50th Anniversary of Srudents for a Democratic Society

2012 marks the 50th anniversary of the Port Huron
Statement, the founding document of Students for a
Democratic Society, the New Left activist group, which
along with the Student Non-Violent Coordinating
Committee, helped to transform student politics in the
United States, making universities centers of dissent
and protest on such important issues as the Vietnam
War, racial, gender, and class inequality, free speech
and curricular reform in higher education. The Port
Huron Statement championed ideals of participatory
democracy and grassroots activism, a distinctive hybrid
of egalitarian radicalism and reformism that shaped the
American Left in the early and mid-1960s.

This protest folk song was written in March, 1967, in Furnald Hall dorm at Columbia University to protest the university's institutional membership in the Institute for Defense Analyses (IDA), a weapons research think tank.

I was a Columbia student and SDS member at the time.

sds was the largest and most influential radical student organization of the 1960s. At its inception in 1960, there were just a few dozen members, inspired by the civil rights movement and initially concerned with equality, economic justice, peace, and participatory democracy. With the escalation of the Vietnam War, SDS grew rapidly as young people protested the destruction wrought by the US government and military. Polite protest turned into stronger and more determined resistance as rage and frustration increased all across the country.
If you want to read the Port Huron Statement and learn more about the SDS in the Sixties, go to the place where we old radicals go to plot and scheme:
http://www.sds-1960s.org/index.htm