Let's Quit Playing Games---the Movement to 1967

Cover of an pamphlet of Students for a Democratic Society, circa 1966 (source)

1905 -- Foundation fo the Intercollegiate Socialist Society (ISS) a socialist education society, by Upton Sinclair and others.

1921 -- The ISS becomes the League for Industrial Democracy. (LID)

1933 -- College section of LID reorganized as the Student League for Industrial Democracy (SLID).

1935 -- SLID merges with the Communist National Student League to become the American Student Union. The ASU becomes dormant during the war and is revived in 1946 using the name SLID.

1959 -- Clark Kerr, Univ. of California President:
"The employers will love this generation. They are not going to press many grievances...they are going to be easy to handle. There aren't going to be riots."

1960 Jan 1 -- Student League for Industrial Democracy (SLID) changes its name to Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). The first meeting of the new SDS is held in Ann Arbor on the University of Michigan campus.

1960 Sept -- C. Wright Mills publishes  "Letter to the New Left," in New Left Review,  asking what was taking so long for the young generation to become a politically leftist and radical voice.

Who is it that is getting fed up? Who is it that is getting disgusted with what Marx called “all the old crap"? Who is it that is thinking and acting in radical ways? All over the world — in the bloc, outside the bloc and in between — the answer’s the same: it is the young intelligentsia.

1960 -- Lunch counter protests in the South are televised nationally across America, showing "stoic blacks" being dragged away from all-white lunch counters.

1961 -- Broadcast of the first freedom riders get beaten up by thugs in the South. Groups spring up to held the SNCC, including the SDS.

"SDS's emergence was spearheaded by a Freedom Rider named Tom Hayden, a onetime University of Michigan student who served as SDS's president in 1962 and 1963"

1962 June 15 --- Completion of the Port Huron Statement, a fifty-page "agenda for a generation," drafted by Tom Hayden and approximately 60 other SDS members, on the shores of Lake Huron.

We are people of this generation, bred in at least modest comfort, housed now in universities, looking uncomfortably to the world we inherit. 

When we were kids the United States was the wealthiest and strongest country in the world; the only one with the atom bomb, the least scarred by modern war, an initiator of the United Nations that we thought would distribute Western influence throughout the world. Freedom and equality for each individual, government of, by, and for the people--these American values we found god, principles by which we could live as men. Many of us began maturing in complacency...

"...[The statement' did not electrify or even mobilize campus activists across the country. But it did establish an agenda for SDS---broadly antiwar, antipoverty, and pro-civil rights---that over time would attract hundreds and then thousands of mostly white students across the nation.

1965 -- Acceleration of the Vietnam War

1965-1966 -- Rise of the Movement. SDS separates completely from League for Industrial Democracy. SDS members people hundreds of civil rights and anti demonstrations,

"But a malaise set in." Protests grow in scope monthly but little improvement is seen in civil rights and the war is not stopped. "A new set of tactics would be needed."

1966 Oct --- Stokely Carmichael's call for Black Power serves "as a warning that white protesters were no longer wanted, much less needed."

1966 late -- First stirrings of "momentous" changes in tactics of SDS away from pacifism and towards to a more confrontational style.

The first to voice them was the organization's national secretary, Greg Calvert, a twenty-nine year old history teacher from Iowa State who would be gone from SDS by the time the others began going underground.

1966 Nov -- Greg Calvert issues report to SDS membership:

"Let's quit playing games and stop the self-indulgent pretense of confusion...I am finally convinced that a truly revolutionary movement must be built out of the deepest revolutionary demands and out of the strongest revolutionary hopes---the demand for and the hope of freedom."

1966-1967 winter ---Calvert's call for a change from "protest to resistance" sweeps the Movement. "At least initially, no one knew what 'resistance' meant."

1967 early -- First draft-resistance groups are started by SDS. They proliferate rapidly, using a popular SDS button "NOT WITH MY LIFE YOU DON'T"

1967 first half -- protesters transition from silently carrying signs to openly confronting authority.

Students at Cornell defy campus order to stop selling a resistance magazine. Student protesters at Penn State occupy president's office until he provides them information on university's practice of releasing student-organization lists to Congress.

1967 spring -- Widespread belief of the "meaningless" of non-violent, democratic protests proliferates among SDS. Belief that the civil rights movement, and pacifism, was dead.

"Some of the radicals in SDS, Stokely Carmichael, Rap Brown, Tom Hayden,---knew it early. But it took the rest of us awhile to give up the sweet life of the democratic Left for revolt." -- SDS member Dotson Rader

1967 May -- Greg Calvert  publishes front page article in the New York Times, suggests that violence was the Movement's next logical step,  a contention that it supported with a quote that Calvert quickly recanted: "We are working to build a guerilla force in an urban environment." Calvert's statement is roundly denounced and rejected by other SDS members. "But not by everyone."

1967 summer -- The Summer of Love. First voices emerge in support of Greg Calvert .

H. Rap Brown (born Oct. 4, 1943

"One of the most striking characteristics of radical thought in the late 1960s was the flash-fire speed with which it evolved. An idea could be introduced, accepted, popularized, and taken to the 'next level' in a manner of months, sometimes weeks."