| Predecessor | Student League for Industrial Democracy |
|---|---|
| Successor | New Students for a Democratic Society |
| Formation | 1960 |
| Founded at | Ann Arbor, Michigan |
| Extinction | 1974 |
| Purpose | Left-wing student activism |
| Location | |
| Secessions | Revolutionary Youth Movement |
Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) was a national student activist organization in the United States that was one of the main representations of the New Left. Founded in 1960, the organization developed and expanded rapidly in the mid-1960s, with over 300 chapters recorded nationwide by its last convention in 1969.
SDS has been an important influence on student organizing in the decades since its collapse. Participatory democracy, direct action, radicalism, student power, shoestring budgets, and its organizational structure are all present in varying degrees in current American student activist groups. Though various organizations have been formed in subsequent years as proposed national networks for left-wing student organizing, none has approached the scale of SDS, and most have lasted a few years at best.
A new incarnation of SDS was founded in 2006.
Origins
SDS developed from the Student League for Industrial Democracy (SLID), the youth branch of a socialist educational organization known as the League for Industrial Democracy (LID). LID descended from the Intercollegiate Socialist Society, started in 1905. Early in 1960, the SLID changed its name into SDS at the behest of its then acting Director, Aryeh Neier.
The phrase "industrial democracy" sounded too narrow and too labor
oriented, making it more difficult to recruit students. Moreover,
because the LID's leadership did not correspond to the expectations and
the mood on the campuses, the SLID felt the need to dissociate itself
from its parent organization. SDS held its first meeting in 1960 on the University of Michigan campus at Ann Arbor, Michigan, where Alan Haber was elected president. Its political manifesto, known as the Port Huron Statement, was adopted at the organization's first convention in 1962, based on an earlier draft by staff member Tom Hayden.
The Port Huron Statement criticized the political system of the United States for failing to achieve international peace and critiqued Cold War foreign policy, the threat of nuclear war, and the arms race. In domestic matters, it criticized racial discrimination, economic inequality, big businesses, trade unions and political parties.
In addition to its critique and analysis of the American system, the
manifesto also suggested a series of reforms: it proclaimed a need to
reshape into two genuine political parties to attain greater democracy,
for stronger power for individuals through citizen's lobbies, for more
substantial involvement by workers in business management, and for an
enlarged public sector with increased government welfare, including a
"program against poverty." The manifesto provided ideas of what and how
to work for and to improve, and also advocated nonviolent civil disobedience
as the means by which student youth could bring forth a "participatory
democracy." Kirkpatrick Sale described the manifesto as "nothing less
than an ideology, however raw and imperfect and however much would have
resisted this word."
The manifesto also presented SDS's break with the left-wing
policies of the postwar years. Firstly, it was written with the same
overall vision all along the document and reflected their view that all
problems in every area were linked to each other and their willingness
not to lead single-issue struggles but a broad struggle on all fronts at
the same time. Then, it expressed SDS's willingness to work with groups
whatever may be their political inclination and announced their
rejection of anti-communism, a definitely new radical view contrasting with much of the American Left
which had developed a policy of anti-communism. Without being Marxist
or pro-communism, they denounced anti-communism as being a social
problem and an obstruction to democracy. They also criticized the United
States for its exaggerated paranoia and exclusive condemnation of the
Soviet Union, and blamed this for being the reason for failing to
achieve disarmament and to assure peace.
The Port Huron
Convention opened with a symbol of this break with the policy of the
past years: the delegate of the Communist Progressive Youth Organizing
Committee asked to attend the conference as an observer. The people from
the Young People's Socialist League objected while most of the SDSers
insisted on letting him sit. He eventually sat. Later in the meeting, Michael Harrington, an LID member, became agitated over the manifesto because he found the stand they took toward the Soviet Union
and authoritarian regimes in general was insufficiently critical, and
because, according to him, they deliberately wrote sections to pique the
liberals. Surprisingly, Roger Hagan, a liberal, defended the SDS and
its policy. After lively debates between the two, the draft finally
remained more or less unchanged.
