Search Help

How does this work?
There are many ways to search the collections of the Freedom Archives. Below is a brief guide that will help you conduct effective searches. Note, anytime you search for anything in the Freedom Archives, the first results that appear will be our digitized items. Information for items that have yet to be scanned or yet to be digitized can still be viewed, but only by clicking on the show link that will display the hidden (non-digitized) items. If you are interested in accessing these non-digitized materials, please email info@freedomarchives.org.
Exploring the Collections without the Search Bar
Under the heading Browse By Collection, you’ll notice most of the Freedom Archives’ major collections. These collections have an image as well as a short description of what you’ll find in that collection. Click on that image to instantly explore that specific collection.
Basic Searching
You can always type what you’re looking for into the search bar. Certain searches may generate hundreds of results, so sometimes it will help to use quotation marks to help narrow down your results. For instance, searching for the phrase Black Liberation will generate all of our holdings that contain the words Black and Liberation, while searching for “Black Liberation” (in quotation marks) will only generate our records that have those two words next to each other.
Advanced Searching
The Freedom Archives search site also understands Boolean search logic, specifcally AND/+, NOT/-, and OR operators. Click on this link for a brief tutorial on how to use Boolean search logic. Our search function also understands “fuzzy searches.” Fuzzy searches utilize the (*) and will find matches even when users misspell words or enter in only partial words for the search. For example, searching for liber* will produce results for liberation/liberate/liberates/etc.
Keyword Searches
You’ll notice that under the heading KEYWORDS, there are a number of words, phrases or names that describe content. Sometimes these are also called “tags.” Clicking on these words is essentially the same as conducting a basic search.
Welcome to the Freedom Archives' Digital Search Engine.The Freedom Archives contains over 12,000 hours of audio and video recordings which date from the late-1960s to the mid-90s and chronicle the progressive history of the Bay Area, the United States, and international movements. We are also in the process of scanning and uploading thousands of historical documents which enrich our media holdings. Our collection includes weekly news, poetry, music programs; in-depth interviews and reports on social and cultural issues; numerous voices from behind prison walls; diverse activists; and pamphlets, journals and other materials from many radical organizations and movements.

Students for a Democratic Society (SDS)

Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) was a mass student organization that at its height had chapters on hundreds of college campuses and an estimated 100,000 members. It grew out of the youth branch of the League for Industrial Democracy, rejecting that organization’s anti-Communism and seeking to become part of a new student militancy sparked in large part by the civil rights movement. Its June 1960 founding document, the Port Huron Statement, advocated radical social involvement under the heading of “participatory democracy.”

From 1960 until its organizational demise in 1969, SDS played a major role in the social movements of the time, often spearheading campus protests and rebellions, and in particular strengthening the struggle against the war in Vietnam and all of Indochina, as well as engaging in community organizing in poor and working class communities, and support for the civil rights, Black liberation, and other Third World movements in the US. The collection represents a sampling of the periodicals, such as New Left Notes, and other position papers of SDS.

Documents

RE: Crisis Response RE: Crisis Response
Author: Paul BoothPublisher: Students for a Democratic SocietyFormat: Press ReleaseCollection: Students for a Democratic Society (SDS)
Proposals for local coordinators to discuss before the May 9th SDS meeting at Swarthmore College
Statement on Student March on Washington Statement on Student March on Washington
Authors: Norman Thomas, A.J. Muste, Bayard Rustin, Robert W. Gilmore, H. Stuart Hughes, Ed Clark, Roget Lockard, Emily Parker Simon, Alfred Hassler, Charles Bloomstein, Harold TaylorPublisher: Students for a Democratic SocietyDate: 4/16/1965Volume Number: 16-AprFormat: Press ReleaseCollection: Students for a Democratic Society (SDS)
Statement on the eve of the anti-war March on Washington 1965.
Urgent: SDS Chapters, March coordinators and other local groups Urgent: SDS Chapters, March coordinators and other local groups
Author: Paul BoothPublisher: Students for a Democratic SocietyFormat: Press ReleaseCollection: Students for a Democratic Society (SDS)
Includes a plan of action for the weeks following the March on Washington, including end the war in Vietnam week, May 9th Conference on Summer Program, and a National Teach-in.