Reflections on SDS, Black Power, War and Racism, 40 Years Later

By Dan Berger, January 13, 2007

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The same three pillars of U.S. society that Dr. King urged people to confront -- racism, imperialism, capitalism -- continue with unparalleled brutality. But what can be done? History may hold some answers.

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President Bush opted to expand U.S. involvement in what is already a globally condemned war, ordering a so-called surge of 21,000 troops to be deployed starting this month. Although the Democratic Party has pledged to resist this increase, the primary tactic of dissent its leaders have thus far put forward is a non-binding vote condemning the move. Three years into a war and occupation that daily bring more news of abuse, violence and destruction -- perhaps now more than ever is the moment when history will look most unkindly upon apathy, restraint or passivity.

The irony of Bush's announcement -- coming just days before the country celebrates an airbrushed version of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. -- should not be lost on us. The holiday commemorating the slain civil rights leader has long been coopted by ruling elites to justify the morality of American policies and practices. The same three pillars of U.S. society that King urged people to confront -- racism, imperialism, capitalism -- are now being further entrenched through this troop expansion. Forty years ago, King regretted the status of his country as "greatest purveyor of violence" on the planet, and since then this unwanted label has only grown in veracity. With a military budget that dwarfs the rest of the world's military expenditures combined, the United States continues to fulfill King's nightmare with unparalleled brutality.

But what can be done? How can the anger and resentment against the open imperialism of the Bush administration and the seemingly restrained response of even a triumphant Democratic Party be channeled into successful opposition? And how can this resistance target all facets of the archconservative agenda: the racist fear-mongering, the stark repression characterizing domestic policy (particularly regarding immigration) and the neoliberal policies that have ravaged this country and still find New Orleans devastated? The phalanx of policies that sends more troops to wage a criminal war -- and supports the continued bombardment of Gaza and the West Bank -- also leaves Latino immigrants criminalized, New Orleans residents scattered, abortion threatened, science questioned and queer people under attack.

To be sure, the urgency of our challenge is matched only by its enormity. There is no one right path, no easy answers to building effective, sustained resistance. Still, history offers some guidelines, some examples of paths that have been fruitful or barren, from which to think about crafting our response. Mechanical applications of situations from other countries or other time periods are misguided at best. But studying the successes and failures of mass movements may help illuminate the ways in which current activists can foster coalitions across differences. Such pluralist, democratic coalitions can harness popular opposition to the Bush agenda into a politically savvy, strategically minded movement to stop the war and work toward racial, economic and gender justice.

The following excerpt from "Outlaws of America: The Weather Underground and the Politics of Solidarity" is offered in this spirit of learning from history. Resistance to the war in Vietnam was not simply the province of spoiled white college kids but of the sweeping opposition movements led most fundamentally by the black civil rights struggle and ultimately growing to include most sectors of society, from business people to laborers to -- crucially -- soldiers themselves. The excerpt discusses the original Students for a Democratic Society (SDS -- which has since been re-formed) in relation to the developing phenomenon of Black Power at the same time as the war expanded in scope and troop levels. The interplay of anti-war and racial justice in the 1960s and 1970s can, I hope, inform a similar dialectic today. The point is not to replicate that time period but to, in the words of former SDSer Robert Roth, "generate an independent political momentum that's not just tied to who wins the election" but to fundamental social change. Indeed, it may just be our only hope.

Dan Berger
Philadelphia, Pa.

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Revised excerpt from "Outlaws of America: The Weather Underground and the Politics of Solidarity," by Dan Berger (AK Press, 2006).

From "Shaking the Conscience to Shaking the System: Reflections of SDS and Black Power, War and Racism, 40 Years Later"

Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) began in 1960 as a national organization, though it was initially based primarily in the Northeast, with a sizable presence in Michigan, among liberal and social democratic intelligentsia. It was the student wing of the Cold War liberal (and anti-communist) League for Industrial Democracy (LID). The young students laid out their vision of a better society in 1962, in a document known as the Port Huron Statement. Written in Michigan by Tom Hayden, who would go on to become a California state senator, the statement expressed the students' support for civil rights, disdain for nuclear proliferation, and hope for a progressive realignment of the Democratic Party. The statement rejected both the greed of the West and the authoritarianism of the East. By not categorically condemning communism, Port Huron broke with the Cold War paradigm -- including that of LID -- without casting itself as a communist organization (yet). SDS and LID would soon part ways, especially after SDS refused to prohibit communists from attending and speaking at the landmark April 1965 anti-war march. Calling itself a New Left, SDS believed that it was charting new waters -- by refusing to ban communists, the group separated itself from the liberal Left and its zealous anti-communism. SDS was also unwilling to fall into the traps of the Old Left; it did not look to the Soviet Union for inspiration, nor did it narrowly view union organizing as the epitome of what it meant to be on the Left. Instead, SDS committed itself to community organizing.