Some two weeks later, a meeting between the LID and SDS was held where
the LID expressed its discontent about the manifesto. As a result, Haber
and Hayden, at this time respectively the National secretary and the
new President of the organization, were summoned to a hearing on the 6
July 1962. There, Hayden clashed with Michael Harrington (as he later
would with Irving Howe)
over the perceived potential for totalitarianism among other things.
Harrington denounced the seating of the PYOC member, SDS's tolerance for
communism and their lack of clarity in their condemnation of communist
totalitarianism and authoritarianism, and he reproached SDS for
providing only a mild critique of the Soviet Union and for blaming the
cold war mostly on the United States. Hayden then asked him to read the
manifesto more carefully, especially the section on values. Hayden later
wrote:
While the draft Port Huron Statement included a strong denunciation of the Soviet Union, it wasn't enough for LID leaders like Michael Harrington. They wanted absolute clarity, for example, that the United States was blameless for the nuclear arms race.... In truth, they seemed threatened by the independence of the new wave of student activism...
The tension between SDS and the LID was greatly increased when SDS
called for a national demonstration to take place during the spring of
1965. The LID was very concerned about "Communist" participation but SDS
refused to restrict who could attend and what signs they could use. The
rift opened even further when, at the 1965 SDS National Convention, the
clause excluding communists from membership was deleted from the SDS
constitution. During the summer of 1965 delegates from SDS and the LID
met in Chicago and New York. The League for Industrial Democracy, SDS's
sponsoring organization, objected to the removal of the exclusion clause
in the SDS constitution,
as SDS benefited from LID's non-profit status, which excluded political
activity. By mutual agreement the relationship was severed October 4,
1965.
Early years: 1962–1965
In the academic year 1962–1963, the President was Tom Hayden, the Vice President was Paul Booth
and the National Secretary was Jim Monsonis. There were nine chapters
with, at most, about 1000 members. The national office (NO) in New York City
consisted of a few desks, some broken chairs, a couple of file cabinets
and a few typewriters. As a student group with a strong belief in
decentralization and a distrust for most organizations, the SDS did not
have a strong central bureaucracy. The three stalwarts at the office,
Don McKelvey, Steve Max, and the National Secretary, Jim Monsonis,
worked long hours for little pay to service the local chapters, and to
help establish new ones. Even during the Cuban Missile Crisis in October, little could be accomplished. Most activity was oriented toward civil rights issues and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) played a key role in inspiring SDS.
By the end of the academic year, there were over 200 delegates at the annual convention at Pine Hill, New York,
from 32 different colleges and universities. It was then decided to
give more power to the chapters, who would then send delegates to the
National Council (NC), which would meet quarterly to handle the ongoing
activities. Also, in the spirit of participatory democracy, a consensus
was reached to elect new officers each year. Lee Webb of Boston University was chosen as National Secretary, and Todd Gitlin of Harvard University
was made president. Some continuity was preserved by retaining Paul
Booth as Vice President. The search began for something to challenge
the idealistic, budding activists.
SDS New School in the building of the Presidio Hills School, 3839 Washington St., in San Francisco was founded in January 1964 by Saul Landau, Alvin Duskin (former president of Emerson College), Paul Jacobs, Carl Werthman (sociologist), Ronnie Davis (a playwright and director), Mike Miller (SNCC), and Bob Scheer.
It was at this time that the Black Power Movement was first gaining some momentum (although Stokely Carmichael
would make the movement more mainstream in 1966). The movement made it
impolitic for white activists, such as those in SDS, to presume to lead
protests for black civil rights. Instead, SDS would try to organize
white unemployed youths through a newly established program they called
the Economic Research and Action Project (ERAP). This "into the ghetto"
move was a practical failure, but the fact that it existed at all drew
many young idealists to SDS.
At the summer convention in 1964 there was a split between those
who were campus-oriented, and the ERAP supporters. Most of the old
guard were ERAP supporters, but the campus activists were growing. Paul
Potter was elected president, and by the end of summer there were ten
ERAP programs in place, with about 125 student volunteers. C. Clark Kissinger of Shimer College in Illinois
was elected as National Secretary, and he put the NO on a much more
business-like basis. He and his assistant, Helen Garvey, mailed out the
literature list, the newsletters and the news of chapter's activities
to a growing membership list. Kissinger also worked to smooth the
relationship with the LID.
