Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) was a student activist movement in the United States that was one of the main representations of the New Left. The organization developed and expanded rapidly in the mid-1960s before dissolving at its last convention in 1969. SDS has been an important influence on student organizing in the decades since its collapse. Participatory democracy, direct action, radicalism, student power, shoestring budgets, and its organizational structure are all present in varying degrees in current American student activist groups. Though various organizations have been formed in subsequent years as proposed national networks for left-wing student organizing, none has approached the scale of SDS, and most have lasted a few years at best.
A new incarnation of SDS was founded in 2006.
Read more about Students For A Democratic Society: Origins, Early Years: 1962–1965, From Protest To Resistance: 1965–1968, Climax and Split: 1968–1969, SDS-WSA: 1969 To 1974 and Beyond, The New SDS: 2006 and Later
Famous quotes containing the words students for a, students for, students, democratic and/or society:
“The fetish of the great university, of expensive colleges for young women, is too often simply a fetish. It is not based on a genuine desire for learning. Education today need not be sought at any great distance. It is largely compounded of two things, of a certain snobbishness on the part of parents, and of escape from home on the part of youth. And to those who must earn quickly it is often sheer waste of time. Very few colleges prepare their students for any special work.”
—Mary Roberts Rinehart (1876–1958)
“The fetish of the great university, of expensive colleges for young women, is too often simply a fetish. It is not based on a genuine desire for learning. Education today need not be sought at any great distance. It is largely compounded of two things, of a certain snobbishness on the part of parents, and of escape from home on the part of youth. And to those who must earn quickly it is often sheer waste of time. Very few colleges prepare their students for any special work.”
—Mary Roberts Rinehart (1876–1958)
“Separatism of any kind promotes marginalization of those unwilling to grapple with the whole body of knowledge and creative works available to others. This is true of black students who do not want to read works by white writers, of female students of any race who do not want to read books by men, and of white students who only want to read works by white writers.”
—bell hooks (b. 1955)
“It is the American vice, the democratic disease which expresses its tyranny by reducing everything unique to the level of the herd.”
—Henry Miller (1891–1980)
“In the latter part of the seventeenth century, according to the historian of Dunstable, “Towns were directed to erect ‘a cage’ near the meeting-house, and in this all offenders against the sanctity of the Sabbath were confined.” Society has relaxed a little from its strictness, one would say, but I presume that there is not less religion than formerly. If the ligature is found to be loosened in one part, it is only drawn the tighter in another.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)