Students for a Democratic Society collection

Biography/Profile

Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) was a radical youth organization founded in the United States in 1959. SDS partially developed out of the youth wing of the League for Industrial Democracy, a socialist educational organization. Robert Alan Haber was elected the first president of SDS at the new political group's first organizational meeting in 1960. Inspired by the civil rights movement and the general wave of counterculture sentiment among contemporary American youth, SDS called for participatory democracy, raged against conformism, the military-industrial complex, and the U.S. military effort in Vietnam. The group's Port Huron Statement published in 1962, written largely by Tom Hayden, criticized the poverty, racism, militarism, and materialism that he believed afflicted American society.

SDS organized large numbers of students across America's colleges and universities. The group inspired the development of other movements such as the Berkeley Free Speech Movement (FSM) that attacked restrictions on the political and private lives of students. SDS engaged in sit-ins, demonstrations, and other political activities. SDS provided the motto for the antiwar movement, "Make Love, Not War!" SDS members and affiliated groups were active in many notable historical events such as the temporary occupation and establishment of revolutionary communes at Columbia University in 1968, the turbulent Democratic National Convention in Chicago of that same year, and the shooting of four unarmed student activists at Kent State University in 1970.