• Leader of the domestic terrorist group Weatherman
• Participated in the bombings of New York City police headquarters in 1970, the Capitol building in 1971, and the Pentagon in 1972
• Delighted in Charles Manson's infamous murders 
• Director of the Children and Family Justice Center at Northwestern University
• Professor at Northwestern University Law School

• "We are a guerrilla organization. We are communist women and men ... deeply affected by the historic events of our time in the struggle against U.S. imperialism."
• "Our intention is to disrupt the empire, to incapacitate it, to put pressure on the cracks, to make it hard to carry out its bloody functioning against the people of the world, to join the world struggle, to attack from the inside."
• "The only path to the final defeat of imperialism and the building of socialism is revolutionary war."
• "Revolutionary war will be complicated and protracted. It includes mass struggle and clandestine struggle, peaceful and violent, political and economic, cultural and military, where all forms are developed in harmony with the armed struggle."
• "Without mass struggle there can be no revolution. 
  Without armed struggle there can be no victory."
• "We need a revolutionary communist party in order to lead the struggle, give coherence and direction to the fight, seize power and build the new society."
• "Our job is to tap the discontent seething in many sectors of the population, to find allies everywhere people are hungry or angry, to mobilize poor and working people against imperialism."
• "Socialism is the total opposite of capitalism/imperialism. It is the rejection of empire and white supremacy. Socialism is the violent overthrow of the bourgeoisie, the establishment of the dictatorship of the proletariat, and the eradication of the social system based on profit."

The title Prairie Fire was an allusion to Mao Zedong's observation (in a January 1930 letter) that "a single spark can start a prairie fire." Dohrn's book was dedicated to a bevy of violent, America-hating revolutionaries, including Sirhan Sirhan (assassin of Robert F. Kennedy).

Dohrn spent most of the 1970s with her accomplices running from the FBI, which had placed her on its "Ten Most Wanted List." During the last years of their underground life, Dohrn and her husband Bill Ayers resided in Chicago's Logan Square neighborhood, where they used the aliases Christine Louise Douglas and Anthony J. Lee. In 1980 Dohrn and her cohorts surrendered to authorities, but all charges against them were subsequently dropped on the grounds that the fugitives had been illegally surveilled. Dohrn did plead guilty, however, to charges of aggravated battery and bail-jumping, for which she received probation.

Shortly after turning themselves in, Dohrn and Ayers adopted Chesa Boudin, son of former Weather Underground members Kathy Boudin and David Gilbert, when the parents were arrested for their violent activities with the Black Liberation Army.

Dohrn later served less than a year in prison for refusing to testify against ex-Weatherman Susan Rosenberg in the latter's trial for armed robbery.

Today Professor Dohrn expresses no real regret over her radical past. Though she has distanced herself from the Manson remark (insinuating falsely that it was a "joke"), her political views are as extreme as ever. On one occasion she justified her past actions, saying, "We organized both against war and racism. We also taught that all human life is equally valid, not just the body count of the United States."

In the mid-1990s, Dohrn and her husband Bill Ayers hosted meetings at their Chicago home to introduce Barack Obama to their neighbors during his first run for the Illinois Senate.

Professor Dorhn has been a commencement speaker at several university graduations, including California's prestigious Pitzer College, where in 2004 she told the graduates: "During your student years here, the shredded economy and loss of jobs, the consequences of deregulation and devolution that bankrupted state and local governments, the relentless punishment and imprisoning of over two million people in America, flagrant corporate plunder and criminality, rolling blackouts, the apparently permanent war on terrorism, the shock and awe occupation of Iraq, systematic and degrading detention without trial, torture and extra-judicial assassinations, and the establishment of a crescent of new U.S. military bases across the Middle East and South Asia -- all have transformed whatever blissful illusions were harbored as you entered college."

Dohrn earned a B.A. in Political Science from the University of Chicago in 1963, and a J.D. from the University of Chicago School of Law four years later.

Dorhn and Ayers have two other children, whom they named Malik (the Muslim name of Malcolm X) and Zayd. Zayd's namesake is Zayd Shakur, a Black Panther killed while driving the radical JoAnne Chesimard (a.k.a. Assata Shakur) to a hideout — the resulting traffic stop shootout ended in the murder of a New Jersey State Trooper.