A small faction of SDS that was interested in change through
conventional electoral politics established a program called the
Political Education Project (PEP). Its Director was Jim Williams of the
University of Louisville, and Steve Max served as its Associate
Director. This was never very large, and it was opposed by the
mainstream SDSers, who were mostly opposed to such traditional,
old-fashioned activity, and were looking for something new that
"worked". The landslide victory of Lyndon B. Johnson
in the November presidential election played its part, as well, and PEP
soon withered away. A Peace Research and Education Project (PREP)
headed by Paul Booth, Swarthmore, met a similar fate. Meanwhile, the
local chapters got into all sorts of projects, from University reform,
community-university relations, and now, in a small way, the issue of
the draft and Vietnam War. With the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965,
the SDS broke with the pro-labor ideas in the Port Huron Statement and
decided that it was best to shift the focus of civil rights away from
the southern states and more towards urban cities in the north.
Then, on October 1, the University of California, Berkeley exploded into the dramatic and prolonged agony that was the free speech movement. Led by a charismatic Friends of SNCC student activist named Mario Savio,
upwards of three thousand students surrounded a police car in which a
student was being taken away, arrested for setting up an informational
card table for the Congress of Racial Equality
(CORE) in defiance of the University's ban on politics. The sit-down
prevented the police car from moving for 32 hours. The demonstrations,
meetings and strikes that resulted all but shut the university down.
Hundreds of students were arrested.
From protest to resistance: 1965–1968
In February 1965, United States President Johnson dramatically escalated the war in Vietnam by bombing North Vietnam in Operation Flaming Dart and introducing ground troops directly involved in fighting the Viet Cong
in the South. Campus chapters of SDS all over the country started to
lead small, localized demonstrations against the war and the NO became
the focal group that organized the march against the war in Washington
on April 17. Endorsements came from nearly all of the other peace
groups and leading personalities, there was significant increase in
income and by the end of March there were 52 chapters. The media began
to cover the organization and the New Left. However, the call for the march and the openness of the organization in allowing other groups, even communist front groups, or communists themselves, to join in caused great strains with the LID and some other old left organizations.
The first teach-in against the war was held in the University of Michigan.
Soon hundreds more, all over the country, were held. The demonstration
in Washington, D.C. attracted about 25,000 anti-war protesters and SDS
became the leading student group against the war on most U.S. campuses.
Representing its move into the heartland, the 1965 summer
convention was held at Kewadin, a small camp in Northern Michigan.
Moreover, its National Office, which had been located in Manhattan, was
moved to Chicago at about the same time. The rapid growth of the
membership rate during the preceding year brought with it a new breed
with a new style:
For the first time at an SDS meeting people smoked marijuana; Pancho Villa mustaches, those droopy Western-movie addenda that eventually became a New Left cliché, made their first appearance in quantity; blue workshirts, denim jackets, and boots were worn by both men and women. These were people generally raised outside of the East, many from the Midwest and Southwest, and their ruralistic dress reflected a different tradition, one more aligned to the frontier, more violent, more individualistic, more bare-knuckled and callus-handed, than that of the early SDSers. They were non-Jewish, nonintellectual, nonurban, from a nonprofessional class, and often without any family tradition of political involvement, much less radicalism. They tended to be not only ignorant of the history of the left and its current half-life in New York City, but downright uninterested: ...
The convention elected an Akron, Ohio student, Carl Oglesby,
President and Jeff Shero, from the increasingly influential University
of Texas chapter in Austin, as Vice President—in preference to "old
guard" candidates. The convention voted to remove the anti-communist exclusion clauses from the SDS constitution, failed to provide for any national program,
and increased the reliance on local initiatives at the chapters. As a
result, the National Office's leadership fell into ineffectual chaos.
The League for Industrial Democracy, SDS's nominal sponsoring
organization, was disappointed with removal of the exclusion clause from
the SDS constitution, as SDS was covered under LID's non-profit status
which excluded political activity. By mutual agreement the relationship
was severed October 4, 1965.
