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.