Port Huron Statement 50 years later: 3-day conference at University of Michigan begins Wednesday

The 75-page statement drafted by Hayden, former editor of the Michigan Daily, emerged from a meeting of the SDS at the United Auto Workers retreat on Lake Huron in June 1962. It became a central document of the New Left movement of the 1960s.

"The Port Huron Statement represented the dawn of an era, which began with the student sit-in movement and the Beat Generation, and didn't end until 1975, with the fall of Richard Nixon and Saigon. Students in Ann Arbor played a leading role in defining this era," Hayden wrote in a column published by the Michigan Daily last week, reflecting on the statement's legacy.

• Read Hayden's column

Haber said The Port Huron Statement "had an impact all over the world." SDS held its first meeting in 1960 on the U-M campus, where Haber was elected president. SDS co-founders Barbara Haber and Sharon Jeffrey Lehrer, who are participating in a Friday morning panel discussion as part of the conference, told AnnArbor.com on Wednesday that Alan Haber was "the visionary" of the group.

Howard Brick, U-M professor of history and organizer of the conference, said the three-day event on U-M's campus this week is the most important among several recent events commemorating the statement's 50th anniversary because of its broad scope and U-M's significance in the birth of SDS.

"Our conference carries special import because University of Michigan students spearheaded the organization of SDS after 1960," Brick said. "It will also examine a wide range of left-wing social movements of the same era in the U.S., Europe, Africa and Latin America."

The conference, "A New Insurgency: The Port Huron Statement in Its Time and Ours," kicks off with a keynote address titled "Refugees from the Fifties," which will be delivered by Ruth Rosen, a journalist and historian of the women's movement, at 7:30 p.m. Wednesday at Angell Hall.

Hayden will deliver a speech titled "The Future of Participatory Democracy" at 7:30 p.m. Thursday at 1324 East Hall.

Other panels and sessions will be held in the Michigan Union. For more information, go to the event website: http://www.lsa.umich.edu/phs.

• View the full program here

The conference is free and open to the public. In addition to its main focus on the early period of the New Left and the founding of SDS in 1960, it will include discussions of the civil rights and women's liberation movements, as well as the Vietnam teach-in at U-M in March 1965 and the speech "Naming the System" by U-M graduate student and SDS president Paul Potter at the first major demonstration against the Vietnam War in Washington, D.C., in April 1965.

Local blogger Mark Maynard spoke with Hayden recently about what gave rise to the Port Huron Statement and the culture of protest in the 1960s.

• Read Maynard's blog post