On November 27, 1965 there was a major anti-war demonstration in
Washington, D.C. at which Carl Oglesby, the new SDS president, made a
very successful speech, addressed to the liberal crowd, and in circuitous terms alleged that the United States government was imperialist
in nature. The speech received a standing ovation, substantial press
coverage, and resulted in greatly increased national prominence for SDS.
The unexpected influx of substantial numbers of new members and
chapters combined with the ousting of the previous leadership, the "old
guard", resulted in a crisis which dogged SDS until its final breakup;
despite repeated attempts to do so, consensus was never reached on what
form the organization should take or what role it should play. A final
attempt by the old guard at a "rethinking conference" to establish a
coherent new direction for the organization failed. The conference, held
on the University of Illinois campus at Champaign-Urbana over Christmas
vacation, 1965, was attended by about 360 people from 66 chapters, many
of whom were new to SDS. Despite a great deal of discussion, no
substantial decisions were made.
Nationally, the SDS continued to use the draft as an important
issue for students, and over the rest of the academic year began to
attack university complicity in it, as the universities had begun to
supply students' class rankings, used to determine who was to be
drafted. The University of Chicago's administration building was taken
over in a three-day sit-in in May. Rank protests and sit-ins spread to
many other universities.
The summer convention of 1966 was moved even farther west, this time to Clear Lake, Iowa. The "prairie people" continued to increase their influence. Nick Egleson was chosen as President, and Carl Davidson was elected Vice President. Greg Calvert,
recently a History Instructor at Iowa State University, was chosen as
National Secretary. It was at this convention that members of Progressive Labor Party
(PL) first participated. PL was a Maoist group that had turned to SDS
as fertile ground for recruiting new members sympathetic to its
long-term strategy of organizing the industrial working class. SDSers of that time were nearly all anti-communist, but they also refused to be drawn into actions that smacked of red-baiting, which they viewed as mostly irrelevant and old hat. PL soon began to organize a Worker Student Alliance.
By 1968 and 1969 they would profoundly affect SDS, particularly at
national gatherings of the membership, forming a well-groomed,
disciplined faction which followed the Progressive Labor Party line.
The 1966 convention also marked an even greater turn towards
organization around campus issues by local chapters, with the NO cast in
a strictly supporting role. Campus issues ranged from bad food,
powerless student "governments," various in loco parentis
manifestations, on-campus recruiting for the military and, again,
ranking for the draft. Campuses around the country were in a state of
unprecedented ferment and activism. Despite the absence of a politically
effective campus SDS chapter, Berkeley again became a center of
particularly dramatic radical upheaval over the university's repressive
anti-free-speech actions, and an effective student strike with very wide
support occurred. Even Harvard endured an upheaval engendered by a
visit there of United States Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara.
At this time many in SDS turned to a more anarchist-influenced
politics and organized activities aimed at the country's burgeoning countercultural community. These efforts were especially successful at the large and active University of Texas chapter in Austin where The Rag, an underground newspaper founded by SDS leaders Thorne Dreyer
and Carol Neiman was, according to historian Abe Peck, the first
underground paper in the country to incorporate the "participatory
democracy, community organizing and synthesis of politics and culture
that the New Left of the midsixties was trying to develop." And SDS' now legendary "Gentle Thursday" events on the UT campus
helped to galvanize the Austin cultural community and turn it into a
potent political force.
Austin's Gentle Thursday inspired similar activities at a number of
other universities including Penn State and Iowa State. Austin, also a
center of civil-rights and anti-war activities, was in 1967 the scene of
an SDS-generated free speech movement (the University Freedom Movement)
that mobilized thousands of students in massive demonstrations and
other activities.
The Winter and Spring of 1967 saw an escalation of the militancy
of the protests at many campuses. SDSers and self-styled radicals were
even elected into the student government at a few places.
