Students For A Democratic Society

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, students, democratic and/or society:

    “Women, because of their colonial relationship to men, have to fight for their own independence. This fight for our own independence will lead to the growth and development of the revolutionary movement in this country. Only the independent woman can be truly effective in the larger revolutionary struggle.”
    —Women’s Liberation Workshop, Students for a Democratic Society, Radical political/social activist organization. “Liberation of Women,” in New Left Notes (July 10, 1967)

    “A complacent old Don of Divinity
    Used to boast of his daughter’s virginity:
    “They must have been dawdlin’,
    The students of Magdalen—
    It couldn’t have happened at Trinity.””
    —Anonymous.

    “There’s no such thing as socialism pure
    Except as an abstraction of the mind.
    There’s only democratic socialism,
    Monarchic socialism, oligarchic
    The last being what they seem to have in Russia.”
    —Robert Frost (1874–1963)

    “Probably I should not consciously and deliberately forsake my particular calling to do the good which society demands of me, to save the universe from annihilation; and I believe that a like but infinitely greater steadfastness elsewhere is all that now preserves it.”
    —Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)