Enoch Pratt Free Library website

Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn
talk about their new book, Race Course: Against White Supremacy.

Ayers and DohrnIn Race Course, Ayers and Dohrn discuss white supremacy and its troubling endurance in American life. They point to unexamined bigotry in the criminal justice system, election processes, war policy, and education, and explore their own confrontations with authorities during the Vietnam era and offer personal stories about their lives today.

Bill Ayers is a distinguished professor education at the University of Illinois at Chicago; Bernardine Dohrn is the director of the Children and Family Law Justice Center and a clinical associate professor of law at Northwestern University School of Law.
Schedule: (click on the location to see map)

* Central Library Wednesday, May 13, 2009 (6:30 p.m.)
Wheeler Auditorium

Suggested Audience:

* Adults
* Seniors

WBAL.com

Officials of the Enoch Pratt Free Library say their security will have an “active presence” tomorrow night, when former 1960’s anti-war activists Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dhorn are scheduled to speak.

“We have received several calls of several people protesting, but we welcome them as well, as long as they are not disruptive to our patrons and to the program, they are welcome to sit in and participate in the program,” library spokesman Roswell Encina told WBAL News.

Ayers and Dohrn, who are husband and wife, are on a national book tour to promote their new book “Race Course: Against White Supremacy.”

They were leaders in the Weather Underground, the group responsible for bombings of empty offices at the U.S. Capitol in 1971and the Pentagon in 1972.

On the website Free Republic, a poster known as “troop rally” is organizing an effort to go to the library to question Ayers and Dohrn, who have been called “terrorists” because of their anti-war activities.

Encina told WBAL News the authors’ publicists approached the library about a speech. He says the library is not taking a position on Ayers or Dohrn’s views.

“We don’t have to judge whoever the author is, or whatever their background is. We believe that is what our patrons can do,” Encina said.