Students for a Democratic Society

Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), in U.S. history, a radical student organization of the 1960s. In the influential Port Huron (Mich.) Statement (1962), the organization, founded in 1960, presented its vision for post-Vietnam War America and called for students to join in a movement to establish "participatory democracy." It was not until later in the decade, however, with the growth of the anti-Vietnam War movement , that the organization became well known. SDS demonstrations against the war drew thousands of protesters. In 1968, SDS sponsored a protest at Columbia Univ. that was ended by the arrest of more than 700 protesters. In that same year, increasingly divided by factional disputes, the organization collapsed, leaving behind a small faction, known as the Weathermen, that advocated violent revolutionary action.

Students for a Democratic Society SDS a left-leaning organization of U.S. university students that formed in 1960. It was active in the Civil Rights movement but is best remembered for its resistance to the Vietnam War.

Students for a Democratic Society. First organized in 1960 as the rejuvenated student arm of the venerable League for Industrial Democracy, Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) burst on the national scene in 1962 with its Port Huron Statement. Comparable to Karl Marx's Communist Manifesto, the statement laid out the organization's analysis of contemporary America and explained how through “participatory democracy” SDS would reform capitalism. The most important and influential of the New Left groups on college campuses in the 1960s, with as many as 400 chapters by 1968, SDS led the first mass Vietnam Antiwar Movement demonstration on 17 April 1965 in Washington, D.C. After that point, despite the fact that the organization strongly opposed the war, U.S. imperialism, and the Selective Service System, its leaders chose not to play a major role in other mass demonstrations. They and their members were deeply involved in many other antiwar activities, however, including Stop the Draft Week in October 1967 and the riots at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago in 1968. SDS self‐destructed in 1969 as a result of sectarian infighting and after the nihilistic and violent Weathermen faction gave the organization—and the antiwar movement—a bad name.
[See also Draft Resistance and Evasion; Peace and Antiwar Movements; Vietnam War: Domestic Course.]

Bibliography

Kirkpatrick Sale , SDS: Ten Years Toward a Revolution, 1973.

Melvin Small