Demonstrations against Dow Chemical Company and other campus recruiters were widespread, and ranking and the draft issues grew in scale. The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) (mainly through its secret COINTELPRO)
and other law enforcement agencies were often exposed as having spies
and informers in the chapters. Harassment by the authorities was also
on the rise. The National Office became distinctly more effective in
this period, and the three officers actually visited most of the
chapters. New Left Notes, as well, became a potent vehicle for
promoting some coherence and solidarity among the chapters. The Anti-War
movement began to take hold among university students.
The 1967 convention took an egalitarian
turn by eliminating the Presidential and Vice-Presidential offices and
replacing them with a National Secretary (20-year-old Mike Spiegel), an
Education Secretary (Texan Bob Pardun of the Austin chapter), and an
Inter‑organizational Secretary (former VP Carl Davidson). A clear
direction for a national program was not set but they did manage to pass
strong resolutions on the draft, resistance within the Army itself, and
they made a call for immediate withdrawal from Vietnam.
It was also acknowledged that male chauvinism
was rampant in the organization, and that women who attended the 1966
convention were pelted with tomatoes after requesting a plank for
women's liberation. The 1962 Port Huron Statement even glorified housewives, stating they should work with doctors, professors and laborers in order to expand the organization. At the 1967 convention women's liberation resolution on the issue of male chauvinism was passed by conference attendees, for the first time.
This resolution on women's liberation,
drafted in the Women's Liberation Workshop, had two goals. They were to
"free women to participate in other meaningful activities" and to
"relieve our brothers of the burden of male chauvinism." For the first
goal, they had three specific subgoals. The first was the creation of
communal childcare centers, so mothers at home could have free time to
pursue their interests. The second was the acknowledgment of the right
of women to choose when to have children. They said that free
distribution of birth control information and competent medical abortion
should be provided for all women. The third called for the even
distribution of household chores between all adult members, male and
female. For the second goal, to rid SDS of male chauvinism, they had
four specific subgoals. The first was that the male SDS members should
first work on their personal chauvinism first, and try and remove that
from their work and social relationships. The second is for women to
participate in all levels of SDS work, "from licking stamps to assuming
leadership positions." The third is for leaders to be aware of the power
they hold in creating the dynamic of the leader/subordinate
relationship, and to be responsible for not abusing that power. The
fourth mentions that all programs created by the SDS must include a
section on women's right. The New Left Notes reprinted the statement,
however, it was accompanied by a caricature of a woman dressed in a
baby-doll dress, holding a sign with the slogan "We want our rights and
we want them now!
That fall saw a great escalation of the anti-war actions of the
New Left. The school year started with a large demonstration against
university complicity in the war in allowing Dow recruiters on campus at
the University of Wisconsin in Madison
on October 17. Peaceful at first, the demonstrations turned to a sit-in
that was violently dispersed by the Madison police and riot squad,
resulting in many injuries and arrests. A mass rally and a student
strike then closed the university for several days. A coordinated series
of demonstrations against the draft led by members of the Resistance,
the War Resisters League,
and SDS added fuel to the fire of resistance. After conventional civil
rights tactics of peaceful pickets seemed to have failed, the Oakland,
California Stop the Draft Week ended in mass hit and run skirmishes with
the police. The huge (100,000 people) October 21 March on the Pentagon saw hundreds arrested and injured. Night-time raids on draft offices began to spread.
Climax and split: 1968–1970
In the spring of 1968, National SDS activists led an effort on the
campuses called "Ten Days of Resistance" and local chapters cooperated
with the Student Mobilization Committee in rallies, marches, sit-ins and
teach-ins, which culminated in a one-day strike on April 26. About a
million students stayed away from classes that day, the largest student strike in the history of the United States until 1970. It was largely ignored by the New York City-based national media, which focused on the student shutdown of Columbia University
in New York, led by an inter-racial alliance of Columbia SDS chapter
activists and Student Afro Society activists. As a result of the mass
media publicity given to Columbia SDS activists such as Columbia SDS
chairperson Mark Rudd during the Columbia Student Revolt, the organization was put on the map politically and "SDS" became a household name
in the United States for a few years. Membership in SDS chapters around
the United States increased dramatically during the 1968-69 academic
year.
