On the evening of November 7, 1983, a call came into the U.S. Capitol switchboard. “Listen carefully, I’m only going to tell you this one time,” the caller said. “There is a bomb in the Capitol building. It will go off in five minutes. Evacuate the building.” Then the caller hung up.
At 10:58 p.m., a blast went off on the second floor of the structure’s north wing. The explosion blew doors off their hinges, shattered chandeliers and sent a shower of pulverized glass, brick and plaster into the Republican cloakroom. The shock wave from the explosion sounded like a sonic boom. A jogger outside on the Capitol grounds heard the blast: “It was loud enough to make my ears hurt. It kept echoing and echoing—boom, boom.” According to one estimate, the bomb caused $1 million in damage.
Later, National Public Radio received a message from a group calling itself the Armed Resistance Unit: “Tonight we bombed the U.S. Capitol.” Nobody was killed or injured in the attack, but the ARU made clear that it had contemplated lethal action: “We purposely aimed our attack at the institutions of imperialist rule rather than at individual members of the ruling class and government. We did not choose to kill any of them at this time. But their lives are not sacred and their hands are stained with the blood of millions.”
The ARU was a nom de guerre for the May 19th Communist Organization, a group of self-described “revolutionary anti-imperialists” formed in the late 1970s to support armed struggles in southern Africa, the Middle East, Central America, Puerto Rico—and inside the American mainland. Although several hundred people were part of May 19th front groups (such as the John Brown Anti-Klan Committee, an early incarnation of what we now call the antifa movement, and the Madame Binh Graphics Collective, which produced revolutionary-themed silkscreens), the group’s inner circle contained fewer than a dozen people.
The group was also the first American terrorist group entirely organized and led by women. Women picked the targets, made the bombs and implanted the devices. It was a new sisterhood of the bomb and the gun. “We lived in a country that loved violence,” one member said. “We had to meet it on its own terms.”