From a student wing to the New Left
Students for a Democratic Society, or SDS, was not born as a radical group. It began as the student branch of the League for Industrial Democracy, an old socialist education body, and took the SDS name in 1960. For its first few years it was small, with chapters on a limited number of campuses. It became one of the central organisations of the American New Left because of one document and then because of one war.
The Port Huron Statement
In June 1962, a few dozen SDS members met at a labour-movement retreat in Port Huron, Michigan, and adopted a manifesto drafted mainly by Tom Hayden. The Port Huron Statement opened by describing a generation raised in comfort and uneasy about the world it inherited. It criticised racial discrimination, the nuclear arms race and the Cold War, as well as bureaucracy and apathy, and it called for “participatory democracy”, the idea that ordinary people should take part in decisions shaping their lives.
The document was reformist in tone by later standards. It sought to build a coalition of students, labour and civil rights groups and did not call for revolution. It also criticised Soviet communism, which put it at odds with older left-wing groups, and the League for Industrial Democracy’s leaders disliked its stance. Relations with the parent body were strained for some time.
Organising, then Vietnam
SDS’s early projects were community organising rather than campus protest. In the mid-1960s its Economic Research and Action Project sent volunteers to poor neighbourhoods in Northern cities, hoping to build an interracial movement of the poor. The results were modest, but the experience shaped many organisers.
The turning point was Vietnam. In April 1965, soon after the United States began sustained bombing of North Vietnam and sent combat troops, SDS called a march on Washington. Estimates put the crowd at around 20,000, far more than expected, and it made the group nationally known. Membership and the number of chapters grew rapidly afterward, though figures from the time are rough and should be treated cautiously. SDS had no strict membership structure, and chapters often acted independently of the national office.
1967: growth and a change of mood
By 1967 SDS was drawing in students who had never heard of Port Huron, and its character was changing. Several shifts can be seen.
- From protest to resistance. Early SDS tactics were marches and petitions. By 1967 many members wanted to interfere with the war machine directly, through opposition to the draft and campaigns against recruiters. SDS members were prominent in the campus protest of 1967 and joined the autumn draft-resistance actions, including the March on the Pentagon.
- From liberal reform to anti-imperialism. Analysis of Vietnam led many members to see the war as a product of American capitalism and global power rather than a mistake. This moved SDS away from the Democratic Party and the labour establishment toward a more openly radical position.
- Looser organisation, sharper arguments. With rapid growth came disagreements over leadership, strategy and ideology, and a distrust of national leaders. Different tendencies, from anarchist-minded to Marxist-Leninist, competed for influence.
SDS did not reach its most radical phase until 1968-69. At its convention in Chicago in June 1969 it split into rival factions, one of which became the Weathermen, and the organisation largely collapsed soon after. That is beyond 1967, but the tensions that produced it were visible earlier.
SNCC and the Black Power split
The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee was founded in April 1960, after the Greensboro sit-ins, with the help of Ella Baker. It organised sit-ins, voter registration and the 1964 Freedom Summer in Mississippi, and its young field workers, many of them barely out of their teens, were an inspiration to early SDS members.
Frustration grew after Freedom Summer, particularly with the Democratic Party’s refusal to seat the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party delegation at the 1964 convention in Atlantic City. In May 1966 SNCC elected Stokely Carmichael as chairman in place of John Lewis, and that June, during a march in Mississippi, Carmichael popularised the slogan Black Power. SNCC then moved toward Black-led organising, and in December 1966 a staff meeting voted, narrowly by most accounts, to move toward an all-Black staff and to send white supporters to organise in white communities. In 1967 H. Rap Brown succeeded Carmichael as chairman. The group’s influence declined sharply from then on, partly because of internal disagreement and government surveillance and partly because of lost funding.
For white activists the effect was complicated. Many were hurt by the decision, while others accepted it as logical. The split pushed some toward antiwar and campus work, which helps explain why SDS became more focused on Vietnam and the draft.
Reading the record
Writers on the period often credit SDS for giving a generation a political language, and also blame it for fragmenting. Membership claims, attendance estimates and even the number of chapters vary between accounts, so precise figures should always be treated as approximate. What is clearer is the direction: between 1962 and 1969 SDS moved from a small, hopeful group of reformers to a large, divided and increasingly militant movement.