Led by the Worker-Student Alliance and rival Joe Hill caucuses,
SDS in San Francisco played a major role in the Third World Student
Strike at San Francisco State College.
This strike, the longest student strike in U.S. history, led to the
creation of Black and other ethnic studies programs on campuses across
the country.
SDS members from Austin, Texas participated in a mass demonstration in San Antonio,
Texas in April 1969 at the "Kings River Parade". San Antonio SNCC
members called the demonstration to protest the killing of Bobby Joe
Phillips by San Antonio Police Officers.
In the summer of 1969, the ninth SDS national convention was held at the Chicago Coliseum
with some 2000 people attending. Many factions of the movement were
present, and set up their literature tables all around the edges of the
cavernous hall. The Young Socialist Alliance, Wobblies, Spartacists, Marxists and Maoists
of various sorts, all together with various law-enforcement spies and
informers contributed to the air of impending expectations.
Each delegate was given the convention issue of the newspaper New Left Notes, which contained a manifesto, "You don't need a Weatherman to know which way the wind blows", a line taken from Bob Dylan's "Subterranean Homesick Blues".
This manifesto had been first presented at the Spring, 1969, SDS
National Council Meeting in Austin, Texas. The document had been written
by an 11-member committee that included Mark Rudd, Bernardine Dohrn and John Jacobs, and represented the position of the Revolutionary Youth Movement (RYM) wing of SDS, most of which later turned into the Weather Underground Organization. It has been noted that the Weather Underground was an off-branch of SDS for a number of reasons. The New Left Notes issue was full of the language of the Old Left of the 1930s; and was thus impenetrable and irrelevant to the majority of SDSers.
According to Kirkpatrick Sale's account of the convention, the RYM and allied groups battled Progressive Labor (PL) members and the WSA faction of SDS for control of the organization throughout the convention. The Black Panther representatives attacked PL and at the same time proved itself inclined towards sexism by advocating "pussy power." The entire convention fell into something approaching chaos, or worse, farce.
The RYM and the National Office faction, led by Bernardine Dohrn,
led 500 to 1000 people out of the Colosseum and, later that evening,
holding a 1000-person meeting in another site near the National Office.
There, the Weatherman faction carried the day, electing their slate of
officers. The 500-600 people remaining in the meeting hall, dominated by
PL, declared itself the "Real SDS", electing PL and WSA members as
officers. By the next day, there were two SDS organizations, which RYM
termed "SDS-RYM" and "SDS-WSA."
In the fall of 1969, many of the SDS-RYM chapters also split up
or disintegrated. The Weatherman faction evolved into a small
underground organization that first took to street confrontations and
then to a bombing campaign. The Weathermen held one final national
convention in Flint, Michigan, from December 27–31, 1969. It was at this
convention, more popularly known as the "Flint War Council," that the decision was made to disband what remained of SDS-RYM. SDS-RYM was fully defunct by 1970, while SDS-WSA continued its activity.
Also in 1969, the New Left was present at a Counter-Inaugural to
Richard Nixon's first inauguration, at which the antiwar leader Dave Dellinger, serving as master of ceremonies, incorrectly announced, "The women have asked all the men to leave the stage." After that, SDS activist Marilyn Salzman Webb
attempted to speak about women's oppression, and SDS men heckled her,
shouting, "Take her off the stage and fuck her!" and so forth until she
was drowned out. Later Webb received a threatening phone call which she thought was from Cathy Wilkerson, but that was not confirmed, and it may have been from a government agent.
In any case, the call contributed to driving apart outspoken feminists
in the national SDS and people who put anti-racist and anti-war work
before feminism and went toward the Weathermen.
SDS-WSA: 1969 to 1974
SDS-Worker-Student
Alliance (SDS-WSA) continued to function nationwide, with a focus on
(a) fighting racism; and (b) supporting workers' struggles and strikes,
including the 1969 General Electric strike and 1970 Postal Workers'
strikes. The WSA organized a support demonstration for the post office
strikers, which greatly worried Richard Nixon's administration. This is the entry from H.R. Haldeman's diary:
Saturday, March 21, 1970.
