1968: The Global Revolutions

In a spring 1962 letter to supporters, SDS President Robert “Al” Haber describes plans to hold a national convention at a labor center near Port Huron, Michigan. Among the meeting’s goals, he writes, will be the “adoption of a political manifesto.” Drafted and approved that June, the Port Huron Statement would serve as a call to action to inspire a generation of college activists. Its yellow cover and mimeographed pages could be found in dorm rooms across the country. The power of its prose and argument was in the combination of numerous layers of activism, ranging from personal fulfillment, to egalitarian participatory democracy, to resistance to bureaucracy and materialism, and to opposing the nation’s Cold War foreign policies.