WASHINGTON — The University of Illinois said Friday that it is releasing records of Barack Obama’s service to a nonprofit organization linked to former 1960s radical William Ayers.
Supporters of John McCain have been trying to exploit the tie between Obama and Ayers, with a conservative group spending $2.8 million on an ad focusing on Ayers. Ayers’ Weatherman group claimed responsibility for bombings that included nonfatal blasts at the Pentagon and U.S. Capitol four decades ago.
The records of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, an organization that Obama chaired and that Ayers co-founded, will be made available to the public Tuesday, the University of Illinois at Chicago said in a statement.
In the 1990s, Ayers was instrumental in starting the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, which was awarded nearly $50 million by a foundation to help reform Chicago schools. Ayers is now a professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago.
In April, Obama said he “deplored” Ayers’ actions in the 1960s and that “by the time I met him, he is a professor of education at the University of Illinois. We served on a board together that had Republicans, bankers, lawyers, focused on education.”
