Student Activists
Perhaps as much as anything else, the 1960s are remembered for the “youth movement” that dominated so much of society, as the 78 million members of the postwar “Baby Boom” generation began to come of age. Although most of those Boomers did not, in fact, become politically active in the traditional sense—voter turnout, for example, began to decline in the mid-1960s, just about the same time that the Boomers became eligible to vote—there were clear indications that the postwar generation would, in one form or another, make its political mark on society.
Perhaps the most notorious of the
politically active groups were Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). Spurred to action initially by the civil
rights movement, this group of student activists eventually would become best
known for their strident opposition to the war in
Well before those protests,
however, the embryonic group sought to solidify itself by drafting a mission
statement. It turned to Tom Hayden, one
of its early leaders, to draft the declaration.
Below are excerpts from the 1962 “Port Huron Statement”, so-called
because it was adopted at the group’s gathering at the United Automobile
Workers’
We are people of this generation, bred in at least modest
comfort, housed now in universities, looking uncomfortably to the world we
inherit…. [T]he struggle against racial bigotry compelled most of us from
silence to activism…. [T]he Cold War … brought awareness that we … might die at
any time. We might deliberately ignore …
all other human problems, but not these two,… [W]e began to see complicated and
disturbing paradoxes in our surrounding
Our
work is guided by the sense that we may be the last generation in the
experiment with living.… The dominant institutions are complex enough to blunt
the minds of their potential critics, and entrenched enough to swiftly
dissipate or entirely repel the energies of protest and reform…
The
search for truly democratic alternatives to the present, and a commitment to
social experimentation with them, is a worthy and fulfilling human enterprise.
(Source: Students for a Democratic Society Papers, State
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