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University of Michigan celebrates Port Huron Statement, New Left
The University of Michigan is hosting a conference to examine the effect of the drafting 50 years ago of The Port Huron Statement, a founding document of the New Left movement that fueled civil rights and anti-Vietnam War activism on the nation’s college campuses in the 1960s.
The conference began Wednesday and runs through today. It features Tom Hayden, Al Haber and other founders of Students for a Democratic Society.
Hayden was an ex-editor of The Michigan Daily when he and others drafted the 75-page manifesto outlining goals for the New Left and calling for “participatory democracy” in America.
The university says the conference focuses on the New Left’s early period, with discussions of the civil rights, women’s liberation and anti-war movements.
The statement began, “We are people of this generation, bred in at least modest comfort, housed now in universities, looking uncomfortably to the world we inherit.”
On the Web…
The statement:
http://books.google.com/books/about/The_Port_Huron_Statement.html?id=Qy57wrJoSngC
The conference: http://www.lsa.umich.edu/phs/program