From the outset, SDS was a group with a multi-issue approach. One of its initial projects was known as the Economic Research and Action Project (ERAP). This endeavor sent earnest white students to poor, often black urban areas throughout the Northeast and Midwest in an effort to build "an interracial movement of the poor." Though the program built off lessons learned from the civil rights movement -- especially the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) -- it tended to minimize race in its attempts to organize "around economic and political grievances" based solely on the "natural alliance among all poor people." It was a sincere effort that taught many SDSers a lot about organizing and built solid friendships among many early SDS members. And it taught many SDS activists that the "natural alliance" would not materialize without specific attention to combating white racism.

By the mid-1960s, SDS was on the upswing. Following its organizing of the first national anti-war march in 1965, SDS staff numbers grew tremendously. Regional offices sprang up across the country, and soon the organization was no longer one where everyone knew one another. After that first national anti-war march on Washington, the organization came under attack by the mass media as "subversive" and "unpatriotic." American youth responded eagerly: SDS membership grew from 3,000 people in June 1964 to 15,000 in June 1966.

In the early to mid-1960s, SDS felt that the public was uninformed, especially about the war in Vietnam and racism in the South. Once the public and the government were made aware of these issues, SDS members felt, things would surely change. There was faith that the government would not knowingly participate in or tolerate illegal, unethical acts. This faith was coupled with a tremendous optimism concerning the people of the United States and their ability to make change, along with an assumption that the government would be receptive to change. It was thought that just by calling attention to atrocities in the South and in Vietnam, people would be moved to act and pressure the government to make change.

Six years after its quiet beginning in 1960, SDS was shifting its approach as a result of dramatic world events. The group began to identify the problem as one of the use and control of power in society. In other words, the structure of society needed a total overhaul; the legitimacy of the United States itself was called into question. As this process occurred across the country, fueled by the emerging radicalism of the Black Liberation Movement and the deepening crisis in Vietnam, a revolutionary movement began to materialize nationwide.

"Our movement had begun with the hope that we could 'shake the moral conscience of America,'" says David Gilbert, then an SDS activist in New York City, now a political prisoner. "But painful experience had taught us that there was an entrenched power structure which profited from and systematically enforced oppression. We could not make a dent in the overwhelming social violence of the status quo without coming up against that power structure."

Central to this radical shift was the cry for Black Power, raised first in 1966 by the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). SNCC was the vanguard civil rights organization in the South, a major source of inspiration to radicals and progressives movement at large. Most SNCC members (and leaders) were black, but liberal whites had been allowed to join. Now they were being "asked" to leave; some would say thrown out. SNCC's logic was simple, even unassailable. It demanded that whites leave the group to organize in their own communities, because that was where the system of racial oppression was based, not in the black communities where they had been organizing. (In his memoir, Stokely Carmichael/ Kwame Ture said this decision was also motivated by the fact that the presence of anti-racist whites in black communities was more likely to invite vigilante violence.) Black Power went even further. It defined the central task for oppressed people as achieving power, not simply "equality" within the country's existing structures.

Black Power created a ripple effect throughout the movement by raising self-definition and self-determination as central components to radical political struggle; it explicitly connected demands for an end to racial apartheid in the South with the struggles of black people in the North and throughout the country. The more cutting edge elements of this movement also made connections between the black struggle here and struggles by other Third World people throughout the world. Black Power was an acknowledgement that racism was not a Southern problem but was fundamental to the structure of the United States. Whether they supported it or not, other black groups now had to define themselves in relation to Black Power, and white activists were challenged to think about politics in an entirely new way. … Black Power advocates argued that the roots of the problem were to be found not in individual white racism but in systematic white supremacy -- the exclusion of black people (and other people of color) from meaningful participation in the political and social realms, accomplished through economic domination and, when necessary, brute force.

The practical implications of viewing black people as a colonized population were made clear by the violent urban riots sweeping the country, the most famous of which occurred in the Watts section of Los Angeles in 1965; it lasted for six days, involved more than 30,000 people, and caused an estimated $200 million damage. Thirty-five people were killed and more than 4,000 were arrested. Two years later, forty-one people were killed in a Detroit riot. The Black ghettoes of the United States were rising up, seemingly in concert with those violent rebellions in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. In cities large and small, the riots found people fighting police and the National Guard, the armed enforcers of a racist state.

Dan Berger is a writer, activist and graduate student in Philadelphia. He is the author of "Outlaws of America: The Weather Underground and the Politics of Solidarity" (AK Press, 2006) and coeditor of "Letters From Young Activists: Today's Rebels Speak Out" (The Nation Books, 2005).