April 9, 1966: Headquarters of the Vietnam Day Committee Bombed

April 9 1966, the headquarters of Berkeley anti-war group the Vietnam Day Committee was bombed. Four VDC members were injured in the blast, which completely demolished the back side of the building and broke hundreds of windows on the block

The incident came just over a month after a very similar bombing at the San Francisco headquarters of the W.E.B. Du Bois Clubs of America, a radical civil rights organization linked to the Communist Party, which was the subject of a government smear campaign at the time

The Vietnam Day Committee (an outgrowth of the Free Speech Movement) was founded in 1965 by a number of radical and progressive organizations. They organized the 35-hour May 21-22 Vietnam Day demonstration, a watershed moment in the history of the campus anti-war movement

Its most prominent leader, the “Castroist” Jerry Rubin, would later become famous as a co-founder of the Youth International Party (Yippies). Here Rubin surveys the damage after the April 9 bombing