Ayers made headlines this summer after Republican vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin suggested that then-Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama hung around with domestic terrorists like Ayers. The professor had hosted a meet-the-candidate event at his home for Obama in 1995, during his run for the state Senate. They also worked together on Chicago school reform and served on a charity board together.

Ayers first rose to notoriety in the early 1970s with the Weather Underground. The group claimed responsibility for bombings at the U.S. Capitol, a Pentagon restroom and New York City police headquarters. In 1970, a townhouse in New York the group was using to build a bomb blew up.

His [Ayers'] quote, "Guilty as hell and free as a bird. Isn't America great?" He got off on a technicality and his rich father brought him into the Chicago fold.

The Annenberg Challenge received a $50 million matched grant which Ayers and Obama used to advance radical alternative education. Funding, did not go to improve Chicago schools but to radical community organization groups, such as ACORN, Ayers's Small Schools Project, a radical alternative education project founded by Ayers and directed by Michael Klonsky, an Ayers friend and former chairman of the Communist Party, and the South Shore African Village Collaborative, the same Black Liberation Theology of Obama's Trinity United Church of Christ pastor, rev. Wright. Obama served with Ayers on the Board of Directors for The Woods Fund, which gave $75K to ACORN, $6K to Obama's church, and $60k to the Children and Family Justice Center founded and run by Dohrn, wife of Ayers. The Fund also gave $50K to the Ayers/Klonsky Small Schools Network. $75K grant was given to the Arab American Action Network, founded by anti-Semitic spokesman for the PLO and Yasser Arafat Rashid Khalidi.