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

There is strong evidence suggesting that Ayers wrote Dreams from My Father, Barack Obama's 1995 memoir. In October 2009, conservative blogger Anne Leary reported that Ayers had personally told her that he was the book's author.

In 1995 Ayers -- whose stated educational objective is to “teach against oppression” as embodied in “America’s history of evil and racism, thereby forcing social transformation” -- founded a “school reform organization” called the Chicago Annenberg Challenge (CAC). He appointed Obama as the group's first chairman.

When National Review Online writer Stanley Kurtz in 2008 reviewed the CAC archives at the Richard J. Daley Library at the University of Illinois, he found that Ayers had been one of five members of a working group that assembled the initial CAC board which hired Obama.

“Ayers founded CAC and was its guiding spirit,” Kurtz wrote. “No one would have been appointed the CAC chairman without his approval.” According to Kurtz, the CAC archives show that Obama and Ayers worked as a team to advance the foundation's agenda -- with Obama responsible for fiscal matters while Ayers focused on shaping educational policy. The archived documents further reveal that Ayers served as an ex-officio member of the board that Obama chaired through CAC's first year; that Ayers served with Obama on the CAC governance committee; and that Ayers worked with Obama to write CAC’s bylaws.

A September 2008 WorldNetDaily report offers still more details: “Ayers made presentations to board meetings chaired by Obama. Ayers also spoke for the Chicago School Reform Collaborative before Obama's board, while Obama periodically spoke for the board at meetings of the collaborative … According to the documents, the CAC granted money to far-leftist causes, such as the radical Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, or ACORN, which …has done work on behalf of Obama’s presidential campaign.”

WorldNetDaily reports further that “while Obama chaired the board of the CAC, more than $600,000 was granted to an organization founded by Ayers and run by Mike Klonsky, a former top communist activist. Klonsky was leader of the Marxist-Leninist Communist Party, which was effectively recognized by China as the all-but-official U.S. Maoist party.”

In 1999 Ayers joined the Woods Fund of Chicago, where he served as a director alongside Barack Obama until the latter left the Woods board in December 2002. Ayers went on to become Woods' Chairman of the Board. In 2002 the Woods Fund made a grant to Northwestern University Law School's Children and Family Justice Center, where Ayers' wife, Bernardine Dohrn, was employed.

At a 2007 reunion of former members of the Weather Underground and Students for a Democratic Society, Ayers painted a verbal portrait of life in the United States which included the following passages:

• "This is a time not only of great stress and oppression and authoritarianism, and a kind of rising incipient American form of fascism, and what the government counts on, what the powerful count on, is that we will stay quiet. It’s the idea that we can tolerate these intolerable things without screaming, without somehow coming out, joining up and coming out and saying something. It’s what they count on in terms of keeping things under control."
• "Empire resurrected and unapologetic, war without end, an undefined enemy that’s supposed to be a rallying point for a new kind of energized jingoistic patriotism, unprecedented and unapologetic military expansion, white supremacy changing its form, but essentially intact, attacks on women and girls, violent attacks, growing surveillance in every sphere of our lives, on and on and on, the targeting of gay and lesbian people as a kind of a scapegoating gesture to keep our minds off of what’s really happening."

And here is how Ayers characterized himself and the longtime radical comrades to whom he was speaking:

"Even though we think of ourselves as political, we weren’t politicians. We were people who had a moral vision of what was possible. And when we talk, for example, about health care, about peace, we’re talking a language of ethics, not a language of instrumentalism or opportunism, or what we might get. So we have to speak in a language that’s large and generous and encompassing. And then we have to act."

In December 2009, Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn were among the 1,300 American and European activists who traveled to the Egypt-Gaza border to participate in a pro-Palestinian, anti-Israel demonstration led by Code Pink.

Ayers spent a number of years as a professor of education and a Senior University Scholar at the University of Illinois, where, as of October 2008, his office door was adorned with photographs of Mumia Abu-Jamal, Che Guevara and Malcolm X. He also has authored a series of books about parenting and educating children, including: A Kind and Just Parent; To Become a Teacher; City Kids; City Teachers; To Teach; The Good Preschool Teacher; Zero Tolerance: Resisting the Drive for Punishment in Our Schools; and Teaching Towards Freedom: Moral Commitment and Ethical Action in the Classroom. In August 2010, Ayers announced that he was retiring from academia.

Today Ayers sits on the board of the Miranda International Center, a Venezuelan government think tank dedicated to bringing Cuba-style education to Venezuelan schools. Ayers is a great admirer of Venezuela's Marxist President, Hugo Chavez.

Ayers and Dorhn have three children. One is named Malik (the Muslim name of Malcolm X), and another is named Zayd (after Zayd Shakur, a Black Panther killed while driving the cop-killer JoAnne Chesimard -- a.k.a. Assata Shakur -- to a hideout).

Ayers and Dohrn also raised Chesa Boudin because his natural parents, Kathy Boudin and David Gilbert, were serving lengthy prison sentences for their roles in the Brinks murders, a joint Weatherman and Black Liberation Army operation in which two police officers and an armed guard were killed. Unlike Ayers, Dohrn actually spent time in prison as a result of their terrorist activities — a contempt citation for refusing to honor a grand jury subpoena in the Brinks investigation.