1 gen 1960 anni - SDS Forms (students for a democratic society(

Descrizione:

Port Huron Statement: A 1962 manifesto by Students for a Democratic Society from its first national convention in Port Huron, Michigan, expressing disillusionment with the complacent consumer culture and the gulf between rich and poor, as well as rejecting Cold War foreign policy.
NEw LEft: A term applied to radical students of the 1960s and 1970s, distinguishing their activism from the Old Left — the communists and socialists of the 1930s and 1940s

College students, many of them inspired by the civil rights movement, had already begun to organize and agitate for social change prior to that first antiwar march of April 1965. In Ann Arbor, Michigan, in 1960, a group called Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) formed. Two years later, they held the first national SDS convention in Port Huron, Michigan. University of Michigan student and SDS member Tom Hayden penned a manifesto — the “ Port Huron Statement” — expressing disillusionment with complacent consumer culture, the gulf between rich and poor, and anticommunist Cold War foreign policy. “We are people of this generation,” Hayden wrote, “bred in at least modest comfort, housed now in universities, looking uncomfortably to the world we inherit.” Hayden and SDS sought to shake up what they saw as a complacent nation.


The SDS was the heart of a movement that called itself the New Left, to distinguish itself from the Old Left — communists and socialists of the 1930s and 1940s. As New Left influence spread, it hit major university towns first — places such as Ann Arbor along with Madison, Wisconsin, and Berkeley, California. One of the New Left’s first major demonstrations erupted in the fall of 1964 at the University of California at Berkeley after administrators banned student political activity on university grounds. In protest, student groups formed the Free Speech Movement and organized a sit-in at the administration building. Some students had just returned from Freedom Summer in Mississippi, inspired by their experience. One such student, Mario Savio, spoke for many when he compared the conflict in Berkeley to the civil rights struggle in the South: “The same rights are at stake in both places — the right to participate as citizens in a democratic society.” Implicitly comparing university administrators to southern officials defending Jim Crow, he called the events in Berkeley a “struggle against the same enemy.”

Emboldened by the Berkeley movement, students across the nation were soon protesting their universities’ academic policies and then, beginning in 1965, the Vietnam War. Students were on the front lines as the campaign against the war intensified. In 1967 the Spring Mobilization to End the War in Vietnam Committee organized a mass march of 250,000 protesters, Martin Luther King Jr. among them, from Central Park to the United Nations in New York, while another 100,000 protesters flooded the streets of San Francisco and 100,000 more marched on the Pentagon. President Johnson counterpunched against the burgeoning antiwar movement — “The enemy’s hope for victory … is in our division, our weariness, our uncertainty,” he proclaimed — but it was clear that Johnson’s war, as many called it, was no longer uniting the country.

Student resistance to the war only grew when the military’s Selective Service System abolished automatic student deferments in 1967. Such controversial deferments allowed young middle-class men to avoid Vietnam so long as they remained in school — leaving military service, and thus the personal sacrifice of fighting in war, to men without the resources to be in college. To avoid the draft now, some young men enlisted in the National Guard or applied for conscientious objector status; others left the country, most often for Canada or Sweden. In public demonstrations, opponents of the war burned their draft cards, picketed induction centers, and on a few occasions broke into Selective Service offices and destroyed records. Serious antiwar activists numbered in the tens or, at most, hundreds of thousands — a small fraction of American youth — but they were vocal, visible, and determined.


oung men burning their draft cards in Central Park in 1967. By that year, a movement opposing the Vietnam War had gained momentum and increasing media attention, and included draft resisters like those pictured here as well as peace activists, students, civil rights leaders like Martin Luther King Jr., and a growing number of religious leaders, among many others.

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