The Port Huron Statement

active young people drafted the Port Huron Statement more than half a century

ago. The fact that this manifesto, from Students for a Democratic Society

(SDS), continues to live in our political and social imagination is truly

remarkable. Its afterlife has been far longer than that of any other document

emanating from the American left over the past century, and it has some of the

iconic quality of other works that have helped define the American agenda, like

W. E. B. Du Bois’s Souls of Black Folk, Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, Betty

Friedan’s Feminine Mystique, or earlier manifestos such as the 1848 Seneca

Falls “Declaration of Rights” and the 1892 Omaha Platform of the Populist

Party. First drafted by Tom Hayden, a twenty-two-year-old graduate of the

University of Michigan, this 25,000-word statement was debated and revised by

fifty-plus people who met in the rustic buildings of a Michigan lakeside

encampment for almost a week in June 1962. The many conferences and essays

that have appeared to mark Port Huron’s fiftieth anniversary testify to the long

shadow cast by this document. It still lives, retaining considerable moral power,

cultural resonance, and political relevance.

The essays collected in this volume seek to explain why this is so. They

probe the origins, content, and contemporary influence of the Port Huron

Statement. Most were first written for a February 2012 conference

commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of the Statement held at the University

of California, Santa Barbara. Presenters at that conference included Port Huron

participants Dick and Mickey Flacks, Tom Hayden, Charles McDew, Steve

Max, Charles Payne, Robert Ross, and Michael Vester, along with historians,

sociologists, and contemporary activists whose scholarship and praxis shed light

on the context, meaning, and legacy of the Statement.