out of the closets voices of gay liberation

New Leftists cheered on North Vietnamese leader Ho Chi Minh and the National Liberation Front of South Vietnam. Increasingly, movement leaders shifted from condemning the 'evils in America' to the 'evils of America,' SDS historian Kirkpatrick Sale has noted, and began advocating violent means to social change. Draft resisters organized across the nation, using the famed slogans,' Hell No, We Won't Go!' and 'Girls Say Yes to Guys Who Say No' (to the draft, that is). As the decade wore on, however, the escalating Vietnam War took precedence for the New Left. society and condemned the reigning corporate liberalism that served the interests of the wealthy rather than the economically disadvantaged.Īlong with the questions of race and class that dominated early New Left community projects, student activists addressed local concerns, as when the Free Speech Movement organized in Berkeley in response to attempts by University of California officials to regulate political activity on campus property. Instead, they argued that anticommunism distracted citizens from the genuine ills of U.S. Whereas Old Leftists drew upon Marxist-Leninist analyses and models of organizing, New Leftists refused to be drawn into the Cold War communist-anticommunist dichotomy. The New Left of the 1960s staked out a politics of anti-anticommunism, distinguishing it from the Old Left of the interwar and Cold War decades. They also positioned SDS to serve as the nexus of this New Left in a role comparable to that claimed by the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), organized in 1960 by students from historically black colleges in the Jim Crow South.

Focusing on the intertwined problems of racial and economic injustice, SDS members sought to organize a white student movement parallel to the civil rights struggle. politics and society through participatory democracy. These students, gathering under the aegis of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), issued the Port Huron Statement, in which they outlined their vision for rejuvenating U.S. In June 1962 several dozen white student activists from East Coast and Midwestern colleges gathered in Michigan to discuss their shared concerns about racism, poverty, the nuclear arms race, and the prevailing Cold War culture of complacency.

Out of the closets voices of gay liberation