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The Port Huron Statement is the manifesto of the American student activist movement Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), written primarily by Tom Hayden, then the Field Secretary of SDS, and completed on June 15, 1962 at an SDS convention in Port Huron, Michigan. It begins:
| “ | We are people of this generation, bred in at least modest comfort, housed now in universities, looking uncomfortably to the world we inherit… | ” |
The main concerns of the statement included racial bigotry, nuclear weapons, and the gulf between ideals such as “all men are created equal” and the “facts of Negro life in the South and the big cities of the North.” Overall, poverty and the civil rights of African Americans were the main concern, while Cold War and peace issues were secondary. Opposition to the war in Vietnam became a central concern of SDS only a few years later. In 1962 it was generally viewed as a US advisory effort. It is mentioned just once.The statement popularized the idea of participatory democracy: a democracy rooted in the principles of decision-making being carried on by public groupings, politics being defined as the art of collectively creating an acceptable pattern of social relations as well as having the function of bringing people out of isolation and into security, and the political order being focused on providing outlets for expression of grievances. It was to provide channels relating men to knowledge and power so that private problems are formulated as general issues. This idea later was translated into “community control” and led to school decentralization in New York, Detroit,San Diego, Parma and other places, with mixed results.