Tom Hayden: “The Port Huron Statement of the Students for a Democratic Society”

“The Port Huron Statement” was the manifesto of the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), an iconic 1960s student activist organization that called for participatory democracy, direct action and civil disobedience, an end to racial discrimination, and the enlargement of the public sector as a way to end economic inequality. The SDS was also highly critical of U.S. cold war policies, the arms race with the Soviet Union, and the proliferation of nuclear weapons. In later years, until the organization dissolved in 1969, it led student protests of the war in Vietnam and was active in the civil rights movement.

The principal author of “The Port Huron Statement,” adopted at the organization's first convention in June 1962 near Port Huron, Michigan, was Tom Hayden (b. 1939). In 1962, Hayden was just twenty-two years old and largely unknown outside student leftist circles. During the 1960s and 1970s, though, he would acquire considerably more notoriety as a staunch opponent of the Vietnam War, as one of the “Chicago Seven,” along with such activists as Jerry Rubin and Abbie Hoffman, indicted for fomenting riots at the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago, and as the husband of then-radical actress Jane Fonda, whom he accompanied on widely criticized peace missions to Vietnam and Cambodia. He later served in the California State Assembly from 1982 to 1992 and the California State Senate from 1992 to 2000.