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ADDITIONAL READING

    • The Port Huron Statement, Participatory Democracy, and the History and Vision of the 1960s Student Movements.

    There is a theory of social change in The Long Sixties: From 1960 to Barack Obama, described as “movements versus Machiavellians,” which should be studied as a basic framework for our class. (pp. 2-20)

    This commentary attempts to understand the role of people like Charles McDew and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) as they emerged in the early 60s.

    There always are conflicts and contradictions with the governing coalition – the Machiavellians.

    In the early 60s, we faced a Democratic Party that cobbled together a majority coalition composed of northern liberals and southern segregationists – known as Dixiecrats. This contradictory – many would say immoral – arrangement was rooted in the so-called Compromise of 1877, which was settled in the House of Representatives by a deal resulting in Republican Rutherford Hayes becoming president in exchange for withdrawing all federal troops from the old confederate states and ending Reconstruction.

    The compromise doomed the newly freed blacks of the South to a century of Jim Crow laws, which were enforced for a century until the student civil rights movement of 1960 successfully challenged them. The Jim Crow system disenfranchised black people voting and electoral representation, and imposed a sharecropping plantation economy where laws were enforced by all white police forces. Perhaps the most brutal dimension of Jim Crow was the lynching of at least 5,000 – 10,000 black people during that era of terrorism.

    Reconstruction was a brief work in progress, which we can say was not really resumed on a large scale until the voter rights, freedom schools and political organizing of the early 1960s – many have deemed this the “the Second Reconstruction."

    The full essay can be found by clicking here.

    In the early 1960's, the Port Huron Statement became the founding manifesto for a generation of student radicals at home and abroad. Drafted by Tom Hayden for a conference of the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) that took place in 1962 near Port Huron, Mich., the statement introduced the concept of "participatory democracy" to millions of Americans, and is recognized as the manifesto for the new left and the student rebellion of the 1960's.

    Fifty years later, historians, social theorists, and Port Huron veterans from around the country will gather at UC Santa Barbara for a two-day conference to discuss and debate the legacy of the Port Huron Statement, including its history, impact, and relevance to current democratic discourse. The conference, "The Port Huron Statement at 50," begins at 2:30 p.m. on Thursday, February 2, in Corwin Pavilion at UCSB. It is free and open to the public.

    Among the speakers will be Hayden and Michael Kazin, who will deliver the keynote addresses. Hayden, a political activist and former member of the California state legislature, is a writer for The Nation, and is currently director of the Peace and Justice Resource Center in Culver City. His talk, titled "Fifty Years of Participatory Democracy, From Port Huron to Occupy Wall Street," will begin at 3 p.m. on Thursday...
    The full press release can be found by clicking here.

    We are people of this generation, bred in at least modest comfort, housed now in universities, looking uncomfortably to the world we inherit.

    When we were kids the United States was the wealthiest and strongest country in the world: the only one with the atom bomb, the least scarred by modern war, an initiator of the United Nations that we thought would distribute Western influence throughout the world. Freedom and equality for each individual, government of, by, and for the people -- these American values we found good, principles by which we could live as men. Many of us began maturing in complacency...

    The full Port Huron Statement can be found by clicking here.

    In the movie The Big Lebowski, the aging, stoned hippie played by Jeff Bridges announces that he helped write the Port Huron Statement. We don't remember the "dude" being there, but it's gratifying that the founding manifesto of Students for a Democratic Society still lives in the nostalgia and imagination of so many.

    A glance at the web will show tens of thousands of references to "participatory democracy," the central focus of that document, which still appears as a live alternative to the top-down construction of most institutions. Participatory democracy has surfaced in the campaigns of the global justice movement, in utopian visions of telecommunications, in struggles around workplace and neighborhood empowerment, in Paulo Freire's "pedagogy of the oppressed," in grassroots environmental crusades and antipoverty programs, in political platforms from Green parties to the Zapatistas, in participatory management theory, in liberation theology's emphasis on base communities of the poor and even in the current efforts of most Catholics to carve out a participatory role for laity in their church. The Port Huron Statement appears in numerous textbooks and has been the subject of thousands of student papers. This continued interest is the more impressive, since the statement was never marketed or even reissued as a book. It was produced only as a mimeographed pamphlet in 20,000 copies, which sold for 35 cents. We were jaundiced toward the very notion of public relations...

    The full article can be found by clicking here.

Sponsored by Dissent, The Nation  and at UCSB the Dick Flacks Democracy Fund,
Associated Students, the Interdisciplinary Humanities Center, and the
Center for the Study of Work, Labor, and Democracy.