded "fighters for freedom and independence for Puerto Rico," though they have little following even on their own island. She maintained that "the conditions are the same" in the nation as when she disappeared...
...continued to strengthen, and she kept up classes. Now president of the Harvard-Radcliffe Dance Company, she directed their production this spring. She was accepted to the joint J.D. and M.B.A. program at Stanford, a program that "a lot of people would kill to get into" she says, but Wilkerson did not deliberate long before she rejected the law school and deferred the business school. Next year she will go to New York and try to get a job as a dancer. She will once again have the cushion of her parents' financial support, but she claims dancing...