How 1960’s Students Fought to Create A Better World – The Intriguing Story of the SDS

Today, Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) is often portrayed as the drama of the good early 1960s SDS turning into Weatherman, the small faction whose story ended in a bombed-out New York townhouse.

In his book You Say You Want A Revolution: SDS, PL, and Adventures in Building a Worker-Student Alliance, author John Levin shows the reality was quite different. SDS at its apex in 1968/69 numbered 100,000 students whose political views reflected a rainbow of ideologies exploring what a new American left could be with a willingness to risk everything to stop the war in Vietnam and achieve social justice. When SDS splintered in June 1969, a majority of the delegates supported the program of its Worker-Student Alliance caucus: building a strategic alliance between students and the working class to achieve the movement’s goals.