P in early, to EOB, to work on briefing books. Had to spend quite a little time on postal problem. The settlement didn't work, because rank and file won't go back, have rejected leaders, and now SDS types involved, at least in New York.
Now calling itself simply SDS, SDS-WSA continued to publish the newspaper New Left Notes. It held a convention in Boston in 1971, at which a striking General Motors worker was a featured speaker.
In 1972, SDS-WSA demonstrated at the Democratic National Convention in Miami against Democratic presidential candidate George McGovern's retreating from his original stronger campaign positions against the Vietnam War.
Several hundred SDS members staged a sit-in at the Doral Hotel as
McGovern and his staff met upstairs with protesting members of
Grassroots McGovern Volunteers and sympathizers angry over the same
issues.
In Newark, New Jersey, SDS-WSA demonstrated against Anthony Imperiale
and his North Ward Citizens' Council which was opposing the
construction of Kawaida Towers, a building complex sponsored by a
community organization led by Black nationalist and poet Amiri Baraka
(formerly Leroy Jones) (New York Times January 3, 1973, p. 84)
SDS joined with PLP and others to protest the writings of Arthur Jensen, William Shockley, and Richard Herrnstein,
all of whom promoted the notion that there might be a genetic component
to the observed below-average performance of black people on IQ tests.
In October 1973, SDS-WSA, PLP, and others organized a convention at the
Loeb Student Center of New York University dedicated to opposing
academic racism. SDS circulated a petition entitled "A Resolution
Against Racism" that was published in the New York Times on
October 28, 1973 (p. 211). Out of this convention the Committee Against
Racism (CAR) was formed to continue the fight against racism. CAR later
changed its name to International Committee Against Racism (InCAR), when
some chapters were formed in Canada.
In 1974, National SDS(-WSA) voted to dissolve as a separate
organization and reform as chapters of InCAR. However, individual
chapters of SDS continued to exist for some time. A chapter at Purdue University was active as late as 1976.
All references to contemporary activities of SDS in sources such as the New York Times after early 1970 are to SDS-WSA. For example, SDS confronted Indiana Senator Vance Hartke at an antiwar rally in New York City in 1971 (New York Times
July 3, 1971, p. 3 and July 4, 1971, p. 3). SDS denounced liberal
Democrats as having been the authors of the Vietnam War in the first
place. SDS demonstrated against the Republican National Convention in Miami Beach, Florida in August 1972 (New York Times August 21, 1972, p. 20; August 22, 1972, pp. 1,36; August 23, 1972, pp. 1, 28).
Unlike SDS-RYM and the Weathermen, SDS-WSA strongly opposed bombing and terrorism. In 1971, SDS-WSA published a pamphlet titled Who Are The Bombers?.
It warned readers against police agents sent into the anti-Vietnam War
movement to foment violence to justify police attacks. It also sharply
criticized the Weathermen, which had begun its campaign of bombings.
On June 26, 1972, the US Supreme Court gave a unanimous opinion, in the case Healy v. James, stating that members of the SDS had been unconstitutionally deprived of their First Amendment right to freedom of assembly when a group was denied permission to form on the campus of Central Connecticut State College in New Britain, Connecticut.
A few early SDS leaders went on to careers as Democratic Party politicians, including Tom Hayden, a former member of the legislature of the state of California and well known as the former husband of actress Jane Fonda, a prolific author, and a former candidate for offices such as Governor of California, Mayor of Los Angeles, and US Senator.
New SDS: 2006 and later
A new incarnation of SDS was founded on January 16, 2006, Martin Luther King Jr. Day, and by 2010 had grown to over 150 chapters around the United States. It has held five national conventions to date, including the fifth in 2010 in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.
Cultural references
In the 1971 film The Andromeda Strain, when Mrs. Jeremy Stone (Susan Brown) informs her husband (Arthur Hill) that unexpected visitors have arrived, he responds, "The SDS, no doubt" before learning that the visitors are Air Force personnel.
In the 1994 film Forrest Gump, Jenny (Robin Wright) introduces her boyfriend to Forrest (Tom Hanks) as Wesley (Geoffrey Blake), the president of the Berkeley chapter of SDS.
